Runaway: Part 4

(Continued from “Runaway: Part 3”, “Part 2”, and “Part 1”)

“Yeah, Brian, don’t worry. Like I said before, I just want to be your really good close friend now. You can talk to me about this stuff. You can come to me when you need advice. You can come to me if you need to complain about other guys. It won’t bother me.”

“Ok. I believe you. We’re friends.”

“That being said, can I ask you something? From one friend to another?”

“Yeah, what is it Trung?”

“When we were together, did you ever cheat on me? More than just that one time a year ago?”

“What? No! Why are you even asking that?”

“Brian, it’s okay! You can tell me the truth. What’s done is done. It was in the past, when we were together, but now we’re not anymore. We’re friends, like I said. You don’t have to lie anymore.”

“Okay, that’s great Trung, but—”

“Did you cheat on me?”

“—no, Trung, I didn’t. I didn’t cheat on you.”



As more sunlight crept up through cracks in the window blinds, the dreary-eyed and the slightly hungover packed their sleeping bags and their Halloween costumes into their cars and headed home. Meanwhile, all throughout the morning, despite sitting on the same couch, Linh and I texted each other back and forth. Do you wanna talk right now? I asked him. When we weren’t texting, we were smiling and laughing for the people around us, those who were oblivious to the wall of tension separating Linh and me. We’ll talk later, he texted back.

I thought later meant privately in his room, but before I could find any alone time with him, Walden, Ron, and Renee’s bags were already in the car, and soon mine were too.

I realized that Linh never intended to talk in person at all.

When I got home to Irvine and checked my Facebook inbox, I already saw a message from Linh, asking me to confirm if “Shaun, Tyrone, and [I] were in the bathroom doing stuff for the longest time? Lol.” I knew he already knew. We talked around the subject for a while until I got this message from him: Yeah, it’s a slap in the face, but I can’t do anything about it. I’d rather be literally slapped in the face rather than to know how ugly I really must be. Lol. I don’t get my hopes for anything because it’s people like you who make me self-conscious and disgusted. Thanks for coming and I hope you enjoyed yourself.

His message made me a little angry, mainly because I neither called him ugly nor thought he was ugly. But at this point, before saying anything really stupid, I decided it was finally time to go to Trung. I copied and pasted to him what Linh had written me.

bbqdinner:
Is there anything in this message from him that I can fix?

Trung:
Nope, you can’t. At all. You’ve officially burned that bridge. The best you can do is stay away.

bbqdinner:
Well I don’t want to stay away. That’s the same thing as running away and, well, that’s been my solution for too long.

Trung:
Umm. In this case, it’s the ONLY solution. Like seriously Brian, lol. It’s not something that YOU can do. The best you can do is say sorry and offer if he ever wants to talk about it for closure, then you’re more than willing to listen. It’s his move, not yours. It’s not like the times you’ve fucked a guy and then tried to run away from the guy you fucked. Last night you fucked a guy (well, guys) at another guy’s party who was really really into you. Confronting head on to the guy who was into you isn’t gonna do anything.

Well fuck Trung’s advice, I thought to myself. He had to have been wrong. I hurt Linh, and I wasn’t just going to run away and leave Linh to drown in his insecurities. I wrote this back to him:

You think this is because I thought you were ugly? I went through a lot of different ideas to rationalize why I did what I did last night. And well, what I did last night was something I did a long time ago, except worse, and I’ve been trying to rationalize it for the last year and a half or so. I tried to come up with a lot of reasons to justify to myself what I did so I could rest a little more easily, lie a little more easily, or just run from my issues without looking back. But I never succeeded. Rationalizing is something I’ve always been good at in general, but never for shit like this, so don’t think you can easily figure me out and the reasons I do shit.

You wanna know what I thought about to try to rationalize what I did last night? These were my logical explanations:
1. I was drunk.
2. I was feeling angsty because I didn’t get enough attention from you.
3. Seeing you in that tranny maid costume made me instantly unattracted to you because (this is also something you don’t really know about me) I am just that homophobic.
4. There was no number four, but I’ll put the reason you used to rationalize what I did: apparently I think you’re ugly.

I wished that I could believe that any of the above were actually true. The problem with number 1 was that, well, I had two fucking shots. And alcohol is always never an excuse. Number 2 is too immature of an excuse for me to use, and for number 3, even though I wanted to shoot myself the instant I realized that the tranny maid was you, within five minutes I got over it and thought your costume was cute. And number four, you’re not ugly.

There’s no good explanation for what I did last night. I can’t come up with one, and you shouldn’t bother beating yourself trying to come up with one either, especially one in which you bring in your own insecurities. The best I can tell you is that I was simply horny, but other than that, there’s no perfect storybook explanation that will satisfy you or me.

Within a few minutes I got Linh’s reply, and I was dismayed to see that he completely missed the point I was trying to get across. In his message he refuted each of my “logical explanations,” even though I had already done that. I wanted to point out all of his argument’s logical fallacies and misinterpretations of my argument. I wanted to bust out my red pen, mark his message up like I would with my middle school students’ essays, and send it back to him to tell him to rewrite it.

The last sentence he wrote to me was, your selfishness can hurt people, so keep that in mind if you talk to other guys, to which I typed out my reply: No shit. Even though everything I just told you had nothing to do with me being selfish, I wanted to say before going back on topic that I take great pride in my selfishness. But then I stopped myself from sending it.

That was when I realized it was time to quit. That was when I realized that I was trying to fight with logic in an argument that was all about emotion. Trust, betrayal, and love—all topics that my knowledge on logical fallacies and ability to rationalize were completely irrelevant to. There was nothing I could do. Trung was right; the best thing to do was just stay away, so I let Linh’s last message sit in my inbox unanswered. As much as I didn’t want to, I had to run again.