Falling in Love at the Flying Trapeze Rig
My palms slapped his wrists, heart dive-bombing my belly as he caught my arms and pulled me off the bar, twenty-three feet above the Santa Monica Pier.
This was the first time I met Kevin.
I was a circus hobbyist trying my first flying trapeze class, and he was beautiful—shirtless, smiling; golden-brown legs wrapped around the cables of a catcher’s trapeze, as mine were tucked over the flying trapeze bar. The manager asked him what he thought of me later that day—she had offered me a job halfway through class.
“Nothing special,” he said.
I found this out several months into our relationship—by then it was funny, because he loved me.
Before Kevin, no one had ever really loved me.
Before Kevin, I had never really even dated anyone (seriously, at least)—strange for someone in their mid-twenties, maybe, but almost standard for a queer, nonbinary millennial with mental health issues like me. (Raise your hand if trying to date when coming of age gave you trauma and it ruined you for love for at least a little while.)
Kevin made things feel easy. He learned my pronouns and taught them to his friends. He played with my leg hair and asked how he could support me. When I cried he told me of course I didn’t cry too much; when I needed things from him he said I wasn’t too needy; when I didn’t understand his love language he tried to translate for me.
When he said he was at an age where he wanted to look for a forever partner, and I said I couldn’t be that for him, we agreed to have an open relationship. I didn’t want either of us to miss out on an opportunity—him to find a life partner, me to date in ways that better expressed my gender and sexuality. See? Easy. (But, of course, Covid. My lovely, health-conscious partner and I and Covid. Only now are we beginning to discuss the terms of our relationship’s opening, as the state and the world open back up too.)
From the beginning, we knew our relationship had an expiration date, we just didn’t know when. So we shared our time as best as we could—in national and local parks, on restaurant patios, on the freeways, at the beach, and above it all, at the trapeze rig. Wearing three layers of clothing watching the winter fog roll in, or four layers of sunscreen watching the summer crowds roll out. Leaving gifts for each other in our work lockers; stealing a kiss in the staff shed; driving up the 405 to work together and crossing the cracked wooden deck of the pier hand-in-hand.
It wasn’t all the good kind of heart-falling-into-belly feelings though—sometimes (often) we missed the catch, no matter how hard we tried. Sometimes we argued in the pier parking lot or drove down the 405 in silence. Sometimes we both felt like we deserved an apology but neither of us was willing to budge.
Even if he thought I didn’t cry too much, I still cried a lot, often because of him. I still needed things from him he couldn’t or didn’t want to give me. I still needed to be told, not shown, that he cared for me, and we often ended up stuck on either side of the love language barrier. I struggled to figure out what caused the difficulties in our relationship—what was his fault, what was mine; what was because it was my first serious relationship, what was because it all was playing out against the backdrop of a global pandemic?
The other week, at a car wash in Manhattan Beach, we were reflecting on our relationship and a gratitude I had forgotten welled up in my throat. After a year and a half of being away from bad men, I told him, I’ve forgotten a lot about how bad they were to me, about how bad they can be. I fell in love with Kevin because he is a truly good man; better than any other who has held, taken, or pushed away my hand.
The good you have done me, in helping me heal from that, I told him, is immeasurable.
I can’t tangibly measure our relationship’s quality, but its quantity adds up like a big-city musical—in bike rides, in french fries, in bath bombs in hotel rooms and my studio apartment; in six hundred fifty-seven thousand four hundred minutes. My longest relationship to date, and its expiration date is drawing closer.
Kevin is leaving LA this summer; one day soon, so will I. One day I will live in a new city; have to make new friends; find a new trapeze rig; fall in love with a new beautiful boy, boi, woman, womxn, or person.
One day I will no longer have Kevin to pick up the phone on the first ring, to make my bed in the morning when I’m not looking, to be patient with me, to make me feel safe, to pull me into his hands and off of the trapeze bar. I will have to learn to trust a new person—perhaps another “mostly-straight” man (his words)—again; to let myself cry and need things and misunderstand everything about love.
I will have to trust that I can still be vulnerable, in a way I never felt I could before, but I’m not too worried anymore. After all, the last time I was falling in love, someone caught me.
This piece was written in April, rejected from the LA Times’s “LA Affairs” column in May, and ghosted from Hobart’s “Rejected Modern Love Essays” column in early June (which, yeah, I get that). Kevin left LA in May and we decided to break up in mid-June. We are still good friends, and occasionally, he still catches me.