UN REQUITED (boyxboy)

One

It is at the end of it all that clarity becomes one of your keenest senses. You begin to reflect back on your life, such as it is. As my life slowly begins to fade away, I take a trip back through my whole, but short life and start from where it all began...

Conner and I have been best friends since literally the day we were both born. We were both born on the same day a couple of hours apart. He was born first and he never lets me forget it. Our mothers were also the best of friends so we may have actually started our friendship inside of their wombs.

They took the journey of expected motherhood together strengthening their bond and creating ours. We both wound up being an only child becoming each others surrogate siblings. Our bond was like no other I or anyone had ever seen.

Every significant event in our lives was experienced together. It was easy to see from as early on as our toddler years that Conner was the bigger of the two of us. That never made a difference to us because nothing could sever our bond. That right there was my first deceptively naive belief. I should have known better but who questions loyalty at the tender age of four.

Kindergarten was the start of it all. You see the first five years of our life, it was just Conner and me. Now suddenly here we are in this new environment called school and new elements have entered our world called acquaintances and friends. But with these new elements of experience came a new awakening, a slow awareness of how things should be that inevitably brings the downfall of innocence in youth.

Quickly throughout our elementary school years, the differences could be detected in how Conner and I would fall into a class based on our appearance. He was so much bigger than me from almost the beginning. Mom told me that when we were born, while I weighed five pounds even and measured seventeen inches long, Conner was a few ounces shy of ten pounds and measured twenty one inches long.

Our features never changed much. I was born with the lightest blond hair that I got from my dad and clear green eyes that are almost see through from my mom. She also blessed me with her pale skin. Now Conner, he came out looking like an exact duplicate of his dad. He has black hair and yellowish/hazel eyes with a natural tan. To me, he is just perfect.

People have always gravitated towards him because he has this aura about him. He is completely easy to approach and even easier to talk to. I cannot say the same thing about myself. I am naturally shy. The people who are his friends are more like my acquaintances and only do this because in the end, no matter how hard they try, I am his best friend.

There is no status quo where I am concerned. I am the most important person in his life and everyone knows it. My popularity is completely tied to his own and I am okay with that. He is the only person I have ever needed and as long as he is in my life, I'm okay.

This was probably the beginning of my downfall. Giving all of myself to a person who never knew the gift he had. This is also where my inner turmoil began because as early as I can remember, my feelings for Conner where on a level that I did not quite understand until we both hit puberty.

We had a group of guys who we regularly hung out with. They were more his crew than mine and later on became his team mates as they took on the roles of football jocks following their QB. My road was much more different. I was the most intelligent student in my school and with the way I looked, if not for Conner, I would have been bullied pretty damn bad.

From our elementary years through junior high, Conner easily threw himself into sports mostly focusing on football and I was his biggest fan. He showed quite a talent from an early age and his parents encouraged it and mine supported him.

My gifts were more academic. I showed signs of genius from as early as the age of one and my parents honed in on those skills and nurtured my gifts as I grew. Every competition, every scholastic meet, every chess tournament, my best friend was there to show his support as my biggest fan.

I reveled in his attention loving every moment as it came and finally the summer that we turned fourteen as we were on the cusp of beginning our high school years, that is when I finally realized the true meaning behind my feeling for him. I was in love with my best friend and it thrilled yet terrified me beyond belief for you see in that moment of realization I also had to come to terms with and accept the fact that I was gay.

Not knowing how to express any of this to the one person I would normally share everything in my life with, I found myself wanting to hide. This again in my young naivety was my first grave mistake. I should have just told my best friend all of it and trusted in our bond but I was terrified of losing any part of him so I hid myself and my feelings for Conner.

My second grave mistake, was putting all of myself into our friendship knowing that if he ever took that away, it would destroy me. The third and the gravest of them all, was falling for my best friend, my straight best friend...