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)

it's not supposed to happen like this

C has been in my dreams over the last several weeks.  In one she was across the street looking at me when I saw her.  I waved to indicate I saw her and see if she saw me, too.  She waved back.  In the other I woke with her, she was talking to me.  It was easy, happy. 

The dreams have tapered off over these last couple of years, but they return once in a while and now that we're out of touch I don't know what -if anything- they mean.  There's this hole that slowly fills with the days events.  In time.  Once the day gets underway. 

In the last week, there's been a snag.  I met a woman.  She's smart, fast-thinking, confident, funny, really kind, and has curves.  There's a lot to figure out here.  Because am I drawn to her because she reminds me of...?  There's more that's problematic.  How much to include, here?  I'll say it like this- first, nothing can ever come of it and second, I am more exposed to her than she is to me.  And she seems to really like me.  There's something personal in the way we communicate and our reltionship is strictly professional. 

Yes, even to my blind ass the similarities are striking. 

I'm heartened that I'm capable of this feeling.  Chemistry.  Love.  Strength or something like it.  I wonder (again, as I used to) if I could perhaps feel this with someone without the barriers.  I can't stand to think I can only get here when protected by the glass vault that prohibits any action by either party. 

Interestingly, it's made me miss C.  A little too much.  Imagining if she called to say hi.  Hanging out even casually.  Or not casually.  The whole heteronormative thing.  A date.  Flowers.  Her laughing, then smiling, then sliding her hand into mine. 

More time, right?  I need to give it a little more time.  That's all.  I hope.

bareknuckle

I tell myself that things are settled but there's some sense in me that that's not quite true.  A lingering.  Is there something left to say?  Some hope not yet extinguished?  I return often to this trying to find some peace with how we left it.

Framed one way, it came as a final test.  Defining a boundary for myself, and respecting it.  Whatever the cost.  The cost is so high though.  And I circle back and put my fingers on the keys lightly thinking heavily.  I lose and gain my nerve in anthems and ballads. 

I try to outthink my way back.  An old party trick.  There are other frames, other mattes, I could make a collage of them.  Some offer a portal, true.  But at the threshold I still have to answer the koan of the first frame: Am I letting love or missing love erase my boundaries?  There's rage there, in that last question.  And so I wander away again, rapped upon the back of both hands with a ruler.  Stung through to the shoulderblades.

This is my lesson and I continue to learn it, slowly.  Angrily.  Stubbornly.

finis coronat opus

I decided to get this down because I may one day wonder what happened. 

Since we quit working together, I have slowly let go.  Not all the way but some.  And she comes back.  As a slow blur separating itself from the background.  As if she comes into focus.  And I get to have that.  A sort of shimmering connection at once near and far. 

We emailed some brief updates and it was so lovely.  Fun.  Light.  Then she said she was going to be in town and asked about seeing each other.  When I replied yes, she pushed against the offer.  This pattern is the third time.  Ease and fun, notion of seeing each other, push and formality.  And I bristle at the change in tone.  It raises uncomfortable questions.  We devolve into semantics around what we want and see as a healthy way to stay in touch. 

Last time I acquiesced, thinking we just needed time to chill into a new way of being.  Now, closing in on a year and a half and us repeating this. 

I feel held down.  Splayed.  Forced into a vulnerability that feels wrong.  Out of proportion.  Inappropriate.  But she keeps saying she doesn't want anything to change.  Needs our relationship to stay the same.  But things did change.  And I need to change with them. 

And when I wrote it all out, explaining it as best I could, she seemed to think I wrote it hot or mad.  Like the time I called her beautiful, it just comes across so different than how I heard it in my mind's voice.  Usually I'm good at conveying my inner tone but as we lose this thing, maybe we losing that, too.  Or maybe it was her heat or anger she heard me through.  I don't know.  Something was way off.

We each left the ball in the others' court, I think.  I have so many feelings.  But, I'm all out of words.

in with the old

I have made progress with turning things around.  I didn't get up swinging, but I did get up.  A stuttering switching of places with the silent witness.  The world other-worldly then.  There is a place inside, a round cushion, the light down low.  The eyes are a window.  A head count and we are all here.  Who is that breathing?  Is the body, too, an Other?  As time is the fourth dimension in space-time, so then is the body a separate sameness?  There is much I don't understand. 

I am profoundly sad and also anxious.  I learned -unexpectedly- that head trauma causes tinnitus.  When people find out I have it, they tend to ask me about or chastise me for loud music.  I listen to folk and jazz/big band music primarily.  Some pop & oldies in the car.  More often nothing at all.  And I avoid headphones as they impart a sense that something is happening that I cannot hear coming.  So I doubt music had a part in it.  When I heard this in a tangent on a science show that's about other types of stuff, I stopped cold. 

Other stuff too.  A death in the family.  I sprained my wrist.  Work is changing.  Summer's arrival is changing my schedule in several way.    My ex forgot one of my kids for hours for the fifth or sixth time.  My son got hit by a car.  The list goes on and on.  And I know that really things are ok - not great not terrible and it will get both better and worse in all kinds of ways.  I know. 

My nervous system is shot and I need a moment (like a few days) of nothing going on.  But then again, once I wouldn't have even known that.  I'd have been swept out to sea using some old pattern as a wake board back to shore.  Or, on second thought, maybe I am doing that with writing.  Somehow it still helps. 

synchronicity

I got a text from the young redhead guy I saw a few times back when I began sleeping with men again.  It was utterly shocking, as if he was writing to a completely different person.

He flirted and I flirted back.  I wondered at myself about this response.  The internal and also the decision, the motions of my fingers, my sense of obliging him, how it all fit together.  Also how odd the timing is, how perfect in a sense.

That is, once upon a time this would have been exactly perfect timing, in terms of my mood or rage or pain.  I haven't heard from him in years and I haven't had a severe bout like this in years.  These things all feel connected.

I'm working hard to turn this corner or to hold on until this corner turns me. Back. Toward my self.

Snuffed out candle, wick still smoldering under the stream of smoke, and there is another me striking match after match.  Holding vigil.  Well.  Trying to.

The scene is unchanging.  Seconds pass.  Minutes.  Sit with them. Feel that? The urgency growing.  It's desperation.  The dark crowds in and I want the light. To push it back.  Before I lose my fear of the dark.

This repetitive trying, caught somewhere between earnest and obsessed.  Maybe the difference is just a matter of scale.  Even so sometimes that's all you've got.

That and the dwindling matches.