I Want to Be Entangled
Death, grief, intimacy and the comfort I've found in Heated Rivalry
Almost every evening after dinner, I restart the series “Heated Rivalry” from the beginning.
The story centers two closeted hockey players — Shane and Ilya — who fall in love. One gay, one bisexual; one Canadian, one Russian.
I first heard about the program as its fandom started growing in the U.S. after HBO Max picked it up for distribution.
My reaction was immediate, weighty and visceral.
I think I’ve watched the entire series no fewer than a dozen times, likely more.
It’s become like therapy for me.
I sometimes think about all the people who exist that I’ll never meet, or those I’ve met but no longer know.
Similar to how if you plot your individual presence within the reality of the universe you start to realize you are but an almost imperceptible blink of energy.
Here … *poof.*
While here, I am a collector.
My mind squirrels away tiny moments I have no logical reason to document and rarely understand their meaning beyond small, seemingly mundane remembrances.
But noticing, quiet observation, is my way of knitting myself into this world.
Shannon, the photographer, my head in her lap, her fingers in my hair as she drove me back to my dorm the weekend we graduated from college.
Andy, muscles and tank top that if you were judging books by covers might make you think he was a frat guy instead of a person who would let a mosquito drink her fill from his forearm. “I mean, she already bit me,” he explained when he saw me staring.
Leah, who one night leaned over and asked if she could kiss me while we were sitting at the bar. One, short but slow. Years later she’d text when one of our favorite bartenders died. “Hey you. Pretty sure Ed was our bartender a few times. Loved these nights looking out onto Dearborn.”
Tim, a true punk rocker with spiked platinum blond hair, leather and Docs, who spoke so eloquently in my freshman seminar class about how the first step to being able to kill someone is dehumanizing your target.
Suzy, tiny and fit, thick English accent, in love with a much older man and independent films.
The longer I live, the more I open myself up to letting my feelings saturate my internal landscape, deep and nourishing if occasionally intimidating, steered by raising my trans son and losing two of the greatest loves of my life.
I want to be in this world fully.
I did not learn intimacy growing up. My parents didn’t model closeness.
There was no hand holding or hugs. There were very few “I love yous” spoken either casually or seriously. Kisses were scarce and awkward, saved for occasions like an anniversary or birthday. Affection was for behind closed doors, which when you’re a child feels like secrecy and shame.
Their relationship looked more like a division of labor than a love story. My mom the emotional bedrock, my dad the provider.
In a conversation not long before she died, my mom shared she’d spontaneously kissed my dad on their wedding day, after the ceremony but before the cake. “Why’d you do that?” he’d asked her in response.
“I knew I was in trouble,” she told me.
The trouble here being a person who felt deeply, needed her roots generously watered with emotion and compassion, had herself grown up in a house punctuated by cruelty and coldness and somehow still managed to want more.
The way, as a kid then teenager then adult, I always wanted more, too.
I just didn’t know what I was wanting or the depth of the deficit I was carrying.
Kurt caught me off guard, both in life and death.
My experience before him was shallow and insignificant, not just in romance but everything.
I was always, always too much.
My feelings like a chasm, deep and endless, with no proper channel, just me, their imperfect and stunted vessel.
I had no way of taming my need, my desire to give meaning to the entire world and make sense of my own place. Imagine carrying all your senses on the surface, heavy and burdened with input, but not having the understanding or skill to process the overload.
That was, that is, that can be me, then, there and now.
Circuits screaming for relief and me — dumbfounded and raw — unable to find the shut off valve or rewire.
I didn’t want avoidance or absence.
I wanted conversations that would help me unravel the disorientation created by having such big feelings with no real place to put them. I wanted people to recognize themselves in me. I wanted fellowship. I wanted deep connection in ways both big and small.
Kurt taught me how to slow down, stand still long enough to let someone take in the emotional view, get acquainted and acclimated.
“Are you …” he began, before trailing off, having just sung the entirety of Me and Bobby McGee in honor of his mother as we sat together nursing beers at the bar.
I knew the question and answered, a little bewildered he’d even wondered. “No, I’m not seeing anyone.”
In therapy, I finally come round to my point.
“When my mom died, she took my entire history with her.”
Trying to put a bun in my hair when I begged her, even though she knew it was too thin to hold.
Grabbing a stuffed animal like one Ben had gotten for his birthday that I liked, the shopkeeper asking, looking at Ben, “Is this for this little cutie?” My mom responding, looking at me, “No, it’s for this big cutie.”
The blueberry pie she’d make from scratch for my birthday every year. The poppy seed thumbprint cookies every holiday. Godiva truffles in the mail and bags of Cool Ranch Doritos on the counter whenever I visited.
Silently sitting on the edge of my bed after hearing me cry in my sleep, waiting for me to wake up, a hand gently resting on my side.
Watching my son take his first breath. Yelling at the doctor to do something about the pain. Waiting for his dad to leave the hospital room before giving me a necklace with Ben’s sapphire birthstone. “I wanted you to have this.”
I think of her brain cascading away, sweeping everything she ever knew into the abyss, collapsing under the weight of oxygen deprivation.
“This is where everything that makes you, you is stored,” her doctors told us, explaining the brain top to bottom, finally arriving at the brain stem, the only thing really left of my mom, giving her the involuntary but essential ability to take a few breaths on her own.
The person who knew me best and loved me most was already gone before I was at her side in the ICU.
And, in ways, me with her.
Grief loops back. “You’re talking more about Kurt,” my therapist notices.
It’s true. Even knowing you can’t compartmentalize grief hadn’t prepared me for how much losing my mom would revive the loss of Kurt. Then, the ache was physical, like someone had scooped out my center and left a furious, gnawing void.
“I feel a lot of the same feelings I did when he died,” I admit. Close to three decades of absence suddenly feel stifling and near. “We didn’t have the decades my mom and I had together, but he was the first person to really get me, show me care, be vulnerable so I could be vulnerable, too.”
When I told him how often I woke up at night just to slip my hand under his shirt, craving skin to skin contact, and he responded by just not wearing a T-shirt to bed anymore.
Stepping outside when the door at the bar was slow, him leaning against the building, me leaning into him, kissing, unbothered by the outside world.
My feet resting in his lap, his thumb slowly smoothing over my skin as he talked to his twin brother about a soccer game.
Driving home from a long road trip to a friend’s wedding. “How does it feel to know you won’t ever have to do this drive alone again?” he asked out of the blue.
Sitting on the curb of a gas station in the early morning hours one of the first nights we met, talking about how he came home sick one day to find his then fiancee fucking someone else on their couch.
Driving to bingo when I started to worry I’d left a candle burning and him quietly turning around to go check with my asking.
Sitting on the couch, visiting with his family when he gets up to go do something. He leans over and gives me a slow, unreserved kiss before leaving the room.
Playing Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” on the jukebox every time we shot pool together.
In ways both similar and different, my mom and Kurt both gave me cover and a way to continually renew my promise to myself.
They both held up a mirror and introduced me to my tenderness, not as a weakness but a strength. Taught me how to protect her while at the same time coaxing her out into the open so she could seek herself in the wild, unafraid and gutsy.
“I think that’s why ‘Heated Rivalry’ is such a balm to me,” I tell my therapist. “I’m replaying what two of the best people I’ve known in my life taught me about intimacy. Ilya and Shane are like both sides of myself.”
One cautious, one a little more audacious. Both with their own reasons for not believing they can either have or deserve what they want and need but still, somehow, finding ways to reach and reach and reach, compelled to nurture their feelings, attend to their softness, over and over and over — after joy, after disappointment, after heartbreak, after contentment.
Against every impulse that suggests self-preservation requires distance and solitude.
Intimacy, in all its forms, demands daring and patience. A resolve to dampen self-doubt and cultivate resilience while knee deep in unease and insecurity, because beginnings, and endings, are always plump with both potential and peril. Being that open, that alive, is a definitive and unambiguous kind of exposure.
You … laid bare.
In the show, I come to realize, I find the heart of both my mom and Kurt reminding me that living is, at least in part, a conscious choice to remain entangled.
I want to remain entangled.
Woven in and around, in spite of death, in celebration of being, vital and essential, knitted to the cosmic human experience, moment by moment, again and again, from ever to end.