Supersweet Election Love Story: Part Three

After I found out that the thing was mutual, I felt nervous about going into work. I didn’t know how I was supposed to act, whether I was supposed to hug him hello and goodbye, etc. His desk was in a very male-occupied space and it always felt very vulnerable to visit him there.  Election Day, on the possible cusp of our first female president and with the fate of the world hanging in the balance, I was also fretting about whether I’d been too affectionate in my voting-morning text. I’m not superproud that my Call Me Maybeness helped get me through the day, but there was also poetry and canvassing and a general sense of patriotic/neighborhood love that made such a fraught day as bearable as possible.

Then, of course, the worst happened. After a year of hope and struggle and fighting misogynist trolls and as much canvassing and phone banking as I could handle, after a year of telling the library kids it would be okay, of telling Bernie Bros to fuck off, of boycotting conservative relatives, the worst happened and Trump won. Wednesday morning, at the college bookstore where we work together, Sweetie and I listened to Hillary’s beautiful concession speech and cried even as we tried to take courage. On my commute, I alternated between singing along with my upbeat playlist and sobbing. If I never hear Fight Song again, it’ll be too soon.

My plan when I got to my afternoon job at the library was to be strong and soothing for the kids, to help them feel as hopeful as possible, but when I got to the children’s department, my friend the Nice Genderqueer Librarian saw me and burst into tears so we held each other and I sobbed loudly and brokenheartedly in front of the kids and everyone. There was nothing else to be done at that moment.

One of the other security guards was down in our department showing concern and accepting a hug, so I was brave/needy enough to snivel “Can you get (Mr. Makeout Music) for me?” She smiled and radioed for him. He totally Muppeted out when he saw me, just reached his arms out as far as they could go and gave me the warmest, friendliest, most joyful hug imaginable. I got the chance to tell him “I’m sorry white people suck so bad!” which is a sentiment I’ll be expressing as often as possible for the foreseeable future. (Seriously, if you’re a white person reading this, get it the fuck together and stand up for people of color. And while I’m at it, if you’re a man reading this, get it the fuck together and stand up for women. It’s past time to inventory your privilege and start using it to help. We’re past life and death here.)

Oh pals, Mr. Makeout Music took such good care of me that day. He talked me through the good and evil factors at play in the election and helped me to articulate my silver lining, which was that good people were drawing together in anger and love. He also asked if he could come visit me at the bookstore that Friday, since the library was closed for Veteran’s Day. I was delighted at the prospect of him distracting me at both my jobs, so we made plans for a picnic on the Hogwarts-esque campus where I work. No one would begrudge me a long lunch on such a week.

That sad Wednesday was made much less sad by the fact that he spent almost my whole shift by my side. He brought his notebook down and worked on a paper so soothingly next to me, it was just such a comfortable family feeling. He joked with the kids and parents and watched me stave off apoplexy when a mean-girling parent tried to challenge my taste in music.  When he switched tables to play chess with my teen assistants, I drew flowers, stars, and tiny red hearts all over his homework while I had a Shine Bright Like a Diamond singalong with one of the little girls. I was totally singing to Mr. Makeout Music. When he turned around from chess to see how the homework-art was progressing, his eyes flashed something so beautiful and perfect and clear. I felt bathed in a glittery cloud of safety and strength, like I recognized someone so special and devoted and true. And, I hopehopehoped, mine.

Supersweet Election Love Story: Part Two

I spent a lot of time angsting about whether Mr. Makeout Music was really available or not. I knew he lived with the mother of his four-year-old son, but he referred to her as his “son’s mom” and not his girlfriend. I have a pretty good instinct for signals, though, because when, after a not-insignificant amount of fretting and some crying about whether he was taken or not, I finally found out through good old fashioned facebook that he was, officially at least, single. I was optimistic in believing that his son’s mom might be a complication, but that with my poly skills I could treat her kindly and handle it.

Besides, he was just ALWAYS there. As the flirting between us seemed to ramp up and I started to let my heart open, I knew I wanted to try with him. After a Saturday where he spent an hour in my library office talking about all of the Deep Topics and distracting me from my data entry, I knew I wanted to get to know him outside of work. On the way out of work that day, I told him to check his facebook and answer honestly, and I asked him if he’d like to hang out outside work sometime, but that if he preferred just to be work pals, that would be okay too. (Lying.) He wrote back that he would really like to hang out, but when I asked about when, he said he didn’t have a lot of free time so he would have to let me know. I guess maybe I should have left it at that, but he was seriously ALWAYS THERE.

I stopped feeling self-contained and happily spinstery and started to get lonely for him when he wasn’t in the children’s department. I felt restless. I still happily went about my work days, but when I he wasn’t with me, I was looking for him. There were days when I felt almost paralyzingly self-conscious trying to look right if he should walk by. It was alternately exhausting and exhilarating.  I was either completely bereft of swagger or it increased tenfold, depending on the day.

The Sunday before last, we were supposed to have our first time hanging out alone. It was my idea for us to go to the record store and then on a Pokemén walk, and I was so excited, but he had to cancel, I assumed for kid reasons. I didn’t want to wait another week to get clear on his intentions, so I texted to ask if we were attracted to each other or if we were just flirty friends. He wrote back that he was attracted to me, that he’d never met anyone like me. He said I gave him the feels. We made plans for makeout music the following weekend. I must have read through those texts twenty times—we really liked each other! It really might happen!

Sigh. I’m so glad I got to feel that hope, that it’s still in me, but I’m achey thinking of how it really went so I’ll stop here for now.

Supersweet Election Love Story: Part One

I spent a year hardly thinking about romance at all, but there’s always a perfect character to come along and break me open again, so that cartoon hearts swirl around my head and I remember who I was born to be. Like the election, this story didn’t turn out the way I’d hoped, but I’m reopening the blog to make sure none of the gifts of this experience slip through the cracks.

I work in my local library’s afterschool program. It suits me much better than teaching because the kids and I spend most of our time on art and I never have to make anybody do anything, except be respectful and kind. I can smile all day and tell the kids “I love you” without being accused of being too soft. The library is my happy place and my biggest source of love, pride, and friendship.

About a year ago, a new security guard (I know! Me and security guards.) transferred to our branch and the first time I saw him, I thought “Yep, that’s what a man should look like.” African American, beardy, glasses, locks, sigh, swoon, giggle. One of my goals for 2016 was to flirt daily, and I felt like I’d finally found a worthy recipient. I tend to sing out my coworkers’ names, so I wholeheartedly sang out his name whenever I saw him, chatted when I could, accidentally told him how very much I like the scene from The Avengers where Black Widow breaks out of the chair.

Eventually, he started hanging around. He would spend his breaks coloring with me and the kids and talking about music, helping me build up my ongoing playlist of kid-friendly love/friendship/inspiration songs. Lord help me, he owns vinyl. He kept suggesting songs that were either too emo or so R&B dreamy that I could barely walk after listening. I made fun of him for his makeout music, but it kept finding its way onto my personal playlist, turning my early morning walks into dreamy movie-sequence mushfests.

He was with us in the children’s department whenever he could be, and started telling me apologetically when he was scheduled elsewhere. (I found out later he’d been making the schedule specially to spend time with us! <3 <3 <3) We painted galaxies, flowers, we drew mandalas. We did coloring pages that said things like “Follow Your Heart” and “Don’t Stop Believing.” He’s in college, (This is as good a time as any to tell you he’s twenty-five and I’m forty-two…) so he’d sometimes just bring down his homework, talk to me about what he was working on, and then happily let me distract me from it.

In the way that sometimes happens when you make a truly great friend, I kept telling him way more than I meant to. He became my safe space, someone I could confide in about my election struggles, my feminist rage, my religious questiness, everything that was the most important. I hope that I was doing the same for him.

I’d gone through a good spate of not caring at all what I looked like, but I started to want to look cute when I got to work. I stopped wearing shlubby T-shirts and became more likely to put on lipstick and blowdry my hair. Eventually he told me he wanted his to be the only name I sang out, and that was both very sweet and probably a bad sign.

A Lovely Milestone in Not-Dating

Fueled by Kate Bolick’s Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own and Rebecca Traister’s All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation, I’ve been inspired to embrace this post-divorce bubble of time as a well-earned luxury, not a middle-aged curse. I’ve been proudly embracing the American spinster’s contributions to cultural and civic life, photographing Saturday morning cats without shame, and generally reveling in hearing my own thoughts. This perspective seems to have changed my approach to dating for the (MUCH) better.

Last fall, after J. turned out to be such a disaster, I didn’t really trust myself to date. My ignoring of red flags and self-gaslighting seemed compulsive and difficult to overcome. So many times upon meeting a semi-viable guy, I’d convinced myself that whatever didn’t work about him was something wrong with me. Once I liked a guy, I could so much more easily see his point of view than my own.

But as soon as spring worked its magic, I went back to OKC and found a seemingly datable guy—he was smart, had a house and kids, and was interested enough in politics to hold an elected local seat. He asked me out and we made plans to meet in the neighborhood for a drink, but after a little while, I started to not like his texting style. He didn’t do anything really wrong, but had a way of angrily confiding about bad days that felt over-familiar, as though I were already placed in a helpmeet role that I know I’ll never want.

So guess what! Instead of pushing myself to be more flexible, to take care of him, to ignore my instincts,  I told him I didn’t think we were a match and that was that. Although I’m at an age (and a size!) where women are generally expected to compromise, to respond to the pressures of the dating economy and settle for less than we deserve, I have higher expectations than ever. I have no idea what the future holds for my heart, but I know that I’m happy to be alone until/unless the right person comes along. Gold star for me!

An Extremely Personal Reason Why I’m Voting for Hillary Clinton

As I’ve written here before, my conception was an accident, while my parents were still in college. Her family’s Catholic faith mean that she had no option of abortion. She was coerced by her family into marriage at the age of twenty. Throughout my childhood, in the worst of times, she told me that her marriage, which included both verbal and physical abuse and marital rape, was my fault. Because I was a child when I heard that accusation, I had little choice but to believe it, and even after decades of hard inner work, a tiny fragment of my heart believes it still.

Though it’s the central pain of my existence, that dual sense of unwelcome and responsibility is also a huge gift. It fuels my drive to make the space around me safe for those who have less power and to push back against coercion and sexist norms whenever I can. My background compels me to do whatever little bit I can so that someday women won’t be forced by religion, family pressure, or tradition to give up control of their own bodies.

For large swaths of my life, I’ve simply hated my mother, almost thought of her as a monster. (My dad, of course, deserves as many paragraphs, and he’s had them.) She and I have spent four painful decades trying to make friends with each other, and to both of our credit, we now enjoy an uneasy peace. But I never truly empathized with twenty-year-old her until the pope’s visit to the U.S. unlocked a treasure trove of anti-Catholic fury in my heart.

It wasn’t right for my mom to take her anger out on me, but she was absolutely right and justified in being angry. In that forced decision, her autonomy was taken away, and only now, as I’m learning to relish my own autonomy, can I begin to fathom that loss. She lived, we all lived, in a tyranny in which chaos and violence could rain down at any moment if, for example, she hadn’t washed, matched, and put away the correct pair of brown socks. What’s more, she thought that she deserved the abuse, because Catholicism and sexism had taught her that she was less than he was, period.

Even long-divorced, she told me that she should have just shut up and obeyed him better, that that would have kept us safe.

But what about existing, you ask? I really love existing, and I wouldn’t trade my family for another in a million years. But what if, in that momentous moment, she’d felt empowered to choose? I think she might have still had me, but if I hadn’t been the product of coercion, she and I may at least have had less of a struggle to make a relationship. I do hold both of us accountable for our own actions, but what would it have been like to grow up in a world where my mother’s body was her own?

I’m sure that some little-kid part of me thinks that by advocating for choice, I can go back in time and repair that essential wound, but I can’t. What I can do is hope to give other mothers a better chance at deciding their own lives, and give more children the chance to be genuinely loved and wanted.

Electing Hillary Clinton send a clear message against misogyny and oppressive gender norms, and she is also the Democrat who is most vocal in her support of Planned Parenthood and women’s (AKA everyone’s) health. I am voting my mom’s life, for my own, and for children of all genders, that they may be wanted, loved, chosen, and safe.

What A Community Can’t Do

Last month, I made the painful decision to leave the Unitarian church that has been my spiritual home for seven years. It was over a philosophical difference that really snuck up on me, a lightning-strike realization that we (the church and I) weren’t on the same page. I try to see it the way it’s best to see dating deal-breakers, that saying no to what doesn’t work makes room for what does, but leaving was a huge loss. I’m struggling with a mix of shame, disappointment, and sadness that is very familiar to be because I seem to hit a wall of it at least every few years.

In her wonderful new book Rising Strong: The Reckoning, The Rumble, and The Revolution Brené Brown says that in order to get out from under disappointment, you have to be brave and really examine the expectations for the situation. So I’ve really given a lot of thought to the conscious and unconscious expectations that keep leading me to be damagingly disappointed by groups, scenes, and communities.

1. A community can’t be a correction for a hurtful family. Just the way I’ve sometimes gone to doms for approval, I go to communities hoping that they can love me into realness, approve me into existence. There’s an underlying hope of “Now that   I’ve found/become/befriended ___________, I will finally be okay, will finally be welcomed into the world and find unconditional love. It’s sad to realize that I didn’t have that with my original family as a child, but I can’t expect healing and wholeness to come from anywhere but within.

2. A community can’t replace my own family, flawed though they may be. I live too far away from my family of origin and I don’t have a family to share a household with right now, and that leaves a hole that nothing can fill.

3. A community can’t fix rape culture, because rape culture is in all of us. It is always easier for groups to be angry at the person pointing out the problem than to face the problem itself. I’ll always have to speak up against it, but I’d love to learn to feel safe doing so.

4. A community can’t erase heartbreak. I’ve realized that, though there were other factors, I left the BDSM scene because I couldn’t process the rejections I’d experienced there. I tried to patch each loss with another person, (and the whole thing was an attempt to patch divorce grief) but the grief kept walking me down the same path. After three years, I’m to the point where I can see the loss for what it is, and I desperately want to stop sponging that pain onto other people. It’s hard not to try and numb the loss of Sweetie and the life we created together.

5. A community can’t stay the same forever, and it can’t change as I change. Just the way that, in dating, I have to walk away from a bad match instead of trying to torture the person into changing for you, I have to let go of situations that aren’t a good fit. It doesn’t mean that I have to fear or fight forever, just that I need to constantly let things come and go.

6. A community can’t replace love. I am sick of being single, but I still have some inner work (and a whole lot of book-editing!) to do before I’m ready to start a life with another person, but I have to look loneliness in the eye, to honor it. I have to realize how much I want my own family and stop trying to shoehorn other things into that space.

7. A community can’t come to my rescue. If I ignore my instincts and walk into something that doesn’t work, no principal, no dom, no friend can be expected to “save” me. I am a grown woman, and I want to train myself to hear and respect my inner voice so that I can stop reliving abandonment or having childlike expectations of “loyalty.” We’re all adults being ourselves, and it’s up to me to find out what actually works, and do it.

8. A community can’t define me, erase me, or absorb me. It can’t give me an identity, and any identity it DOES give will feel constraining. The only thing I know I am is me, and I have to find out a way to be solid within myself, so I can stop expecting others to create me.

This has been a harsh, lonely time. The double loss of J. and the church has made for a very sad couple of months. It’s hard to have faith in anything right now, so I’m just trying little things as they come along, letting joy and connection in whatever little windows they can find. I’m also still trying to find help with the walls and wounds I keep running into. I don’t like being back in this Groundhog’s Day of sadness, this most vexing part of the labyrinth, but I’m doing my best to learn as much as I can while I’m here. 

#TBT: The Mayor of Kittentown and Being Bi for Realsies

As I've mentioned a few times, I'm in the process of turning the first year of The Kitten Calendar into the first book of a memoir trilogy, and that means I've had to fill in parts that were missing from the story the first time around. As much as I STILL sometimes wish I could simplify everything by being a lesbian, it's important to remember what to took to get in the habit of being true to my penis-loving self.

I named him The Mayor of Kittentown because he was the first man I had PIV sex with in seventeen years, (oh, whoops, spoiler alert!) and also because he mentioned on our first date that he’d been named Mayor of White Castle by Four Square. I was attracted to his profile because he mentioned Mystery Science Theatre 3000, had long, silky-looking dark blonde hair, was taller than me, and had a son—I have such a thing for dads. I told him that I had fond \memories of snuggling up with my goth, indoorsy Nineties boyfriend and watching “Manos” The Hands of Fate. I didn’t hear back right away. (Meaning not within a week or so—this was before everybody had the app on their phone and the process sped up.)

It was almost my default emotion in those days to be frustrated. I was in a meeting of my (Unitarian) church group processing irritation at a party-kissing-related near miss when MKT finally texted. He asked if we could get together sometime and a warm feeling wrapped my shoulders like an afghan made of sex-hope.

I was working in the library at the time and my boss noticed that I was ready for a date. She said she’d noticed a glow ever since I started going after guys, like I was coming into myself. I wore more makeup than I usually do (red lipstick=confidence) a red top that showed off my cleavage a little, my cute red girl-about-town raincoat and fake-Chucks sneakers because I had to take the bus.

Ah, riding the 23 bus to dates—45 minutes of feeling pretty and hopeful and texting my various two-person support groups for courage. The night I went to meet MKT it was a miserable, gusty October night—bitter and rainy. I felt awful for the Occupiers as I walked past their encampment and hoped they were bundled up warm in their tents. I made a mental note to mention them to him as a way of gauging whether he was an asshole or not—if he was mean about them, he would be out.

We were meeting at the science museum to watch “Eight Legged Freaks” MST3K style. When I saw him across the cosplay-dotted lobby, he looked snuggly but shy. I was delighted to see that he really was taller than me—I’m 5’ 10” so that’s hard to find! He felt nice to sit next to while we waited for the movie to start. He was a tech-guy early adopter who brought an iPad on a date so we scrolled through his photos, which I deemed sufficiently soulful: leaves, water, an inexplicable pile of decaying stuffed animals by the river.

He didn’t even make fun of me when, after I visited the restroom, the belt of my raincoat was hanging down and had clearly dipped itself in the toilet—a rom-com moment if there ever was one.

We walked through downtown to a diner after, my lifelong favorite way to eat. When we passed Occupy, he told me had a Lego display on his desk (a few blocks away in the tallest building in the city) of Star Wars characters carrying signs like “These are not the spending cuts we’re looking for,” “Occupy Tatooine” and “Tax the Hutts.” Of all the things I’d imagined potential dates saying about Occupy, this was not one of them.

With both of us being all of the awkward, conversation over French silk pie was stilted, but there was this: Both of us has worked at Great Adventure in the summer of 1993. Because I was slackersome and didn’t try for one of the better jobs, I was on the cleanup crew, sweeping up trash and cigarette butts and charming male workers into cleaning up roller coaster barf. He worked on the Demon Drop, which is exactly what it sounds like. You go up really high and it drops you, and you scream with delight. The thing is, though, I’d had a crush on the operator of that ride—I’ve always had a thing for the glasses/ponytail combo, but especially in my grungetastic teen years.

With that little coincidence, he seemed like a good prospect, until, almost to the bus stop, he mentioned that he frequented the nearby nude beach. I saw absolutely nothing wrong withit, but I said “Oh, I’d be way too shy for that!”

“Oh, I have body issues too.”

“Um, why would you assume I have body issues?”

One of the major psychological and actual barriers to me dating men has always been my size.  I’m 5’ 10” and a size 20, so as one former boyfriend remarked, there is nothing little about me. In the context of my own little world I can feel powerful and goddesslike, but it’s hard to avoid feeling fat in the eyes of men—part of me assumed that a man could NEVER find me attractive, so I looked for evidence of that, and almost always found it. Until I didn’t.

In follow-up emails I mentioned his statement and he was horrified to know that’s how I took it, telling me he did in fact find me nice to look at. He was by far the most promising candidate yet, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt and invited myself over to his house to watch MST3K.

It took a little bit of juggling, but we found a Friday evening that worked. I had another datelike thing that afternoon, a walk through the local state park with a nice librarian I’d met through friends. It was the perfect picture of a fall day, like an advertisement for being alive. We took the less-trodden trails and found Narnian bridges and falling down stone fences. There’s a fancy inn in the park and we had apple crisp and spiked cider. I didn’t feel a spark with the librarian but it put me just in the right frame of mind for my MKT date.

What scared me the most was driving there. Though Sweetie was agreeable and encouraging about it, I had this idea that I might crash her car on the way and thus become the official worst person ever. She was a terrible backseat driver so it was always hard to find confidence, but I think the driving fear was just a way of feeling anxiety over being disloyal. Even when you’re bi and sorely in need of a penis, it’s very hard to transition to playing outside the marriage.

His newly-trendy neighborhood was very parked up, but I found a spot (pretty far away, it turns out) that I could go frontways into—parallel parking has never been my favorite thing.

From outside, his rowhouse (which he owned!) looked impressively adult—two well--kept arbor vitae framed the door and the window had a lovely beveled glass design—not so different from what I imagine my Grandmom had in the olden-days version of this city.

When he came to the door, I handed him the cupcake-taker (he’d requested lemon) and surveyed my surroundings. Toy-collecting divorced guy can go in many directions, but for him it was a somewhat tasteful one. There were toys on the mantle—a Peewee Herman doll, Gypsy from MST3K. There were Legos that looked decidedly untoylike, as they’d been built into tiny but intricate architectural structures, including (and this was a major selling point in his favor) Fallingwater (which, as I Google it for capitalization check, I notice comes in a kit.) All of his dishes seemed to be plastic, which I thought was endearingly single dadlike.

He had a beige two-people-can-recline couch, how could we not recline. He selected Red Zone Cuba for our MST3K and we settled in to our marooned astronaut (I think the Joel episodes are the only real ones) and his wisecracking robot pals.

He was easier to warm up to when we were alone than when we were out in public, and I easily snuggled into his lap. Somehow, we two must awkward of people took off our glasses and went from snuggling to making out.

In all of the years (seventeen, all told) that I’d been almost exclusively with women, what I missed most was the decadent teenage sensation of dry-humping, the feeling of straddling someone and finding something there. When I gathered the courage to climb into his lap, that rush came back to me with a surge of joy. He was big and hard beneath me, but what felt even better than that was the vitality of him—his whole body was shot through with pure life, and he smelled like aliveness, too, sweet and clean and strong.

Though our pants stayed on that night, we surged into each other like a waterfall. He took off my shirt and ran his hands over my shiny red bra, pet then gently over my back and through my hair. I wanted his hands in me, wanted more, and there was this completely new feeling of being of being utterly in charge and utterly at home.

But I wasn’t at home, and I never stopped being conscious of the digital clock next to the TV screen. I’d told Sweetie I’d be home around 11, and I counted the hours left in my head the way you do when you can’t sleep. When it was close to time to go, I had a few sips of soda so I would be alert for the drive home.

He grumbled about how far away I’d parked in a way that made me question his chivalry a little, but he walked me there nonetheless. We kissed goodbye and I drove home in a dizzy haze, changed.

After that, MKT and I fell into a routine. With my school stuff and his family obligations, we found time for each other every couple of weeks. I’d park far away, we’d watch part of a bad movie, catch up in kind of a cursory way, and then make out. The night we watched my favorite one, “Manos” Hands of Fate, found me splayed on the couch with his hands inside my favorite pink lacy underpants. The moon was big that night and when it was time for me to go, we couldn’t stop making out at the car, just like that couple at the beginning of the movie.

Ravenous though we both were, he was patient. He knew I hadn’t had PIV sex (or what most of the world simply calls “sex”) since a little after my twenty-first birthday in 1995. It that I’d been abstaining or anything,  I’d just been single for most of my twenties and then met Sweetie, been perfectly satisfied for a few years, then spent a handful of years being dissatisfied but not doing too much about it. I liked the idea of the kind and gentle MKT being my first-in-a-long-time.

Our relationship was somewhere on the friends with benefits spectrum, but I adored his penis. After three years of research and much, um, reflection I’m ready to pronounce it the best one. It’s difficult to believe that someone who’s walking around with something that amazing could be so meek and unassuming—kind of seems like a miracle! He was magnificent: long, thick, cheerily pink and perpetually hard. He apologized that his antidepressants made it difficult for him to climax, but that meant so many hours of good, hard enthusiasm.

The night I planned to go all the way with him (such an old timey term, I know) I was meeting him to see the new Muppet Movie—the one with Amy Adams and my imaginary boyfriend Jason Segel. Because I’d be taking the big step of staying over, I left the car for Sweetie and took the bus all the way across town. It was early December but not too cold so I could wear my red coat again, but with a teal beret and mittens. They were the kind the kind with flap and the the button on the back so that they were both mittens and gloves.

I was excited to see both MKT and the Muppets, but I felt a little bit off. There was someone else on my mind, someone you’ll meet in the next chapter, someone more Domlike, the appraising look he would give me if he saw me dolled up. I liked MKT and he liked me back in a way that (because I am the worst) Made me just a little less turned on by him. He was nudist at heart, wouldn’t care about the lipstick or the pretty shoes I walked 9 blocks from the bus stop in.

MKT did, in fact care about the lipstick. He had a little girls-are-icky moment of worry that is would get on him as we kissed hello. The other guy had no such compunction—our relationship was pretty much based on his ability to demolish lipstick.

Nonetheless, MKT was the perfect person to watch the Muppets with (re-watch, actually—I’d seen it with my family on Thanksgiving) and as we bussed over to his neighborhood, he wove his hands into my mitten/gloved ones. Because of his deadly shyness, there was always something excruciating about being in public with him, but he was fundamentally sweet and I was fundamentally ready for him.

He was radiant with health and life. Even though it was time for his Lego Christmas village to be up and running, he still shined with beach light—every bright smile I would learn to smile naked on a beach was in there and I still can’t think of a more welcome guest, a more welcome friend.

I’d been ravenous for a penis inside me for many years, but I’d also wondered if it was a forbidden fruit situation—did I only want it because I couldn’t have it? Would I get a man inside me and discover I was a true blue lesbian after all? I half hoped for that, it sure would have uncomplicated things.

But as he slipped the condom on and pushed inside me, I felt a great heave of relief and happiness. Joy came out of my lungs in great gasping wails. I loved it so much. I paused my caterwauling long enough to ask if the neighbors would mind, and he said he didn’t care.

We didn’t get to snuggle in the morning, because he had a Lego convention to get to. To catch the train on time, we had to be out of the house by 8:45. I had a having-a-hard time feeling of being claustrophobic in my own skin, but also the sanguine feeling of having an inner suntan. Every memory of him feels a little beachy, even if we never made it to the beach together. There’s rosy cheeks and sand in my hair when I think of him.

We were a little early for the train, so we stopped at Dunkin Donut to get breakfast. As I ate I prattled a way about poly and sex and Sweetie and he started to look worriedly around like he didn’t want anyone to overhear.

“Are you…ashamed of me?” Vexingly, tears came and I lost all semblance of friend-with-benefits-playing-it cool-ness, if I’d had any to begin with.

“What? No! I’m just not used to people talking about this stuff.”

I sniffled and felt myself sink inward, away from him. I spread cream cheese on my bagel and stared down at the table while he reached for my hand.

“I’m not ashamed.”

“Because if you are…” I set my jaw and tried to be brave, but I was sad to be so close to a dealbreaker, sad about everything, ashamed myself. I’d trusted him, it has felt so good, but what if he was someone who couldn’t like me for what I was? I mean, I already knew we weren’t long term, because of the whole he’s-not-poly thing, but I also knew that I wanted something darker, deeper, more permanent. I wanted to be spanked and dominated and owned, but most of all, I wanted the crazy, cracked romance I already felt for another character.

MKT walked me to the train and made sure I was really okay—my warmed-up body felt opposite to my heavy heart, and what I wanted most was to go home and get into bed with Sweetie. It was a long trip from his side of the city to the bus that would take me back home. I felt wistful for all three of the people on my mind and cheered myself by texting updates to my friends. This morning was both an accomplishment and an ending, both a triumph and a betrayal, but I covered the complication with bravado.

When I finally got home and got in bed with Sweetie, she tried to embrace me but I felt her body stiffen and then sigh into sadness. With tears in her voice she said “You smell…different.”

In the rush to get MKT off to the convention, I hadn’t showered. The smell I wanted to keep with me and mull over was hurting the person I loved most. I said I was sorry.

“Nono, I don’t want to make you feel dirty, like you HAVE to shower, it’s just…”

The wind went out of my sails and I felt so trapped and frustrated. It had felt so good. the shirt he’d lent me, a bit of tech conference swag that said “Heck yeah!” on the front was expressing how part of me felt, how all of me wanted to feel. Here in my own bed, I was so far away from the joyous shouts of the night before. I was a tangle of warring sensations as I lay there and dozed with Sweetie.

Overtaking it all was the unassailable physical well-being that went all the way to my core—if it had had a voice, it would have sounded like this: “I’m bi! I’m bi! I’m bi! I’m really DOING this, can you believe it?”

My limbs were soft and warm and my belly felt full, full in a way I’d craved for so long—it wasn’t that I’d been empty without him, but I was empty without that part of me finding expression.

Then there was the guilt—as much as I wanted to love what I was, to find a way to fully inhabit myself and really bi up a storm, it was heartbreaking to know that I’d hurt her, that this was one in a series of so many disloyalties. I’d already hurt her so much by not being gay, and I would hurt her so much more (and only sometimes in a fun way.) It would be years before our relationship would be at peace, and even then only after monumental changes.

And then there was the loss. I loved my life with Sweetie so much, it was so full of snuggles and birdwatching and Sundays in bed, and I knew what I’d done, what I’d admitted I WAS would change our relationship forever.