Good Enough For Here

I've laid waste to thoughts of my wasted, forgotten, though sometimes enjoyed youth - dispersing the painful, embracing the cheerful and pondering the meaningful.

Lately I find myself looking at myself as if a ancient building, the one on the corner made of well-worn faded red brick. You've passed every day on the way to work for as long as you could remember. But then one day comes and calls upon you - for whatever reason - to know the details of that building - it's heighth, it's age, it's character - and much like that I now often stop and stare at my reflection in the mirror and wonder :

what are you built from ?
what constitutes your foundation?
how strong do you stand?
who lives inside?

I look back on my youth - at 33 I recognize I have so many years ahead of me - but they are the years that will be guided with agressively-gained experience and not with a more innocent and sexual yearning to be broken in.

I look back on the times of my "firsts", always somehow intermingled with the times of heartache - not the kind a man feels, but a boy feels.

So tonight I find myself reflecting on a man named "Sam". He always lead me by at least 8 years of life - and the funny thing with age , you can never catch up. Sam was all things - many of them my idea of perfection - from the smile, to the hair, to the walk, to the cock - and he fell into my life again and again from 17 - 23. To me Sam was the unobtainable - to Sam - I was the "sure thing". An odd mixture - my youthful yearning for what I considered to better than me - and for him, a pup-tent's erection and a few beers south of drunk - I was "good enough for here". He never took me on a date, asked me out to dinner, brought me flowers, or gave me a valentine...but in those five years, I found his mouth on mine, his ass riding my cock, his smile carefully aimed - to win my affection. Book stores, public parks - he would seek me out, fire alive, desire unrequited...but at dinner parties and dance clubs I was the guy against the wall - propped up by his friends. To him I had my time and place and only when I was "good enough for here".

I see him now and then - aging less well, than better.
And I wonder if he knows how much a call the next day might have meant,
a night at the movies could have been magic
and when he smiles at me from across the bar - that smile - I wonder if he knows

....I'm thinking he might not just be "good enough for here".