I used a pseudonym, Denyce, in the beginning; I was scared to tell the world her real name, and then I decided that I could get over it. Now she’s a recurring character. You will get to know her over time.
Dana told me that her eros energy for anyone is gone, so please. Date anyone you want. Distract yourself. I will try to be nice to her. I said, “my history with you is that you get very possessive.” She has in fact helped wreck my relationships with two previous women because they would see us in a room together and know that to us, they weren’t really there. Angela and Katharin both knew that I was going to end up with Dana to some extent, but I was really in denial because we weren’t attracted to each other. What changed my mind? The fact that cute is a dime a dozen but the people who will get down in the shit with you are worth way more than that. She, over time, became the face I loved more than all others in a forever sort of way. The last few weeks have not destroyed that, but they have for right now. Dana is not coming back any time soon, and yet wants to be friends in the same way that we were in Portland.
That is not reality, and needs to change. If Dana is set on not getting back together, I cannot let her in to the degree that I have in the past because my ACTUAL girlfriends feel supplanted. Our connection was so strong and so tight that even though I was attracted to other people, they faded into the background as we used each other’s minds as a metaphorical playground. We GET each other…. although I understand that we both need new heuristics for life and when we’ve learned them, it may not be advisable for us to be together because it might take a week or it might take a year, but we would lapse back into old patterns.
One of the key disagreements that we’ve had thus far was whether I was justified in posting about our separation on Facebook. I am not offering excuses, because I think I’m right and she doesn’t. This is just my side of the story. I asked her, “who was more important that we call first? Your parents or mine? Who’s sister is more important? Yours or mine? Who’s………..” You see? it gets harder and harder when your family of friends is in the 200 range. Hierarchy becomes impossible. Plus, to me, it gave my life a sense of definition that the State of Texas could not grant…. a day in court to dissolve our union in front of all the people we wanted to invite. The UCC does a wonderful job with divorce ceremonies, because to us hippy liberal Christians, how you leave a relationship is just as important as how you start it. It’s definitely not the ceremony I’d planned to be having this year, but what’s not to like? We all get to get together and get drunk, anyway. I’m Irish. It’s the law.
Even though it’s St. Patrick’s Day, I am sober and enjoying the evening at Dana’s so I can work on my 17-inch iMac instead of my Android tablet and bluetooth keyboard. I just feel so much more productive and focused at my own desk. It is destroying my rhythm to post elsewhere. I know the feel of my own keyboard the way my mother does to her piano. I cannot type as fast anywhere else, and the layout of the BT keyboard isn’t standard. The punctuation is in weird places with function keys. Better than a touchscreen, but not by much. But I am not banging on the technology. I just can’t do as good a job on the go as I can when things are blown up enormously large.
But still, I’m thinking about Auna, who called to tell me that she couldn’t thank me enough for helping her before her job interview because she was UT’s newest Admissions Counselor. This was after I went to her house, where she showed me two collections (a book and a coffee table book) of African-American art) that she’d brought to life. Yes, that’s right. The Art Historian has two books in print and the writer has none. It scares me how smart and capable she is. She can adult so much better than I can, and she is ten years younger. What makes her that way is her whole approach to life. She sings all the time. She laughs with her whole body. You’re probably thinking that she’s capable of distracting me from my grief. Look at my life. Am I ever distracted by grief? Nope. I pretty much live there… not because I enjoy walking in darkness, but because it has more life lessons to offer than pent-up rage. Exploring darkness means there’s at least a pinpoint of light somewhere, and you have to look hard for it. I have lost Dana and Argo. Therefore, there is no other female in my life looking out for my heart in a way that I can accept.
I cannot accept Dana’s friendship because I want to work on our relationship so much that she is tired of hearing the question, and thinking about it. I think she wants me to date Auna so that I will stop focusing on her in a very immediate sense. I don’t want her to leave me because the reason we got together in the first place is that when we were with other people, we couldn’t keep our minds off each other. So we would just be kind of half showing up to both relationships oh my God Dana doesn’t know how to function if I don’t have a girlfriend and it got easier for her to relax into that role when I met Argo…. although not completely because she didn’t break my relationship with Argo for me, but she helped a little bit. Argo got really tired of being Dana’s excuse in our relationship. It was a cheap political point for her to say, “Argo’s just going to fall for you, anyway” because it showed Argo how clearly Dana did not get it. I am extraordinarily honored and pleased at Dana’s faith in my ability, but damn. Besides, if telling her that I’ve cooked professionally didn’t work, nothing will. I know Argo. We’ve met.
That constant Eeyore-like line from Dana has been haunting our marriage from day one. Except until Argo came along, there wasn’t a name attached. Dana has been sure that this was going to happen for a long time….. meaning me leaving……
I cannot decide on whether I want a future with Dana, Argo, or even Auna…… but when she said I deserved a makeout session for all my help, I at least thought about it for a second. I am ten years older. She makes me feel every bit of it. And 20 years younger all at once. At first I thought that we weren’t going to be attracted to each other that way, but when I walked into her historic Third Ward home, I felt all the children that had run through it before ours. It scared me and then I remembered that my personality constantly dictates that I see things as they could be and not as they are. It is not reality. It is a version of the future. If it doesn’t work out with Auna, it doesn’t mean it was a bad thought. It was just a future that didn’t happen. However, I did send a letter into the universe asking for what I wanted, and it arrived.
It’s like that scene in Doctor Who where Matt Smith is jumping all over the place because he’s gotten a mail cube…. There are moments when I look at Auna and I can see her at 70. The thrill is opening the package to see what’s arrived….. all eighty million parts. She says she’s never kissed a white chick. Can my little lips handle hers? Well JESUS. With an opening like that, how can I resist? It hasn’t happened yet. But knowing that there’s a possibility that it could is enough for me. Right now is not about what is solidly there. It is about diving into the wreck to see what’s left of me, just me.
I had a black girlfriend once before. It did not end well. She wanted to marry me after six weeks and I was barely out of high school. However, what I learned from that relationship is that in Texas, if you’re an interracial couple, no one will notice you’re gay. #smallblessings
All of the sudden, I feel like I have untapped potential all over the place. It’s not that I haven’t had the answers, it’s that I haven’t asked the right questions. Getting the answers to the questions I didn’t know I needed to ask has brought me so much more peace than continuing to think that what happened to me in middle school and high school was normal and sane. I am not the same person that I used to be because who this person was got lost. She’s been hiding, crippled with fear, waiting for Argo’s touch. It’s not that I knew who I was waiting for. It’s just that I know her name now. Argo will never be my girlfriend, but she is the only one to ever kiss my soul directly.
If only she would stop slipping me tongue. :P~~~~~
Stories That Are All True 