When he tuned out the last voice

He brings the steaming cup of coffee to his mouth and stares at Greta across the tiny black sea. Though this is the first time they've been in the same room in ten years, they’ve never been more distant. Not that she shows any indication of this. She’s acting, in a way that he can’t, like everything’s fine. 

“—And you knew how we had always wanted to adopt—” 

She alternates telling him stories, some he’s heard, some he hasn’t, with taking bites from her croissant. Each nibble is a performance—she pauses, takes the croissant in her right hand, cups her left hand under it to catch the flakes, carefully bites into it while closing her eyes ever so slightly, wipes the buttery snow from her hand, and then continues talking. There’s a confidence about it that annoys him, that she knows he will wait, that he is her captive audience. 

She’s in LA for some kind of conference, and she asked if they could meet. She said her evenings were all booked, but she’d like to grab a coffee, if he wanted. He was surprised that she contacted him, and from the moment they sat down at the small table in the corner of his favorite coffee shop, he knew he should have declined.

“—They were in the NICU for a few weeks, which was just so, so stressful—”

They’ve known each other since they were 12, and throughout their nearly 30-year friendship their physical and emotional proximity has fluctuated in concert as their lives continued to take them back and forth to each other. He came to LA about a year after she did, but he hadn’t followed her, technically. He came to pursue grad school and a guy who didn’t want him. 

Her being here had helped tip the scale, despite what she thought. A few months before he moved to LA, there was an event at his grad school for newly accepted students, and he had asked Greta if he could stay with her and husband that weekend. To his surprise, she had nearly told him no. At first she said that they had “a lot going on”, but he finally got it out of her that she was upset with him. She had thought that the last time he had visited he had just used them for a place to stay and didn’t spend any time with them. He wasn’t sure this was true but acknowledged that he had spent one evening of that weekend on a date with that guy (who he hasn’t talked to in years). Finally, she got to the root of her concern, which was that she felt like he hadn’t even considered her in his decision to come to LA. He told her that of course he did–and he had–but just hadn’t said anything to her because he didn’t want to pressure her to pressure him, which she never did either of her own accord. She conceded that it sounded like they were both holding back. 

A few years later, and about a year before she left again, she made it clear that she had been holding back something else, too.

Something that ultimately broke his heart. 

“—And we brought them home and then had two little babies to care for alongside Gia and Gabby—”

The last time they had seen each other, he was helping her and her husband move out of their apartment before they headed to their new life in Indiana. He took breaks to eat pizza and play with his honorary niece, their only child at the time, who now probably has no idea who he is. He recalls the thick layer of tension that clung to him beneath the heat of that July day in the San Gabriel Valley, his shirt soaked in sweat and grief. He had tried to move on from what she had told him, to patch himself up as best he could, but he knew things were already irreversibly different. 

He had told her that already, in a Facebook message that he goes searching for every now and then to reread, as though he needs to relive the moment over and over to make it stick. He had told her that he wasn’t sure he could go back to the way things were. But she ignored his messages. And he ignored her ignoring him. He has since realized that he ignored a lot of other things over the years–signs along the highway of their lives leading them to that moment.

There was that one time in Berlin. She had come to visit him while he was living there. It was a big deal for her to come, and later she would always tell people that it had changed her life. They took a weekend trip to Prague, and she fell so in love with the city, and with Europe in general, that she decided a few months later to apply to spend a year in the Czech Republic as an English teacher and missionary. For her, this was providence, the Lord working in that way they say he does, bringing her to finally answer a calling. 

But while she was there with him that week, he had wanted to take her to one of his favorite gay bars in Prenzlauer Berg. The place was less of a bar and more of a lounge, rather tame as far as Berliner gay bars went. He recalls how nervous she was to go with him and that it took some convincing. He had had to assure her that it was “nothing crazy”, that they could just have a quick drink and leave if she wanted. 

Though it really was one of his favorites, he had chosen it strategically to accommodate her. He had known the prospect of going to a gay bar might be too much for her. To the person he was, her fears were completely founded. He wonders whether that particular bar appealed to him as well because it also made him less uncomfortable. You can be gay, but not too gay. 

She did go with him in the end, but he watched her squirm in her seat the entire evening, barely drinking her cocktail, and after he finished his beer, he told her they could go, to which she offered no resistance. 

“—With my work, you know, I was able to take some time off, but ultimately we decided that Dave would just stay home—”

In the beginning, after he first came out to her she quickly latched onto the idea that they were like Will and Grace. That classic duo—her, the loud and outgoing one; him, the cranky gay one. He had liked that then, eager to be that with and for her, but now he finds it telling of her capacity to know him and to process their friendship. Being someone’s gay best friend didn’t really fit into the mold of her life, so she patched it with pieces of fiction.

And over the course of the next several years, that fiction started to fall apart. 

“—And Gia is nine, if you can believe it, and Gabby is almost seven. You would love Gabby, she’s so, so funny—“

He had never been confused about whether he was gay–he had always known that. It was others who confused him. He thinks of his mom talking about “hate the sin, love the sinner”, his dad talking about not allowing gay troop leaders in the Boy Scouts, and his friends from church who also “struggled with homosexuality” counseling him on how to overcome it. He often had the feeling that he had a million voices in his head, a cacophony of opinions on how he should live his life, who he should or shouldn’t be, what made him good or bad. And those voices often spoke through him, for him, until finally, when he was much older and after many years of going in and out of the closet, he was able to locate his own voice in the crowd. 

He wonders sometimes if maybe it was his own fault for discussing that confusion with her. He recalls multiple conversations with Greta and many emails where he talked to her about his struggle and his searching and his anguish. From her perspective, watching her confused best friend fight with loving himself, she could have easily conflated that darkness with the darkness she (and he) had been taught to believe about loving someone of the same gender. And in imparting this confusion onto her, he gave her permission to try and fix him, because that was also what he thought he needed. Fixing him was something she could deal with–being best friends with an out gay man was not. 

He often wonders how she talks about him to her new friends, if she talks about him at all. What if someone sees a wedding picture? “Who’s that man standing next to you that’s not your husband?” Her “man of honor” she called him, printed it in the program even. Does she still say that? Part of him hopes it’s awkward for her to explain, her gay best friend. He hopes she has to say the word, so people understand. And he hopes she gets nervous about it. He hopes she feels like she’s coming out every time she says it. 

“—And did you see we got a new dog! Poor Spunkers passed a year ago and the girls were begging us for a new dog, so we finally did it—”

It was a stupid thing that led to that moment that changed their friendship, that changed him. He thinks now about that moment when she finally said it, the thing she had been holding onto for all those years. They were talking on the phone, and he had poor reception at the place he was living, and she kept saying how she couldn’t hear everything he was saying, but she could tell how upset he was. That her dishonesty had hurt him. But he marvels now at what a strange thing that was to say, because was it her dishonesty or her truth that had hurt him more? And isn’t the latter much, much worse?

She and her husband had invited him to join them for the Christmas parade in their small suburban town. He had quickly agreed, and then later thought to invite a couple of his friends along. He honestly didn’t think anything of it. They were two of his closest friends, who would meet his lifelong best friend. 

But they saw it differently. 

She wrote him a message later, in response to him asking if he could bring them along, that even though they were uncomfortable with the idea, that they needed to think about their daughter, by the grace of God and to show the love of Jesus, they would welcome his friends to join them.

He had been shocked. Though she hadn’t said the words, he knew immediately what it was about, and it was devastating. He called her right after reading the message. He wonders now that he was able to do that–normally he might have let it go to avoid the confrontation, but then he remembers that feeling of having the floor taken out from under him, of the confusion and anger and pain as he fell into that abyss between them. He wouldn’t let her throw him into the pits of despair he had spent his life crawling out of. 

And so he confronted her.

He asked her why she said what she did, telling her that she didn’t know anything about his friends (“you’re right, I don’t,” she had said, frustratingly turning his point around on him), questioning what it would even be that would make her uncomfortable, and, most painfully, that, by extension, she was saying that she wouldn’t want him around their daughter. 

Then she finally came out with the words. The words he knew were there hanging over them but had chosen to ignore, swatting them away like pesky flies. She didn’t agree with his “lifestyle” (had she really used that word?), she believed it was a sin, she couldn’t support him in that, she could love him, but she would never think differently.

He was crying then, babbling trying to tell her that her words, in a sentence veiled in flowers but laced with poison, banished him to the closet. He tried to tell her about the voices and confusion and how far he had come (but clearly not far enough yet) and how he was in disbelief that all along, this whole time, her voice had been part of that disjointed, out-of-tune choir. Though it’s easy to see now that of course her voice joined with the others. It had never been on the sidelines. It was always center stage. And her voice was not ever, and never could be, his voice.

But she didn’t hear him, she couldn’t understand him. 

“—Oh, our little town. The people, our church. We love it so much. I love being so involved in the community, you know. I never had that in LA—“

Years after all this, and he chides himself now for letting it happen, for thinking things would be different, he let her hurt him again. 

As a missionary, she would send out a newsletter every now and then asking for support. By this point, a few years after she moved away from LA, they had already started to lose touch, but still held on through occasional texts, mostly on birthdays, and, for her part, through newsletters. 

In this particular one, she had announced that she and her husband were adopting twins and then shared the winding journey that seems to accompany many such stories. She explained the babies had been born six weeks early and asked for the reader’s prayers, for both her and her family and also the babies. She also wrote a personalized note to him on the back of the newsletter, expressing her excitement and trepidation. 

He had been floored by the news. He quickly sat down to write her back, a handwritten note, to both express his joy at her new arrivals and also to share his own, beautifully coincidental joy, that he and his partner had a surrogate who was also expecting twins, and though it was early, everything was going great.

He was so excited at the prospect of sharing the experience of having twins with her. The two best friends with twins born a few months apart. It was an incredible thought. 

But he was also nervous about telling her, and, in a moment of desperate honesty, said as much in his note. That he wondered how she would feel about this news, that he hoped their families could meet one day. And whether that would be ok?

But he didn’t get what he wanted from her. How could he have? She replied with a short note a couple weeks later saying how she couldn’t write much but that “Wow! What news you have!” And that was it. He remembers throwing away her letter in a huff—her response was just as stilted as all those emails of the past, almost uninterested, and definitely withholding. He tried to tell himself she had four little ones to care for, two of whom were in the NICU, but to him it was obvious that she didn’t find joy in his news the way he found joy in hers. And he thought he knew why, and it ruined him all over again.

Only a few weeks after he sent her that note, they lost them. 

Those weeks and months after their incalculable loss were some of the hardest of his life. She should have been someone to turn to, but of course she wasn’t. She never would be again. He eventually told her in a text message nearly six months after the fact. He had texted her on her birthday, not intending to say anything about it, but then she had finally asked how things were going, even though it had been so long without any news that she must have known something was wrong. 

So he told her. 

He told her that their surrogate had complications at 19 weeks and had to deliver two boys with no chance of survival and that they held their two dead sons for a few hours before saying goodbye forever. 

But she ignored that message, too. 

She finally texted a few months later that she was sorry, that she was so sad and shocked that she hadn’t known what to say. 

He had hated her after that. 

“—Gah! I’m sorry! I’ve been talking this whole time. How are you, how are things?”

He doesn’t blame her in a way—the urge to pretend like everything is normal, that nothing has changed, that they will always be what they were to each other—it nearly overwhelms him. Old habits, he thinks. 

But he knows this isn’t possible, nor is it what he wants. He's different to the person he once was, and keeping quiet no longer appeals to him. 

Theo has found his voice, so now he will use it.