One usually goes from bad to worse, hopeless to desparate from deep to rock bottom. Well, I was sinking deeper into my depression too. Days were rolling by, I was sending job applications by the hundreds per week. Still most of the time I never heard back from any of the employers. I was convinced it was because of my visa status. No one wanted to go through the trouble of applying for an H1-B visa for a foreigner when their doors were lined with hopeful citizens. It all made perfect sense to me; however it was still hard to accept that I was yet again on the outside, yet again not a part of the in-crowd.
I was Americanized to a point of no return. A point at which one goes back to his own country only to find his own people dismissing him as a foreigner. Furthermore, I had finally put the sexual orientation issues part of my life behind and focused on my career. Needless to say the bust of 2001, and 9/11 really arrived at the wrong time for me. Then again, I guess there was no good time for either one of these two event to arrive. They never were and never would have been welcome.
My partner David insisted that I return to Austin, TX where he had an apartment. He himself was almost never there because he commuted to Long Island for his job. He worked as a consultant on one of the information system migration projects of a big hospital in Long Island. He also was not yet completely disengaged from his project in LA. So he was traveling to LA one week, then to Long Island in the next, and spending one weekend in Austin and another in New York City with me. This was a taxing schedule for both of us. We did not see each other much that whole year. Needless to say, things were not the same, there was less and less to talk about, less and less intimacy, and it all just did not feel right anymore.
If he had not been as mature and as patient as he is, he and I would have broken up long time ago I think. What's worse is I was stranded in alternate options land with all the time in the world. Two ingredients one should never put together: time and options if he is intending to keep a relationship going.
The thing that was on my side however was the fact that most Manhattan boys at one time or another did something or said something that immediately threw their cover. Most of them seemed so normal, so nice, so interested at first. They immediately sniffed out that I had a weakness for compliments, and man they piled them on.
It is through this experience that I learned that you can make people do whatever you want if you just find the right place to rub. Self esteem usually is the point that's common to most people out there. So that's where they hit first. If it's not that, then it's money, if not that then it's status, or drugs, or sex or something else.
Most of the time I am very good with sniffing out what someone is up to. That's because most of the time, people usually have little patience and theyget to the point pretty fast. Just when I thought I had people figured out, I was fooled. Just when I thought I could not be deceived I made the biggest mistake of my life.
I am not ready to write about this experience yet but I am willing to say that during the last three months of my stay in the big apple, I was really tempted by something, by someone, by another path that could have been mine.
Most other people would have taken the other path, but I felt this would be the wrong choice for me, the wrong solution to my woes, and perhaps an addition to the pile of troubles I had created for myself. So I passed it on, I turned it down, I pushed it away, and out of my system as forcefully as I could.
It flew out of me like a projectile, tearing bits and pieces of me off, and leaving gushing wound behind that just as quickly as it formed, filled with blood and strangely started a speedy healing process. By the time I moved back to Austin, there was only a scar left, a subtle reminder of a mistake, a bitter keepsake from my last days in New York City.
I had given the King Midas his haircut, and now I had to keep my mouth shut.ˇ
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