I’m leaving Paris.

In two short, short days I’m leaving Paris to set down roots in Charlotte, North Carolina. Why Charlotte, a lot of my friends ask? You don’t know anyone in Charlotte.

True. But I didn’t know anyone in Paris, either. But then I met my Parisian and I discovered a totally new Paris. A Paris seen from the inside, as though I was able to hold up a mirror and see myself there. Knowing my Parisian let me, little me, see myself in Paris from the inside out.

I ache with my decision to leave him. He’s become one of my closest friends and I will miss him terribly. But it’s unfair to stay anywhere for anyone. It’s too great a burden for them to bear. It’s smothering. It’s too weighty. It’s like shovels full of dank dirt thrown onto wilting hearts. There’s no joy in burdens. And more than anything I want my Parisian to be as happy as I am.

“You’ve got set down roots someplace,” he offered over a beer, “You’ve got to have a place to escape to, to run to when the world wants too much from you.”

Which is the most painfully honest thing anyone has said to me in years? Yet in my heart of hearts, I know that I must step into my future. And it is my future which beckons me.

I have met so, so many men. So many handsome men. I routinely navigate to the dating site I frequent and in less than twelve hours I find strikingly handsome men in Palm Springs, Ghana, Belgrade, Pretoria, New York that vie for my attention. And they’re all beautiful, and witty, and good texters, and lovers of literature. But none of them are flesh and bone like my Parisian.

One day I know I will find the next true love of my life. But in the interim, I must take heed of what my Parisian said this morning, “Be comfortable with yourself and let the expectations of the world pass you by. Someone will recognize you. You’re too beautiful to be alone for the rest of your life.”

Sigh.

I have a foot full of holes.

Why? Because I shoot myself in the foot many times a day.

Like yesterday. Yesterday I aimed a Tommy-gun at my foot and pulled the trigger, writing a scathing post about the Parisian and his somewhat strange attraction to my bedtime stories. I was hurt, I was angry I suppose. So I wrote a post and published it on my blog heralding his odd behavior. But his behavior wasn’t odd. It was full of caring. But why couldn’t I see it, or hear it, or feel it? Because I was being selfish. And arrogant. And anything but humble.

A dear friend of mine in Chicago, Richard, reminded me that discovering intimacy with honor requires a great degree of humility. Humility? What about my needs? What about my desires? Why can’t I feel the brushiness of another man’s face on my own; why can’t I taste the day on his lips; feel the humidity of his breath on my ear; or, open his shirt as though I were cautiously opening an envelope to withdraw a letter I’ve yet to read?

But somewhere in my befuddled mind, I lost track of the Parisian’s true intention. He found me, me and my writing, my writing as an extension of me, so alluring, so captivating, so inspiring, that he couldn’t contain his opinion: “You write so beautifully. That story you read me last night, “The Other?” You didn’t just have them chat, you described little details that made me imagine I was one of those men and you were the other. The way you described ‘us’ and ‘our’ thoughts was unbelievable.”

Sigh.

What an old, arrogant fool I was. Using a public forum to herald my upset because a Parisian wasn’t interested in kissing me, but was so enamored by my writing. And isn’t that precisely what all writers desire? To be seen by someone, anyone as a writer? A wordsmith? A person capable of creating whole, independent worlds in which readers submerge themselves in like a warm bath?

“Promise me something,” my Parisian asked during breakfast this morning, “Promise me that you’ll write a novel and get it published. Because you’re that good. I know you are. Promise me, Harlan?”

Oh, I promise.

I have done my best to avoid writing today.

I simply didn’t want to understand the cause of my pain. I didn’t want to cogitate its authority. But I knew the second, from the hateful moment I realized that my sleep last night was going to be disturbed, I knew that today I’d be faced with another burden of understanding the folly of my ways.

And I’ve grown tired of understanding. Why can’t I simply experience attraction for another man, without some lousy lesson to be learned? Why can’t I simply stumble into the lap of another man, excuse myself, and be caught off-guard by his mischievous grin? Why can’t I feel the weight of someone else’s foot crushing my toe, then feel an apologetic hand rest on my shoulder, and a smokey voice whisper into my ear, “excusez-moi, je ne vous avais pas vu.”

But no. I’ve always got to meet men whose interest borders on the absurd. It’s not me they want, but some fraction of me. Yes, they want to it terribly. And they’ll do everything they can to get it. What I don’t understand is how obvious they can be. These men won’t even begin to disguise their true intentions. They’re so cocksure and almighty that their need will be met, it’s not a consequence to them if it means that mine will not be satisfied.

I said goodbye to Artem and his money desires; now I must say goodbye to the Parisian.

All I want to do is kiss. The Parisian refuses. Though he comes to my hotel room, dines on my food, and eventually kicks off his shoes and hops into my bed, we lay next to each, without even the degree of intimacy a dozen sardines enjoy in an oiled aluminum tin!

We lay there, fully clothed, watching TV, or like last night, I was writing and he playfully text me, quietly interrupting my writing. But he wasn’t tenderly interrupting the attention I was giving to my writing to draw it back to his own (which would have been charming), no, he was prompting me, to write more of this or more of that. You see, he too has fallen for a part of me. Not perhaps as cold as money, yet something strange. He’s fallen for my writer’s persona. That persona, I’ve attempted to explain to him, is a professional persona. It’s my business self.

“But, I love what you write, everything that you write; I love your blog, it’s inspiring; but more than all else, I love the bedtime stories you write for me,” he said last night. And then he continued, sounding like my editor, “And since you didn’t write me one yesterday, you’ve got to write me two tonight!”

But he wasn’t joking. He was dead-pan serious.

The Parisian wasn’t interested in sharing his physical affection with me. He didn’t want the emotional mess. What he did and continues to want are prurient stories which he can then fantasize with, fantasize about me, not the flesh and bone me, but some idyllic me, to masturbate to someone that doesn’t exist, all the while cordoning off true feelings and intimacy.

Maybe this is what courtship is like in the age of texts and Twitter.

In Life, there is only Truth.

And sometimes, when I’m stumbling through the darkened rooms of my soul, I turn to others that can see in my own darkness.

I have witnessed my own humanity in the eyes of those I love.

Especially in the eyes of my Parisian.

I have discovered recently, that I, for one, have expectations of my own Life. And, I suppose, in my own arrogance, I have expectations of others. Especially of my Parisian.

I yearn for his kiss. I long for his touch. I’m excited by his excited-ness.

In Truth, I’m not a terribly sexual person. Sex is fine, but it wanes. It cools. Sex ignites libidinous deeds: clothes ransacked, mouths feeding, textures of flesh and bone felt, all building to the tensing and releasing of pleasure. And while my flesh is satisfied, I know that there are precious moments following. It is in these moments, post coitus, that I discover who we are in our purest forms.

The first time we danced together, the first time that our bodies met in passion, we muddled through. We didn’t know each other very well. We self-consciously tripped over the others’ foraging. We were both in a hurry to discover the other’s passion. Stumbling, when looking back, we yielded, giving in to libertine passions.

But it’s at breakfast and dinner that we get to know each other. It’s at night when I write him unpublishable bedtime stories do we share what is truly genteel.

Those are the times I cherish.