I am so sorry, Sam

I saw a guy on the street car a few weeks ago who could have been Sam. Well, if Sam was still the same age as he was the last time I saw him - which would have been about 27 or so. This guy might have been even younger - closer to the age Sam was when I met him: about 18.

Sam was startling beautiful. He had almond-shaped eyes and olive skin and a slow, deadly smile with canines that looked like they would cut skin very easily.

My mother asked my very nervously when whether I had ever had a relationship with Sam when I told her he had died in New York. She meant to ask if I had ever had sex with him. I pointed out that I had not, but that I would always wish that I had.

Sam was part-native and half-Italian, and at fourteen his mother had found a copy of Growing Up Straight in his bedside table and promptly put Sam out of the house. Intent on survival, he moved to Toronto and took to the beds of strangers to make ends meet. I got to know him through a series of accidents that might easily not have happened after Sam had moved back to our small town, rented himself an apartment and was putting himself through high school.

Although I didn't know it, all the young men I socialized with and all the women I dated were gay. But among the our group, Sam was perhaps the strongest and the most fragile - and he was, of all of us, the only one who was openly, actually gay. He was a figure for whom I had a tremendous, silent respect.

Being among a group of confused young gay men, our budding friendship triggered two sharp jealousies and a successful conspiracy to end the friendship - so our closeness was very short lived. I still very much wish I had been stronger, and that my friendship with Sam - even if that were all it was - had grown deeper.

Almost ten years later when I finally came out, Sam was living in Toronto again and, unlike me, had had a long time to get over the dramas of our youth. He was a year younger than me - but I still looked to him as a kind of elder. And someone to whom I owed a tremendous debt.

But the seeds of that teenage conspiracy and taken deep root - and Sam still seemed to believe on some level that I had betrayed him. And I had never really come clean with him about my own feelings for him. We were men now - and the past appeared childish and embarrassed me now more than it did when we were younger - although for very different reasons. All those years he paid the price for his openness - I had been safely in denial.

We lost touch again when Sam suddenly moved to New York. There was a big party for him just before he moved away and I was invited or a friend was, and I came with. I tried to connect with Sam in any way that night. But face-to-face I was speechless. I have no more words now for what I wanted than I did then. I wanted Sam to know how important he was, but it sounded so foolish so matter how said.

A year later I heard a rumour that Sam had died. He had been diagnosed with AIDS and had moved to New York so none of his friends would see him grow sick and die. I understand his ashes were spread in New York. Only one friend from Toronto went down to see him when he was ill, and he'd been Sam's friend since before I'd met either of them.

Sam's name is not on the AIDS memorial here in Toronto and I have a feeling that this is because Sam asked that it be so.

I still see him in crowds on streetcars. I see his sharp smile on beautiful faces and wish he were smiling at me in the gentle trusting way I had seen so briefly. I already missed him when he was still here. I still miss him now, and regret words unsaid - unsaid on so many lost opportunities.