imagine you are a gay man in your 60s and you've been in the military most of your life so you've never been free to be yourself or to seek out people like you and as a result you're now elderly and alone and you've spent a lifetime betraying yourself and you've never been loved and you get experimental brain surgery to cope with this and then one day you learn that the innocent child version of yourself who knows nothing of your isolation or your sins fell in love with another man and the man he loved was killed for pursuing that relationship and then your other self is also killed presumably for the same reason but you meet the other version of the man he loved and he's married but he wants to get to know you and you don't know him but you have some inextricable connection, something is pulling you towards him and you know you shouldn't trust him but you do and you just don't want to be alone and his husband is kind of a dick so you follow that feeling and it leads you right into a trap he set for you and it turns out that he was just manipulating you all along, to make you let your guard down, and you fell for it because there's a part of you that wants to put your life in his hands and so you do and he takes you to a train station and tells you to get as far away from here as you possibly can, he's saving you perhaps even at the cost of his own life and you think maybe you weren't entirely wrong about trusting him so you tell him you want him and he doesn't deny he wants you back, you tell him you're ready to be loved by him and you don't even know what that means but you keep saying it over and over because it just feels right, like you've been waiting for this your whole life, and maybe you have, all you know is your life hangs in the balance but for the first time you're not afraid, and maybe his interest in you was under false pretenses but you don't care because there's a part of this that's real and you both know it, he doesn't let you kiss him but he lets you touch his face and stroke his cheek with your thumb and then you walk away and get on the train with your dog going to god knows where and as the tracks whisk you away into the great unknown and the dying light of a cold winter day paints your face you think maybe you have been loved all along. happened my friend irving bailiff
