It happens to the best of us. Sometimes, our feelings get in the way of our logic and we start falling for the people closest to us - people whom we love with all our heart and soul, yet know may never reciprocate our love despite all we’ve been through together. The straight people. Your best friend. Your colleague. Your college mate. You know that although you share a common bond, your sexuality is different and vastly separate than that of theirs - and for fear of rejection, you hide the truth.

Perhaps it will go away, you think. Perhaps, it’s just a crush - a phase. Perhaps he / she won’t ever have to know that I’m in love with him / her but unknowingly, having spent enough time in their company - your attraction culminates to a point where you simply cannot have it be a secret anymore.

You reveal it.

It is a true test of friendship. Some of us are rejected cruelly. Others are let down gently, their friendship never faltering - but falling for the straight people teaches us that humans feel deeply for others, irregardless of sexuality - and some understand it enough to let you protect your emotions as a friend, while others are blinded by stereotype and paranoia that they avoid socializing with a gay person for fear of inevitably catching some sort of a virus, or even worse - be branded gay as well.

It’s the way the humans work: we reject those we do not understand.

For me, I understand what it’s like to be on the end of the rejected - having been on the receiving end of cruel cold rejection before and I understand exactly what it is like to be on one end of the spectrum only to see the man I love on the other end; knowing that we can never be together. That doesn’t stop me from loving him however, and six years on - I still do. He was my first love, and although it never worked out - somewhere in the back of my memory, I still remember who and what he was to me as if it was yesterday.

This is my story.

I was sixteen then, and it was February 2002 and Mattheu had just returned to the country, having spent the last few years in the United States. We were in the same class, but never talked until one day - by accident, my pants caught on a nail, tore open a gaping hole and I became the laughing stock of the class. But Mattheu, unlike the others didn’t laugh - instead, he fetched a needle and thread from the teacher’s office, brought it back and helped me sew my the tear. And that was when I first met him.

We became good friends. Months on, Mattheu and I spent long hours together - games was the common ground between us, and he taught me to love basketball, speak in a wild unknown lingo, and dance. There were some laughs, and some great moments together - and two long years had passed, I fell for him.

I suppose it was because he seemed much more older; and there was a tone of maturity in his voice. He was cute in the way he acted, he was well-built and smelled good and the American accent he had on him was wickedly attractive.

One day during a sleepover at his place, I lost my senses: I kissed Mattheu.

We were at his grandmother’s house then, it was two days after Eid and he had lost his grandmother a few days ago. Caught us by shock it did; we woke up one morning to find a commotion: his grandmother had collapsed in the bathroom and had fallen into a coma. Three hours later, she had passed on in the early hours of the morning and a funeral was immediately held to whatever relatives and friends were present and available at the moment.

As Mattheu grieved over the loss of his grandmother, I felt the kiss was a comfort to him - or as much as I thought of it as comfort in the darkest times. But when he awoke to the peck on his forehead, he turned aside in another turmoil to the sudden realization that his best friend was gay.

Telling his parents about the kiss, they told him to stay away from me - and after I got back from his kampung; was the last I heard of him. Three days later however, when I was visiting a friend’s house - he showed up, much to my surprise when he said he wouldn’t be coming back anytime in the next two weeks.

Words were exchanged over the dinner table that evening, and Mattheu told me the true reason of why he stayed away. He could not accept the fact that I was gay, and when I admitted to the kiss and my sexuality - our friends supported him; not one interested in what I had to say about the nature of the kiss. It was at that brief moment that I felt the strongest pain in my heart, and realized that I had lost a friendship, breached it with a forbidden love; my love unrequited.

Five years later, I am still battling the memory of the things I did and the friendships I botched up, as well as the misunderstandings between the both of us and the lack of honesty we could’ve given. And I can still remember Mattheu telling me that we were two world’s apart - two cultures different, and that he could never understand the kiss I gave him, even if it was on the forehead. Sometimes I do even still feel the burning sensation of the loneliness and the long periods of silence without his company and how much I remembered - that that was the time I most wanted to curl up in a hole six feet under, and die.

Still I love him very much, and even though we could never have been together. But despite the age-old gay warning, telling us to “not fall for the straight people” - perhaps if there were less prejudice and more understanding, we would all respect each other as humans better.