Bizarre story from R and H’s heartache

Photography by Norm Yip

Here we are again… H won’t talk to me again. After his pre-Christmas visit he’d been a bit down and depressed but we’d been constantly in touch. Two months later things just took a quick turn.

We were chatting online when the conversation went into me meeting R after about three months of him virtually disappearing. R had been having problems on and off with his “sort-of-boyfriend”. They have a very strange relationship mostly down to his boyfriend’s reluctance to fully take him as such.

In any case, after a period of having “split up” R’s then ex came back to him and asked him to be his boyfriend, this time for real, which R agreed to.

R’s boyfriend apparently made him delete most of his profiles and contacts but R refused to delete mine as we were good friends, which is when he told him about having seen some emails with pictures….

Turns out that R’s ex-army boyfriend had enlisted the help of some friends to break into his email and go through it. Now, if that doesn’t make any alarm bells ring, then what does?

By reading his email he found out that R had meet a couple of people, and among them me. Just as a reminder, R and I had a few bondage sessions together before turning into very good friends and dropping the sex bit. As it happens some of those emails contained some faceless pictures from those encounters I had sent him afterwards.

So that was the bizarre reason why R had disappeared for a while and was now finally getting in touch before leaving for a month back to China.

In any case, I gave H a very shortened version of the events, excluding the bondage element and focusing in how amazing I found that R didn’t even seem upset by his boyfriend breaking into his email and even dismissed my dismay with a “at least it shows he cares”.

Well, the crazy woman in Fatal Attraction also “cared” but that didn’t make her any better than a psycho bunny boiler better put in secure confinement.

But H seemed to find the idea of my having had something with R a year before entirely unpalatable and basically cut off the conversation saying “I’m feeling sad now and I think you’re kind of a bastard, bye”.

Well, I didn’t expect him to quite like the idea but a) that was over a year ago and b) we all have some sort of history (except it seems him).

After that he disappeared for a couple of days before getting in touch by email. It’s always a bad sign when he sends an email, they’re overly emotional and his way of keeping a distance to tell me he can’t cope with it anymore and needs some time off. They also make any decent discussions pretty much impossible.

His silence has been going on for about a month now. I was hoping it wouldn’t last long but he’s still not in touch. I miss him very much and hurts me he is unhappy. His picture is still next to my bed and I can’t shake him off my mind. I am still in love with him and would love him to be my boyfriend should he live in London.

It was me who said no to a long distance relationship because I thought it would only give us both a hard time. We’ve only physically met in three occasions for 3-4 days and his plan to come to London was only a possibility a year and a half away. I just couldn’t see a relationship in such conditions working well for any of us for as hard as it may be to admit it.

I sometimes find myself thinking on ways a relationship with him might work and always end up thinking it would have to be an open on. I can’t see myself giving up meeting people in such situation seeing H only once every month or two for a couple of days. But given his extreme reaction to my story about R, how could I even propose that? And how could I even do so if he won’t talk to me?

Just last week I sent him a brief message. I told him I missed him and whether he was ready to talk to me again. His answer was brief: he is not ready yet.

Unfortunately  H seems to be the measure with which I see everyone else and I’m afraid the feeling and the fireworks I saw with him just won’t happen with anyone else. Maybe I just set myself an impossible benchmark and for as long as my feelings for H are still alive I won’t be able to settle for anyone. Hearts are stubborn and pay no attention to reason.