Sweet Valentine, Part Five: Princess of Saying Stuff

 Last night I was in an online Codependents Anonymous meeting with a handful of strangers and we were talking about the feeling of floating, the moments when it feels like Higher Power has us and we can just cruise along and accept the gifts. I admitted that lately, when I'm in that good floaty place is when I tend to make my love mistakes. But then I realized! Maybe they weren't mistakes! Maybe my soul knows what it's doing and I don't understand it yet! 

For now, I'm not going to try and understand it. I'm just gonna celebrate Sweet Valentine and hope for the best.

The night before Valentine's Day, I went to the little shop down the block to get roses and vegan cupcakes for my new dear. I hoped he would bring presents, but I wanted to make sure presents were there. One thing I'm extremely certain about is that such a cute connection deserved to be celebrated.

On Saturday mornings, I'm usually playing games and listening to The Flop House, so that's what I did. I told him to text when he was on his way, that the door was unlocked. I felt both like a human and like a fantasy, made of something between bones and lace. When I was younger and more pretentious, I used to describe myself as diaphanous, and that kinda works here--grounded and floating. See-through and also (maybe a little too) real.

I was working away on my Animal Crossing island when he arrived, smelling of him. He came right into bed and we kissed and cuddled, folded into each other like he'd been there all along. "I missed you before I met you, " I said. Princess of saying stuff.

(I forgot to tell you about a moment from our Wednesday date, when I told him he had some of my purple face glitter on him, and he rubbed his face against mine to get more, like he wanted to cover himself in me. I felt exactly the way a sentient cupcake might feel when it's getting devoured with gusto. In the wise words of Lizzo, Lick the icing off, put the rest in your face.)

There's something about his presence that hooks me in at the middle, at the crux of my being. He makes me feel safe and seen, like he has me. I felt like I could relax and be myself and not second-guess every move I made. Really, there didn't need to be much thinking at all, just wise and beautiful bodies carrying us through the day. 

When he was wrapped around me, I felt home. When I was kneeling in my cozy bow-down-to-Love-Itself spot looking up at him sitting on my bed, I felt tiny and treasured. He called me Princess, and I felt him mean it. I asked him to be my boyfriend, and after clarifying what that would entail, he agreed. I felt absolutely confident asking, but from a couple weeks away, it feels insane. 

Friends, I miss him so, so much. I'm giving him time and space to figure things out, giving myself time and space to see what I really want. There's three more weeks left of that time and right now, here's how I feel:

I will be so, so sad if I don't get to keep getting to know him, but I want to give him the space I promised. For myself, I want to keep heartspace for partners with more time, more surety, more bandwidth, but right now, I just want him. I want a chance to start over and take our time, to step back into the flow of him, to someday be part of his life. I want to take walks and hold hands.

I know I'm usually more explicit with the sex part, but for right now I want to keep it to myself, and for him. 

Perfect Friday Night With Dreamy Playlist Angel, Part Three

I would really like to bite this butt next time I see it!
And also spank it! Possibly also spoon up next to it and go to sleep.

Despite the name, I've totally been forgetting to tell you about his playlist! In Such Great Heights, A Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion, (The book I'm still reading and which The King of Carrot Flowers finished weeks ago!) Chris Deville says it's a typical male fantasy that some girl (Or in my case, some Manic Pixie Dream Mature) is gonna come along and tell a guy he has great taste in music. I guess I fulfill that fantasy pretty regularly! When I was younger and (even) sillier, I thought new music could only come via a cute boy, even if that's never really how I collected it.

ANYWAY, since Dreamy Playlist Angel introduced himself by way of complimenting my Sleater Kinney t-shirt and mentioning a Portlandia rewatch (What would the Gen-X equivalent of this be? Complimenting a Strawberry Alarm Clock tee and mentioning a Monkees marathon? Either way, I'm in.) I had no qualms about asking him to choose the music for our rope time--and that was the correct choice.

Off the couch and upstairs with the candles lit and the cat crated, I felt a jolt of joy as we found the bight and square-knotted the ropes. Dreamy Playlist Angel, with his sculpture-y shoulders and sweet-but-not-too-sweet demeanor, was such a warm and beautiful and inviting canvas.

I hadn't practiced on anyone besides me in the longest time! The ropes felt easy on him, flowy and smooth. I reached around his waist to loop the ropes around, rested my cheek in the crook of his neck for a moment. Kissed his sweet neck and his soft, politely-eager mouth. Good Boy. He's so good.

I wish he'd wanted a picture of the front of him, the harness came out so nice! He looked so pretty and sexy with the loops and knots over his chest, swooping up between his legs and squeezing his butt crack all snug.

His music was dreamy but not overwhelmingly feelings-y! Sweet and swoony at times (Thinkin' Bout You by Frank Ocean! My favorite thing to sing!) but leavened by silliness. Plus! Surprising amounts of saxophone!

Dancing around to indie-rock sax while putting the finishing touches on a beautiful man's hishi karada seems like a very wise way to spend a few moments of my one wild and precious life. 

 

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.

More Nineties! Pagan Boy Part One

Word choice note! I’m usually only comfortable describing myself as “fat”, meaning it in the most up-to-date, celebratory, body-positive way. (For very good writing about body positivity, see The Body Is Not an Apology: https://thebodyisnotanapology.com Sonya Renee Taylor is such a treasure.) I don’t think Pagan Boy would mind me calling him a hot fat man, so I’m going to learn to write that way. Wish me luck!

 

A draft of this entry has been in the to-type pile for a couple of weeks. I lost Pagan Boy to Covid at the beginning of this year, so every sentence, no matter how cheery, is a little molasses-step through grief. I hope I can do justice to this miraculous on-again-off-again friend and the lust for life (and pop culture!) he helped me to cultivate. In my own, snotty, irritable way, I loved him, and I hope to make that clear.

 

After Perfectly 1993 Guy broke up with me, I had even more room in my working-at-Burger-King-and-getting-ready-for-photography-school life for…something? That roller coaster summer, I’d started making poems in a black-and-white speckled notebook with doodle-y lilies drawn all over it. I don’t remember anything except one of the poems had a reference to Blondie’s Heart of Glass. (#onbrand)

 

I fully fancied myself a beatnik, so the early-Nineties coffeehouse craze was EXACTLY the thing for me, even pre-Friends! So I dressed in a polyester turtleneck day-glo psychedelic maxi-dress and headed to the newly minted Cake Place (not its real name) with my no-doubt melodramatic poems. (Side note: The featured poet that night became my mentor ten years later post-California. Magic night! Synchronicity!)

 

I sat down next to Pagan Boy after my poem and he said something catty-complimentary, reminding me of Perfectly 1993 Guy’s best friend. I looked at him and my heart said OF COURSE.

 

Fat, expansive, queerish, a little goth. So. Much. MAN. Plus, these really fluffy dark eyelashes. Pretty and handsome and musky in a way that went perfectly with the buckets of patchouli I used to wear. (Okay I bought some a few weeks ago. Still smells SO GOOD. Gonna put some on now.)

 

Jeez I really miss him. I always wondered if we should be together and kinda took our friendship for granted, even let him become a Bernie-bro facebook casualty through most of the Trump years, but he came back. (The ONLY man in my life who apologized for Bernie-and-Russia-fueled madness! He gets all the stars,)  It was like he never left, and right before he died we were texting through bad movies together. I miss him so much, and I hope I can make these paragraphs the reunion we deserve. Of heart, wish me luck.

 

 

(Curfew Has Lifted) Postscript: Quarantine Crush

It’s been such a hard couple of weeks, even here in my relatively un-police-terrorized neighborhood. My city was one of the ones with the curfews, with the police brutality toward protesters, with the military occupation. We’ve had so many victories, too, but I still really struggle to put the experience into words. Mostly I’ve just been repeating it over and over, like I did that time in the Nineties when my house burned down. Only everything is burning down and building up all at the same time.

On Saturday the 30^th, Sweetie an I were in a big protest (I’m so fucking SICK of the phrase “peaceful protest” because of its respectability politics implications, but it did start out that way.) and we got separated from our friends (twenty- somethings who referred to us as “protest moms”) just before the first fire started. (“Tear gas is an accelerant,” my young friend later pointed out, not sure it wasn’t the police who set their own car ablaze.) My friends were boxed in by the police and I was just outside the crowd. Sweetie, panicking because she struggles with wearing a mask for very long, had gone to get the car. I stood there feeling like the very epitome of a dumb white lady, filming and sobbing, while my stuck-in-the-crowd friends texted periodic updates so I’d know they were alive.

My friend in the crowd texted “Walk, don’t run, north.” I followed her instructions and picked a place for Sweetie to meet me with the car. I sat in some grass on a quiet corner, took off my mask to breathe a little better, and snapped a selfie, mostly so I would know I was alive. My regular check-in-buddy, my extremely mild-mannered neighbor in charge of feeding the cats if Sweetie and I ever get hurt or arrested, had never received this upsetting of updates. I hoped I wasn’t scaring her. I wanted to text Quarantine Crush but I knew that made no sense. I was relieved when his facebook reactions showed me he was out there rooting for me.

Sweetie and I were waiting in the car when our friends finally unstuck themselves from the crowd and started making their way towards us. They texted that they were almost run over by a police car in an intersection. (They later clarified that it was THREE police cars that went ahead and drove into the crossing protesters. May Heather Heyer haunt those police bitterly for the rest of their lives.) I got out of the car and waked toward my friends and though our county was still in the red zone, quarantine-wise, we definitely did hugging.

Though it was the police and not the protesters instigating and cultivating the violence and fear, our mayor put our town on curfew after that day. I did activism from home most of that time, but many people I cared about were still out in the now-also-military-occupied streets. I joined the protest watch group on Facebook, so I knew when my friends had to close the windows of their homes to keep the teargas out. I knew when the police were dropping teargas bombs from helicopters. Like everyone else with a heart, mine was petrified, breaking, and proud all at once. I took roll calls every morning so I’d know my friends had survived. So far, they have.

One night, after days and nights of terror, once I finished posting my phone number for the however manyth time in case there were emergencies in the night, I RSVPed yes to Quarantine Crush and Adorable Co-Host’s poetry reading, figuring I needed any comfort I could get. Figuring that things were now so life-or-death (I know! They seemed super life-or-death before!) that heartbreak and longing couldn’t possibly be factors any more.

Oh, Adorable Co-Host. Perhaps the person who hung up on me because I was talking too much about U.S. imperialism after 9/11 wasn’t the person to go to for comfort in this particular week. I feel like an actual crazy person for having thought so.

There were many signs in the pre-Zoom-reading chitchat that should have told me I’d better log out. Someone said “I’m glad *theyre* protesting.” (Emphasis mine.) The apparent queen of this almost-all-white reading piped up in favor of “states’ rights” as if we were in Civil war times. A white guy (possibly the one who said “We’re all in cages now” a few weeks before) used the phrase “identity politics.” I really should have logged out.

“Since we’re not gonna get abolition,” began Up-To-That -Point-Adorable Cohost, “One way to compromise with the police would be…” I tried to push back, but he switched into lecture mode:

“I mean, the police do good things too, like control crowds…”

I stayed for a little while. I read a nice post-protest poem and a not-nice letter to city council. I felt so jagged and broken that it felt like I was shouting Sweetie’s house down. (There was a weather-related power outage at my place, so I camped out with her for a bit.) I heard what the readers had to say, and it was good, as much as I could hear through my humming panic and boiling blood.

Right now, I’m so angry with myself for whatever in my heart and not-okay mind made it seem like this reading would be a place of comfort. I’m so angry at myself for mistaking facebook friends, twenty-years ago friends, for people who would really care about a city so far away, about me.

In the grand scheme of things, micro-abandonments by white and/or not-sufficiently courageous friends, don’t matter so much. I know that. What matters is that the Minneapolis City Council is in favor of defunding the police, that my city, through the efforts of so, SO many may have a chance at defunding as well.

Please, no matter who you are or where you are, go beyond your usual roles. Use every platform you have, not to make a cozy space for hand-wringing moderates, but to work for real change. Sheltering-in-place is not an excuse for sitting by the sidelines, especially not online. Write to your mayor, your city council, your governor, your friends. Please.

From The Museum of Bad Advice to The Library of Love (And Knots.)

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!

For the Museum of Bad Advice, Part One (Hang Up)

Sometimes, I’m lucky enough to have paid someone to say exactly what depression itself would say, so I could hang up on them both.

Toward the beginning of quarantine, constant family contact, fear about my job, and general everyone-might-die-ness was making me worry that I might lose any of the mental health ground I’ve gained in the past few years. Insurance was in flux as I filled out every disaster relief form, so I took some of the extra money my brother had sent (He felt lucky to be able to work full time from home.) and subscribed to BetterHelp.

The first therapist I tried seemed insufficiently invested in science, letting slip some Trumpesque complaints about CDC guidelines. The second one was better, but I think she was mixing me up with another of her clients. Suffering from Quarantine Brain myself, I felt compassion for her, but didn’t think she would help with my growing sense of nonexistence.

The third one, I liked. She seemed sensible, grown-up, and (I’ve seldom in my life found this appealing, but in-these-times etc.) like she knew what I should do next.  She recommended The Four Agreements, one of the worst, victim-blamiest self-help books I’ve encountered, (By the Book sums it up pretty well: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/stitcher/by-the-book/e/59267477#/) but I decided to overlook that red flag. She sent me a so-detailed-as-to-be-sleep-PREVENTING Sleep Hygiene Diary, but she also seemed fine when I disregarded some of her advice and took other aspects to heart.

Last Tuesday during an early morning phone session, still weepy and off-balance from saying bye-sort-of to Quarantine Crush, I was sharing my pretty boilerplate 45-year-old-single-bi-woman worries when I heard (not for the first time in my may therapist lifetime.)  third therapist lady become audibly annoyed:

“Well, you have this air of desperation,” she said, and that can be really off-putting. If you really do what you need to do to love yourself, they’ll be more attracted.”

A.    Desperation seems like a TOTALLY REASONABLE EMOTION TO HAVE when:

1.      Tens of thousands of people are dying.

2.      My work life is fairly decimated.

AND

3.      I was relearning how to write poems with a friend I missed so, SO much.

B.     What did attracting anybody even have to do with it when I had:

1.      Fallen for someone who was both taken and

2.      A dear, important friend and

3.      2,500 miles away?!

“I just think you need to adjust what you’re looking for.” She said.

(Connection? Poetry? A creative spark? A window into meaning from the past? Hope? Songs? I know what she meant but it seems like she was oversimplifying.)

“What am I looking for?” I asked, joining her in irritated-voiceness.

“Well, romance might seem really nice in books, but in real life, you might be too sensitive for it.”

(Note: The Highly Sensitive Person book suggests this too, but it also suggests that communities with a lot of immigrants have fewer sensitive people, so I put it in the garbage. Not even good enough for the recycle bin.)

I tried a little bit to tell her how many different kinds of relationships I’d tried, certainly more than the average person.

“It’s just that I’m mostly happy being alone,” I said, “So I’d rather not keep trying casual stuff and then getting mad at partners for being too casual.” (Basically the theme for years of this blog.)

It really irked my soul that she was reading me as a commitment-hungry stereotype when I was willing to love someone I’m unlikely to even see any time soon—seems like maybe it was the opposite problem. I’m still arguing with this lady I unsubscribed to a week ago.

She told me that AT MY AGE (caps mine, she wasn’t yelling) I needed to start changing my expectations.

“Men don’t want commitment after they’re divorced, so you’re probably going to have to go with it and be grateful for the couple of weeks you might get.”

“Well, that is really…grim. I’m hanging up now.” And I did.

I called Sweetie and cried out the hurt and shock that someone who was supposed to be on my side, and also someone who was basically a stranger, could be that cruel.

Quarantine Crush Part Eight: Phew/Sob/Yay!

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.

Quarantine Crush (Because of Course) Part Six

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.

Quarantine Crush (Because of Course) Part Five

I feel like I need Liz Lemon to come in here and do a Twenty Year Wrap-Up (Wrap Wrap Wrap-Up) so I can someday finish this story. Let’s see how well I can summarize.

A lot happened in the fall of 2001. I turned twenty-seven, which I’d always thought of as the Cobain birthday, thereby fulfilling an arbitrary and teenage-dramatic goal I’d set for myself. When 9/11 happened, I was both glad to be with my family and fretting my heart out about my California friends. I remember Adorable Co-Host not-unkindly hanging up on me once I’d gone on too long about U.S. imperialism.

I met Sweetie about a month later, and we figured out that we’d been in the same peace vigil on Small East Coast City University’s campus in the days following the towers’ fall.  Fitting, since we’re still vigiling together. Well, not right now, but probably again before too long. (Big East Coast City where we live now is still a red-zone county, so who knows?)

I kept in touch with my CA friends as I started to set up my own poetry life at home. I admit that I was over the moon to be able to walk most places, and I soon was asked to co-host a venue myself, but I piiiiiiiiined for my first family of poets. I missed them so badly that it took a long while for me to like my poems at all, though I did keep writing them. A music, a spark, a sunbeam was missing, and it would take a long while to get that back.

QC and Adorable Co-Host both wrote poems for my and Sweetie’s wedding ceremony. I’m still bowled over that they would’ve come all this way, even if they did have some New England gigs just after. In maybe the most bi moment of my entire life, (Okay, aside from my actual unicorn adventures! Almost forgot!) QC (at my request) held up a boombox Say Anything style as Sweetie and I, with our parents and the bridal party, walked down the aisle of our hometown rose garden. (Though if anyone has ever been holding up the boombox in this story, it’s always, always been me.)

Twenty years with varying levels of keeping in touch. When my book of poetry came out in 2012, I featured at their venue over Skype, so I was oddly prepared for the there/not there of Zoom poetry—lonely and together all at once, talking to friends and reading into the void.

The first time I Zoomed in this spring, I’d been crying/panicking about Zoom every day because of work. I wanted to try something nice with it, a treat. I left the camera off, did my nails, and felt like an interloper, only piping up to applaud. But I got to hear him, beautiful and clear. His was a life and death poem that rumbled through me and overflowed my heart. What choice did I have but to start writing poems again?

Quarantine Crush (Because of Course) Part Four

The couple of days I spent staying with QC before heading back east are two of my favorite days of ever—like a charmed bubble of time when I could love and be loved, be nowhere and everywhere. It was the distilled feeling of being perfectly free and perfectly cared for.

His arm around me that night as we sat on his front stoop looking up at the few stars we could see.

His hand warm on my shoulder.

Dozing in his bed next to him listening to bluesy songs.

It was perfect. It was perfect love. That I could only let myself love him all the way once my bags were packed and waiting in his living room, I guess that says something about me.

Like the Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow story, that weekend means so much partly because it was so (in this case vexingly) chaste.

To be treated with such care.

To be given absolutely every heart thing by a man who expected nothing in return, who let me just lay there next to him and be. To have let myself do the same.

I have to believe that feeling can exist again out in the world for me, but with someone who isn’t just-friends or star-crossed or whatever. (And with constant kissing and him knowing all the knots.)

I would definitely ravish now-QC if it were possible, (It isn’t, for a variety of reasons.) but even if I had Sex Tardis technology I wouldn’t change any little thing about that weekend in 2001. I can’t think of a more perfect example of love-from-a-masculine-person—I’d never rewrite it.

And then QC and QC’s Adorable Co-Host took me to the train or the bus or whatever and said goodbye. I looked for signs and poems in the midnight lights as I rose away from unconditional love, and toward it, too.

In a few days, my brother would pick me up at the Small East Coast City bus station, lugging my life and a box of tomatoes from our Iowa Grandpa. I’d move into my sister’s old room at my mom and stepdad’s house, to live with the three of them until I figured out what to do next.

Quarantine Crush (Because of Course) Part Three

So while I was drinking in all the poet love, feeling obnoxiously invincible as a writer, and surrounding myself with art and beautiful vistas, I was also, like anyone who moves across the country without a plan might, struggling to survive. I’d come to art school with way to pay for it, bad credit, and (Still so shocking!) no driver’s license. I was getting by on a narrow-to-no-margin, always hungry, sometimes rationing the groceries out to the tiniest detail. For most of my time in California, I slept on the floor in a pile of blankets rather than in a bed.

The Saturday night before I decided to leave, I was scheduled to work at the dress shop past the time the busses stopped running and I didn’t want to take a cab all the way from Fancy Beach Town to the suburbs where my third-apartment-in-two-years was, so I walked. It took three or four hours. It was so beautiful, following an emphatic moon and smelling the eucalyptus in the gentle night air.

I walked so much back then, and with no Spotify, no podcasts, and no audiobooks, I entertained myself by singing. Tori Amos’s “Leather,” Ani DiFranco’s “Little Plastic Castle” (The Russian Doll of its time.) “Amazing Grace,” “The Rainbow Connection” and Jeff-Buckley-Style “Halleluiah” before it became a cliché.

(I’d forgotten about the singing to myself until I read Lane Moore’s How to Be Alone if You Want to, and Even if You Don’t (SO GOOD! READ IT!) where she describes singing herself out of despair. In my case, I was singing myself out of boredom, and in these quarantine weeks, the urge to belt stuff out on the sidewalk has come back. I usually can keep it to just whistling through my mask, but sometimes I can’t help but sing along with my headphones, even though I know it must sound terrible.)

I had a poetry gig the next day and I’d hoped to sell some books so I could get some groceries. That almost always worked, but this time it didn’t. It felt like my synchronicity was broken, maybe it was. QC’s Adorable Cohost took me to Ralphs on the way home and bought me enough food to get me through until payday. I remember picking out one perfect green apple—produce seemed like an incredible luxury at the time!

I’d been having trouble with my roommate, an art student a little younger than me, and when her dad informed me that they were moving her terrible boyfriend in, he offered me 300$ to help me relocate. It would have taken at least a couple thousand to get my own place, and even though I was making pretty good commissions at the dress shop, first/last/security might as well have been a million dollars.

By the end of July 2001, I’d decided the only thing I could do was head back east. I boxed up everything I wanted to keep and mailed it c/o my mom. By the eighteenth of August, I landed on QC’s doorstep, bags packed, to stay a couple days before leaving home/going home.

Quarantine Crush (Because of Course) Part 2

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.

Quarantine Crush (Because of Course!) Part One

How’s your shelter-in-place? I’m doing okay now that the Pelosi money started coming in. Sweetie and I considered moving her into my apartment for quarantine, but I’m so, SO glad we decided to be a quarantine household while still in separate apartments—our wonderful, wonderful separate apartments.

To explain how I got to Quarantine Crush, we have to go back twenty years. Why not?! Time means nothing anymore. In 1999, when I was twenty-four, I left Small East Coast City to go to art school in Fancy Southern California Beach Town. I chose to go to school there because a. I wanted to go to California and b. The name of the town sounded pretty.

Obviously, this person becomes a poet. I was half-assedly taking my art classes, pining for my newly-ex girlfriend back east, working in a dress shop in true rom-com style, and walking a bajillion miles of canyon and beach. One morning when I was crying in the campus courtyard because I missed the ex, a guy I thought was cute invited me to a poetry reading, and that was that for like the next ten years of my life. (Wouldn’t it be awesome if the art school guy was Quarantine Crush? He isn’t, even I’M not that much of a rom-com.)

Southern California was the place where I felt both most alien and most welcome. The poets were almost instantly one of the Friends-style families I’d been collecting for the entire Nineties.  We spent Christmas and New Years together, like it was the most natural thing in the world. I didn’t have a car! In Southern California! How did I do anything? Poets! They drove me everywhere, which is really, really saying something in a place where every single thing is at least forty-five minutes away. My mind is absolutely dazzled by the sheer number of hours my friends spent shuttling me back and forth to readings, despite the fact that I never gave them gas money (I never, never, had any money ever) and I sometimes forgot (or just didn’t know) my freeway exit, and my personality was a complete nightmare, I’m sure.

But still! They drove me and drove me and DROVE me and that strikes me as such an act of unquestioning, unconditional friendship love that I really wish the Sex Tardis were up and running so that I could take it on a little platonic stopoff at the millennium to be more grateful.

Quarantine Crush only crystalized as a deep sort of one-that-got-away-situation after a few years of pressing like on his gorgeous nature photos on Instagram, but in retrospect, I can’t help asking my younger self WHY DID YOU NOT KISS THIS PERSON? Right up there with the Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow, he’s in contention for The Actual Best Guy. Let’s add a “so far” so I don’t get the blues.

I’m not even sure if I knew him before the day I leapt into his arms. We were competing in a Slam Championship. His voice was (and still is) such a ravenous, glorious bluster. When he finished his poem I didn’t stop to think, I didn’t wonder if it made sense, I just jumped, and he held me without difficulty, and theatrically carried me out the door.

Of course shelter-in-place and too many corona feelings and counting the hand wash seconds would make me hanker for some leaping, to see what kind of advice me-in-my-twenties might have. The results were…mixed, but decidedly THE BEST.

In Which I Realize I Am Really Lucky to Have Had My Adventure Years, Part Three

That week, while my creative coaching client was collaging through her blocks, I made this. Both a staircase and a trapped butterfly, seems about right.

It should be said, friends, that my almost-year-and-a-half dry spell was a literal dry spell as well—I’ve always been the squishiest, but there was a while when I was so dry that I thought I might be starting menopause. I could just have stocked up on lube, but the idea of always having to was something I wasn’t ready to face, so I got by on spit and determination. From the moment I met J, the dry spell was over. I came home with soaked underpants every time, wetter than in all my adventures. It felt like a reunion, like a second chance at being alive, to be coursing with so much life, to be opening up like a flower. That’s why, no matter how it ended up, I’m glad I let my hoo-ha make the decisions for a while—that part of me (literally and figuratively) has been neglected for so long, I’m glad I didn’t begrudge myself a perilous treat.

When I met him, I was in a delicate but thriving state. It was the first time in my adult life that I could say I was truly happy to be single. I was teaching poetry in my pretty apartment, spending lots of time with my friends and at church, and starting to have faith about where I was going. However, back in February I had to resign from the school district due to acute stress disorder, and I’m still pretty jumpy and prone to panics about once a month. The fact that J. was triggering space issues seemed like it was partly due to my own recent and distant past, but typing the story to you makes it seem less likely that that was so. I am still brokeny, but I think I was scared of him because he was (unintentionally, I’m almost sure) scary—sometimes it’s not that deep.

Anyway, the day after our beautiful but ill-ended flower date, he sent a text apologizing and citing grief. I conceded that not everyone can be besties with their exes the way I (somewhat unhealthily) am with Sweetie. (Currently she and I work at the same three-employee store, she’s my boss, and we spend about an hour each morning processing my feelings about various things. All this with a person I once jumped out of a car to get away from. I know.) I told him to give me some time,  that I’d have to do some soul-searching, so we went to radio silence and a love poem proceeded to pour out of me in a way that hadn’t happened in a long time. I felt jangled but fired up. I made art all day that day.

(When I second-drafted the poem with my friends in poetry class, I noticed that it accidentally implied that I wanted to have babies, including feeling the vibration of his Apple watch as “Another little heartbeat.” and, seeing the children in the flower garden wearing glow bracelets, responding with “I want one” meaning but not really meaning the glow bracelets. I hid it pretty well before I posted it, but still, I was like, nicely done, subconscious! Got it.)

Anyway, maybe latent baby-wishes were what inspired me to give him a chance, or his prowess at planning dates, or the cuteness of his texting style. (It was the first time I’ve dated with emoji involved, and I can’t overstate the adorableness of a good morning sunflower rainbow kissy face…) Maybe (probably) it was just plain lust and curiosity. That Sunday, I took a beach trip by myself, to clear my head and make the right decision, and I knew (I always know things best in the ocean, even if it is with a bathing suit on these days.) that if I let him go, I would always wonder if there could have been something real between us. Also I have to admit there was the stupid “What if this is my last chance?” feeling that comes from being socialized to think of myself as ancient at almost-forty-one.

When he asked me a couple days before the date what I was in the mood for, I very brazenly and honestly said red meat. He sent me a couple of menus for fancy places I could dress up for, with very grown-up prices, and I thought, “Is this what regular dating women get all the time? I should start expecting more from life.” That was the central lesson of him, and I hope I can see it through.

The day before our third date, I had an enormous panic attack. The first week of classes is pretty much the only busy time our college bookstore job is stressful, just because of all the extroversion and sometimes-getting-trapped-behind-the-register it requires. The one rude kid on our super-adorable campus found me and I found myself with a pounding headache, unable to work or get myself home. A kind coworker brought me to the campus infirmary, where the nice nurse asked me why I had neither a therapist nor meds. Reasonable question. I got some good rest before the date, but I carried a residue of fear under my pretty black polka-dot dress. (Hello again, red satin heels!)

As I followed my GPS to the suburbs, everything started to look familiar, especially when I turned onto J’s block. Remember way back whenSteampunk Guy pulled over on a quiet suburban street for car sex? THIS RANDOM OKC GUY’S HOUSE WAS THE HOUSE WE PULLED OVER IN FRONT OF. J was one of the nice people I was trying not to wake with my sex yowls three summers ago. I didn’t know if that was a good sign or a bad one, but I’ve never been more sure that my love life is a labyrinth. So where had I returned to?

I can’t overstate my delight at being properly dated, to be out in the world being shown off in a fancy outfit, being treated like someone who’s someone instead of a dance card afterthought. I ate rare filet mignon and felt like an animal, like a sexy lion, like a woman who’s thoroughly alive. He ordered a good pinot with the inauspicious name “Writer’s Block” but I seem to be overflowing with paragraphs nonetheless.

The conversation turned again to his writing, which was a tricky subject. He’d told me before that he wrote erotic novels, and I (somewhat hypocritically) was scared to read them—I had a feeling we wouldn’t be able to go on if I read his stories, and probably I was right. He confirmed that “Well, let’s just say it’s not all consensual.” I didn’t ask him who in the stories was not consenting to what, only told him I was now A. Scared and B. Too tipsy to flee.

“But sometimes someone just needs a little…push…”

Okay, so this blog wouldn’t exist if that weren’t a little bit true, but I didn’t like hearing it from him. “That’s not up to you. It’s not up to you to decide what someone else needs.”

He rightly pointed out that he’d written it, not done it, but still, I felt so let down and sad. “I just want there to be one guy, one guy, who wants a real person next to him in bed.” Yes, there have been plenty, but I was having tunnel vision, heavy with the burden of trying to keep myself not-raped. In the do-over version, this is where I have the waitress split the check, wait around a bit to sober up, and grouse about it to my friends at brunch the next day. But as he paid the bill, the conversation simmered back to happy somehow and I admitted that what I wanted most in the world was just to tear. Him. Apart. I was getting in that pool, and no stupid thing he said was going to stop me.

Next time: Big moon, hot sex, more stupid things.