Last Friday night, peaceful and close to sleep, I was
swiping through Bumble a little bit, matching a bunch and generally feeling
hopeful about the futures of my heart and hoo-ha, when, OF COURSE, there he
was. The Shy One. Not the same picture he’d sent me from Sierra Leone, but one
from the same series. His lips. His gentle eyes. His lightly bratty smile. His
pink, pink sky.
I’d been feeling a little more steady, a little more
over him lately, but the profound surge of fight-or-flight that came from a few
moments with that picture pre-swipe-left smushed all my illusions of progress,
at least for a little while. “You both like Ed Sheeran and Burna Boy!” Bumble
unhelpfully proclaimed. Darn Spotify being connected to Bumble. Darn Afrobeat
being my yard work music lately. Too, too much connection everywhere. Every
algorithm a tangled road back to him, back to wistfulness.
I sobbed to BFF about it. I made a bedraggled
Instagram story about it and sent it to three Close Friends. I never wanted to
swipe again or kiss another stranger or text another (possibly cursed) “good
morning” to anyone else.
But when I woke up in the morning I felt…mostly fine!
The matches in my queue were cute and viable and it definitely wasn’t THEIR
fault I got pink-sky-haunted! I said hello and felt my forward motion starting
up again, just slightly rickety like a wooden roller coaster.
And then, last Saturday afternoon, a whoooole bunch of
WhatsApp notifications. It was from a new number to get around the block—shady,
but I’ll allow it. He sent a beautiful dreamy-sad faced picture: The Princely Guy.
He missed me. We would never forget me. Three kiss
emojis, the lipstick print kind.
Of course I wrote back, what am I, made of stone?
He just wanted me to know he would always be there for
me. The Princely Guy is one who uses the “love” word casually, which I like,
instead of treating it like a taboo or a weird grail.
The Princely Guy had moved away and I definitely didn’t
want a long-distance relationship. But it felt good to know everyone’s not out
there forgetting me.
By Sunday night, I was on the phone with Le Monsieur,
one of the Friday night matches. He’s a beautiful divorced-dad sweet talker my
own age, originally from La Cote d’Ivoire. We talked for an hour and a half (!)
while I worked on my maybe-impossible 1000-piece dahlia puzzle. He made me
laugh. He made me want to remember my like SEVEN YEARS of French I’ve never
really used. There’s a lot of Google Translate in this flirtation and I LOVE
IT.
I thought it would be a while til I could meet Le
Monsieur, but it wasn’t. 😊
Okay so I'm a little drunk on well-being today. I went to see an amazing show (Not Mike and the Mechanics) with a friend last night and danced! With a whole bunch of superhappy people! Who didn't have masks on! Have faces always been this beautiful? Has joy?
Anyway, so this morning found me walking to the library belting out every song from my new pre-spring playlist. The best song to walk along singing was this one, which came back into my life via an absolutely transcendent needle drop in the movie Spencer.
Since I’m still missing pool season, I decided to doll
up my morning walks by leaning into my heart/mind/body’s ridiculousness. I
especially like the absurd transitions between songs, they make me feel loopy
in the best way. Like crushes do!
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.
Oh Veronica Mars, you're no Buffy, but you do have pluck. Not quite tackling that List of Lost Things yet, but when I do, at least I'll have this good 'ol theme song.
Since I'm curious about that nice energy that started moving around in me at the Big Poly Conference, I decided to see what would happen if I chanted daily. And here's my gold star for doing so every day this week!
In addition to doing my om namah shivayas every day before work, I've been belting out early Beatles songs every time I'm in the car. I think I'm making my way back to my joyful self.
Though I'd rather not meet the same fate as David Foster Wallace, I haven't learned to let go yet, but I enjoy the idea of being the only person who'd put these two songs together.
I still can't believe how much I can miss people I never met, so here are two pretty long-distance/breakup songs. I know we'll be fine, but jeez, I miss him.
Yesterday the Cutest Boy at the Party texted to thank me for still mentioning him in the blog and it was the second conversation I had in as many days about how some people will just always be mentioned. With the Big Poly Conference and its attendant reunion-snuggles coming up tonight, it's really sinking in that I've made some true and lasting connections. So yesterday when I was driving around singing in the little red car, I decided I had to dedicate this song to all the nice characters I'm still heart-hoarding, which is to say, all of them.
I expected this first real month post-Sweetie to be much harder than it was. I'm overwhelmed with gratitude for the blizzard of support and kindness that's come my way all year so far. Special praise to all of the snuggle-friends and snow angels who made this cold month mostly about love.
In the course of starting to write about why I'm on a break, I decided that this is a good song to belt out in the car a lot. Sorry, part of me that used to be cool.
It’s too early to know what the song of this year will be,
but “Thrift Shop” was my song of last year, the one I woke myself up with on
the way to work, sweated to at the gym, and heard in my head when something,
yes, fucking awesome was happening.
I wrote last fall about how it’s a good philosophy of life;
just being delighted at what you find, letting chance and serendipity show me
where I need to go. With that theory in place, I left the year with an armload
of experiences, many of which were unequivocally awesome, some that didn’t fit,
some that were stained and downright nasty. As unegalitarian as it feels for me
to say this, chance threw some things my way that simply weren’t good enough
for me, and I took them home anyway.
I like that seeing play as a magical thrift shop helped me
to take down a lot of the structures of control that I had in place. Though I
still do love planning and anticipating, I think that my calendar fixation was
a lot about trying to make things stay the same, trying to keep things safe and
cozy for Sweetie so that she wouldn’t yell at me and call me names. I learned
how to be more flexible, to adjust my expectations, and even how to not want to
claim people immediately upon kissing them. Well, a little shaky on that last
one, but still.
I really, really miss it, just powering through and
experiencing every single sensation that I could, even when the emotional cost
was high, even when I had to fight my own instincts to do it. Last night was my
first night skipping the Regular Dungeon in a long time, and though I had a
fantastic time, I still felt nostalgic for the nights where I was able to
experience thing after thing after thing, to slip seamlessly from bottom to
top, from fire to floggers, and feel like a princess superhero while doing so.
It occurs to me that very, very little of that experience had to do with the
Steampunks, so I probably don’t have to give all of it up just because they
don’t like me. I hope to eventually return to some of it after the wounds have
healed.
Back to my metaphor: In real life, I don’t shop like “Thrift
Shop.” Not even when I’m IN a thrift shop. I tend to mostly browse, enjoying
the bright randomness of everything and only picking anything up if it’s really
special, like a tulip-glass pitcher or a perfect grandma cardigan. I would
certainly never take home anything that needs fixing, especially if I already
had a broken keyboard at home.
In regular stores I’m even pickier. In fact, I’m currently
refusing to buy work pants until tapered legs go out of style. I don’t have a
shape or a budget for careless shopping. I’m a grown-ass woman who knows what
she likes and should never have to settle for anything that doesn’t fit or that
I don’t completely love. If I’m that picky with spending my money, can I be a
little pickier with spending my heart?
When my therapist got unavailable because her supervisor
wanted to Girl Interrupted me, I
refused to even look for another one. I couldn’t stand the strangers’ input
that came from the 10-minute screening process. So I waited seven months for my
real therapist to get her own practice, and now she even makes house calls.
There’s a lesson there about waiting for something that works, rather than
trying to fit with things that don’t.
My point, and I do have one, is that I hope to find a
balance between the natural excitement and momentum in my heart and the
discernment that will allow me to get what I want and deserve. That way I can
have chance and magic but also, you know, sanity.
That said, I reallyreally hate being on a break from the
pursuit of sexytimes. My emotions are grateful to have the time to rest, but my
body is like what. the. fuck?
But remembering what pants-on activities I enjoy is
rewarding and comforting. On Thursday night, I sat in the meeting room of a
neighborhood historic building (we have a lot of them) and drew while I listened
to my friends sing and play the most lovely and gently moving music. I was
flooded with a sense of (mostly) platonic wellbeing that nonetheless made me
have to go home and ravish myself.
Last night, Gold Star Winggirl (So named because she sends
me gold stars whenever I’m awesome at being on my break) came with me to a
Bhakti dance, and by the end when we were Om Shanti Shanti-ing, I felt so good
and loved that I could have Om Shanti-Shanti-ed for about 10 more hours. The
best part was getting lots of time to catch up with GSW and root for her
adventures too.
Transcendent and fulfilled as I was though, I still would
have liked to have driven over to the Regular Dungeon and handed out some
what-for. Funny how that’s the thing I miss most.
But guys! Guess what. Granted, it’s only happening on
Twitter (hence the loophole) but for a few weeks, I’ve been spending attention
on a guy who actually gives it back. Who is actually nice to me! Who checks on
me if I’m sad and whose girlfriends and wives and metamours all seem to be
delighted by our exchanges. I’ve never even seen any of their faces and at the
moment I’m not ready too, but I do feel a genuine connection and I think this
is excellent practice for letting myself be treated kindly when it comes time
for IRL flirtations. A gold star for me, and one for the Mystery Man and his
family. (I’m quite sure they’ll be good at sharing a star.)
Likewise, the Recurring Character is being
internet-adorable, telling me semi-daily which of my (G-rated) body parts he is
rooting for. So a gold star to him, too.
Okay, so I’m somewhat terrible at taking a break, but I am
still making a lot of progress: Friday I told Sweetie we can no longer do
groceries together, and yesterday I told her that this is my last week of
sharing the car with her. Next weekend I am going to try and find a car of my
own. I’m getting better at letting Sweetie-things go, and that’s progress.
PS. As I leave on pop song behind, I just want to take a
moment to celebrate and thank the part of my soul that will always sound like
this:
Sure, I'm already jumping out of my skin from being on a break, but it's important to note celebrate the Mystery Man who tweeted this song at me the other day:
“It doesn’t matter if we’ve been prepared or trained or
certified or if we’ve been delayed for years. What matters is if we can listen
to our own unmitigated possibility with our whole being. For this will enable us
to begin, the way one day of rain and one day of sun will start the flower in
its destiny to bloom. In deep and unexpected ways, saying yes is a form of
listening that brings who we are and what we experience into true meeting.
Saying yes is the beginning of all flowering.” Mark Nepo, Seven Thousand Ways to Listen
Here’s to everything new, loves. Midnight kisses to all.
It's a holiday I made up. Every time Friday the 13th rolls around, I listen to this Big Star song and try to do all of the (usually self-) forgiving that needs to be done. This time, I may just have to settle for listening to the song.
Usually this time of year I'm bubbling over with gratitude and posting lovey-dovey Flaming Lips songs. There's still time for that, but this morning, it's this:
Friday night I was on a date with myself, walking across the
middle of the city to a storytelling show (Theme: Excitable! Apt.) when the
Smiths shuffled on. I remembered the last time I’d heard this song, the day Icried sex tears (and regular tears) for SG. I’ve never told you this, but that
was two days after my last and worst fight with Sweetie, the one where I felt
so scared and trapped that I actually jumped out of the car while it was moving.
The day I played with SG, there was a big bandage on my foot covering the place
where the road had scraped away my skin. My knees were covered with bad bruises
that made it hard to kneel down in front of him.
Probably I shouldn’t have been playing with anyone, should
have been, I don’t know, on the run? In the hospital? In some sort of women’s
facility? But I’m glad I was crazy enough to try to keep going on with my life
the way I wanted it, not the way it actually was.
I’m glad that time isn’t just defined by the scars. Instead,
I got a momentary visit the life I
really wanted, covered with that warm and vital man, every corner of my body
touched and ravished, animal life coursing through me. Of course, I knew it was
only a simulacrum, a shadow, a glimmer, but it was enough to yank that desire
up from me and get me to the right place, which, lonely as it is, is here.
“Real arms around me,” Morrissey sang, and that plus
whatever part of my soul woke up that day was enough to make me walk away from
twelve years of compromise, love, and deep shame. Both visceral and not-real,
it was enough to push me towards whatever real love is or is not waiting for me
on the other side of all this.
I’m so far way from “real arms around me” in the romantic
sense, so far from the thing I gave up everything awful and good for. There’s a
scar on my foot and too many bad stories that tell me what happens when I
compromise my feelings, when I fight my fear or my grief or my love, so I’m
teaching myself to surrender to all of it, just as much as real life will let
me.
As painful as it is to recall that scene and that glimmer
knowing he’s maybe not even a friend, I’m grateful all the way to my bones that
he gave me something other than a scar to go on, that that moment pulled me up
from denial and made it impossible not to say aloud what I really wanted.
I hope real love is waiting on the other side of this
detached and achy interval, but I really can’t begin to thank the world for the
miracles I’ve managed to experience so far. Adventures, you’ve saved me, or
better yet, you made me save myself.
