I hope you don't mind

I met Bruce under very unusual circumstances, to say the least. We only spent a week or so together before deciding, independently of one another, that we’d finally found our match.

Of course, I only knew this intrinsically, and was pretty oblivious to the fact that Bruce was several steps ahead of me in acknowledging the reality of our situation outright. He’d even made this plain in an email he sent a few days after I left London to attend a wedding in Poland, when I was still feeling unsure of whether or not I’d ever see him again - such was my faith in both love and people.

But my feelings were stronger than any doubts I harboured about his sincerity, and whereas this would have caused me a great deal of trouble in the past, I’d somehow blundered into the most appropriate avenue for this vulnerability, thank god. I loved him more than anything or anyone, and part of me – well, all of me - didn’t want to know if it wasn’t reciprocated.

I still feel that way. I don’t mean that I doubt his feelings for me, but one thing I do know is that love is a complete contradiction: the more you love, the better you feel, which renders the act of giving more selfish than generous. I will always believe that I get more out of loving Bruce than the reverse, but I’m okay with that, so long as he is. Call me selfish.

Anyway, I came across this song again on my iPod, which I first heard on Bruce’s now defunct MySpace page. I was still stupidly unsure about how he perceived the situation, because we hadn’t been any more explicit than two people living halfway around the world from one another can manage without irony in an email or a phone call. But I flicked onto his page, and there was the song, and it was like an atomic bomb went off in my chest. He hadn’t put it there to be interpreted by anyone, obviously, and yet from that moment on, all the beautiful music in the world started to sound like something he’d created just for me. It still does.

Discover Spiritualized®!