I know this will sound a little vain, narcissistic, perhaps a little silly, but at 23 years I feel as though I’ve been a mentor to too many people.

It started when I worked at Boston Pizza serving highschool students and partygoers. I felt I was a guardian. Their parents were somewhere sleeping and for a short time they were in my care. I watched the same people week by week cry and laugh. cheer at their new relationships. I was their therapist. Telling them what to do how to do it. Making them feel better about themselves. I watched them grow up over the span of a few years, forgetting that I too was still growing up. I was always invited to their graduation ceremonies. They would ask me like a child hoping their parents would be proud. I was so young myself though.

I carried my mentor habits with me into the gay community. I talked many people down from their depression, or gave them advise on love and relationships. I cried with young men who were so confused. I myself was depressed, and had never known a relationship. I was young, and new to the gay experience. I always made them feel better though. Where did my wisdom come from.

I guess it climaxed when I worked for the pychic line. Scared, lonely, depressed, angry people would call me and not just want, but need my voice and my advice. I was truly an angel to these people. It felt like such a burden to be the one with so much power over people, but it felt so good that it was me that was there for them. Many asked me how old I was, I always lied and said 43. I didn’t want them to know that the advice that made them laugh, cry and feel better came from someone young enough to be their child.

I quit the advise buisness. I stopped giving advice to young adults, and old adults and those imbetween. I just simply lost my abilities. I ran into a roadblock. There was no wisdom left in me. I became bored with the same old issues. There were no new issues to tackle with people.

More than anything, I lacked my own mentor. I had nobody to go to for advice. Jason was always there during the bad times to lift my spirits with a hug or a kind word. Who was there to teach me about life, and how I was feeling? I was so used to people coming to me for advice that I lost all ability to go to people for advice for myself.

My wisdom went silent, even to this day. Someone will ask me advice at work, because people still come to me. I used to prop myself up onto a soapbox and spout for hours. Now, I just say, “I don’t know”.

My point is that to this day I still need mentors. I need people to sit with me and tell me things I don’t already know about life, about love, about anything. Is there anything I don’t already know?

Jason’t always worrying about friends when they don’t call on time, or he hasn’t seen them for a week or so. He nearly enters a panick. But, he’s always the first to tell me, “I don’t worry about you, because you are the one friend I have that can take care of himself”.

true

Sometimes, I just want to know that someone out there worries about me and my emotions. Someone who laughs at my continuous facade, and my easy ability to mask any pain. A mentor who will say “Shut up, you are not” when I say cheerfully “I’m fine!”

Someone to wrap me in their comfortable arms and know that you don’t always have to speak to make me feel better. Someone to tell me that they feel better simply because I’m there.

I think I’m just lonely lately for my mentor. I envision my lover as a mentor, but to each other. I find myself in that space between periods of perfect happyness of singlehood. I’m wedged in the crack of lonelyness. Struggling to get out.

I’m hungry for my skin to touch sking. Masculine, rugged, musky skin. Skin that craves my presence as much as I crave it. Breath that gently fall on my face before a kiss. Eyes that see me with hypnotic power and wonder.

Long, silly nights curled up in bed with my mentor talking of life, and philosophy - each other. Shedding tears in turn as we discover each other’s secret failures. Ripping off our faux expressions with our voices. Becoming one being as our bodies become even more entangled.

I feer that I will always be the one that takes care of people. The one with the worried voice that feeds on people’s misfortunes. Seeking the rush of power when making a sad friend happy.

I’ve lost that voice. I know I will find it.

But I don’t want it.

I want to be on the receiving end of the worried voice. And the rush of my mentor is that of love and care.