Colin's Long Walk - Part 3

The upside to my dark, lonely apartment is that being a house belonging to a group of males under twenty-five, it contains quite a vast supply of alcohol. Even more importantly, the couch is within arm’s reach of the fridge.

So while I sat, drinking vodka out of the bottle and watching episodes of TV shows where people get broken up with, I came to a rather depressing realisation. It wasn’t that I was single and alone – that one had sunken in on the way home.

The realisation was that I was actually kinda sad about it. I’d been so busy making myself be annoyed about my jacket (although in fairness, it was a cool jacket), that I’d neglected to actually realised that I was just trying to keep myself angry since that way I wouldn’t have to be depressed. Deep I know, but that’s the kind of self-reflection only obtained by half a bottle of vodka and that episode of Will and Grace where Grace has been dumped and lies in bed depressed all day as everyone fruitlessly tries to cheer her up.

I mean, Xander and I had been dating a little over two months, which when you convert into gay-relationship time, was really more like six months. You see, gay relationships for some odd reason tend to function differently to the relationships of straight people. While a straight relationship will quite commonly last for six months, and this is considered a milestone, and a year onwards is quite common once a relationship has hit this boundary, the average lifespan of a gay relationship is under three months, and so a relationship that makes it to a year is considered to be something akin to marriage.

So two months, although it doesn’t seem like a long time, was actually quite a while. Two whole months of petrol and spending money on soppy things like dates and presents and giving up nights that I could have spent doing productive things like getting drunk and watching TV in order to spend time with my significant other. Well at least tonight I was back to the productive things.

So productive in fact, that at some point in the night the combination of the alcohol, the tiredness, the depression, and the sheer comfiness of our couch combined, and I passed out.
Unfortunately, heavy drinking and emotional exhaustion are horrible if you let them associate with each other, and so at some point the next morning I woke up to pain. After I attempted to open my eyes a few times, only to decide that closed was a much better position for eyes because the light couldn’t hurt them as much that way, I then tried to figure out what the pain was.

Oh yeah, hangovers. Man’s best friend.

After about ten minutes of lying, wallowing, feeling sorry for myself, I was finally motive to attempt movement by the overwhelming urge to pee. But this worked out, since the toilet is close to the shower, and after a night of drinking there is nothing that feels better than sitting down in the shower and just letting the hot water make everything feel just a little bit better while you’re waiting for the painkillers to kick in.

About twenty minutes later, I emerged from the bathroom now resembling something that although not completely human, could be considered to be one of mankind’s early cousins.

Definite improvement.

I then grabbed my phone and set about arranging a lunch date with something that is essential for the survival of almost any gay man in a modern world – the straight woman.

There are many different kinds of straight woman that accompany the gay man in his journey through the world. There is the one that lives vicariously through the adventurous sex lives that gay men often have, relishing the scandal that takes places. There is the attractive woman who goes to the gay clubs where no one can hit on her, and then there is the unattractive and slightly large woman who goes to the gay clubs because then she actually will get some male attention as the drunken gay men feel her up. There is also the straight woman who for some unfortunate reason, keeps falling in love with gay men.

Emma, my straight woman, fell mostly into this last category. Although she did love the scandal of gay sex that was my life and friendship circle, she also had fallen hard for several different gay men. She had slept with at least two gay men, dated three who had decided they were gay not long after dating her, and she had dated a drag queen. Twice. We never asked her why or how such a relationship worked, since we were afraid of the answer.