Page 35 of Status Undefined
January 1
(visa expires in 13 days)
I met Daniel in the afternoon at a book-lined café in Old Phuket Town. It was a quiet place where we could have some privacy. Israeli tourists weren’t generally attracted to the library-like atmosphere. I hadn’t been able to sleep after the phone call with my mother. I needed to talk to Daniel even though I hadn’t fully absorbed all the details. How could my relationship with Daniel have set something in motion on the other side of the world, in a place that was a parallel universe, as far as I was concerned? Weirdly, the call had made me certain that Daniel and I had met for a reason – one that we were destined to discover together.
He seemed to sense something was up. He was tense; not his normal sunny self.
“So did you talk to her? Tell me everything!”
“Well,” I said when we’d found a table in the corner. “It was intense to hear her voice. For her too, I think. No matter how angry I am with her, she’s still my mother. The person that raised me. But I did ask her to explain herself.”
I took a deep breath and looked into his blue eyes before I said the words I knew he’d been dreading.
“She met your mother.”
He looked down; I couldn’t read him.
“Yes. I thought so.”
“But how? There are millions of people in New York!”
“You don’t understand what it’s like in a religious community outside Israel. My parents are religious, your mother is too. Religious Jews in New York eventually meet one another – kind of like us meeting at Chabad on Hannukah. They meet, they marry. Everyone knows everyone because the community is so small. Everyone is connected in one way or another. It’s not a random coincidence. I’m guessing they met on Shabbat?”
I was a bit hurt that he didn’t see our mothers’ meeting as destiny – some sort of expression of our connectedness that manifested itself a million miles away. I had naively assumed that he would understand that fate had intervened and be convinced not to leave. So stupid.
“They met before Shabbat at Chabad in Brooklyn, a few hours after you posted the picture.” I hesitated but there was no point dragging it out. I hated seeing him like that. “I’m sorry Daniel, but your parents were upset. My mother was shocked when they showed her the photo but then she put two and two together. She tried to convince your folks that we are – how did she put it – a match made in heaven. But they wouldn’t listen. They turned their backs on her.”
“No surprises there.” They were the most bitter words I’d ever heard come out of Daniel’s mouth.
“I wasn’t aware they didn’t know…” Registering that he’d kept that detail from me annoyed me a bit, but I couldn’t be angry with him. Not now.
He took a deep breath.
“They didn’t know. I didn’t come out to my family or anyone else while I was there, and I haven’t said anything since.”
“So that picture with me…?”
“Yeah. It was a kind of coming out. It felt like the right time.”
Now I understood why he’d cried after posting the picture.
“Why didn’t you tell me? What were you afraid of?”
“I’m supposed to be the extrovert, the one who shares everything. I didn’t want you to know that I was running scared, hiding something. I didn’t want anyone to know that I haven’t always been the happy-go-lucky guy I am now. I want to pretend I was born this way. But I was a different person in New York, one I’m not sure you would have liked. Leaving was like starting over; my self-image improved, I was free to love guys, to let my true self out of its deep, dark hole. So I’m desperate to preservemy image, even with you because, no matter how much I try to deny it, New York is still part of who I am.”
We’re so good at putting up defenses, walls that keep us from being our true selves, with all our flaws and weaknesses. Even nomads can’t leave their personal problems behind; they just lug them to new settings. But Daniel had seemed so invincible, so happy and fulfilled.
“I told you that my life was pretty perfect there and I wasn’t lying. That’s what I thought then, when I lived there. It was only after I left that I realized how miserable I had been, how a huge part of me had been chained up. Before, I thought that was just life – that I had to get over the frustration and loneliness because they were just a small part of me and to be thankful for all the rest: family, friends, home. You get used to hard things; you stop resisting them. It’s hard to explain, but you think you’re happy until you find out what real happiness feels like. And now, I can’t go back. They’ll never accept me the way I am now, and I can’t accept me the way I was before.”
“Maybe you never gave them the chance? If you explained to them… Instagram has its limitations, you know.”
“New York has this progressive, evolved image, but the Brooklyn Jewish community, or at least the part of it that I spent most of my life in, isn’t like that. I have great friends that I care about, but there are no gay people in that community. I didn’t want to be rejected, so I left on my own terms.”
“So how did your New York followers respond to the Instagram picture of us?”
“Some stopped following me, some didn’t react at all, some liked the post. But I had no idea about my parents’ reaction – until today.”
“You think they were surprised?”
