This morning, the dark roast at Starbucks is the French roast. Apparently, they have stopped calling it “The Bold Pick,” because the last few times I have ordered as such, they’ve looked at me like I was from the moon until the manager told them what it was. It’s awesome that with my gold status, I can get a large cup of coffee for less than three dollars, and fill it up as much as I want. Although with 20 oz, I normally get a cup on the way in and a cup for the drive to DSI, about 20 minutes away. Even without free refills, though, sometimes I go to 7-Eleven, because they have finally made the Slurpee of my dreams- Diet Cherry Coke. It’s not calorie free, but 50 calories for a 24 oz is not bad. I’m sure they do it to cover up the aspartame aftertaste, and it works well… except I like the aspartame aftertaste. I’m not a real soprano without it.
How many sopranos does it take to change a lightbulb?
Two. One to hold the Diet Coke and one to get the accompanist to do it.
Last night I went straight home and got in bed. This pneumonia is hanging on for all it’s worth, and I am only now starting to notice a difference since I’ve been on the Augmentin for six days. The cough, however, is not budging. As you walk to the back corner of DSI, it starts to sound like a TB ward… although it’s nice that my office mate has officially, officially moved out and all her crap is gone, so now I really have my own office. I’m not bothering anyone with my sickness unless someone comes in to talk to me, and right now, they know better. Maybe I should make a recording of myself coughing for those days when I don’t want to deal with people. 🙂
I am really starting to learn what it means to move on without Argo in my life, and it’s scary and wonderful all at the same time. I miss her, but not at the cost of my own sanity. I am still the sweet, lovable nerd she met in the beginning, but apparently there is no way to show it. It’s all so fucking sad, because I truly didn’t mean any harm, and I was hoping that she’d continue to buck the mainstream and we’d keep talking, keep building each other up, keep working towards wholeness in a world that is continually broken.
I was talking to Scales about it the other night, and she said something about me “still being in it.” That perhaps I’m still in love with Argo and don’t realize it consciously. I don’t think she’s right, and I said so. I said, “there’s a difference between losing someone you love, and someone you’re in love with. Losing Dana and Argo at basically the same time was taking both my right and left hands away simultaneously.”
I know within myself that the Eros feelings I had given the enormous amount of truth we shared are over. I don’t have these dreams that haunt me anymore, and I don’t spend my days wishing that things could have been different. They just are the way they are, you know? Whatever was supposed to happen did. I will find other friends, and have, but I won’t forget her, just like I’ll never forget the other important turns my life has taken, both away from myself and back inward. Just like with Dana, I had to spend my time in the desert figuring all this shit out. And like I said before, leaving Dana was easier because there were things roiling under the surface of our perfectness that created a storm within both of us that we could not talk about… would not talk about. Dana and I both wanted out, and with Argo, that was never the case. I’d get mad at her escalated language and fire right back, when the right thing to do was respond with more love, more care, more thoughtfulness. But at the same time, when I did remember to do those things, even being nice to her was frought with being wrong. I couldn’t win, and not for lack of trying. She told me she had friends that would rage if we were still in contact, and first of all, I didn’t realize that I was up for discussion. And second of all, she said that she was not interested in following “mainstream anything,” two words that I carried in my heart until I realized that she was playing me. Being my friend was not a way to be my friend, but to keep an eye on me to make sure I didn’t get any closer than she wanted me to be. I didn’t want to be that person. I wanted to be that person she could come to with anything, but that time in our lives was over.
I never got the chance to be free and easygoing with her, like in the beginning when she said that she was much more fun and funny in person, and I couldn’t wait to see what she meant by that. Girl giggling and meeting each other’s eventual significant others and eating bacon in our pajamas.
But I couldn’t be seen in that way anymore, and for that, I regret, but I don’t choose to focus on it all the time, because I have plenty of people to eat bacon with, except for Pri-Diddy, because she is a vegan…. although I do like the vegan bacon at Sticky Fingers Bakery, so there’s something.
I really do love Dana with everything that is within me, but there’s another relationship that I’ll never get back, because she doesn’t trust me as far as she can throw me and I feel exactly the same way. There were only a few things that I felt I could confide in her, Argo being one of them, and everything else was fair game. Anything and everything I said was likely to pop out at one time or another. And perhaps it was a mistake to let Dana into the Argo part of my life, but it seemed utterly wrong not to. Married couples that hide their crushes destroy their relationships from the inside out, whereas naming it helps it to go away, helps it to refocus on the relationship with each other. But it is my belief that by the time I’d started confiding that stuff in her, she wanted out, and Argo was the easiest shortcut to get me to go ballistic in a hot second. I knew I had enough love within me to love both of them, as long as I took care of my problems appropriately, and I did…. it was just that time ran out with both of them to prove it.
Dana was part of my heartbeat, whereas Argo was just my beautiful, rule-breaking moth. My poetic and noble land mermaid. The person who, to me, was brilliant and kind and stupid hot. These are all taken from Leslie Knope Galentine’s Day cards, and in no way meant to indicate romance. Although my favorite was when we were discussing boundaries and I said, jokingly, “I don’t like it that you’re funnier than me. Could you tone it down? Noooooooooo…….
We had a lot of fights that were just redirection that cost us time because we were talking about surface issues instead of what’s really wrong. For instance, I have been doing this Internet thing a long time. Gender and sexuality fly out the window for me, because my sexuality is in no way binary. She needed me to have a better boundary there, and I tried so hard…. until I realized that the shortest and easiest path to getting her to go away was to say all these things I didn’t mean in order to push her away from sharing her truth, because every time she did, my heart would squeeze into a vice and I couldn’t think about anything else. My relationships all suffered, because I didn’t belong to a community anymore. I isolated as far as I could so that I could wait for the familiar ding of my phone.
Argo never would have wished that on me, but I couldn’t help it. Her life was a series of crazy with crazy sauce, and I worried like a mother hen, when I should have been worrying about Dana and Aaron in the same way… the ones who were dealing with my own crazy with crazy sauce.
I just burned on re-entry. Dana didn’t want to talk to me anymore, to the point where we were having a ocmpletely calm conversation where she was asking me questions. I was sitting on the floor facing her bedroom, not getting any closer, because I knew the questions she was asking me were hard and required me to dig deep. But she didn’t want to listen to the answers, and when I gave them, called my dad and said that I was having a “psychotic episode.” My dad told me to hand the phone over, and when he realized that I was calm and collected, he told me to go to bed, that nothing was going to get done, and to stop trying.
So I did.
I locked myself in my office with enough sleeping pills to knock me out for a day and a half, and I must say it was the right thing to do. Everything looked better with a truly good night’s sleep. But Dana still didn’t want to talk to me, to address our issues, without leaving them as our issues. Argo made me feel like a million dollars when she said, “surely you realize that one of the reasons I backed away from you was so that I wouldn’t be Dana’s excuse anymore.” And no, I didn’t realize that at all. I thanked her for picking up something that I didn’t, and said, “good call.” I told Dana what she said, and she surprised me. She said she was sorry that my friend pulled away because of something she did. It made me feel like a million dollars, and I sent Argo another thank-you note that she’d helped me make even more progress with Dana because she GOT IT, and that part had been missing for a long time…. because it wasn’t just about me anymore. I can’t imagine what it was like for Argo to give her heart to me in hopes that we could make a friendship that was strong and comfortable, and then to step into dysfunction up to her ass.
But she didn’t. Dana was ready to go, and didn’t know how to say it, so Argo was so convenient as an excuse not to talk to me about our own issues. Argo’s sexuality is binary, always has been, and there was nothing I could do that would change it, and I didn’t even want to. Anything that I sent her along those lines was predicated by, “I know this is not your reality, but these are the feelings that are troubling me, not something for which I expect a response.” And besides, any romantic relationship with Argo would have gone about as well as a dumpster fire. In a way, Dana, Argo, and I were all raised by the same dad. And I’m going to let that sentence hang right there, because the three of us all know what that means, and needs no explanation to anyone else.
Plus, I didn’t want to fuck each other up any worse than we already had. I only wanted goodness, sweetness, and light to win out, but it couldn’t, because instead of letting our rabbit hole sustain us, we became cut from the same cloth, defenses in place so that neither one could let down the protective walls that didn’t start out with bullet-proof vests under our t-shirts, just devolved into it over time.
I wish I could go back to the time in my life where I was so excited to meet her, so excited to invite her into my life for real so that the 3D version of me was what she knew instead of an Internet troll with a God complex. I became this narcissistic bully with no ability to fold, and so did she. So there was no going back, as much as I loved her, prayed for her, wished her well.
And now I talk to her in my head all the time, because when I do that, I get the responses I want, rather than taking the chance that she’s going to come back at me with escalated language, or that I will send her any. We are at peace, for the first time in years, because according to the Argo in my head, my glasses are cute, I will find the woman of my dreams, and she is the angel cheerleader that sits on my shoulder as I find my way through life.
Scales said that she felt bad about the comment where she said she didn’t think that this was the end, that we seem to wax and wane, because she didn’t mean to cause me grief. And I told her that grief was always a double-edged sword… that even though I felt pain, I also felt like a million dollars remembering my Argo-given nickname and for one second, I felt complete and whole within myself, because the ability to remember with happiness outweighed the ability to look back in anger.
And on that note, it’s time for my re freefill and get to work.
See you on the flip side.
Stories That Are All True 