On the eve of my 43rd birthday I get a call

I get a surprise phone call from Sean Kilty who informs me that he's separated from his wife after all these years. Am I surprised? No. And now he's calling me. He lives in Castroville, near my cousins. We'll try to connect this weekend. Tomorrow I'll be 43. 

And I keep thinking, now there's an opening on his dance card, do I want to check it out? Like with poor Hanafi who visited on Sunday, we went for a hike in the Palisades, he's smitten, but I'm ambivalent. Not worth the bother.

I've been Sean's casual lover for years. Very sporadically I might add. Once every other year for nearly a decade—we've kept it hidden from his friends. That's not enough to base a relationship on, and now I have to look at him in a whole new light. I need to find out about what exactly is going on with this separation. Do I even want to? Sideways opportunity.

He has three small kids, so the rest of his life will be tied up with her and with them for at least for the next 15 to 20 years. I would need to follow him. Do we have enough in common to make something actually work? He's tied to a middle-class existence. And here I am conjecturing, and I haven't even talked to him yet, nor have I seen him in over a year. 

Once Sean and I fell madly in love in an instant, but his sin was ambivalence. He was afraid to act and when his friends stopped us at the door as we were about to run away together going to Mexico. He gave me up—just like that. I never quite forgave Michael Larrain, Luke Breit, nor Patrick Grizell for their intervention. It wasn't divine intervention, that's for sure. What was so wrong with me to be rejected by a committee of his friends like that? 

Within that same week he met his future wife. Also a Maureen—Michael Larrain's sister. That love and passion Sean and I shared was a long time ago, and certainly I have a fondness in my heart for him, and the lust that comes and goes, is a bonus. But whether there's a grand passion there remains to be seen. 

Handsome Sean, who looks a lot like Anthony Quinn, is easy on the eyes. Then, there's the problem of his size, he's enormous all over. As in girth. I've been completely inactive for most of the year, so sleeping with him is bound to hurt. Hopefully our bodies adjust to such things. 

Then there is the desire for a child that I haven't quite gotten out of my system. He's had a vasectomy, no, make that two vasectomies, the first one didn't take. At least one kid is a post-vasectomy child. 

I let things resolve themselves via the law of entropy. I don't return the call. Tomorrow I'll be 43. 

November 23, 1995