Closure Is a Thing, Part Two

 

(Last night I sent pretty lingerie pictures to the new person, Artist Boy, and he said I was beautiful. He really is doing such a good job, and definitely deserves all the paragraphs of his own.)

I had Covid over Christmas, so after a few careful hours of celebrating with BFF-Formerly-Sweetie, I was alone with my books and art biopics and gentle weed gummies. It was kind of great. I had to cancel a museum trip midweek, so I ordered some magic mushroom gummies through the mail. A little trip at home, these magical modern times.

The letter from The Shy One came the Friday after Christmas, the same day the mushroom gummies arrived. I put the package aside for the evening, then opened the letter. It was a Thank You card like I’d sent, the flowers on his much more modest than the floofy, sparkly peonies and such on the card I’d sent him. “Best wishes in 2024,” said the card, “I’m always rooting for you.”

The rooting for me is sweet, but I don’t love it. Instead of hoping I find true love, I’d always rather he were claiming me, then shouting it to the rooftops, exactly the thing he knew he wasn’t capable of.

The Shy One’s letter was both ordinary and profound. I won’t quote it, it’s just mine, but it said enough that I knew he missed me, I knew I’d been important to him. I cried and then put it in The God Box (Doesn’t everyone have one of these, a Box of Things to Be Worked Out Later by Unseen Forces? It’s an Artist’s Way thing.) so its presence wouldn’t be too overwhelming.

He mentioned texting in the letter, but I wasn’t ready to unblock—too close to those haunted, hunted “good mornings.”  The next day, I wrote back a very pretty New Years card, with fancy blue butterflies, even on the envelope.

Closure Is a Thing, I Think, Part One

I’ve read so many Dear Prudence columns downplaying the idea of closure, and I totally get that! Talking things through can feel like a cigarette after having been quit for years, a grim sense of starting all over. Or, it can feel like a liberating sensation and a fresh start. I might be leaning optimistic because I had a really good first date Saturday night (We snuggled up on the couch and actually WATCHED A movie! So cute!) but that is an adorable post for another day.

Sometimes, a letter at the end of the year can be a lovely way of letting things go, a last thanks/sorry/good wishes before joining a new year as strangers. That worked for me with Gilmore Guy, with This Charming Man—the letters were probably very self-indulgent but they helped me with the process of letting go.

This adventure started with a spell at Angel Face’s Solstice party—his spouse handed me a slip of paper and asked what I would like to let go. I clutched my fist and said “NOTHING.” But I wrote The Shy One’s name on there anyway and put it in the fire as instructed.

Shortly after, The Shy One visited in a dream. He was standing outside my classroom (In real life, I do not have a classroom) looking dapper and fatherly in a winter coat. We hugged hello/goodbye and his spirit felt…lighter. It made me so happy to think of him not full of worry or stress, just peaceful. Of course, I looked for him for the rest of the dream, but he was gone.

So, partly because I forever live in a romcom, I sent him a thank you card, right before Christmas. His reply came SO QUICK.

Sex, Love, and The Shy One, Part Two

 

I think it was Lottie on last week’s Yellowjackets who said it’s hard to form memories when you’re in an ecstatic state. Not like anyone should be going to Lottie for advice, but the idea’s relatable. I can’t always access the sensations and emotions of my lost love, my first real grownup love with a man.

Some nights, close to sleep and looking for a little extra. peace, I say a little prayer inside my head: “Come back to me.” Now that I understand that he wasn’t the right one (one of the right ones) for me, I don’t think it’s entirely a prayer for his miraculous somehow-return. It’s like, let me reclaim the experience. Let me remember and care for the beautiful things that happened between us without the shame of rejection or the grief of loss, or at least alongside them.

Of course, sometimes “come back” is just “come back.” That’s love and heartbreak and I hate it and I love it.

The love part, I handled so badly. Not the part about loving him almost-instantly and thoroughly and eternally, that’s all fine and on-brand. But when the love word crept into his side of the text thread, I think in a GIF of a cartoon bear with a wheelbarrow of hearts saying “Goodnight, my love!” and then didn’t come up again for a while, I freaked.

The thing, the ELUSIVE THING was so close. It might have been there all along, in its own way. He said the love word to my body the first night, easy and unencumbered. But no matter which way he said it, sometimes I just couldn’t hear it. Then, later on, in the highest heights of sex, he would withhold it. But first—

I freaked. He and Mrs. Shy One had fallen in love with the lady who came right before me, and in my worst moments, I wondered why she was easy to love and I was so impossible to love. This comparing, this sense of inherent inferiority, might be one of the things that makes it harder to love me and of course, sometimes I choose the situations that will trigger it the worst.

It’s a lifelong struggle—the thought that I’m missing some secret thing that other women have, like my orientation package was missing a map or some other vital page. In the background of that fear are my millstone words, or I guess my family’s words, probably both/and at this point: Stupid. Empty. Worthless. Here by mistake.

When someone loves me I think: Get out now or I’ll be humiliated. I’m already humiliated. I’m ALWAYS humiliated. Wish it was in the fun way a little more often.

I didn’t tell him the millstone words situation directly, but I did ask: Why is it easier to love (previous girl) than me? What was I missing? Jealousy tumbled out everywhere and he did NOT have the space for it, which made the panic worse. The shame of it is hard to argue with, even as I try to treat myself more kindly.

So when he, a day or so after all the jealousy and tears, texted “I love you” all friendly and sweet, I was overjoyed of course. Peace filled up my heart and spread warmth through the rest of my body, as it did again when I wrote the first draft of this post.

But as things fell apart, I couldn’t stop wondering (and I still wonder) if I’d manipulated him into saying it, it he’d offered that phrase to calm me down and keep me happy-enough.

When I look back at what happened, when I (so rarely, I swear) revisit the vacation WhatsApp thread or read his second-to-last email or putter around the apartment in either of the two robes he gave me, (One silky, one fuzzy) or see his fancy Eid-gift teacup at the back of the dish cabinet, I have to admit that his love was real, and I know I didn’t take good care of it.

What I’m trying to do with these paragraphs is to keep what’s mine, to honor whatever things belong to me so I can truly let him go. It’s hard, it’s sad, but I’ll keep writing.

Two Moons Later

January 3rd moon--we were free and in love.

I wasn’t going to type this one up, but there, last night, was the full moon looking down from a halo in the sky when I went to take the trash out. Moving on is a labyrinth. It’s the cycles of the moon. Grief is an unpredictable tide.

Last week, I had that lovely burst of horny healthy moving-on inspiration, and it was real. But then, just as quickly as the happy, hopeful vibes had come: a wall. A panic. The vulnerability, hopefulness, and mostly-real self-assurance it takes to be dating is A LOT, and I just sort of crashed.

It helped to tell the lukewarmly interested new guy that I heard his lukewarmness, that I was glad I’d gotten to meet him but we weren’t a match. But the feeling of exposure kept coming until I deactivated Feeld and took it off my homescreen along with Hinge and Bumble. I turned off all the notifications.

I felt the panic recede after that but, close to the end of my workday last Friday, a new tide of missing The Shy One came in. The way I deal with that grief is finite: I sing along to Frank Ocean’s Moon River. I screech along to Robyn’s Dancin’ on My Own. Sometimes when I really want to twist the heartbreak knife a little, I put on Virgo’s Groove. (I didn’t realize that Beyoncé sings about “You’re the love of my life” in that song-aaaaaaalllll the times I heard it when he and I were snuggling, I never noticed. At least I know my life doesn’t have just one love.)

I wanted, when I parked at home Friday night and the blaring speakers went quiet, to find out if The Shy One had really loved me. It had been an unspoken agreement with myself for a few weeks that his love wasn’t real, it was a way to be less mad at him for going away, less mad at myself for not finding a way to feel okay in that relationship. I knew where to look, that his second-to last letter was probably right there in my “sent” folder.

It had to be finite. I do NOT go down heartbreak rabbit holes, my depressive brain can only confront these things a little at a time. So I set a timer for 20 minutes. I got into child’s pose and said a prayer for him, for me, for moving on, for new love. I sang the loving kindness meditation I wrote myself right after the breakup:

May I bloom and expand.

May I remain curious.

May I honor the longing.

May I thank and let go.

May I put it away til it feels
easier.

May I hear my heart, my body, and my mind.

May I internalize the love.

May I leave scarcity behind.

May I live in faith.

The Shy One’s second-to-last letter was from after our second-to-last fight. It was full of paragraphs and plans, apologies and ideas for how we could get closer, how he hoped to help me feel more secure. It was a lovely letter, hopeful, kind, and attentive.

Rereading it, I felt my body calm down and my heart quiet: He’d loved me. The knowledge was like a warm internal blanket, soft, solid, dependable, secure. I knew I had that love with me, that it was going to be a resource for whatever comes next.

Then I read through the WhatsApp messages from his Sierra Leone trip—no struggle. Just hotness, kindness, and future plans. And one video I definitely was not ready to look at, maybe never will be. My soul aches to think of the couple who wrote those texts, who selected those GIFs, so full of hopes, so briefly free.

I was done before the timer went off, full and secure. I worked on my puzzle and lay down for a peaceful sleep.

It definitely doesn’t feel like that all the time. They say (or used to say in, like, the Eighties when I was little?) that it takes at least half the time you were with someone to get over them. If I count from our first date, which I do, we were together ten months, so that’s five. Two down, three to go?

I don’t know how long it will take til my body stops missing him, stops wanting him only. Dear moon, dear universe, dear Christmas box of pretty lingerie (a completely reasonable thing to pray to!) please let him not have been my last love. Yes, give me time to honor him and heal, but don’t take too long sending the next sweetheart. Please.

Dear Sierra Leone, Part Three

If you weren’t so far away and weren’t, you know, a country, I’d have you over to watch Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It’s my second favorite movie, after Slacker. I used to have it on VHS. I’d watch it after scary movies so I’d be able to sleep. It’s about a scared, lost but fabulous lady and whether or not people can belong to each other. Spoiler alert: they do. (If you watch this movie, I’m really, really sorry about Mickey Rooney.)

The other day I was listening to Danny Lavery’s podcast (https://slate.com/podcasts/big-mood-little-mood) and he was talking about the Relationship Escalator. No one actually calls it that unless they DON’T want it, he said, they’d just call it “commitment.”

What a weird thing to feel bad about, wanting commitment, but it definitely feels like I was telling on myself when I let it slip. In my defense, it was in the haze of beautiful rosy-hued morning goodbye sex, right before he left for you. The Shy Ones wear stretchy bead bracelets instead of wedding rings, and I said with the confidence of the just-thoroughly-fucked that I wanted a bracelet too, a purple one.

I maaaaaaaaayyyyyy have said I wanted a commitment ceremony too. None of this meant marriage, it meant whatever kind of commitment we came up with. He said the bracelet part might be doable, but I wonder.

Is that why he came back liking me less? Did the bracelet idea get vetoed and he just didn’t have the heart to tell me? Or did I know deep down he wasn’t That Guy and push him away? Did he want to keep some of that freedom he felt with you and I was the thing most jettisonable?

It’s far past time to stop wondering, but he did bring something back besides  maybe a little malaria. (Which, I’m so sorry I overreacted. I only know it from novels. I thought he might die.) Maybe he brought back a deeper commitment to his faith, to his family, his eldest-son leadership responsibilities. It SEEMED like he brought back that gift of all families everywhere: shame. I heard it in his radio silences, in his quick zippering.

No matter which, I have a confession: I thought somehow this would be the Last Waiting. I thought I could somehow graduate from the always-missing-him if I got good grades those weeks in Being Self Contained. And I aced the exam, we both did. Unlike the regular text thread, burdened with pain and paragraphs and push-pull logistics, the WhatsApp thread from when he was with you, it was all love.

Thank you for making us that unlikely space to be free together, to belong together before reality smashed back down. Maybe because when he was with you, he was happy. Maybe missing him hurt less when he was across the sea than when he was across town.

There was a bracelet, not a wear-every-day-as-a-symbol one. It’s carved out of coconut shells, dyed beautiful jewel colors. It came with a necklace and red earrings like tiny coins. They live in The Box of Things to be Worked Out Later by Unseen Forces (The God Box for short) in an envelope marked Prayers for a Bigger Life:

Sierra Leone, I can feel myself getting unstuck and ready to be moved forward by grace and love to wherever and whatever. I think I’m finished writing to you, but you have my whole heart. So many, many things do.

Dear Sierra Leone, Part Two

 

Sometimes when I have a hard time getting a feeling into words, it helps to cut up a pop song. This used to be Robyn's Dancing on My Own.

Oh my dear. There was a place for us and it was WhatsApp.

I liked spending New Years with you and not with you. I was with Rainbow Pal, both of us sparkling and dancing to brass bands playing pop songs. It was Dancing on My Own when midnight came, our midnight, five hours after yours. Everything was silver and spangled and I was wearing the purple princess dress from my birthday. My synchronicity necklace from the flea market in Famous Art Town.

Rainbow Pal and I hugged and bopped silver balloons around the dance floor. No one really knew the words to Auld Lang Syne but we sang it anyway. I love, love, LOVE the sound of strangers happy together and muddling through a song.

Rainbow Pal wanted to stay late—brass is their great love and they knew eventually the band would be playing in the crowd and all would be right with the world. They gave me maybe the best gift a younger friend can give an older friend—the dispensation to go home at 12:30.

As I walked out to the car, a perfect golden firework popped in the sky over the parking lot, and I read it as a message from you. This year would be for me. It would be golden. I held it in my heart as a way of taking a picture, and I told him about it first thing in the morning. My morning, your late afternoon.

Oh Salone, I know I shouldn’t have gone back to him last summer. I saw the not-cute future of self-erasure and control and heteronormative bullshit. (Rainbow Pal has a shirt that says “Heteronormativity is a cult” and they wore it for me the day I was over at their place painting about our breakup, crying watercolor tears and maybe making them a little bit uncomfortable.)

But what if I hadn’t met YOU? What if I hadn’t woken up to your pink-sky beaches and your bright patterned fabrics and intricate tiles? What if I’d missed our New Years?

I wanted to cross the ocean between us. The Atlantic between us is as big as the gulf between me and my post-insurrection family. I don’t know how to be family-real the way he does, but I have other reals, I guess.

I only know how to shift and flow and get stuck on a rock sometimes until the water rises and takes me forward. Okay, that’s not the ocean, it’s the local creek I walk by whenever I’m confused or lost or it’s Friday.

I’m impatient to get unstuck, dear Sierra Leone, dear Atlantic Ocean, dear beloved local creek. Some days I can feel the current carrying me away from him, and therefore, safely, closer, the memory restored, the love affair done. Other days I’m stranded creek debris, waiting for rain, for the water to rise and carry me home, which is everywhere and nowhere.

Dear Sierra Leone, Part One

 

His face glowed so much there, in the WhatsApp pictures. I didn’t realize he was homesick ALL the time until, for twelve days, he wasn’t. Of all the empathies that came and went and landed or exploded between us, I wish I’d done this one more: Homesick boy. The fishermen pulling in their morning catch. Salone. Salone.

I didn’t know I could have travel compersion, but there it was, there he was. On his own, so maybe he felt a little bit more mine than when he was at home. Or maybe his lightness of heart was my lightness too, maybe we were both shining with you. Maybe we were hibiscus blooms in the dead of winter. Maybe I caught his tropical relief.

On his own, on three-wheeled motorbike cabs, or riskful and free on the back of the motorcycle taxis. (How could you ride one of those without snuggling into the guy’s back? But he wouldn’t have.)

And the beach. Second beach or second river and I didn’t ask where’s the first beach or the first river, but I did understand pink sky. The boyish sunset glint in someone so serious, so often downcast here with me.

Sierra Leone, I don’t exist there, nor should I. But also, I wanted to. And also, I should. Those wedding parades with their bright family-matched fabrics, their brass bands, their waiting outside for the aunties’ permission, where do queer lives go for their belonging? It wasn’t my place to ask but I did of course eventually. In his family, they go to straight marriages, they pretend. Like my own family, maybe everybody’s for most of history, they erect an architecture of lies as old as colonialism—be straight, be normal, be real.

There’s no way out of it. It’s his way to be real.

He told me he wanted to bring me to you someday. “Sure,” I said, “You can be like, mom, this is my girlfriend.”

“And then she’ll fight you.” He said.

“At least I’ll get to meet her,” I said.

I could have avoided it, I guess. The closet, the little humiliations. Becoming an object of fear, both rightfully and not. But then I would’ve missed you, and not known that I’d missed you, and we’d never have had (and not had) New Years together.

Oh my love, a place I’ll never visit. A place I’ll always.

Knotty Thursday: Figure 8 Knot and Tiny Steps Forward

 

(Note: the first draft of this post was a little more chill, but I’m in the middle of watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind so, yeah.)

It’s hard to find any hope about love. I’m impatient for the grief to be over, but about once a day, it sirens out. If it’s too close to work time, I just talk it through—I call BFF-Formerly-Sweetie and have Ten Minutes of Sadness. She listens to me loop though the whys and what ifs and whats nexts.

But if there’s enough time before work, I wail. Wail and drive or wail from under the weighted blanket or next to my In Full Bloom flowers-of-the-world thousand piece puzzle. The sadness wails out from my guts, harsh but self-loving, excruciating but productive.

It comes from my guts because that’s where my soul lives, and my soul has lost one of its dearest mates. The Shy One sent me off in search of My Person, but that’s just not how I’m built. I belong to him, as much as I belong to the rest of the characters in this story. As much as I belong to the spring azaleas or the Hope Diamond or the cats.

Someday, with distance and time that belonging-to-him will feel safe again, and I’ll love things for the way they were, not for how we wished they could be. Grace. Forward motion. Lavish and abundant and loud and beautifully vexing love with someone or someones who fit. But my soul says not yet. My soul whispers “come back” like a prayer.

Maybe The Shy One’s soul was only meant for one mate. Maybe that’s the unbridgeable ocean between us. It’s not for me to know.

For now, tiny steps toward the brazen and sexy person I was when he met me. One knot a week, and then back to my puzzle and my soothing movie podcasts. I’m proud of this knot, little and ordinary but infinite.

 

Holy Fuck, This Guy Tried SO HARD.

My heart hurts so much this Valentines Day, even as I make lots of art and celebrate all kinds of love past, present, and future. It would be much easier if I could be angry, bitter, if I could blame The Shy One and myself for teaming up to break our own hearts. Instead, I keep coming back to:

Curiosity.

Wonder.

Acceptance.

Maybe even the building blocks of peace and hope.

Yesterday, I did the maybe-ill-advised thing of pulling The Shy One’s texts out of the “recently deleted” folder (Who knew that was even a thing?) and gave it a little backwards read. Not all four thousand something texts, I only made it as far back as December. But I read enough to have my heart broken open by the truth: The Shy One tried his heart out until the very, very end.

He loved me. I got very, very loved, dear readers. There’s no amount of pain and loss and grief that can stop me from admitting it.

I’m glad I undeleted those texts long enough to rescue his last picture of the moon. To read his last “I love you too, Ma’am” (Kissy face emoji) There was hope and cuteness for our Tuesday date. I don’t fully understand why I couldn’t make it to that Tuesday night, or to our first trip together that was supposed to be this weekend.

Without the fight for his attention, without the pain of waiting to hear from him and missing him all the time (Well, I do still miss him, but it’s different. Because I’ve accepted my longing. Because we’re both free to build the lives we want.) I could scroll through those texts and feel the love from him that I couldn’t always feel when we were together. When we both were trying so, so hard.

It makes me wonder all over again (Without the fix-myself-so-this-can-work pressure) if I’m just someone who is incapable of being loved by a man. Because of the years without them. Because of the fear and trauma and anger and all these years fighting the patriarchy.

But I must be capable of being loved, because I was, I am. I almost believe what he said about loving me forever, even as he was ending things.

I think looking back on those texts (Which I have since re-deleted, and then deleted from the recently deleted) was a good experiment. Even in a moment of such loss and hurt and Valentine’s Day, I cold feel how dedicated he was, how much I was adored. One of my heart’s major quests!

I still feel guilty that I just couldn’t let it be enough, that I couldn’t have made it another day, another week.

Whenever we were at odds, grace is what he always asked for, and what, for the most part, I gave. Grace is what I feel today, with all the sadness. Now that I’m not fighting for whatever I was fighting for, grace is easier to feel for both of us. It’s possible to feel kind, empathetic, even a little at peace.

Grace.

May 23, 2022: A Letter to Myself From Unconditional Love

 

Elizabeth Gilbert has a quarantine-era meditation on Insight Timer that I still use sometimes on badbad days: https://insighttimer.com/elizabeth_gilbert_writer/guided-meditations/facing-fear-with-a-compassionate-heart

One of the things she suggests is writing a letter to oneself “From Unconditional Love”—I mean, I’d much rather be getting love letters from cute boys than from abstract entities/myself, but these letters do work. I found this letter in one of my journals from the first time I broke things off with The Shy Ones, and I’m like, whoa, this lady really knew what she was doing.

I’m going to edit it for floweriness because no one should have to read an actual journal entry! Also, neither of them actually used the word “discretion” but it’s what they wanted, and it’s the reddest of my red flags in the past and henceforth.

Dear (Me),

You don’t have to feel better yet. I love him too. I love him so big and wide and all-encompassing. I wish this could all be okay.

That warmth. That connection.

They expected “discretion” and I know you’re wondering why you didn’t provide it. Why you couldn’t just *do* it.

You’re wondering if you just ran away because you were scared. You were very brave. You didn’t want to let him go and you did your very, very best.

I’m so proud of you—you stretched and found whole new chambers in your heart. Whole new muscles.

This is important. Just because it was short-lived doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t mean you’ve failed. It just reached the end and I know you miss him so much but it did reach the end.

I know it hurts. Thank you for writing this with me, for doing the things that help the most.

This is going to take a while. It’s going to take a while because it’s important. Because it was meant to be. Because it’s meant to live in you and change you. You can’t control the way it changes you, or the time it takes.

Just keep moving. And know he was smitten, he really was. I want you to take that to heart, even/especially what he said at the end: you do deserve to find what you want.

There’s no guaranteeing it, but if you trust your heart, I promise to take care of the very very nice adventures to come.

Let yourself be sad, but don’t give up hope.

Love,

Unconditional Love

Postscript to the Shy One

My heart has no sense of perspective about kind touch or attention to detail. It’s why I asked-out-then-befriended my massage therapist. It’s why I have had a crush on Cute Guy at the Car Place for SEVEN YEARS, ever since the first time he put my keys back on the key ring for me.

Kind touch and attention to detail are where all the swirly/woozy/glittery emotions about the Shy One came from, what makes him so hard to move past. Warm affection, carefulness, specificity. The first night with him, after the pretty ropes and lovely sex, in the cozy glow of peace and satisfaction, I leaned back onto him and he said “I love your body,” running his hands over my shoulders, my arms, my waist, my hips. Firm, warm touch, easily given—I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s gotten a hundred girlfriends since we broke up in mid-May.

That first night, it was so easy to learn the Heart Link harness because A. He didn’t mind me rewinding a YouTube video a bunch of times trying to figure out the hearts! And B. He was so still! Excited and engaged, not impatient or judgey. Encouraging. Sweet. I don’t think too much about dad energy, but maybe that’s what it was.

The night of all the presents, our third date, after our month of sunsets, was one of the most powerful instances I’ve felt of arousal being intertwined with joy. He had the condom on and was ready to go in, but I told him to stop. Just stay there. Wellbeing fizzed up through me as he paused, hard dick resting on my vulva. I put my arms around him tight, kissed him, and felt the full force of whatever bond that month of mostly-chaste flirting had built.

It was a feeling of wholeness that, somewhat vexingly, still occupies my entire body. Any time I’m quiet and calm, I can feel it in my toes.

To paraphrase Lady Mary (spoiler alert!) when her suitors were closing in and she was still deep in grief over Matthew Crawley, I’m still full of The Shy One. It’s true that The Hipster jangled loose a lot of stuck desire and made me want to start a summer sex rampage like the hot kaiju that I am, but even as I move into this new stage of why-doesn’t-so-and-so-text-me flirtation/vexation, The Shy One is still with me. He’s not just in the limbo of my Feeld inbox, being all “This human has deactivated their account,” he’s in my soul’s inbox, in my whole heart. Both of those places are very crowded, but still.

That third date was the only time he slept over, and in the long process of saying goodbye, he sat on the floor next to the bed to hold me and kiss me while I was still under the covers. That morning was THE WHOLE DREAM, a distillation of why I started this blog in the first place, the CLOSENESS, the ROMANCE, the being adored. There was another time, on our second date, we were all wrapped up in each other, when he looked me in the face (I’m sorry but NO ONE was better at looking at me than he was.) and got still.

“What are you thinking?” I asked.

“Nothing. Well, I am thinking something. I like you.”

It’s hard to imagine any new feelings ever coming close to that, though there’s never any need to compare feelings. I know every connection is its own universe, every new match a fresh start, a new mystery.

Two days ago, I wished long-absent Mr. Sweetheart a happy birthday on facebook, the most low-stakes interaction possible, and to my delight, he reached out to say hello! We’re planning a catch-up Zoom! He was excited that I remembered his blog nickname, and I said “Of course I do! Once in the story, always in the story.”

So, dear Shy One, who is probably not reading this, same thing. Once in the story, always in the story. You’ll snuggle and read about history and watch your true crime shows and love and work and hopefully see flowers and think of me every once in a while. I’ll learn to let you go, to forgive myself for not finding a way to fit, but you’ll still always be with me. Your generous touch, your giggle, your expert tongue, your supercute butt; always a little bit mine. And my heart, slutty though it will surely be, will always belong a little to you. I’ll love you. Forever. That’s all.

Perfectly 1993 Guy, Part Nine

Someday maybe this blog will stop being a weird time loop, but for now we’re back in the late summer of 1993. Perfectly 1993 Guy and I had been fragmented all afternoon, ever since I accidentally used the word “temporary.” Still, we were back in my room, snuggled into the waterbed with its goldenrod yellow sheets. He had started making a mixtape for me before the trip, so he moodily clunked it into the tape player. The first notes of Blind Melon’s “No Rain,” not particularly our song but EXACTLY the song of that summer, made us both lose our defenses at once, made us melt into a heap of sweet sentimental slackerness, Slow kisses and maybe a few tears.

We lay there listening to what he had so far of the mixtape. It was…uneven. I was mystified by the inclusion of Nine Inch Nails’s “Head Like a Hole,”—I guess maybe he saw me as the one he served? There was nothing about that in either of us, so probably he just really liked the song. I still have it in semi-heavy rotation, so it’s not like he was wrong. I was tickled by Living Color singing “Everybody loves you when you’re bi,” assuming that the “everybody” in the song included him.

I don’t remember the auspicious, his-first-time, midnight-between-our-birthdays sex in detail, (sadly!) but I know it was sweet, kind, and halting, the first go-around endearingly teenage-brief. The second and third times, we found a quiet rhythm. I remember feeling a spark, a little asterisk of sure pleasure the last time he came inside me, less an orgasm than a…togetherness. A confirmation that I could be loved. A Bee-Girl-Finding-Her-Bee-People relief. A warm little flame of home in a body that often felt everywhere but.

Broke or modest that we were, we had only invested in a three-pack of condoms, so when we woke up the next morning with some exact small number of hours and minutes until his bus left, he wondered if we should go out and get some more. We didn’t. We stayed in each other’s arms until the last possible minute, until it was time for my dad to drive us to the bus station. Perfectly 1993 Guy had to get back to campus, and I had to figure out what my back-home life would be.

We promised to call and write, and we certainly did, glowing and fresh and sad as a not-yet-existent Get Up Kids song. I missed him SO much after he got on that Greyhound, and I a little bit pine for him still.

The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow, Part Six

He wore the fish shirt to the stupid drama performance, I think. I mean, he probably did, he was very sweet and thoroughly thoughtful.

I had so looked forward to him being inside my school, I so wanted to snuggle and PDA it up and show him off to my friends, but I couldn’t connect. What I remember of that weekend was sadness, a feeling that I was losing him, that he didn’t love me anymore, that all was lost. Whatever grace had shined upon me over the summer, whatever suspension of disbelief, had left me and now I felt a million miles away from everything.

The sadness, distrust, resentment, and disappointment I was feeling (toward the world, not toward him, he one of the few people I could probably have trusted) didn’t leave much room for kindness, tenderness, affection, love. Sometimes it still doesn’t.

But instead of being able to articulate all that, I was just an asshole. I had discovered, during one of our conversations, that he couldn’t name all four Beatles. The 8X10s from my dad’s White Album hung on my Smurf-blue bedroom wall like a shrine. John Lennon was like a religion to me, (I know! I’m sorry! Women born in the Seventies (or probably at any other time ever) are pretty fucked for pop culture father figures.) it being decades before I wised up and converted to Yoko-ism.

So I concluded, in archetypal teen-asshole fashion, that if he didn’t know the Beatles, he couldn’t possibly know me! (I’m not sure why I wouldn’t have just made him a mixtape? Somewhere in there is the sexist assumption that boys should provide the music?) I’m utterly cringing as I type this part of the story, (I still panic sometimes about weird pop culture disconnects. It’s one of my very worst qualities.) but there was a grain of truth there—not about the Beatles, just about life.

I didn’t understand (I still don’t understand, really) how he, over there all beatific and (I assumed) untraumatized, might really be able to understand the fear, pain, and horror that had colonized my head, my heart, my body. If I would have told him, he probably would have listened, but it all seemed too dirty and bad for him to know about and besides, I couldn’t even express those things to myself. So I was mean. I was petty. I wrote a dumb letter and broke it off about the Beatles.

(Favorite Aunt was PISSED: “He is wonderful and perfect and you just threw him away.” So not too long after that I lost her support for a while too. That was probably okay—when it was time for me to come out as bi she was pretty crapola.)

There’s part of my mind, a part I’ve only in the last few weeks decided to debunk, that had me convinced for the longest time that someone as messed up and harsh and inside-ugly as me could never have deserved his sweet and generous love. I’ve sometimes felt that about Sweetie too, about my nieces, nephews, and students, about my friends and, on the worst PMS days, about my cats.

No matter how much I meditate or get therapy or just generally live a kind and awesome life, I still have the stubborn belief that I’m just a goth-girl Tasmanian Devil of grief, despair, and destruction, annihilating everything and everyone around me until I’m back to my natural state—alone, safe, everyone once again safe from me.

But it’s well past time to let that belief shift. Thinking that The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow was a generous angel and I was a selfish mess is not only unhelpful, it’s dehumanizing. Past or present, he deserves better than to be stuffed in a box of imagined virtue, and I certainly don’t need to keep considering myself a threat. I’m glad it only took a few hours in a museum to start unraveling that story I’ve been telling myself, to wonder what will happen if we just get to try out being real human friends.

The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow, Part Five

An old painting, but apt. <3

It was such a pleasant weekend but I’m antsy to get back to the story, anxious for the part where the paragraphs drop me back in 2019, on a few-weeks-ago bright spring day in a nearby city, surrounded by people with fancy dogs and deeply curated outfits, pleasantly arguing with Sweetie (Still ex-wife, now freakishly close best friend and co-aunt) whether I was stopping to take pictures of forsythias or just boring yellow leaves.

While driving toward family for Easter, Sweetie and I decided to play YouTube DJ, with the rule that we could only pick fun-to-sing but wholly undignified songs. This led to a lot of belting hair-metal ballads and the over-optimistic decision to swing by my teenhood home. I was curious and it was on the way. I had this idea that it would be healing to be there and see how un-evil the place was, to be there as a strong adult with a reliable car for easy escape. But we hit a bad pothole and a hubcap flew off my pretty car, and Sweetie was worried about the tire.

Even if there hadn’t been car-upset though, the street would have felt rotten and bleak. Not even a couple of Pokéstops could redeem it—that place doesn’t deserve Pokéstops! The sky was trauma-grey and there was no escaping the fact that this was the place where the worst things of my life happened. The little park made me so angry and the old house had been painted a particularly upsetting shade of taupe. It was old-Twilight-Zone creepy there, without the fun or charm. I fucking hate that block, I hate that I’ve spent so much therapy time on it, I hate it, hate it hate it.

The magical thinking of mental illness clicked in and I thought I had broken my lovely car by getting curious about this awful place, but the tire was fine and if I want a new hubcap, the guy at the car place is very cute. Nieces and nephews several towns over broke the spell of the bad street, my youngest nephew chose a Captain Marvel book on our traditional comic shop visit, and all was well.

Back in the nineties, it’s still that summer. I’m pining and waiting for the mail—which, now that I think about it, was my default state for the ensuing ten years. I loved the feeling that someone cute was going to send you a card or a letter or a mix tape, sometimes they even still do.

Far more painful than the pining were the long and painful treatments for STIs—who knows if I got them consensually or not, I guess it doesn’t matter. The doctor was a harsh and judgmental old man, gouging and pinching away at the hurts, freezing my insides to try and heal them. There were big, intimidating, emphatic antibiotic pills. My mom was there with me for all of it, and, though we’ve spent big chunks of our lives at odds, for this, she was kind.

Once, after a particularly harsh doctor’s visit, I was walking in town and heard kids yelling “Slut!” out of a pickup truck at me. The summer was half ugly insult, half beautiful dream.

When school started again in the fall, everyday life settled onto me like a weighted blanket, not in a pleasant way. I gained so much weight (though I’m sure I was teensy compared to today, but this was WAY before Dietland/Roxane Gay/Shrill.) that my drama teacher (No Kate Moss herself) took it upon herself to tell me that I needed new jeans. I remember those jeans, high-waisted and acid-washed to almost white, devolving into a permanent wedgie as I got bigger. I want to say I didn’t care, it seemed like I didn’t, but I seem to remember it a little too vividly.

(This might have also been why I only got the teensiest, tinesiest part in that fall’s Drama Club production, one scream from backstage in a murder mystery. I hate this drama teacher. She also told me I’m too tall to ever be a leading lady, which I guess is true in the patriarchal sense. Fuck that lady though.)

ANYWAY, there was a very bright spot to look forward to! The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow was coming up with Favorite Aunt for the Drama Club production, maybe in early October. In anticipation, still glowing with love about the pillow, I sewed him a shirt.

Objectively, this shirt was probably pretty hideous. I LOVED fabrics that made not sense back then, I really kind of still do. It was aqua blue, light green, and purple, with a large and semi-realistic-looking fish print. (He told me the other week that it also had tiny turtle buttons, a detail I thoroughly enjoy.) It was the most structured thing I ever sewed, with a collar and buttonholes and all kinds of ironing and steps. There is NO WAY I would ever have the patience for all those steps today, good job teenage me.

The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow, Part Three

After I said goodbye-for-now to the cute boy and went home from the respite of Favorite Aunt’s, that summer is a fog of dissociated memories, but I remember this:

My mom wanted me to get out of the house into the sunshine, but I was afraid. She wanted me to walk a few miles down the rural stretch of road that our suburban street turned into, to pick some daylilies, sweet peas and black-eyed susans. (The only way I’m sure of the timeline of this memory is the kind of flowers she wanted me to go visit. The clock of the year has always been a loyal friend.) In fairness, flower-picking had been my m.o. since I was very little, on any given stretch of road. But just then, I felt frozen and afraid, in need of the deepest kind of privacy.

Mom said “Do it while you can, before you’re married and trapped and you can’t do anything.”

(I have to wonder what horrible-but-sort-of-true advice I’ve given my nieces and nephews and students over the years, what they’ll be typing into their blogs and/or quoting to their therapists…)

I couldn’t argue with her (for once) and I didn’t have a better idea of what to do with my afternoon. While I was recovering (or not) from the Big Trauma, my mom was concealer-ing her own bruises (I never covered mine, I felt like people should know. I still do, obvs.) and navigating her stay in a violent, contemptuous marriage, a lifetime of hurt, of controlling and being controlled. So I went and picked the the flowers. I felt empty and not-there, a summer afternoon in quotation marks, but I remember the colors. Maybe she was right, maybe the flowers did save me. (And also right that marriage feels like a trap, although in my case definitely a trap of my own making.)

In addition to flowers, better than flowers, even, that summer there was MAIL. The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow sent letters, and I wrote back on dolphin-themed stationary. (Why dolphins? I actually have no idea. I don’t think we saw dolphins at the beach or anything. Anyway, dolphins it was.)

(I wish Marie Kondo had a term for the opposite of sparking joy—the pang you feel when you realize you gave away something precious you probably should have hung onto. In my early twenties, I did my first performance art piece: I built a small pyramid of shiny pink boxes, suitcases, and other shiny pink things, all filled with memories and other things I (thought) I wanted to give away. I liked knowing that a stranger was taking home a collaged shoebox full of all my love letters, three loves to that date and so, so much treasure. The idea made me feel more connected to the world at large, but the practice left me with loss and emptiness. I’m glad there are blogs now so I can give away all my love stories to strangers and still keep them safe with me. And letters stay with me forever now, Marie or no Marie.)

(Another thing about Tidying Up: In addition to the excitement of having neat closets and always knowing where my headphones are, I like the way that Kon Mari has helped me to unstick myself from the present. “Live in the moment” seems like excellent advice for an Insight-Timer-addicted chakra enthusiast like me, but in practice, living in all of my timelines is better. It’s less lonely with all my past selves, past loves, past friends, past cities closer at hand and closer at heart, integrated with today—that’s kind of what this story is about.)

As you know by his name, he sewed me a pillow. I think he gave it to me on a visit, I remember hugging it on a Greyhound bus. (It’s also possible that he mailed it to me but I brought it on a Greyhound bus to hug. Totally something I would have done.) Favorite Aunt must have helped him make it. It was light purple satin, with a darker purple lace around the edges. There was a purple applique of a dolphin in the middle. It is the most perfect object I have ever owned, and I have no idea what happened to it. It might have been a casualty of cat pee in my first apartment, or perished in a housefire in my skater flophouse fourth-fifth-or-sixth apartment. I wish I had taken better care of everything ever. I’m amazed that I have anything left.

There were a few more days with The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow that summer. I think there were some cancelled plans, too—I remember being sad in a mine where you could look for phosphorescent rocks. When we were together, we got in our own little world (well, our own little world that almost always included Favorite Aunt) of giggles and inside jokes.

Also, we went to church together, holding hands sweetly in the front pew. I felt fresh and new there, cleansed, like I was doing something right for the first time in my entire life. It makes me really, really sad to think of that feeling, the idea that he, in addition to being an actual person I thoroughly adored, could feel like a source of legitimacy and redemption to a young woman who would maybe never know she needed neither. I want to rescue us both from that aspect of things, swoop in like Carol Danvers and sweep us both to a field somewhere, tell us both that we’re perfect and lovely and queer and have everything to offer, that the Catholic Church could just fuck right off.

Maybe he never would have needed that rescue, maybe he always knew his whole worth, maybe coming out was a breeze or a nonissue, who knows? We’re getting a little into not-really-my business territory, I haven’t asked him the million questions I have yet.

For a long time, I didn’t acknowledge the real connection between us because all of the Catholicism and trauma and patriarchy involved convinced me I must’ve been just a burden to him. For a long time the whole thing just seemed orchestrated, like a performance of normalcy that was probably less than convincing, a feint at something like virtue.

But then, weekend before last, my body was near him for like two seconds before I realized that that interpretation of things was nonsense, just as dumb and reductive and confining as religion itself. My body knew what my mind had written off, had stored love in my muscles and bones and veins for thirty years and gave it back to me like a gift, like a miracle.

Between us, this is still a very chaste kind of story. Within me, it is decidedly not.

Fuck This Sexist Piece of Kindhearted Advice

            Not the first part, that’s like my whole thing. The “let love find you” part.

Last week, I left the library where I worked with Mr. Makeout Music. There were a lot of good reasons for doing so (Work crushes can sometimes be a sign that I need to be doing something more absorbing.) but the main reason was that it was exhausting to keep pretending to be okay around him. I wasn’t. Now that I’ve got the time and space and naps to heal, the pain of him is almost gone.

            Because I couldn’t bring myself to walk past MM one more time, Sweetie went to clean out my desk for me, with Awesome Genderqueer Librarian’s help. In the bag with my collection of kid art and my desk socks was a lovely stack of “We miss you!” cards from kids and coworkers. It was very gratifying to still be valued there, after three sometimes-crying months of love-shame and election grief. The woman who wrote the above advice is one of my favorite humans in the universe, but it unleashed a stream of gleeful annoyance that I’m kind of excited to paragraph.

            It’s partly that she knew (Ugh, everybody knew.) that my leaving was even about heartbreak at all, but mostly it’s this—I’m mad at myself for spending three months crying about a guy who got scared of me because I made the first move. He has tried to frame it in other ways, but from where I’m sitting, he adored me until I took his hand.

            Of course he had the right to decline my advances for any reason, but I hated the way I felt around him after that—too big, too excited, too complicated, too much. About our weird somewhere-between-friendship-and-the other-thing situation, he kept saying “just let things develop organically” every time I had a question or needed a clarification, but I think what he meant was, let things develop on his terms.

            Even the way our flirtation started, with him visiting my department or my office when he could (He had keys to my office, but I certainly didn’t have keys to his.), with me waiting around with an open heart and what I hoped was a pretty face for him to come and be praised, it sometimes made me feel helpless and trapped, even when things were nice. In one of our fights, I said I wasn’t a web cam girl, just waiting around to approve of him. (He probably wished he hadn’t told me his porn preferences…) The way the building is designed, he could see me from almost any of his posts, and it felt really claustrophobic sometimes.

            The “let love come to you” (if you’re a woman) paradigm is part of what makes the traditional structures of dating unworkable to me. When I like someone, I really like him/her/them. When I want ANYTHING, I try very hard to be awesome at getting it. If I’m attracted to somebody, I tell them. I ask for what I want and see if it works for them. I’m not Sleeping fucking Beauty, I’m an adventuress on a quest. On a good day,  I’m a goddess, and men have been known to kneel down for me without my even having to command it. I have a dominant, honest, brave, ridiculous heart that knows what it wants and will always go after it.

            The passiveness of the “wait for love to find you” paradigm takes me to a dark place. It reminds me of necrophila. It reminds me of rohypnol. (When I just Googled that for spelling, the horrifying third choice was “rohypnols buy.”) It reminds me of back when there was MySpace and all of my guy friends liked girls whose profile pictures managed these slack, vacant expressions. I could never have made my face look uninhabited enough to resemble the ghost/zombie girls who were the style of the Mid-Zeroes. It reminds me of the time I was told that I smile a lot for a submissive.

           

            The boxed-in passiveness of the advice reminds me of Moana being told that everything she needed was on this one little island and that all she had to do to be happy was reject the song of her own soul. (Did anyone else see her and her many new islands as a polyamory tale? Maybe it was just me.) Like Moana, I am an explorer, a leader, a navigator. I won’t sit in a box and wait to be clicked on, and I hope to never tunnel-vision myself into any more narrow little islands of gendered constraint.

Like many of my rants, this is really a culmination of an argument with myself. Since my brokeny teenage years, I’ve always “known” in my heart that I’m not passive enough to be loved by a man, that I could never be compliant or compromising enough for a straight cis male. That idea is offensive to one and all, but it didn’t come from nowhere. I would love for it to go away.

When I look at it objectively, I see that Mr. Makeout Music was a rare exception. I am surrounded, past and present, by men who have enjoyed being sought out, pursued, and pounced upon. Far from being a turnoff, my literal and figurative bigness and enthusiasm have drawn the best, most adventurous, most oomph-filled men to me. Some of them have even stuck around.

Though I’ll always appreciate the way that he woke up my body and heart, I think Mr. Makeout Music mostly served to show me what I don’t want—I never want to try and make myself smaller or less in hopes that someone with a narrower scope might see me. I never want to be stuck on an island again.

            I know that romantic love isn’t something that can be to-do-listed into existence, but I WILL have agency. I will not sit in a box and wait. I will not listen to the fears and the family/social pressures that kept me away from the water. I aim to untie myself from the hetero/mononormative shore and learn to sail. My heart knows the way.