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 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.

The Generosity of Love

            I’m having trouble lately with staying mad. Mr. Makeout Music and I have (I’m almost sure) moved on from being in a fight to just taking space from each other. We’ve communicated this to each other in the most adorable way ever:

            Last Wednesday during Lego Day, he stopped in to reprimand some kids in such a protective and manly way, telling them (in his dreamy a-little-bit-mad voice) to be respectful of me and each other. I looked up from my coloring, smiled, and offered him a high five. He took it and I felt just a little more whole.

            The kids and I have been working on a kindness chain—a paper chain where each link is something kind you could do or something kind someone has done for you. He hung around and wrote like five links, the last one being “Giving people gold stars for existing.” Which is a thing that I do, so I knew he still felt friendly toward me, still thought of me as the person I was before November’s storm of grief and drama. Just that little visit was enough to start up the daydream machine again, so I’m still keeping my distance.

Saturday, though, used to be our main hang-out-and-make-art-while-he’s-supposed-to-be-working day. There may still be a stack of his art in my middle desk drawer as souvenirs. While I was getting ready for work last Saturday, I accidentally listened to the wrong toward-the-end-of Hamilton song so I went in with the achingest of hearts.

I was able to pour a lot of that love into the Thankfulness Christmas Tree I made with the kids, but I wanted to reach out to Mr. Makeout Music a little, so I made him a card with a pretty, delicate blue paper snowflake glued on and wrote:

“Space is awesome.

But/and I miss you a whole bunch.

I hope your life is full of awesome.

<3,

(me)”

Poor editing that I used the word “awesome” twice, but after I gave it to him and he was sweet and thank you-y about it, I felt a million times better and much closer to the part of myself that feels missing while I’m missing him.

It reminded me of the brave day I let myself fall for him. He gave me a paper of his to read, a paper about rising to the occasion of fatherhood. I liked it so much and felt so grateful that he’d let me read it that I COVERED the margins in gold stars, intricate pink flowers, vines, and tiny purple asterisks. (No hearts, but those would come soon enough.)

I did all this in full view of my boss and everybody. One of the kids asked what I was doing and I (only a little bit sheepishly) said “My friend let me read his homework and I really liked it.”

It’s part of my routine to sit around work and doodle while waiting for my programs to start, but I knew this time I was being a little ridiculous, a little carried away, but something just unlatched and a light shined out of my heart, golden yellow like the million stars I was drawing. Something inside me said “Give, it’s safe.” So I did. I folded it up in a #10 envelope with the library’s return address on it, like an envelope could contain the ridiculousness.

That was the first day we really talked, the first time I stood next to him and really felt next to him. I don’t’ want to reduce him to just a Muse, though he certainly IS one, but there was something about our connection, something in his generosity of spirit that made me want to give him and the world every loving thing I had. While I miss his companionship very much, I also miss being able to give and give and give—to sing out his name, to lavish him with praise (and accept his), to unabashedly hand him every piece of art I felt like making him, without feeling the need to ask (as I did with the card on Saturday) “Is this okay?” I miss and value so much the flow of it, of him, of us.

I wonder sometimes, in the midst of that glitter-storm of generosity, why it was so important that he didn’t love me back in the same ready, open way. But it is, and I know every day that I take care of myself with space and grieving is a day closer to the next love, the next unlatching.

It’s hard not knowing whether he and I will end up friends or if our whole thing is just beautiful and done, but if I can love him in little ways, if I can visit the selflessness, softness, risk and vulnerability of those first margin-doodles, maybe I can stay in touch with the me that he was drawn to, maybe even become more like her. I have a lot of thinking to do about service, submissiveness, and unconditional love, and I’m so proud of how I got to these realizations. I’ll never stop loving him for it, even as I learn to let him go.