Camping

This morning when I woke up, I reveled in 2004. That is the year Dana and I became friends. We’d hung out a few times, but not in a serious, I will go to Walgreen’s in the middle of the night for you sort of way. What brought us together was the all-church camping trip at Mt. St. Helen’s. I didn’t have any equipment, and Dana had a ton. We ended up spending the entire weekend together and I realized that I liked her more than I initially thought. The loud obnoxious blonde woman had some redeeming qualities if you got her alone once in a while…… that’s when the obnoxious stopped and the sweet, strong, silent began.

I thought of that trip this morning because I woke up at Dana’s, on her couch because now that she has one, spending the night isn’t weird anymore. It is amazing how much one piece of furniture calmed my nerves almost instantaneously, because our friend rhythm is back in place. I don’t have to straddle the line emotionally anymore by being her friend all day long and falling asleep next to her and wanting her but knowing it would destroy me…. because I know she wants me for a minute and I want her for a lifetime. I can’t sell myself short. Feeling good in the moment just isn’t worth it to me.

I can’t control how she feels, I can’t even do anything about it, but what I CAN do is concentrate on the things I loved about Dana before I fell in love with her, and to not spend so much time with her that those in love feelings don’t have time to go away. I also want to be able to come and visit the 60-in TV. Let’s not get stupid.

And, okay, I was joking in the paragraph above, but here’s the real reason I need Dana now more than ever. My relationship with Argo requires confidentiality, and I acknowledge it wholeheartedly. Dana is the only one that’s been cleared for me to be able to share thoughts and feelings I have about what’s going on in both of our lives. It does not work for me to be married to Dana, but at the same time, I have to have a place to be able to triangulate, on purpose, because I’m a verbal processor and sometimes I need to talk something out with someone else before I write to Argo. I mean, I say plenty about our lives on this web site, and I will continue to in the way that all friends talk about each other. But just like everyone else in my life, you will never see every side to every story. You get to see the first maybe fifty layers when there are closer to fifty thousand. As I told Argo, “can’t you see that my mind works on an x,y, and z axis? It looks like Minority Report in there….”

I hate that love feelings for both Dana AND Argo have to be on the z-axis. It’s not that they’re not there. It’s that I have to pull them further away from me and take them out and look at them. If Dana doesn’t completely understand my relationship with Argo, how could I EVER expect someone new to be able to jump in without knowing what to say? “This is Argo. She metaphysically drinks at my house every Friday.” I have this image of Aaron and Argo in my head that I cannot get out because it is so stinkin’ adorable.

I call Argo “The Doctor” for multiple reasons, mostly having to do with the fact that none of my other friends have ever met her. The picture I have is of Aaron with Rory’s look of absolute disbelief that The Doctor is a real person. It reminds me of when I used to have a crush on Allison Frost, one of the on-air personalities at Oregon Public Broadcasting. We went out on one or two dates, and then she didn’t call me again because I think she met someone else that she liked better- her loss- but after those two dates I started jokingly calling her “my corporeally-challenged celebrity girlfriend on the radio.” Every time she was on the air, either I said that to Dana or she said it to me.

It’s the same deal for me with Argo. I know how her mind works, occasionally, but I don’t know much about her life before she met me… only that she is fabulous and her parents must have done something right, because damn. I also know that she did something right, because damn. Her kids are fabulous, too. The last thing I know is that I did something right by giving her my heart, because she’s been so careful with it. I didn’t get the relationship I thought I was going to get, but the one I got is even stronger. Why would Argo and I ever have to separate if we weren’t romantically involved in the first place? Hoes before hoes, in my case. 🙂 Over time, she’s become the woman I want to spend the rest of my life with, taking girlfriends “home to meet Mom” and eating a fuck ton of ice cream together when it doesn’t work out. As I have told her, “I cannot say that I am ‘over you,’ but I can say that I am ready to stop thinking about it. I cannot apologize for what was done to me to make me capable of what I did to you, but I *can* apologize for not going to the doctor sooner and the effects of my illness ON you.” Because of my history, wanting someone’s body when they open up to me is just par for the course. I’ve had to work on this with every relationship I’ve ever been in, save the one with Aaron. We didn’t click in a crush sort of way. We clicked in a “lesbro” sort of way immediately, even though he knew I was bi from the beginning.

It feels good to have progress in this area of my life. I decided that Argo was going to be the last one. The last friendship in which I would ever struggle with eros, because I’d hurt her so much that I began to see it as the damage I can inflict when I am focused on it. By the same token, I also remember her telling me on the first day that she liked to rap to Eminem. I said, “explain to me exactly how I’m not going to fall in love with you. USE BIG WORDS.”

This whole triangle with Dana and Argo has been a lesson in love for me. I had to learn how to bend and sway like a tree caught in warm summer breezes, because the more I tried to control what happened between the three of us, the more difficult life got.

The more I laid on the ground and watched the clouds roll by, I began to see how nice it was to go camping in my mind’s eye, letting the peace all around me calm my need to control everything. It’s the main reason I am so spiritual and religious. It gets my enormous ego out of the way so that I can see I am not the be all and end all.

God tells me this in a very loud voice, because when I am camping, I am still enough to hear it.