Erosion and Catholic Guilt

I get so much satisfaction from walking on the red bricks, that stick out farther than the others.
I like feeling them shift under my feet. I like to think that someone set them apart that way,
just for me, but I know it's far more likely that they shifted because their structure eroded from weather and pressure, and I can relate to that.
 
I keep my eyes to the ground when I leave her house, in part to find those loose bricks and in part to avoid the mortifying ordeal of being seen.

The cold is oppressive and I'm walking along the waterfront where the rich people come to dine and the poor, to sleep. I'm walking and watching the toes of my shoes pass each other over and over again propelling me toward a place where I can say nothing and no one waits.

I walk inside and lock the door behind me. I sit on the floor, probably just for the drama of it.

I'm waiting for a phone call. Not in the way that people used to sit, with their head in their hands, near a phone with a spiral cord and rotary dial. I'm sitting, waiting for my courage to come, so I can make a phone call that I need to make. 

My father loves me, I know, despite my mother's best efforts, that he does. He's become one of my closest friends, and through childhood, wrought with pain as it was, he was there and he tried, and his structure might have been eroded by weather and pressure but he was there... and he tried.

I worry that his Irish Catholic heart can take the blow, so I keep finding reasons to tell him later, and later, and later, until never's in view. I just don't want to disappoint him.

My queer friends say that it is internalized homophobia, and my straight friends ask whether and why he even needs to know.

I guess, I tell myself, that he'll know if I ever get married...
I guess, I tell myself, I'll know when the time is right...
I guess, I tell myself, that it shouldn't be a phone call...
I should drive 300 miles to have a story for the books.

I'm not really scared that he'll hate me. I'm not really scared that he'll disown me, or even that he'll tell me at all if he does feel disappointment. I'm really just scared that he'll privately wonder to himself what he did wrong.

And he did a lot of things wrong, he did a lot of things right, too.
But he never did get things wrong enough to change nature.

Perhaps after a bit more weather, and a bit more pressure, I'll find the

time
or
courage
or
bravery
or
honesty
or
whatever

to tell him that I've got this girlfriend that I think he'll really like.