Life took on a different shape for me.
I found it surprisingly easy to let go of the life I had lived and embrace the new one that stood out in front of me. No rules, no engagements, no expectations of me. The sheer amount of freedom was almost intoxicating.
Shades and I shared the same bed, but it turned out the only way that he would let himself act on his impulses with me was if he got drunk beforehand. I hadn’t known or wanted to see that about him. There was a lot that he had kept hidden from me, the biggest omission was that he was dating a woman.
Rainbow didn’t exude an array of different colours. Instead, she looked at everything with a very calm outlook. There were some in our group that thought she was arrogant. I recognized a little of myself in her and I knew that her attitude wasn’t arrogance. She was trying to protect herself. Rainbow had been drawn in by the flame that Shades put out, but she was being careful.
Despite Shades pressuring her for sex, she refused. She would look at him with a coy glance and give him a little smile as if she were laughing at him internally. When she refused him, he would turn to me. I wondered what Rainbow had seen, what she had dealt with to make her so able to observe the true heart of any matter that was placed before her and speak her mind about it.
Rainbow and I would sit outside waiting for Shades to come back with money, cigarettes or food. He took his ability to provide for us very seriously. Rainbow and I would smoke and look at the world around us, wondering if we ever fit within it.
“You deserve better,” she said to me once.
I shrugged. “I love him,” I told her, knowing that she was referring to Shades. I don’t know what made that love so vital to me, but there it was. It was the first time I had said the word.
Taking my right hand, she traced a finger around its knuckles. “I know it may seem like love, but I’m not sure that Shades is capable of it.” She let my hand go and pulled a cigarette out of the pack. “You deserve someone who loves you as much as you love them.”
“What about you?” I asked.
Now it was turn to shrug. “I know that I love myself,” she said, taking a drag off of a cigarette. “That seems to be enough.”
“Then what is he to you? How can you be with someone you don’t love?”
Rainbow gave me a genuine smile. “Haven’t you ever been with someone you don’t love?”
I thought back to the people I had been before I came out of the closet. I loved them, but not in the way they needed. I thought, too, of the men that I had been attracted to since coming out. They were all unattainable in some way. None of them got too close to me and I’m not sure if it was me keeping them away or their non-ability to have an actual relationship.
“I guess it’s enough for now.” I said.
Nodding, Rainbow blew out a plume of smoke and kissed my cheek. “Well, at least you know that I love you and that’s what really matters.”
I sat there in the warmth of the sunshine and wondered if this was enough. I took a cigarette out of the pack and lit it, drawing smoke into my lungs. I pictured the cloud of smoke becoming a wall of thorns, hiding who I had been and who I was going to be. All that mattered was who I was right now and I could tell my own story.
Spirit of the Wolf 