Bitterness and Giddiness Part Two: Infinitely Better Scrabble Guy

For a couple of days after my Instagram lapse, I felt AWFUL. I felt like I’d drunk poison—the particular rotten feeling of going backwards. There was no one to blame but myself, Usher, and Julia Roberts.

I wondered if I should take a dating break until the rottenness passed, at least until this breakup-versary month is behind me. But there’s always going to be something, some flower or sunset or moon giving me the excuse to be in a wistful funk. Forward is the only way to get unstuck and the internet is so full of faces!

I don’t know what possessed me to plan a call on the way home from a loooooong workday last Friday, but I did. (Boy, I work a lot in this story! I really work so much these days. It’s mostly wonderful and the gummies help!)

Infinitely Better Scrabble Guy was a sweet, gentle cutie from the facebook dating app. (Actually my favorite dating app right now, partly because I feel like I’ve used up the other ones!) We had like seven friends in common! I liked the way he went back and forth with his son about gaming while we were on the call, like I was immediately welcomed into his world. His work is similar to mine. When he mentioned that he plays phone Scrabble, I immediately invited myself to play.

Possibly some, though definitely not all, of my giddiness about IBSG was because it felt so good to return to Scrabble! I’d sworn it off after the long-ago Scrabble Boy saga, but I loved getting back in touch with my two-letter words! After not too many turns, IBSG placed “sex” on the board and then I added “thine” and “deepen.” I was in romantic Scabble heaven. He looked SO CUTE in his thumbnail picture, framed in gold with a little crown.

The next morning, before getting ready for my Saturday job, I strewed the peach and pink petals of my Valentine roses all over the snowy yard, feeling buoyant and set free.

IBSG wasn’t ultimately at match—I have GOT to stop pretending that “smokes occasionally” might mean just weed or just-at-a-party-sometimes. Boundaries are real and they suck, but love is addictive enough without smooching nicotine.

But it felt sooooooooooooo good to get totally silly about someone, to let my heart soar a little. I hope it comes around again soon! And I hope IBSG finds the very best partner, who’ll spoil him all to heck! He deserves it so, so much. He made me so happy.

In the meantime, it’s not such a bad thing to be all messed up a year later about a broken love thing, and it’s not a bad thing to revel in a Scrabble crush who wasn’t a match. I want to give my big weird heart time to appreciate both, to appreciate ALL the things, and to take it a little slow towards whatever adventures are next.

A Backtrack, A Cliff, and a Buffy Sing-along

After the last post, all full of accomplishment and yoga-y goodwill, I was inspired to send a sorry-I-was-a-jerk note to Scrabble Boy—I’d been thinking of him because our dalliance was an April thing and because our friendship ended, as so many of mine have, with me getting superpissed. Since the divorce, I’ve been working my way through the list of people at whom I’ve misdirected anger.

He accepted my friend request right away, as if he’d been waiting for it, and was equally apologetic and forgiving. We planned to do a call after I got back from Easter. (Hey everybody! I drove up to my sister’s and back without having a breakdown for the first time post-Sweetie! Credit to my cute little red car, I think. And time.) A funny thing happened when I hit the road though—all kinds of daydreams started to unspool about him—holding hands under the flowering trees, throwing him into my pretty princess bed and finally having my way with him, running away to join his life in Ann Arbor. (Cue Get Up Kids song…)

Though I loved the idea of reuniting with my poet self through him and seeing the last three years’ adventures through his eyes, the adventures seemed to pale in comparison with him. He was, at least in those daydreams, still the best one for me, the guy I’d choose out of all of them if I were given a chance. I hadn’t so much gotten over him as put a bookmark in that day we spent together, and as soon as we were on good terms, love started bursting out like so many tree-petals.

Easter was SUCH a good trip. I played Mario Party with the kids and earned almost no mini-stars. I took my niece and nephews to their local comic shop and bought my niece some manga and my nephew a sonic screwdriver. After we finished lovingly perusing the old-school Star Wars figures, we all went out for cocoa. It’s finally sinking in that I can still have my family, even post-Sweetie.

When I got home, I knew I couldn’t really bear to be updated about Scrabble Boy’s life. I’ve come too far to pretend that I want to be just friends with someone I love. (Annoying) gold star for being honest with him about that, and in the process I learned that he’d found someone shortly after his divorce and was happy with her. I sent him a perfect, distant, congratulatory response and that was that, but I was completely devastated by the news. I don’t know why it hurt so badly, but it did. I sometimes feel like everyone just pairs (or whatevers) up so easily and it’s still just a mystery to me.

The more I dismantle the defensiveness and fear that came from The Bad Thing, the more I realize some of that stuff was what’s holding me up, so it’s hard to hold myself together without it. I will probably find more of these pockets of feeling that got stuck because I was ill-equipped to face them at the time—my heart might be a TARDIS ride for a little while.

With that loss added to all the others and my defenses down, I felt like Wyle E. Coyote when he realizes he’s walked off a cliff. The bottom dropped out from under everything and for a few days, I was completely lost. I felt the loss not just of Scrabble Boy, but of my school, of Sweetie, of everyone I’ve lost in the past couple years’ adventures. I was so hyperventilatingly sad that I wondered if I did need a Girl Interrupted interruption, or shock treatment like Rory Gilmore got when she was on Mad Men. I thought I would never find love the way SB did because I would be tangled in this web of grief forever.

The feeling only lasted a couple of days—with yoga, sitcom episodes, and lots of writing, the devastation passed and I was able to get back on track. The main thing I learned from the Scrabble Boy thing is that hermit time is over, that reaching out has got to become the norm again. I’ve enjoyed these months of focusing on taking care of myself, but the loneliness is deep and wide and it’s time to rejoin the world.

So I did. Last night I joined some friends-of-friends for a Buffy sing-along and ice cream birthday party. (Can you believe that was a thing?!) I felt nervous because I’ve almost completely forgotten how to be social, but singing “Walk Through the Fire” with a bunch of cute near-strangers was as transcendent an experience as I’m ever gonna have, and I have been actually set on fire.

So I will. Walk through the fire, I mean. Though it seems impossible sometimes, I’ll keep moving forward until I work someplace safe and love someone(s) kind, until vulnerability and lightness and heart can thrive. Next weekend, everybody, is the Sparkly Festival of Awesomeness, not a moment too soon.

Last April, I Accidentally Wore the Scarlet Letter: Part Four

Scrabble boy and I planned a phone call shortly after I found out his wife didn’t know. He called from his car outside his local library, where he had a gig. He told me I was the first person he’d done anything with besides his wife since the Nineties. I painted the above painting while we talked. I was so touched by what he was telling me that I couldn’t stay mad. He choked up at the idea of not being my friend.

I feel like I want to apologize to everyone I know for the few weeks after that. I feel like I went kind of nuts. Sweetie tried to talk some sense into me, but I was desperate to believe he loved me. I’d always been afraid that I couldn’t be loved by a man, and I saw this as proof that I could be. “He doesn’t love you,” she said, “He screwed you over.” Adorkable was more sympathetic, listening to the songs he’d send and dissecting the poems over gelato. But still, I’m embarrassed for how I acted.

Whenever he mentioned a song, I’d put it in my iPod immediately and listen to it like a jillion times.  We had deep, romantic conversations on Scrabble chat, and my life started to revolve around that little chat box, around waiting for him to play his next word. He mailed me a poem (not his) about being trapped under a parachute. The migrating birds in the poem got tangled in the strings. He sent me his students’ poems and my delighted comments ended up in the introduction to their book. We took the Scrabble words and arranged them into poems. I combed his poems for clues he was still thinking of me, and they were always there. I was a window, a star.

Things continued with varying levels of angst until something fairly innocuous finally blew it all up. Scrabble Boy’s best fried is Feral Girl, a twenty-year-old former student of his. (He was 37) She was also a friend of mine from poetry. One day, they posted on facebook that they’d gone to a How Water Music show together and screamed along with the songs. The physicality of that image versus the computer-and-poems trapped feeling of my relationship with him sparked something and I texted him that I felt envious.

That’s when he kind of lost it on me. In that claustrophobic Scrabble chat box, he said “I don’t talk about this much, but I love my wife and kids. I don’t intend to abandon any part of my life here.”

I flipped out too—had I ASKED him to abandon anybody? He’s the monogamous one! I was so mad about the accusation that I did that impossible-to-feel-mature-about-but-still-necessary step of unfriending him. I made a lot of sarcastic jokes to my friends about being a homewrecker, but his accusation stung to the core of my love-loving heart. It still makes me scared, even in very very poly situations.

Our friendship was poisoned, as was my friendship with Feral Girl, somehow. I eventually did tell her why I unfriended her, and that probably wasn’t very nice.

Last fall, Scrabble Boy and I took another crack at being friends and planned a call. He and his wife had separated for reasons unrelated to me. It turned out, he’d never told her. He considered the fact that we “made out that one time” (Oh, crap, straight people have a different idea of what sex is!) to be “beside the point.” Which, in the grand scheme of things, I know it was, but still. What girl likes to be called beside the point?

We both spent a lot of that conversation apologizing, but I also realized he was never going to love me, and I was unreasonably angry about that. I mailed him back his poems and mix CDs. (The poems are still saved in the computer though. And the Scrabble games still live on, archived.)

I don’t know how I can be both the communicative and becoming-more-confident person I am not and the so-desperate-to-connect-with-a-man-that-I-helped-screw-seven-people-over mess that I was then. It’s almost April, I hope it’s time to forgive myself.

Last April I Accidentally Wore the Scarlet Letter: Part Three

After I kissed Scrabble Boy goodnight, I went into the bedroom and found that Sweetie hadn’t been asleep. She was laying there crying and looking traumatized. What’s worse, since the bathroom is right next to the couch, she’d felt trapped and unable to get up and go pee. I was a jerk about it, and we exchanged a few harsh words before trying to sleep for a couple of hours.

The morning was tricky and painful. I had no idea what he was thinking, and I just wanted Sweetie to somehow like me again. Aside from my inane morning chatter, there was very little talking. I passed her a note that said I was sorry, and passed him a note that said “I like you.” He finished up the robot-themed mix he’d been making me, and I made them breakfast: scrambled eggs with spinach and cheese. Scrabble Boy and I ate at the dining room table while Sweetie hid in our room.

Scrabble Boy drove us downtown to the teen poetry workshop we were helping to lead at one of the local universities. The day was so incredibly perfectly pretty-the flowering trees along the river were in full bloom and the sky was its very best cheerful self. We listened to the robot mix (Not as dreamy as the situation called for) and kissed at every stoplight. I loved holding his hand as we walked from the car to the gig. For two such hung over and twitterpated people, we did a great job with the workshop, except I was in no state to write anything coherent.

When he dropped me off afterward, I was full of worry about Sweetie and I didn’t want him to leave. We kissed and kissed and kissed. We decided that we would keep in touch via facebook Scrabble, which was the beginning of facebook Scrabble being ruined maybe forever for me.

I had another gig that night, but luckily there was time to take a nap with Sweetie first. By the next day, she started to like me again and we started to feel okay. We took a walk by the river and took in the flowering trees.

Scrabble Boy was on tour and also had to fly to Florida to attend his grandfather’s funeral. (So some of his urgency was probably grief.) We were in touch almost every day through poems and texts and Scrabble. He mentioned me in a coded way in almost every poem he posted, including this: “dear reader, I love you.” Of course, he could have meant any and all readers, but I wanted it to be me. Some of the poems were a little paranoid, mentioning “unauthorized activities” but I guess I just didn’t notice. I was writing unabashed and smutty-for-me love poems.

It took me a few weeks to write about it in a literal way, on my other blog. I wanted to acknowledge the fact that I was now sure of being bi and had experienced all these new emotions.

Are you ever watching a dumb sitcom or something where there’s a misunderstanding or something and you feel frustrated, like, why didn’t they just TALK!? That’s how I feel at every stage of this story.

As soon as I posted the post, I sent it to him, and he popped up on gchat almost immediately. He asked me to take out the paragraph mentioning his wife. She didn’t know. He used the phrase “not authorized” again. He was obviously scared and upset and I was LIVID with myself for making what seemed like such an obvious mistake. I did take the paragraph out, but unredacted it a few weeks later. It’s a really important paragraph, because it showed my first experience of compersion:

“And I had such an epiphany a little while ago when he posted a beautiful poem about his wife. I guess I thought I might be jealous, but I read it anyway. And a little latch-box opened in my heart and the sun shined out. I was/am genuinely happy that he’s in his real life, loving and loved and writing hot poems for her.”

Next time: We try to be friends…

Last April I Accidentally Wore the Scarlet Letter: Part Two

At the poetry reading, we acted just kind of goofy for each other. To the point where we just sat there and held hands. He read a sonnet about giving oral sex and it was goooood. In the world of performance poetry, you end up hearing a lot of really terrible sex poems, so a good one is a real treat.

I’d bought him a coffee at the reading, so at the bar afterwards, he asked if he could buy me a shot and I said “Sure! Buy me twelve!” I’m really not a big drinker, but I was experimenting a little with whiskey at the time and he decided to teach me all about Jameson. Turns out, I really like Jameson. As we drank, we got closer and closer, like he was pulling me toward him. By the time we were home on my couch, we were just tangled up. I changed into my flannel cupcake pajamas. Sweetie hung around for a bit, then went to bed.

I haven’t thought about this part in so long, I don’t remember how it started. We just somehow went from hugging nicely and snoozing a little to kissing like our breath depended on it. Those kisses, they just make my heart drop, even still. That feeling, like a man wants me so much he might literally eat me, that passion and abandon, is something I’d craved for so long that I thought I might never get it. We just kissed and kissed and kissed like the inexperienced teenagers we both are at heart. I was crushed up against him, his hands unbuttoning my pajama top and running over my bra. I kept pushing his hands away and they kept coming, and I kept being glad they kept coming.

When his hand went down my pajama pants and found my clit, I was complete mush, so crazily turned on. He would later sneak this into a poem as “a study in fluid dynamics.”

And then, just like in the sonnet, down he went and I was like (in my head, not aloud) OH, let us now praise facial hair. He was so much rougher than Sweetie, his tongue so desperate and insistent and all-the-way-in-there, but I couldn’t come. I’m a loud comer, and I thought Sweetie was asleep in the next room.

I fumbled around ineptly in his pants for a little bit, but the sun was coming up. We made jokes about what Shakespeare said about the birds. For the record:

Juliet:

‘Tis almost morning, I would have thee gone

And yet no further than a wanton’s bird

That lets it hop a little from his hand

Like a poor prisoner in his twisted gyves

And with a silken thread plucks it back again,

So loving-jealous of his liberty.

Romeo:

 I would I were thy bird.

Juliet:

Sweet, so would I.

Yet I should kill thee with much cherishing.

So, you know, Shakespeare’s birds weren’t the best harbingers.

Next: Dear Sweetie, I really suck. Also, a poetry workshop and how he became Scrabble Boy.

Last April I Accidentally Wore the Scarlet Letter: Part One

I don’t like a learning curve. I’m a straight-A student and I get very frustrated about the fact that I have to fuck up and learn from it sometimes. This is that kind of story and I hate it, but I’m gonna have to write it out and move past it if I want to have at some poly husbands. (And I DO.)

I should tell you that at the time of this story, I hadn’t hooked up with a guy in any serious way for about ten years, and I hadn’t had PIV sex for fifteen years. I’d considered myself polyamorous for a while, but had only expressed it through a little bit of party-kissing (I mean regular parties) and a lot of having crushes. Part of me still dismissed my bisexuality as a sort of commitment-phobia. I wondered if, when I finally ended up with a guy, I wouldn’t like it and would turn out to be a lesbian after all. (Spoiler alert: not so much!)

Every April, a lot of my poet friends around the country write and post a poem a day as a celebration of National Poetry Month. It’s a great way to get to know your fellow poets. For most of us, a poem a day is a fast pace, and posting early drafts is a trusting and vulnerable thing to do. It dredges up a lot from your subconscious, so a lot of us end up addressing our traumas more and more deeply every April.

Between the urgency of the poem-a-day and the number of years it’d been since I’d been with a guy, I was kind of boiling over.

The morning that Scrabble Boy set out from the Midwest to drive to our city for a gig, he read my jillionth poem about Laura Palmer, about my need to aestheticize trauma, as a way to climb on top of it, as it were. I seems a little unfair to associate the poem with what happened, but the truth is, this guy I’d never met (but had received some mix CDs from) had been reading my first drafts for four years. That feels like closeness and it feels like he had a little bit of power over me. Of course, I’d been reading his first drafts too.

Scrabble Boy was married, I knew from his poems, with two little daughters. But he’s best friends with the most famously polyamorous poet I know, and in my head, that made him a possibility. (I KNOW! Why didn’t I ask? I’ve wondered that a million times.) Possibility or not, I was sooo excited to meet him IRL! He was scheduled to feature at the local poetry slam, for which, at the time, I was the booking and hospitality person.

When he walked into my apartment, I was cooking him dinner. Sweetie wasn’t home yet. I was wearing my favorite apron with the sparkly cupcakes on it. I was dressed up to host the reading, including red lipstick and fishnet stockings (Note: sometimes things happen to me wherein I’m wearing neither fishnets nor something printed with cupcakes. Just not, apparently, on this blog.) I had pink terrycloth slippers on, with little ribbon bows.

He walked in and it was just like OH, he’s perfect. Picture a nice tall sensitive poet. He looked at me like I was perfect too. It felt like a flash of recognition.

Next: A good sex sonnet is hard to come by.