hedgehog's dilemma

 

Friday night / Saturday v early.  It's been raining and misting for days.  I have come, at last, tired, to the other side of the river.  I don't know how I got here and I so much want to write it all down.  For a future me to come across and find the way back, again.  But it's different every time, isn't it?  I mean it's the same and different.  

I deconstructed, entirely.  The scaffolding came down, too.  But because I'd done so much work before, had done the hard labor of cutting a path through those woods, finding the way back didn't take six years.   And the other good part this time was the ability to watch myself fall apart and, with intense curiosity and radical acceptance, a strong stomach and a lot of faith, watch myself figure out how to come back together.  

There are still things I don't understand.  And I don't know if I can bring myself to a place where I can watch with open eyes (truly knowing) the mechanisms there.  I can watch and accept what is happening, but I can hardly bear thinking why.  I'm pretty straight most of the time (except for a persistent celebrity crush on Clive Owen of Closer & Mike Colter of Luke Cage) but then for a little while I am very, very gay.  This has happened several times now and it's perplexing every time though this time I recognized it as a part of this bigger mechanism that follows certain kinds of events or feelings maybe and then it works its way out of my system.  

There's a memory component where everything that leads up the deconstruction becomes hazy and eventually fades away.  I think I'm getting there, now.  Or very soon.  

It's good that life tests your mettle periodically, I reckon.  And when you break, it's an opportunity to watch how the pieces fit that somehow make you whole, again.  To map the terrain, again and again, in case you keep having to pass this way.  

“Forgive everyone for your own sins 

and be sure to tell them you love them 

which you do.” - Jack Kerouac

4/10 @ 4:10, marking 4&10

 
There is so much to say that I don't know where to begin. 

C is leaving in 4 days.  And somehow this has forced me to process letting her go again, before I even knew she was leaving. It seems crazy because we've seen each other once in 4 years.  So why/how can this be loss, anew?  I have some notions but when I try to sit with it, the other thing comes up which brings me to the other thing.  We made plans to go for a walk before she takes off.  Obviously, there's a lot to unpack here.  

These two things ricochet off each other in a chaotic way, splitting on impact to other things.  

In the past when we've almost made plans or made plans to make plans, at first, it feels light and breezy and then there's a text or email that feels formal, stern or admonishing, almost, and I have taken from it that she thinks I was looking at it as a date.  I sometimes thought she was scared I was going to want or do something out of bounds.  But other times I've wondered if she was scared she might.  In those fleeting moments, it was possible to imagine she felt the same ways I did.  It's hard to get to that moment of belief anymore which felt so eureka! and so, so delightful.  It felt like an epiphany but just lasted one second.  Two if I was lucky.  But hold that thought... 

We met up by her old office and walked the hills.  It was familiar, being with her.  And different, obviously.  We took a meandering path around the hills.  I was hardly paying attention to the path we took.  And as we seemed to be circling back she asked which way and I didn't care or really know and something crisp in her voice as she expressed dismay that I wouldn't make the decision surprised me.  It was so exactly like Meg - a pediatric resident I was with for three years whose impossible schedule I needed to conform to if we were to see each other at all, and who decided all the ways our time would be spent when we did see each other and indeed who set the parameters of the relationship - would become suddenly frustrated with me that I wasn't making a decision.  In both cases it feels like the impact on me of all these implications was wholly missed.  No, more than that.  Was deemed less important than any impacts on them of sharing responsibilities in forming these relationships.  As if they want to be dominant or for me to be submissive but are disappointed in me or mad or have complaint when I'm surprised to find a choice.  That I don't even get to choose what I have a choice about.  Weird and maddening. 

Our first year, common era, I  communicated about this fairly relentlessly, beginning before she left until we were both sick of me asking for my needs to be at least a factor for consideration in defining the contours of the new paradigm.  

I was explaining -or trying to- why I was kind of gentle about how I interacted in the build up to going for this walk.  I said something like I didn't want to make her feel scared or worried or whatever had caused the admonishing when we were going to meet, before.  But she didn't respond to my sentiment, rather singling out the wording of it and replied, 'You can't make me feel anything.'  Again this felt insulting in the moment and wholesale false in retrospect.  Microagressions are very real.  Humans can and do make each other feel fearful or devalued or loved or hated, intentionally and far more often unintentionally.  How we respond to these, yes, that is on us.  I believe even the question, "You don't think I can scare you?" can be said in several unsettling ways.  

I was kind of horrified that she has somehow come to believe that but the conversation kept moving on before I could reply to that and we were approaching the spot we'd said we would part ways.  

Things sort of veered off further from there and the big revelation got let loose: C does not/did not feel the ways I hoped/feared she did.  That's it.  That's the headline.  Which I guess means the hot potato was a just metaphor for sex after all, or attraction.  It wasn't the 'potato' we were passing back and forth = a love thing.  It was just the 'hot.'  Which was heartbreaking.  If you were holding that thought as instructed, above, here is where you release it. But watch your step, for it shatters.

As I stared at the ceiling back at home, thinking it through -that she doesn't feel the ways I thought she did- I wasn't crying exactly but tears kept pooling in my ears.  Because it was the same old thing it always was.  Sexual attraction.  As with Meg, Sarah, Gesine, everyone who came before, and most everyone who's come since.  And C, too.  

It's still kind of shocking even if I am only coming to it eight or more years later and nothing is actually any different than before she said that.  Well.  Everything's the same except for me. 

Things unraveled somewhat over the next days.  There's a daily game I play on the NYT app while I drink my morning coffee, after reading the news.  When I got up in the morning and made my coffee, and got to the game, it was 75% completed.  

When a bone breaks there's an unmistakable crack.  When the older trees are split in a storm whether by lightning or by wind, a slow, loud cleaving runs up your back and you listen for the falling crush.  

Back when things were very bad, I used to sometimes wake to pieces of writing and/or scrapes or cuts on the back of my hands without memory of the writing or the scrapes.  And there were no scraps or scrapes this time.  So hopefully it's a fracture and not a full break.  But since then I sleep with the heat on even though I prefer the cold. Cold can send me into depression and I want to make this gesture, though it doesn't feel like a gesture for me.  It feels more like when you leave the porch light on because you're expecting someone.  

The fallout of this non-news has been widespread, and intense.  As evidenced in my morning game.  I'm very embarrassed, even just to myself not necessarily even to C.  I think there's shame, too.  I feel stupid.  I've lost trust in myself.  The list goes on and on.  *sigh* 

Altogether, it's a little too much.  But next week is spring break and I won't have the kids for both weekends and the week in-between, starting tonight.  So I have 10 days alone to work this out of my system.  

the highwayman

I've been trying to put words to this for weeks and I'm torn now between finally doing it and giving up trying.  On the heels of my last visit here, I dreamt us the playful electricity.  It works - the flirting - because we're not serious about the implications.  Or I don't think she takes me seriously and she knows I'll never push.  And so we hold the tension without strain, without risk.  

I'm realizing as I try to write it why it's been so difficult - I'm trying to say it and not say it at the same time.  I'm embarrassed, I guess.  Ashamed.  We were there, together, and I did something.  Faced her.  I opened in some new way.  I dared.  But when I did, she faded just a little.  Receded, almost imperceptibly.  Still talking, laughing, still seeming to draw near to be but yet at the same time drawing ever so slightly away.  

It came as a surprise, somehow.  A moment of painful, embarrassing clarity.  It felt like she somehow wants what we have to continue, but doesn't want me.  And as with some dreams, it lingered and grew murky and I cannot now tell if it was me, or her, or my subconscious.  If it's right on the nose or completely off the wall.  For weeks I've been trying to figure it out.  

In the meantime, I've become taciturn.  I think it's the embarrassment which is of course ridiculous since it was just a dream.  But also I have lost my voice - if we're not the us we've been, I don't quite know how to be, how to frame what to say.  I'm not great with facades.  I get mute when I cannot be authentic.  

For me we will always be that couple dancing, she throws her head back to laugh and puts her forehead on my collarbone with a smile still on her lips.  Or that version of us is always out there, in the universe somewhere, anyway.  Even now, as I come to glean that she maybe would want that with someone - or maybe not - she doesn't want that with me. 

Without that common language and all the understandings and assumptions that came with it, I don't seem to know what to say.  Paradoxically, clarity around what isn't wanted has given rise to shyness around what is wanted, because I cannot fathom what that is.  

“Listen to the silence. It has so much to say.” - Rumi

50, 51

 

C's been on my mind and I don't know why.  I thought about writing but it's so one-sided and I don't have the stomach for that very often.  Tonight, though, I let it wash over me.    

For a while I had the last Friday appointment.  I loved that slot.  I got to be the last person to see her off to her weekend.  This was in the early time, the office that when I dreamt it was always a treehouse.  

And then the fall came and we sometimes did a 1.5 slot.  This meant it might be twilight or even dark when we were done.  Night changes me.  I'm vulnerable, but also impulsive.  Maybe we all have this quality?  The vampires and the werewolves.  It felt risqué.  Daring intoxication.  

I've had to do a little driving recently and found myself in some of the same routes I used to take to her and from her and played the mixed tape in the background.  Sometimes, I laughed out loud, or blushed, even though I was alone in the car.  I remembered the images that so preoccupied me.  Not images, exactly, because I stepped fully in.  

It went pretty far.  Maybe too far.  I could feel - doing 80 on the freeway - my mouth around her clit and pushing her thighs back and open with my forearms in one carnal move.  Those milliseconds string together like those books you can flip through to make an image appear animated.  It's not just sex though. It's vulnerability, presence.  We used to have that.  

Anyway, I drove that tonight and remembered it all, and the twilight goodbyes because it's the season of twilight goodbyes, again.  I think about dropping a note but it will say 'How are you?' 'Great! How are you?'  And then something polite, innocuous, and somewhat effervescent.  And that's a wrap for four to ten weeks or so, when it will happen again.  

We are each of us capable of incredible depth but it doesn't seem like we try to do that.  We do this instead and maybe if I didn't know what we could have I would find this fine, but the contrast is too great.  And I begin to wonder why we try to stay in touch if it's going to be like this.  It's difficult to fathom what she gets or wants from this, either.  

This whole post brings to mind a line by Parker Posey: 

"It's dark. It's glam. It's sad. It's Christmas."

the intimate stranger

It's been a year.  Since the pandemic.  Since the move.  Since schooling the kids from home.  I've been surprisingly even-keeled through most of it.  But the edges are wearing and curling away.    

I felt the breaking apart tonight.  In bed.  Not cleaving, but splintering.  Or waking.  There's a low groan of antsy frustration.  I've known it most my life, off and on.  But it's been integrated for the most part into things I can access, ways of being that we can embody together.  Now, it stirs, pulling away a little.  

Trying to be patient and exercise curiosity about it, I begin with remembering where it's taken me before.  I find myself in a bar.  Kissing a stranger on the mouth.  Perhaps going home together.  It feels like anger but it comes out like sex.  And then somehow -after all that- it collapses and I'm just me again.  

I assume it's returning because my life is so cooped up, comparatively.  Most peoples are.  Perhaps there are other reasons, but I don't know where to look.  Perhaps it doesn't even matter.  

What brought me here is the prospect of a safe place.  We've let much out here before.  And there's no where else to bring it, anyway.  There are no bars open.  No travelers from afar to meet in the hotels.  And the windows for such things anyway are exceedingly narrow.  There's something of a recovery period, a kind of coming home to self, that takes alone time, which I have hardly any of.  

I am more curious than nervous about this for now, and the nervousness is just about whether it might build since there's no means of outlet on the horizon.  

the Revelers

The world is coming to her end and I cannot find the words to write.  Such a momentous occasion and me with the nerve to finally make a toast.  With nothing left to hide, not even fear.  But, alas!  Where are the words?!

Sometimes lately it feels like I was waiting for her to get to where I've always been.  Yearning, like me.  Ready, like me.  Walking by the lake, but on the yellow line.  Like me, talking to the moon.  There's no one here but us.  It's utterly revelatory.  And I am madly in love.  

Last month I sold the house.  I'd moved out months ago and there was a sting in it, but the stress and the worry stood like misplaced furniture and boxes filled with personal treasure but blocking access to what I most needed- grief.  And then it came.  I returned alone to drop off the other set of keys, my set.  

Until that house, I've moved nearly every year.  I had two three year stretches but mostly I move.  So I've never grown attached to a place.  Or a structure.  But this was different.  I was safe and did the hard work in that house.  In every way I wouldn't trade it for anything.  And yet I did.  

I wrote to C while I waited for the realtor.  Exceptions abound, in moments of profound angst or loss, wherein we can speak straight from the heart.  Rare treat and I imbibed.  And there was in the end an anointing quality - whether of selling the place, the moving on, the rather blunt expression of emotion - to walking through the fires.  

I find I don't care much for the posturing any more.  What is the point of any of it if you have to keep tucked in and buttoned up?  

The world is coming to her end, and I hold out my arm.  She laces hers through mine and says 'I wasn't sure you'd still be here.'  

quarantine this

I recently got the kids full time. I don't live very near where they'd been going to school and I very much want them to live near their school so they can socialize with peers after school easily and with increasing independence, as they're going into high school next year. So I figured I would need to either bring them up to me, or after a lot of thought it became clearer the better decision for them would be for me to move closer to their school. This would mean less change for them, keeping their current friends and classmates, etc.  

I rented a 3BR 2.5BA in an amazing school district where I plan to live through their high school years (and after which I hope and expect to begin a next phase of my life.  More on that in some other post.) So, I signed the lease, got a realtor, and booked a mover. Properties were averaging 22 days on the market, closing in under 30 days at that point. So it seemed like a sane decision in that moment to have both up in the air at once - leasing a townhouse and selling a house. The move was the weekend the Governor announced that schools were closing and then a few days later the statewide shelter in place kicked in. Meaning I had a rent and a mortgage in the most expensive part of the country and no way to sell or even prep the property.  Luckily the coming layoffs were not yet on my radar or I might have been lost to panic.  

In the month that's followed, slow progress in fits and starts has brought me to a listing date. I have no idea what the market is like, if there are buyers, if there is enough infrastructure for a sale to go through even if there are buyers.

And I have not even begun to process the emotional aspect of selling a house, which I'd read about and my realtor mentioned but which I still did not expect.  This was the first place I ever really felt safe.  The first place that felt like mine, like home.  I love it viscerally and can hardly believe I would ever sell it.  I think I'm even mad at myself for doing it.  But to compare the life we'd have there with the one we'd have here makes it obvious what I should do.  I only have 4 more years of parenting (well, parenting non-adults) and I want them to be close, sweet years.  Where it's easy to do stuff and everyone has their own room and we're walking distance to stuff.  It's already been amazing.  But still.  There's pain.  And I don't know what to think of it or what to do with it.  

And there's the pandemic in the background, ravaging lives and livelihoods.  Heartbreak of every kind in every direction.  And I have so far been spared.  Millions and millions of layoffs, including in my own company.  It's scary and humbling. Is there such thing as collective trauma or is all trauma personal?  It's also infuriating and sad the federal response.  Corporations.  The electorate.  Losing Bernie felt like a personal loss, surprisingly.  I think that had to do, too, with hope and safety - like the house. 

I'm going through so much and yet the days creep by with nothing happening.  And so it is for us all.  I wrote recently and remembered how good that feels.  It's been over two years since C and I have barely written anything since then.  Here again with the hope & safety.  Maybe it's a result of the virus or the shelter in place, or the government, or ...just... life.  

apogees

I wrote to check in on her and referred to her off-handedly as 'extroverted.'  Because of the shutdown I thought maybe she was feeling hemmed in.  I don't know.  Anyway she wrote me back a note and added at the end that she's an introvert.  And I blushed.  Read this text alone on my porch, I blushed and finally I laughed at myself for blushing. 

We talked often when I doubted what I felt, about whether I knew her.  I pointed out I don't really know her and she'd reply that she's authentic with me and that what I don't know is her history but that I do know her. 

Over the years I've studied the surface and the depth of this, like an amethyst, the facts and the perspective, texture and gradation.  And I found it's a relief, this error.  Bundled affirmation into mystery.   What else do I have wrong?  How exhilarating. 

She becomes a familiar stranger to me.  Second date.  All hope and chemistry.  The pendulum swings, the rhythm ticks up.  This is the curve we've spent years flattening.  And so, dutifully I back away until it slows back down. 

If I write too soon, there's a fingertip under the edge of her chin, pull without pulling.  Weighted gesture.  I'll drawn too near her.  Lips will graze her cheek, jaw, ear to say something soft but heavy.  If I write too soon, I push in and against.  My hands on her hips thighs knees shoulders.  Such proximity is dizzying.  We needed six feet for vastly different reasons.  And my writing -even just in my head- closes the gap. 

Deep breathing slows the pendulum. 

five minutes

Sometimes her presence is so vivid.  As if a portal opened and we are somehow right next to each other.  She is in the front of my mind, bearing gravity or is it magnetism upon my attention, my emotions.  And it whets the appetite.  It whittles away mundane, striking then hewing  then carving then sanding, down and down.  Until I am lithe, svelte.  Hard. 

I try to stay present, but she moves toward me.  My awareness fixt but flowing.  What is the word?  To both need and not need.  To want so much it feels like need.  That she would stand next to me. Or sit on my lap.  Playful.  Happy.  Intoxicated with it as I am.  Fully clothed because it isn't exactly sex.  It's sexual, but that's a mere mist of the whole essence.  To call it that is to simmer down. 

I could transmit it all in a kiss.  Not technically one kiss, because I'd draw back to look at her lips, of course, and her eyes.  The rough impatient intensity and the depth of tenderness and the bruising ache of passionate love.  I'd say five minutes would do it.  We're talking minimums not ideals.  Ideally yes, I could take her and she would be open to me to all of this.  But I could communicate what I need to and garner some relief, if we don't count the catching one's breath, the full out coming down, yeah.  Five minutes. 

teleporter

I saw this today and it beckoned me.  Here.  To my crypt.  This is what I saw:  

An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love” — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.

It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.

It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

Adrienne Rich (May 16, 1929–March 27, 2012)