Reunion
by Jamieson Wolf Villeneuve

 

I’m not sure who noticed who, really. He had grown. Gone was the lanky, thin boy I remembered. He had filled out some; put some meat on his bones. I saw him when I walked into the restaurant.

"Stopped eating carrots and lettuce?" I called out.

He looked up. His eyes, as blue as I remembered them, looked up at me, piercing my skin. "You remember that old diet?"

"You wanted to lose weight. To attract woman." I sat down across from him and felt myself wanting to touch him, to prove that he was real.

"Fat lot of good it did me, then, huh?" Marc said.

"Yeah, how about that." I said. I thought back to the time that Mike had tried to show me his penis in the washroom. Yeah, fat lot of good indeed, I thought acidly. "I hear you’re into men now." I said.

"Yeah." He had the grace to look sheepish. "We always knew you were."

"How nice," I said, almost spitting the words. "Too bad I didn’t."

"How couldn’t you have known you were a fag?"

"How come you didn’t?"

"Touché.".

"Yeah, I thought that was a good call myself." I said proudly.

We were silent for a moment. The waiter came and took our orders. I ordered a grilled chicken creaser salad and he ordered a party platter.

"Guess you’re the one trying to eat proper now huh?" He said.

"Look, what is this about?"

"Why did I want to meet you?"

"Yeah." I said.

"I wanted to see how you were."

"That’s it."

"Yeah."

"What about easing your conscious? Would that be part of it? Or was this just supposed to be about friendly chit chat?"

"Drop the tough guy act alright? I just wanted to tell you I was sorry."

I slammed my water glass so hard onto the table that water splashed him in the face. "I spent my entire high school experience with a crush on you, you ridicule me and toss me out to dry when you realized I wasn’t popular enough for your grand high school expectations and now that we’re both gay, you want to say you’re sorry? Do you realize how lame that sounds?"

"I know it’s a little late in the game."

"A little late. God, do you have any idea, any idea at all, how much you crushed me?"

"It was eight years ago, Owen."

"You don’t get it do you?"

"You certainly know how to hold grudges."

"I don’t hold grudges."

"Then what do you call this?"

"You shaped my entire high school experience!" I yelled at him. I wanted him to feel some of the injustice I had felt at the time.

He stare turned cold for a moment and then softened. "How bout you cut the crap?" he said.

I got a hold of myself and looked around the restaurant. No one was paying too much attention to us.

"I’m sorry." I said.

"It’s all good."

"No, really, I mean it."

"I know. It’s all good." He smiled. "You have to stop letting the past hurt you, Owen." He almost whispered this.

I almost spit out my water before I swallowed it. "Excuse me?"

"You heard me. You’ve been carrying this around for eight years, haven’t you? Some silly high school drama."

"It wasn’t silly to me."

"Look, I know that." He leaned in towards me. "But you have to stop letting the past take precedence. You have to stop giving power to a negative situation."

"You sound like a new age handbook on life."

"In a way, yes, but think about it: How long have you held this anger in?"

I stopped and thought back. I didn’t need to really. Each time I went over what had happened, being ostracized, losing friends for the sake of popularity, I felt a kernel of hot anger start to burn in my stomach. "A long time." I said.

"Too long, I’d say." He took a sip of his water. "When you think of negative events, you give them power over you."

"Now you’re defiantly sounding like a new age handbook."

"I’m serious, Owen." He sat back a bit. I could still smell his cologne. "When you give negative emotions power, they have power over you."

"Life can’t be all happy sunshine all the time."

"I know that. But you have to learn to forgive; otherwise, how can you move on with your life? How can you live fully, if you’re still rooted in things that happened to you in the past?"

He leaned forward again and took my hand. When I tried to pull it away, he held onto it more tightly. "You have to forgive, Owen. I’m not asking you to forget what happened, but to forgive me for what happened. Until you do, you can’t move on. That kernel of anger will stay inside you and grow into something else." He released my hand. "Life is to short to hold grudges, to hold onto anger."

"I have a lot to forgive you for." I said.

"That you do." He smiled. "I’m not expecting instant forgiveness. I would never ask you for that. But you have so much hurt in you." He pointed a finger at my heart. "In there. What you’re father did to you, what I did to you. You can’t go through life holding on to that hurt. It’ll make you bitter before you’re old and gray. The world is too beautiful to see it through jaded eyes."

The waiter brought our food then and sat it in front of us. Both of us were quiet for a moment while we pecked at our food. As I ate, I looked at Marc and thought about forgiveness.