Ciro's Birthday Proper
May. 28th, 2008 10:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rinueThe first time I met Ciro, I already knew a lot about him, substantial parts of it untrue - which I knew, only I wasn't sure which parts. This was about six years ago. I'd been hearing about Ciro for maybe the six months previous. He was normally the bad guy of these stories, but I thought he sounded pretty great anyway. To meet him, I had to lay down a series of ultimatums.
Patrick, of course, was the first (and much later, the last) obstacle, because for the first year I knew him, he refused to introduce me to any of his friends, out of a general fear that we'd all like each other more than we liked him and stop hanging out with him. This turned out to be true - again much later, and as a consequence of his later behavior rather than our simple meeting - but at the time I thought it was absurd and threatened to take matters into my own hands, particularly because I had the sense he was telling other people I was his girlfriend when I wasn't (he was) and wanted to pop that bubble as soon as possible. (Something that becomes clear throughout this story is that Patrick lies a lot. Sorry about that. I'm not trying to bury a hatchet, or anything; I'd much rather spend the time talking about how great Ciro is. Unfortunately, it's integral to the chain of events.)
My threat lead to a trip to the cinema with me, Val, Patrick, and Patrick's old friends Tom and Chad. (The movie, I believe, was Harry Potter.) Patrick made no efforts to foster conversation between us, and tried to sit himself, Val, and me in a different row from Tom and Chad. However, Tom leapt into the breach as a dazzling conversationalist, and I insisted on sitting with the two of them. Chad I didn't like so much.
Patrick sensed that change was in the wind, and our conversations for the next month were chiefly about his great adventures with The Richardson Boys. (My name, not his.) A name kept coming up - someone who was not a friend, someone who was the great betrayer. Ciro.
Thing is, it always sounded to me in these stories like Ciro was being reasonable. He seemed to be making the same decisions I would want someone to make. Also, his name was Ciro, and my name was Romie, and everyone else was named things like Ben and Chris. The paralells were obvious.
I could not contact Ciro for confirmation, because he had left town. (No he hadn't.) Nor would Patrick give me Tom's phone number so I could hang out with Tom independently - my access was to remain dependent on Patrick. (Tom and I did an end-run around this later.) I did, however, have THE INTERNET. And Chad, it turned out, had a blog.
Chad and I became best friends, mainly through admiration of each other's writing and the fact that we were the only two people we knew who tended to be up at 3 in the morning. Well, us and Chad's other very-much-in-town best friend, CIRO.
Who I still wasn't allowed to meet for another few months. For, indeed, Chad too had a crush on me, and although he knew nothing would come of it, he also wanted to enjoy it for a while and didn't really like the idea of his two best friends connecting instantly and running off together. I retaliated by frequently demanding stories about Ciro, which was not hard because Chad is great at telling stories and Ciro tended to be the hero of them.
Enough is enough, I eventually said, six Mays ago. Stretch has cooked Thanksgiving dinner in a spring month which is decidedly not Thanksgiving, and you can only come if Ciro arrives with you. Get on the phone.
And that is how I first laid eyes on Ciro. He had just returned from a grand road trip across vast swathes of the US, and insulted Montana immediately, not even knowing that it was Stretch's home state and that insults against it were the way the rest of the family bonded. I thought, dear god, this is my shield brother; we have been separated since birth and that is the reason I have felt alone all this time, but I am not. It wasn't like falling in love, at least not the way I understood it; it was like finally finding home.
You would think this would be the beginning of an intense relationship, but we pretty much kept our distance. I went to poetry readings he hosted, and he liked to have me there because he knew I had his back. When Johnny was in town, we all had an avant garde game of truth or dare, where dares tended to run along the lines of "puppet show version of the orpheus myth" or "improvised horror story starring the people in this room" and truths tended to run along the lines of favorite things and identifying traits.
Patrick, who was also there, although he left early, before things got going, claimed untruthfully the following day that some of Ciro's truths weren't true. He also, in stories about Ciro, tended to ascribe actions to different characters than enacted them, so that Ciro's (and sometimes Chad's) good moments became Patrick's or Will's, Ciro's and Will's motivations and thinking styles reversed, and Patrick's bad moments became Ciro's. It took me years to untangle this. The moral of these stories was typically Ciro Does Wrong To Women, although it occasionally took detours into Ciro Makes Things Up About Film.
I never bought into the stories, but they did throw me off. As for Ciro, he kept his distance out of affection for Chad, which I read as disinterest. And neither of us were looking for long-term attachments - we had empires to squander. Still, I really liked the fact that he existed, and vice versa. It was good to have an ally. "If Ciro were here, he'd get it," became a usual refrain. I knew that in the future - far in the future - we would do something great together. Only first he had plans to move to LA and I was going to run off to join the circus in England.
And it sort of wound up happening that way, only his visit to LA was shorter than hoped for, and my trip to England wasn't quite for a circus and was four years delayed.
It turns out that back when we first met, Ciro regularly drove to my apartment, for no other reason than that he wanted to drive and I seemed like a good place to drive to. I should have known, because I saw his car on the road all the time - it was easy to recognize. It cheered me up, but I thought it was a coincidence. Sometimes it probably was. But other times, late at night, when I was awake and writing in my apartment, he was sitting outside. If one of those days I'd happened to open the door, how differently those four years might have gone.
And how similarly they would have ended up.
Patrick, of course, was the first (and much later, the last) obstacle, because for the first year I knew him, he refused to introduce me to any of his friends, out of a general fear that we'd all like each other more than we liked him and stop hanging out with him. This turned out to be true - again much later, and as a consequence of his later behavior rather than our simple meeting - but at the time I thought it was absurd and threatened to take matters into my own hands, particularly because I had the sense he was telling other people I was his girlfriend when I wasn't (he was) and wanted to pop that bubble as soon as possible. (Something that becomes clear throughout this story is that Patrick lies a lot. Sorry about that. I'm not trying to bury a hatchet, or anything; I'd much rather spend the time talking about how great Ciro is. Unfortunately, it's integral to the chain of events.)
My threat lead to a trip to the cinema with me, Val, Patrick, and Patrick's old friends Tom and Chad. (The movie, I believe, was Harry Potter.) Patrick made no efforts to foster conversation between us, and tried to sit himself, Val, and me in a different row from Tom and Chad. However, Tom leapt into the breach as a dazzling conversationalist, and I insisted on sitting with the two of them. Chad I didn't like so much.
Patrick sensed that change was in the wind, and our conversations for the next month were chiefly about his great adventures with The Richardson Boys. (My name, not his.) A name kept coming up - someone who was not a friend, someone who was the great betrayer. Ciro.
Thing is, it always sounded to me in these stories like Ciro was being reasonable. He seemed to be making the same decisions I would want someone to make. Also, his name was Ciro, and my name was Romie, and everyone else was named things like Ben and Chris. The paralells were obvious.
I could not contact Ciro for confirmation, because he had left town. (No he hadn't.) Nor would Patrick give me Tom's phone number so I could hang out with Tom independently - my access was to remain dependent on Patrick. (Tom and I did an end-run around this later.) I did, however, have THE INTERNET. And Chad, it turned out, had a blog.
Chad and I became best friends, mainly through admiration of each other's writing and the fact that we were the only two people we knew who tended to be up at 3 in the morning. Well, us and Chad's other very-much-in-town best friend, CIRO.
Who I still wasn't allowed to meet for another few months. For, indeed, Chad too had a crush on me, and although he knew nothing would come of it, he also wanted to enjoy it for a while and didn't really like the idea of his two best friends connecting instantly and running off together. I retaliated by frequently demanding stories about Ciro, which was not hard because Chad is great at telling stories and Ciro tended to be the hero of them.
Enough is enough, I eventually said, six Mays ago. Stretch has cooked Thanksgiving dinner in a spring month which is decidedly not Thanksgiving, and you can only come if Ciro arrives with you. Get on the phone.
And that is how I first laid eyes on Ciro. He had just returned from a grand road trip across vast swathes of the US, and insulted Montana immediately, not even knowing that it was Stretch's home state and that insults against it were the way the rest of the family bonded. I thought, dear god, this is my shield brother; we have been separated since birth and that is the reason I have felt alone all this time, but I am not. It wasn't like falling in love, at least not the way I understood it; it was like finally finding home.
You would think this would be the beginning of an intense relationship, but we pretty much kept our distance. I went to poetry readings he hosted, and he liked to have me there because he knew I had his back. When Johnny was in town, we all had an avant garde game of truth or dare, where dares tended to run along the lines of "puppet show version of the orpheus myth" or "improvised horror story starring the people in this room" and truths tended to run along the lines of favorite things and identifying traits.
Patrick, who was also there, although he left early, before things got going, claimed untruthfully the following day that some of Ciro's truths weren't true. He also, in stories about Ciro, tended to ascribe actions to different characters than enacted them, so that Ciro's (and sometimes Chad's) good moments became Patrick's or Will's, Ciro's and Will's motivations and thinking styles reversed, and Patrick's bad moments became Ciro's. It took me years to untangle this. The moral of these stories was typically Ciro Does Wrong To Women, although it occasionally took detours into Ciro Makes Things Up About Film.
I never bought into the stories, but they did throw me off. As for Ciro, he kept his distance out of affection for Chad, which I read as disinterest. And neither of us were looking for long-term attachments - we had empires to squander. Still, I really liked the fact that he existed, and vice versa. It was good to have an ally. "If Ciro were here, he'd get it," became a usual refrain. I knew that in the future - far in the future - we would do something great together. Only first he had plans to move to LA and I was going to run off to join the circus in England.
And it sort of wound up happening that way, only his visit to LA was shorter than hoped for, and my trip to England wasn't quite for a circus and was four years delayed.
It turns out that back when we first met, Ciro regularly drove to my apartment, for no other reason than that he wanted to drive and I seemed like a good place to drive to. I should have known, because I saw his car on the road all the time - it was easy to recognize. It cheered me up, but I thought it was a coincidence. Sometimes it probably was. But other times, late at night, when I was awake and writing in my apartment, he was sitting outside. If one of those days I'd happened to open the door, how differently those four years might have gone.
And how similarly they would have ended up.
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Aww....
Date: 2008-05-29 02:22 pm (UTC)Only it's true! And you guys aren't French. And Patrick didn't end up offering to duel Ciro for your affections. But otherwise totally French fiction! (Actually, now that I think about it, it's nothing like French fiction.)
So, I wanna clear up some things that you may not know about Ciro. First of all, Ciro is totally capable of lying, but it's generally only to authority figures or vagabonds who bear ill-will toward his friends (so many stories could I tell). The one time I know of that he ever lied for himself was when we were rather young; he had claimed he wrote a book and it was in the middle of being published. He later came out and admitted, even though it hadn't hurt me in any way and I'd already long forgotten about it. It's said that creative people tend to be liars as children, so it's only natural that he would give it a shot, and it's good to know he's got so much compassion for his friends that he'd rather be honest than allow his guilt to linger. I haven't known him to ever lie like that since. One great way to know if someone is being honest with you, is if they tell you things you don't want to hear. Ciro's too smart to be caught in a lie, so the only reason anyone could hate him is because he told them the truth (or because they're jealous).
I'm sure you're aware of this, since you know he held back from admitting his feelings toward you for Chad's sake. I just wanted to let you know some extra backstory behind his integrity.
I have a question, though; would things have been different if Patrick hadn't gone through all that trouble to keep things from you? If so, I think there's a lesson to be learned in this.
-Quip
Re: Aww....
Date: 2008-05-29 09:34 pm (UTC)Only maybe we would have run into each other at a poetry reading.
I try not to get too caught up in the maybes.
If what you're asking is whether I would have been intrigued by Ciro without the lies (I don't think you are), then the answer is yes. If I met him today and didn't know anything about him, I would still know immediately that he is the person I want to be with. This is a really mushy thing to say, but I genuinely do think he's the handsomest, most passionate, smartest, most interesting person I've ever met, and I admire him more than I can say. He is everything I have ever wanted in another person - even an imaginary person. And when I am around him, I am the best version of myself.
I will say there is one nice thing about the Patrick delay, which is that Ciro and I worked together a lot before we became a couple, so we know that we genuinely DO like each other as artists, and don't just feel that way because we are sleeping together. And that is a good thing to know.
-Romie
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-30 02:18 am (UTC)It's interesting to read this, as I had assumed when I was in town that this was a clearly tightly knit group of friends... oh how it all falls apart in hindsight.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-03 05:40 am (UTC)