Okay so I'm a little drunk on well-being today. I went to see an amazing show (Not Mike and the Mechanics) with a friend last night and danced! With a whole bunch of superhappy people! Who didn't have masks on! Have faces always been this beautiful? Has joy?
Anyway, so this morning found me walking to the library belting out every song from my new pre-spring playlist. The best song to walk along singing was this one, which came back into my life via an absolutely transcendent needle drop in the movie Spencer.
Before I head-argue with BetterHelp lady any more, I
just want to stop and celebrate the creative surge and series of breakthroughs
I’ve been experiencing during and following my Quarantine Crush adventure! I’m
never sure if its super-ethical to consider people muses, (Past and present
muses, feel free to weigh in! Not here because the comments are turned off.) but
QC is a powerful one anyway. Since Zooming with his poetry reading, I’ve
written poetry I’m excited about for the first time in years, revived an old
poetry series, made however many drawings and paintings, tried new drawing
styles, gotten a new perspective on my business life, and written like a
jillion paragraphs here.
I even signed up to read from the Kitten Calendar at
an old-fave local reading so I’d have a way to re-experience rope adventures!
Miracle of miracles, I’ve even learned to love
dressing up for Zoom events, including pretty shoes for no reason!
Whether or not I can justify the tears to a narrow-minded
therapist, crushes fucking WORK for me, and they often lead to more friendships
as well! (Angel Face is still one of my main inspirations—he invited me to
Online Goth Night on Friday and I am TOTALLY going!)
Romantic lovewise, though. I know I can’t control if I
ever find the requited version again. If I don’t, I think I can probably handle
it, because I almost always feel completely full of all the kinds of love in my
life: friend-love, family-love, work-love, talking-about-Gilmore-Girls-love,
art love, book love, nature love, and of course good old fashioned self-love.
Actually, I think I’m pretty amazing at love, even as I’m still missing a
person or people.
It has really struck me in the past few days how
simple, how ordinary, my romantic wishes/fantasies/hopes are. I don’t think it’s
crazy or demanding to hope that someday before too long a masculine person will
be sending me songs for smitten reasons, not for just-friendly reasons like QC
or for opportunistic predatory reasons like Bill. And maybe, just maybe, that
song-sender will know all the knots.
Because of my age and other particulars, it’s easy to
see my romantic hopes as lightning-strike bonkers. I sure thought of it that
way while I was divorcing, but I had to make room for that imaginary guy
anyway, I had to try. Such an ordinary wish, to be like-liked. It happens to
people all the time. I know that I deserve it as much as anybody, that no
amount of self-as-project can make it come along any faster or slower. It comes
when it comes. Until I get there, I fall, I get giddy, I cry, I make art. It’s
a pretty good plan.
I am WILDLY underemployed this summer, so I need some
CDC-friendly adventures. I need to be always writing paragraphs. So!
1.Learn
one knot a week. Think about how much the Republicans would resent me using
stimulus (ha) money on a new set of shiny peacock-blue ropes.
2.High
Fidelity without the visits. I feel pretty resolved about all
of my past loves, but it would be fun to visit them in my mind and heart. Since
I already lavishly paid tribute to The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow, I’ll start with
the guy after that. The guy who sang Rage Against the Machine on amusement park
rides. The guy who looked like Eddie Vedder at just the right moment. The guy
who was my first sex/love combination. Ohhhhh Full Name Guy, you’ll be a summer
treat.
That way, until I find my next human true love(s) I’ll
have all the rope-love and paragraph-love to keep me company. Thanks for
reading, wish me luck!
I couldn’t sleep after I asked him if he meant the
songs, so I got up and went to my email, to the poem thread. I didn’t write a
poem there, just told him how I felt. It was a pretty unhinged thing to do in
the (here) middle of the night, but I’m glad I wrote it. I’m glad he knows.
His late-even-for-the-west-coast reply brought equal
parts relief and heartbreak. He hadn’t meant the songs the way I did. He has a
partner and they’re happy. That meant I didn’t have to worry so much (still
some though) about his safety. I was grateful to the person, so QC was being looked
after. (It’s tempting to say here of course he’s taken, he’s the Actual
Best Person, and that does have sort of a fatalistic ring of truth, but lots
and lots of perfectly lovely people aren’t taken, I know. Like me!)
What a letter this was. It was the kindest, calmest,
most accepting, most platonically loving letter in my collection of I-don’t-like-you-that-way
notes. Genuine, golden, shining care for my well-being and valuing of the
real-life writing relationship—what more could a person even ask for.
My heart physically warms up when I think about this
letter. The only rejection I’ll keep to calm me down in times of jangledness—a talisman,
a charm.
The wanted to keep writing poems back and forth and I
hope we will again someday, but not now. For me, writing with someone takes so
much trust, maybe the MOST trust, and I’m saying this as someone who has
submitted to being set on fire for fun. (Oh Fireguy! Here is a cuddle in case
you’re reading, and even if you’re not.)
After the (probably shouldn’t have been a) surprise
partner fact, the trust was a little harder to access, and what we were doing
felt (to me) too intimate to do with someone who belongs to somebody else. Even
if we’d done away with the songs and the daily chitchat and the encouragement,
I would still have ended up combing the poems for signs of love. I really,
really HATE combing through poems for signs of love. I’d rather let the poems
and the people and the real feelings just be what they are.
So I said a grateful bye-for-now to the Zoom reading,
citing (my new favorite euphemism of ever) “time zone issues.” They’ll be IRL and
back to being far away soon enough anyway. I got to hear Adorable Co-Host read
a poem and I got to send one last (for now) post-reading high-five to QC. I’m
so pleased and proud about his latest.
It felt good to put myself first, to give myself the
space (So weird to need space from someone who is 2,500 miles away, but, phones
are little Pavlov machines.) to paragraph everything through.
I miss his daily presence in my inboxes and I’m
certainly more bored and lonely than I was last week. Way less sobbing though.
I really, really wish we could have continued that series of poems, it was
really good. Maybe we can write again someday. (In the first draft I accidentally
wrote “today” instead of “someday.”)
In the end, I’m a little mad at myself for the crush
part, but I think all in all this was a very, very good adventure. It feels
productive and hopeful to have let out a love that has lived in my body all
this time, to be able to hold it up to the light. I’m glad he knows how I feel,
how important he is to me. I’m so, so grateful that I could be there a little
while for a dear friend in a harrowing time. I’m proud to have had and been a
bright spot.
Dear QC, dear everyone (well almost everyone) in every
Kitten Calendar story, thank you. I have the luckiest life.
Just a few weeks of poems and songs. Writing with QC
was amazing, a reunion with him and with California and with myself. I’d given
up poetry for all kids of good and bad reasons, and it felt so good for my
brain to start working in those patterns again. The joy of taking a heap of
disparate images apart and putting them back together again into something that
makes, if not sense, then its own version of sense.
With the poetry and the songs and the chitchat and the
Zoom came the LONGING, powerful enough to make me sob, and the grief. The pain
of leaving my friends twenty years ago felt fresh and as I waited
for the next text or poem, the missing him, the missing ALL of them but especially
him, almost physically hurt. Okay, it did, a little bit, physically hurt.
I wanted us never to have been apart, or to catch up
all at once, or for us to keep writing together forever (not just til
quarantine ended and we went back to our lives) or to toss all of the metaphors
out the window and just say stuff. Like Carly Rae, I wanted to cut to the feeling.
I guess that’s what I’m doing now.
I thought, in those dreamy, jangled, waiting-for-the-phone-to-buzz
nights (better than thinking about death tolls or presidential gaslighting or
maternal gaslighting or the fact that I’m going to gave to canvass for Joe
Biden or that there’s always a new how-many-fingers to know…) about dancing
with QC at my wedding way back when. It was the only few minutes of my life I
can honestly think of as getting “swept off my feet,” a surprise jolt of happiness
as clear as any of the best naked adventures. QC was the only man every to
truly LEAD me on the dance floor or anyplace, for that matter. The giddy
delight of letting his arms guide me. Feeling like…whoa. I mean, WHOA and laughing
in glittery delight. (Yep just gonna say delight too many times.)
Truly a moment that made me realize, both in 2003 and
in 2020, what I’d missed in not at least having tried to claim him. Most
of my Sliding-Doorsiness has worn off by now, but ohboy. I know (partly) missed
out on someone so special and super, super hot. All of the Doms and Masters and
Tops in this blog so far (Still so much thanks guys!) had a tenuous, theatrical
command, just playacting compared to that dance. I wonder if I’ll ever feel led
like that again, if I’ll ever let anyone. I hope so.
(The writing side of this being led, the part where my
brain tried to make me think I needed his permission to write poems, that part
wasn’t so fun. But that’s on me.)
The longing, the time-slip, the time-travel wishes
were all too much after a while, but it felt too gorgeously life-affirming to
give up. Mixed in with the dreaminess was the covid fear making everything so
much more fraught—if he wasn’t writing back, did that mean he was dead? There wasn’t
really any way for me to know, and I was sure no one would think to tell me. I
wished I could ask for all of his emergency contacts, and all of THEIR emergency
contacts, and so on. It wasn’t making the normal serotonin-drop of crushes any
easier to navigate.
Sometimes I thought I knew what was going on for a second.
Some of the songs that he sent were so explicitly romantic that I would hold
out my phone to no one or to the cats and ask “Are you HEARING this?” Where is
a slumber party when you need it?
Then, he wrote a very good poem wherein he was in a
lot of danger, past and present, and I felt heart-wrenched and helpless toward
those dangers. For some reason, that meant it was time to ask if he meant the
songs. I told him I DID mean the songs, then tried to sleep while I waited to
hear back.
By the time QC and I started chatting again, my Big
East Coast City had been on lockdown for a month. I’d lost my morning job and
(I hope temporarily) lost 2/3 of my client-hours from my own business. I was worried
that all the work I’d put in building a life for myself would disappear
forever, and like everybody else, I was worried that somebody I loved might
die. I had Sweetie to hug, high five, and talk to, but having an ex-wife as a
quarantine buddy has its own fears and strains.
My mom, a state away, wasn’t social distancing and my
Trumpish Favorite Aunt had no problem trolling me about it. “Who dies, dies.”
said Favorite Aunt in a text, presumably meaning herself, her grandkids, my
mom, whoever. Meanwhile, mom shifted into full-tilt gaslighting mode, suggesting
that I might be causing coronavirus or at least making it worse with my fear.
I wanted to be Helpful Science Person and try to stem
the tide of disinformation, but a stop by a semi-estranged cousin’s facebook
page convinced me that reaching out to most of my family was futile. I felt
hurt and panicked and irresponsible to know that there are some places truth
and science just can’t reach.
But, for all of those sad scared feelings, I knew I
was safe. The flowering trees in the neighborhood were just going completely
bonkers, I had books and funny podcasts and watercolors. In my neighborhood,
people had been putting up rainbows everywhere for kids to find on their walks.
One Sunday afternoon, I’d just finished doing some
melancholy/cheering work errands while driving around singing George Michael’s Faith
at the top of my lungs, and I decided to take a nice fast walk. When guess
what!! The friend who was soon to be QC texted and said he wanted to be writing
more. I’d wanted to be in touch with him better for a good long while, and I
wanted to keep writing too, so I suggested writing something together. By the
time I got home from my walk, I had a poem!
Writing to/for/with him was easy and fun at first! It
gave me such a joyful feeling of completeness, an oasis of oh! This makes
sense! In a life that felt like helplessness and chaos a lot of the time, what
a pleasure to just let something new sprout and exist! The first one I wrote wasn’t
even really a poem so much as it was just listing off a series of things that made
me feel grumpy, but he took it and ran with it, someplace good.
There was no reason this had to be about falling for
him. Maybe if I hadn’t included a link to a (completely uncute, unflirty) song
in one of the poem emails, (It was William Shatner covering “Common People,”
seriously the un-woo-ing-est song) and he hadn’t mentioned that he was
listening to an album with the most wildly sentimental first song (see above),
then maybe I’d still be all cool and friendly and writing all the poems.
(But probably not.) (And not that I’ve ever been cool
in any way.)
Nevertheless, songs were exchanged, and the time
difference between us meant that he might have been offhandedly sending links
between work tasks or palling around with other folks while I was in bed all
swoony and cozy and susceptible. Not everything was sincere and moony, but he’s
much more folky/songwritery than I am. It was easy, with his song choices, to
slip into mostly-chaste twenty-years-ago-love
without (all-the-way) meaning to, but also not really minding.
It was only a few nights, really, of waiting for the
buzz of my phone, listening a couple times, knowing exactly what to send next,
then dozing with a warm, briefly untroubled heart. I forgot, I guess, that that
kind of thing is like a nine-millionth-date to my emo self. I got my heart into
a little bit of a tangle.
In all my years of therapy, I’ve done so much thinking
about how my body keeps a physical record of trauma, but once in a while it
hits me that I’ve got a record of so much love in here too.
In early drafts, I started listing off times that
Quarantine Crush seemed like more than a friend back then, but I kinda want to
keep them to myself, partly because they’re dear and partly because I’m
petrified of being fact-checked. This story ends with me tangling myself in a made-up
version of present day events, and that’s enough having-the-rug-pulled-out-from-under-me
for now.
When I was twenty-five, my search for love was
absolute, all-encompassing, and unapologetic. I perpetually fretted aloud to my
in-the-driver’s-seat friends about this-or-that crush, or lost love, or bottomless,
nebulous yearning. I worried SO HARD that I would never find The Right One, and
I kind of admire that ability to be a messy romantic ball of need all the time—now,
visits to that place in my heart just tend to make me feel powerless, trapped,
and jittery. (Though in fairness that could just be cabin fever.)
Anyway, there were long, quiet, questioning moments,
at least on my end. Times when I thought “Maybe?” or “Why can’t it be THIS one?”
It’s possible I even DID try to start something and was rebuffed, but I don’t
think so. That would have been braver than helplessly and somewhat peevishly
waiting for him to make a move.
Now, sheltering-in-place and deprived of most everyday
touch (Besides hugging the cats and Sweetie) my body gets quiet enough to
remember the physical pleasure and comfort of those young friendships, especially
with him. It seems, back then, like it was so, so easy to get myself held. Or
to do the holding.
Anyway, for about a year and a half, all of the poets
were with me almost every day, writing with me, cheering me on, helping me
rehearse, indoctrinating me into the magic of Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
and always, always, just so casually sharing their whole selves with me. QC and
his venue-running-partner (Just the cutest little newly-out Christian gay guy
in the universe) stole and kept my heart the most.
Their venue was/is my favorite, a place where I always
felt like everything I wrote was brilliant but that if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t
matter because my poems and I were so gently and thoroughly blanketed in
unconditional love. Life among those poets, especially within QC’s venue, was
truly the deepest and most uncomplicated acceptance I’d yet felt.
So of course, in this timeline, a few months ago when
life became about fear, isolation, losing most of my work, and my mom refusing
to social distance, I joined that same venue during a Zoom call. Miraculously,
it had persisted for twenty years, and it was profoundly, comfortingly, welcomingly
the same.
And there he was. Almost never with his camera on, but
still.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. First we’ll have to
talk about leaving California, (On literally a midnight train, okay it might’ve
been 12:30), about 9/11 and Sweetie and QC Dobblering a boombox playing “In
Your Eyes” in Sweetie’s and my wedding ceremony at my request.
But for now, I’ll leave QC and myself in 2001, occasionally
falling nebulously into each other like the kids we were, fluffy and soft as
sunset clouds.
I spent a year hardly
thinking about romance at all, but there’s always a perfect character to come
along and break me open again, so that cartoon hearts swirl around my head and
I remember who I was born to be. Like the election, this story didn’t turn out
the way I’d hoped, but I’m reopening the blog to make sure none of the gifts of
this experience slip through the cracks.
I work in my local
library’s afterschool program. It suits me much better than teaching because
the kids and I spend most of our time on art and I never have to make anybody
do anything, except be respectful and kind. I can smile all day and tell the
kids “I love you” without being accused of being too soft. The library is my
happy place and my biggest source of love, pride, and friendship.
About a year ago, a new
security guard (I know! Me and security guards.) transferred to our branch and
the first time I saw him, I thought “Yep, that’s what a man should look like.”
African American, beardy, glasses, locks, sigh, swoon, giggle. One of my goals
for 2016 was to flirt daily, and I felt like I’d finally found a worthy
recipient. I tend to sing out my coworkers’ names, so I wholeheartedly sang out
his name whenever I saw him, chatted when I could, accidentally told him how very
much I like the scene from The Avengers
where Black Widow breaks out of the chair.
Eventually, he started
hanging around. He would spend his breaks coloring with me and the kids and
talking about music, helping me build up my ongoing playlist of kid-friendly
love/friendship/inspiration songs. Lord help me, he owns vinyl. He kept
suggesting songs that were either too emo or so R&B dreamy that I could
barely walk after listening. I made fun of him for his makeout music, but it
kept finding its way onto my personal playlist, turning my early morning walks
into dreamy movie-sequence mushfests.
He was with us in the
children’s department whenever he could be, and started telling me
apologetically when he was scheduled elsewhere. (I found out later he’d been
making the schedule specially to spend time with us! <3 <3 <3) We
painted galaxies, flowers, we drew mandalas. We did coloring pages that said
things like “Follow Your Heart” and “Don’t Stop Believing.” He’s in college,
(This is as good a time as any to tell you he’s twenty-five and I’m forty-two…)
so he’d sometimes just bring down his homework, talk to me about what he was
working on, and then happily let me distract me from it.
In the way that sometimes
happens when you make a truly great friend, I kept telling him way more than I
meant to. He became my safe space, someone I could confide in about my election
struggles, my feminist rage, my religious questiness, everything that was the
most important. I hope that I was doing the same for him.
I’d gone through a good
spate of not caring at all what I looked like, but I started to want to look
cute when I got to work. I stopped wearing shlubby T-shirts and became more
likely to put on lipstick and blowdry my hair. Eventually he told me he wanted
his to be the only name I sang out, and that was both very sweet and probably a
bad sign.
