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Charlie comes home from work and sees his partner curled up on the sofa, softly sobbing while looking at his mobile.
“Puppies?” the smaller man asks, smiling at his adorable softie of a spouse. “Or the magic of children’s laughter?”
Nick sniffles. “Queer joy,” he quietly sobs.
“Oh darling,” Charlie coos, coming over to sit next to Nick and inviting the larger man to curl up into his lap. “Are you on the fruity side of TikTok again?”
“Look,” Nick simply says, shoving the phone into Charlie’s hands. It’s a pink map, with millions of little pins in it.
“Fell in love with a girl in my year nine art class here,” Charlie reads out the highlighted tag. It seems to be attached to a local secondary school. “Sounds like it was written by Tao.”
“Look at them all,” Nick murmurs. “It’s global. Queer people pinning places that are important to them around the world. It’s like… thousands of stories of queer love and heartbreak and resistance and joy. We really are everywhere.”
Charlie zooms out and starts to scroll. Most of Europe is densely populated in black pins, so thick in some areas that you can barely see where you are. Other places are more sparse, though.
I know we’re not together anymore, but I’ll always love you. Please stay safe, in Ukraine. Charlie’s not one for crying, but he feels his heart clench. He knows he was lucky to stay with his first boyfriend for his entire life, and that most people don’t meet their person so young. But he also feels… if something had happened that caused him and Nick to separate, if they had broken up in some alternate universe, he thinks he would have still spent the rest of his life loving this man. And he can hardly imagine the ache of that– let alone the idea of such a long lost love being stuck in a warzone. What a thing to endure. And yet, this person endures it every single day. So many people do.
Scrolling further east, he finds a longer pin in Russia. Today my dad said «gay son or lesbian daughter, you’re still my kid. no matter how i might struggle internally because of how i was raised i love you and want you happy» Maybe…not everything is lost? Maybe despite all hard times we face right now there’s still hope? Please remember that there are many of us even if sometimes it feels like you’re one against the world. We will be free and happy.
“I can see why this might make you emotional,” Charlie says, holding his own feelings inside. He will not start crying over a map on the internet. No matter how much hope and tenderness and resiliency he sees so vulnerably on display. Nick is the sappy one in this relationship, damn it.
Nick sniffles again. “Some of them are like, gutwrenching. But then there’s ones like this…” He takes his phone back and zooms in on France, quickly pulling up a lonely pin along the Seine. “My first blowjob happened in the changing room of a swimming pool,” Nick reads out, and Charlie giggles.
“Queers really are the same everywhere, aren’t we?” he laughs.
“I’m not saying that semi-public sex should be a queer right of passage, but… well… have you seen London?” Nick shuffles to look up at Charlie, his eyes still red with tears but his laugh lines now on full display.
Pin upon pin upon pin, in one city alone, telling snapshots of stories of first times and last times, fond memories and future plans. Sex and snogging and holding hands and holding hair, falling in and out of love, finding friends and forevers.
We got day drunk in the garden here. There's something about gay friendship that we don't talk about, but it's amazing.
First time I was brave enough to go into a gay bar - The Black Cap - aged 20 in 1981. Life began!
Made out with a girl (Jenny) for the first time. Her breath smelt like vodka redbull and cigarette. She pressed me against the wall in Heaven and shoved her thigh between mine. Afterwards we walked to Piccadilly Circus while she smoked. Such a gentlewoman.
The stories are beautiful, but Charlie finds the one line declarations to be just as powerful.
This is where you helped me realise I’m ace.
Bisexual Muslims Exist.
Here I learned to love wholeheartedly.
“How long have you been on here?” he gently asks his husband.
Nick looks up at him. “Maybe a while.”
“It’s incredible.”
“Yeah. It’s like… do you remember when we were kids, and I said I wished I met you when I was younger?”
Charlie smiles. “Such a teenage thing to say, as if you already had a foot in the grave by year 11.”
“Absolutely ancient,” Nick laughs. “But I felt so behind already, you know? I obviously have more perspective now.” Charlie strokes Nick’s hair as the blonde man continues. “I wish I had something like this when I was younger, though. There’s something so hopeful, even in the heartbreak.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like,” Nick starts clicking different pins, looking for an example. “This one. ‘Where we fell in love. Where we said goodbye.’ It’s like… it’s sad and beautiful at the same time, you know? Even when queer love ends, the fact that it was able to bloom at all is kind of a miracle.” He clicks through another few pins, holding up another case in point.
Realised I didn’t have to hate myself for being queer. I was deep in the closet, full of self-loathing. Learnt I wasn’t an abomination.
“Straight people get to just… fall in love,” Nick continues. “They don’t have to think twice about it. But whenever queer people love, whether it’s someone else or just themselves, that’s a whole fucking journey. Even when they have accepting families, like we did.”
“Mostly accepting,” Charlie corrects, his last memory of David slamming the door in Nick’s face still clear in Charlie’s mind even though it occurred over a decade before.
“Mostly accepting,” Nick concedes.
Charlie looks down at his gorgeous, tenderhearted sap of a husband. This man he’s loved for more than 20 years now. Who’s stood by him, held him, wiped his tears, cleaned his sick. Just as Charlie’s done for Nick. Most days their love feels ordinary. Steady, predictable, plain. Beautiful, of course, but just there. Everpresent. Like gravity, or sunsets, or doghair. An everyday proof of living that doesn’t warrant much of a second glance, so sure is Charlie of its ubiquity. It’s easy to forget that this life they lead now wasn’t always the case. It was hardly a guarantee. In fact, the cards were pretty stacked against them at the beginning.
“Have you checked Truham?”
“I was waiting for you.”
Nick zooms out and scrolls over to their hometown before spreading his finger and thumb across the screen again and pulling in on their old secondary school.
“Kind of shocked to see any pins there at all, honestly,” Charlie admits.
Nick lifts himself up to give Charlie a kiss. “We were never the only ones.”
They click on the first of two pins.
my friends: you did not abandon me and i loved you for that even though the year we were fourteen and this school hurt to be in
“I guess some things never change,” Charlie murmurs, the tears he’s been holding back finally threatening to overwhelm him. He clicks the next pin.
This is probably about the balcony of my old school, where they now raise a pride flag every year
“Some things do, though,” Nick whispers in response.
“Yeah,” Charlie sniffles. “I guess some things do.”
Nick clicks to add a new entry to the old building. Charlie watches as he types, tears rolling down both of their cheeks.
This is where our love story began.
Epic.
Ordinary.
Heartstopping.
Forever.