Cape May

El Cobarde

Gabby went back to Seattle. It was a difficult parting for we couldn't stand to be apart from each other now that we had found ourselves again.

Six months came and six months went.

Gabby did her part. Her divorce from John went smooth, for he knew there was no love there. He preferred moving on with his life and perhaps someday find the love that eluded him with Gabby. He was not a bad man. He was just in the wrong place with the wrong person. He also found a job in New York and relocated back. He got visitation rights. Gabby wouldn't deny him that. That was good. I felt good about that because I thought about how much I would hurt if I could not see my girls. I don't think any man deserves not being able to see his children.

Me, I felt myself stalling. Not that I did not love Gabby nor that I didn't want to be with her, it was something else keeping me back. At first,

I did not know what it was, but as time went by it slowly crept up on me. Insidiously it entered my mind slowly until finally it hit me like a train hitting a wall at full speed;

I could not bring myself to do it!

It had been a year now that Gabby moved back into mommy's house with the kids, a year and a half since we found each other again in my mother's garden. She was waiting for me, waiting for me to make my move so that we could be together. We met intermittently, in hotels, as lovers, on passion filled weekends, orgies of love and lust. But she was getting impatient. She had kept her word, had done her part and now it was my move. She was waiting on me. The pressure mounted every time we met. She reminded me of our love and how we were meant to be together, forever and ever. I agreed and I felt the same, but I knew what my problem was.

I Robert Joel Maldonado was afraid.

I had lived a life unfulfilled, a life half filled, a life of compromise for seventeen years that now when faced with the possibility of freedom, of soaring with the eagles, I knew better. I was not ignorant anymore. Gabby had no such fears for she was missing that thing in all of us that causes fear, that causes us to compromise and therefore live our lives unfulfilled. She never did fear and therefore had no boundaries. She knew no limits and so the fear of the world finding out our secret did not impact her as it did me.

For our love, she would risk; risk it all. Hers was a crazy love. She was an anomaly, an anomaly which in adolescence I cherished, embraced and welcomed with the zeal only an innocent and ignorant could. I soon realized however, as an adult, I could not match her for sheer intensity, recklessness and risk.

I was no longer ignorant. I knew better.

When it came time to put my hand in the fire, I could not. I feared the consequences. Gabby, on the other hand would have walked through fire for our love.

This then was my curse.

As a seventeen-year old, I didn't know any better and so I fell into that love that so few people experience. I thought that Gabby also didn't know any better, but it wasn't that. It wasn't that at all. That was just her way of being, the way of Gabby, not fearing, not beholding to society and their restrictions, not caring what others thought. She felt our love in her heart and to her that was more important than anything else.

She doesn't see consequences as you and me.

Even now as an adult she did not fear, she did not see cause and effect. That made her so brave in my eyes. She was who I would love to become because although I loved her to no end, I was afraid. I feared what would happen if people found out, after all, what we did and were doing was illegal, immoral in our society. Mommy, Holly, John, our children, my job, society, I knew our lives as we know it would end if this ever got out. This is not a secret one wants anyone to know.

As children, we lived in a world of fairy tales. The challenge was that we were no longer children. And as adults I realized that our actions could have serious consequences. In real life, we live in a world where fairy tales exist only in the pages of books, where adults are expected to compromise between wants and needs, between desires and realities; a world where we are expected to live a life half fulfilled.

Ours was not something we could just pick up where we left off without some planning, clandestine actions furtively weaving itself throughout our lives. We longed for that love, but that love was a thing that could destroy us, and everything around us forever. I saw that. She did not. Or perhaps she did, but just did not care. That I could believe too, for that was Gabby.

We could not 'come out of the closet' so to speak. There are certain taboos and lifestyles that are applauded, protected even in our society. Had I, or she been gay or suffered from some terrible disease and we declared our homosexuality or sickness, friends and family and society in general would rally to our sides, empowering us, supporting us for making such a momentous decision to expose all, 'to come out' as it is so popularly called.

But ours was not a secret that we could tell, never, ever, for no matter what, ours is not something that would ever be condoned, applauded, supported, accepted.

Ours is a secret we have to keep and keep and take to the grave.

Because of this, I did not dare make that move. I knew that Gabby was so willing to go forward and yet I was not. In essence, she was so brave and I......

I on the other hand was a coward.

The last time we met she told me unequivocally that she did not want to become my mistress, which is what it she was becoming. Eight months had passed since her divorce and I could not bring myself to tell her that I could not go through with it. I just could not utter those words to her.

The many times we rendezvoused she left crying, disappointed in my reluctance to act.

This last time she did not cry.

She knew.

I know she knew.

She looked me in the eyes and saw the coward in my soul. She felt the trepidation in my touch, my kiss, my hesitation to act. I, who in her eyes was always so strong, so brave, her valiant protector was now a man filled with fear, a being reduced to a shriveling, cowardly heap, unable to act for that which defined our lives; our forever love. And worst yet, didn't even have the courage or respect to tell her so.

That day her face showed no emotion as she got off the bed, dressed and left. She just said, "Goodbye Bobby."

It was strange of her do so. Her aura seemed cold, resigned.

When growing up, Gabby used to detest weakness, not so much physical weakness, but emotional, and moral weakness. She disliked people who lacked the moral fortitude to speak their mind, who averted eye contact less the world detect their impotence of character. She was fond of saying, 'I don't care how small or weak you are, if you roar loud enough, you will appear as a lion.'

I felt her eyes upon me as she dressed. She did not look upon me as her savior, her protector. For the first time in my life, I understood the true meaning of impotence. It has nothing to do with sex. It is the drug companies that equate sex with impotence.

It had everything to do with the basic fiber of your being – the weakness of the core of who you are, your inability to do as you said you would do. In some circles, they call it your word. Give your word, and it is as good as done. In years gone by, all that was needed was a handshake, and more importantly, your word. If one was a person who kept their word, you were as good as rich, for the word of an honest man, a courageous man was worth more than gold itself.

And so she walked out of the hotel room, never looking back and I felt a wind pass through my body as if something deep inside just died. I tried to get up, but could not. And so I lay there for over an hour thinking upon the trajectory my life had just taken.