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)

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.