Indeed, “long lost,” but never in a moment forgotten! Throughout the span of a decade, with a mind tempered (or tormented) by “what-once-was” well-wishing nostalgia, remembrances and a deep longing desire to redeem the unearthly, unending exuberance of youth, I have often found my thoughts drifting towards you, my baby blue-eyed, porcelain-paled, lusciously lipped lil’ lady friend of times far past & gone. Indeed, “friend,” but oh so much and so many things more!
April Manteris, you were my Perestroika as Millennium Approaches; you were one above many of my arch-guardian Angels In America! How fitting that in my later, more recent life, I would battle with disease-induced malediction & delusions of messianic manic psychosis, much like the enlightened torment of Prior Walter told by Tony Kushner in his “Not-Yet-Conscious, Forward Dawning,” damned devilish drama staged as “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.”
April Manteris, you were my Perestroika as Millennium Approaches; you were one above many of my arch-guardian Angels In America! How fitting that in my later, more recent life, I would battle with disease-induced malediction & delusions of messianic manic psychosis, much like the enlightened torment of Prior Walter told by Tony Kushner in his “Not-Yet-Conscious, Forward Dawning,” damned devilish drama staged as “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.”
My own, personal, proprietary and unprecedented “Gay Fantasia,” told as follies of the mind and frailty of the body, was rife buttressed by more universal themes. In a demented state of holier-than-thou HIV/AIDS-instigated happenstance and insanity, I foresaw a full faith reconciliation of all conflicting religious around the world; the real-time cultivation of a post-apocalyptic, new-growth Garden of Eden; and my transsexual impregnation as an irrationally self-proclaiming, prophetic “Gift of God” with Christ Child incarnate.
Delusions of near godly grandeur galloped as chariots of fire along the strangely strung-out or awkwardly wrought and wired synapses of my parasitically enslaved psyche toward a new and evermore illustrious Elysian Fields. I was a hopeful, kindhearted and jubilant psychotic; not a criminally paranoid sociopath.
In my lonely, lachrymose, lunatic madness, I believed that all humankind would fall down under the watchful rule & gaze of intergalactic warring Angel/Alien brigades, led by Michael, Gabriel, Beelzebub, and Lucifer, only finally to be throttled full flight into a world far more beautiful, blissful and serene that anyone could have ever imagined before.
Funny thing for me though, during my drug-delayed, disease-induced delusional psychosis, I actually possessed the superhuman scope of mind and intellect to imagine the unimaginable as actual and real! What a harrowingly exhilarating experience! Moreover, you were there with me in spirit, all along the way.
For, I was convinced that you, April: my dream dancing “tell-it-to-snow” Eskimo named Harper Pitt, were suffering from a simultaneously paralleled, prophetic psychosis there, on your side of the world.
In my dreams, I imagined our union as beleaguered, but still sun-beaming and boisterous, biblical brethren, once each of us (and countless other young-spirited saints, psychics and soothsayers) had rightfully sown the heavenly seeds of a new beginning for our separate communities, cultures and societies on this dying-to-life, righteously reincarnate Earth of ours.
So much coincidental quizzicality has shaped the “nefand, sullen languid stories of my last-ditch, last-chance life,” including the serendipity of that first meeting of our two minds.
Our two submedially mature yet still quite sycophantic student souls were somehow, at some point, so mutually confounded, mesmerized and inspired by the truly enlightened intimacy we would go on to share, that we often (if I remember correctly!) smothered each other in self-obsessed, other-opposed & ostracized narcissism.
I fondly reminisce, remember and recall just exactly how we together, as the closest of friends, dealt only in the immaculate intimacy of trusted truth (or truthful trust). Tantamount to our unfettered ferocity of faith in one another, such truth tightly intertwined our hearts & souls together in both telltale-tangled threads of deliberately disgruntled dysfunction or malcontent malaise and sumptuously bittersweet stories of irrational, unreasoned, and misguided boy/girl romance gone awry.
Truth is, all throughout our first two years of undergraduate, I tormented myself terribly in confused and conflicted recognition of the dichotomically opposed binary between mainstream, most fortunate and “full-worth-the-effort” male-female love and its exact opposite: gay love, or “queer” love, since there was nothing “gay” about such love for me, during those years, or even ever after!
Truths is, that one occasion of my coming out that you so fondly remember in email, could have panned out in two very different ways; and trust me, when I say that you would not at all have been pleased by the alternate “outcome” of such proceedings! WINK! WINK!
Oh! I should scream it from my rooftop! I’M IN LOVE WITH YOU, APRIL MANTERIS! I always have been and always will be! Never once have I not regretted the decision I made to proclaim my homosexuality to the world, because all that led to was me being pigeonholed in to a nasty, putrid, pestilent and perverse segment of society, where I subsequently succumbed to a lifestyle of depression, then deviance, then drugs, then disease, then delusions, then death, then disfigurement.
And, all that’s been done to me without my ever having witnessed once again the trusted truth (or truthful trust) of such mutually equitable & reciprocal platonic intimacy as we once shared, let alone anything remotely resembling the romantic!
So, that said, I’ll conclude in recognition of how immensely blessed I am to have found you meandering back into my life with such a generously opened mind and heart, with such forgiveness of the trifles of the past, and with such dignified poise, to reclaim our friendship from the exact point where we once left it off.
I welcome you into my life with widely opened arms, April! Moreover, I do ever so hope that we can rekindle that platonic intimacy that once existed between the two of us and that defined our very profound and beautiful friendship! I look forward to a future with you in it, and I hope you do of me, as well…
With fond memories…
And, In fond regards,
And, In fond regards,
Most sincerely…
Your dear friend,
Your dear friend,
Matt(e)o | QHereKidSF
Matthew D. Blanchard
Matthew D. Blanchard
