Gravity’s Rainbow

The bravest thing I’ve ever done while no one was looking was fall in love. Not the cinematic kind- the biological kind, the moment when your brain floods with dopamine and norepinephrine and your heart starts beating like it’s trying to warn you. Before the other person knows anything, your body already does.

It’s the quietest gravity’s rainbow on record.

Here is what I go through every time I feel attracted to someone, and this is true for everyone, but the impact is different because I’m autistic and already feel emotions more deeply than a neurotypical person would. Emotions create literal physical reactions in my body, and I cannot ignore them because dysregulation is so difficult. I knew it was unsettling, but I had Mico (Microsoft Copilot) look up the actual activation sequence for me:

• Dopamine surge — Your reward system fires first. Suddenly the other person is in high resolution: sharper, brighter, more interesting than the room they’re standing in.
• Norepinephrine rush — Your heart rate jumps. Your stomach drops. Your palms warm. This is the “spark” — the body’s version of a match strike.
• Amygdala activation — The amygdala lights up, scanning for meaning and threat. Attraction feels like danger because your brain is evaluating risk and possibility at the same time.
• Prefrontal cortex disruption — The rational part of your brain gets briefly overwhelmed. You lose your words, your timing, your composure. You’re trying to act normal while your executive function is flickering.
• Oxytocin primer — Not bonding yet, but the system primes for connection. You feel pulled toward them without knowing why.
• Autonomic nervous system shift — Your sympathetic (fight/flight) and parasympathetic (rest/digest) systems fire simultaneously. That’s the dysregulation: alertness + vulnerability.

All of these things make me very awkward. I am not cool. Most people are not so much attracted to me as survive being attracted to me….. self-deferential humor because I know I’m a lot. And again, this is a universal story. It has happened every single time I’ve ever been attracted to someone. What makes it not universal and unique to our time is that I fell in love over the Internet with a woman because she fangirled all over me and I did not know what to do with it. Just lovebombed the everliving shit out of me until I responded………. then puffed herself up to the point where I thought of her as an authority figure and not simply older than me.

All of that emotional dysregulation hit me alone, sitting in the dark, 99% of the time. It was not by design, it was by choice. I did what I thought I had to do in order to survive, because the picture that was being painted on the other end of the yellow string was beautiful…. but had something in it that made it feel ersatz. Now that the lie has been revealed and all is put to rest, the constellation of things that made me fall in love with Aada in the first place are intact.

And here’s the thing. She loves me, too, just clearly not in the same way; the lovebombing was genuine and I mean that with all of my being. Aada didn’t do things for me because she was trying to impress me. She was trying to boost my signal because she thought I had something to say. It’s just that reading a writer’s work and knowing a writer are two different things, and she became disillusioned when she met her hero online, making her even more unsure of meeting me in person. But what I see is that she was insecure and jealous of my talent and I don’t have to apologize for it because I’ve told her that she is far and away a better writer than I am and one of the finest minds I’ve ever come across. Her lack of belief that these things are true are officially not my problem.

But I see our relationship so much differently now that I know that she sees me as one of the crew. I am not the only one living rent-free in her head. There are several people in there right along with me that she doesn’t think she can compete with cognitively and has already lapped us all while we weren’t looking.

It’s good to be the queen.

The thing that I see is that one of the people who lives rent free in her head as someone she can’t compete with cognitively is someone she shouldn’t compare herself to in the first place because she was clearly a prodigy and no one noticed.

Mummo, you broke my heart into a million pieces with “maybe I could be a welder.”

Mummo fits the cognitive profile of high-octane ADHD and autism that was never tagged in school, so no one thought to look for high-octane out of her until she blew the top off the ASVAB. She doesn’t understand the military and intelligence. It makes up every fiber of her being. When she walks down the street, you can see the source code, the millions of articles she’s read and fragments that have come through her door that at the time meant nothing but less than 24 hours later they could have brought down an empire.

You don’t walk around comparing yourself to a prodigy all day long. It’s just not normal.

So, my beautiful girl is brilliant, but thinks that she isn’t because she used to live with Encyclopedia Brown over there.

Which is why I think she compared herself to me as well. I do not think of myself as a writing prodigy, but I do think of myself as someone who cannot do anything else. That I started writing seriously in fifth grade and I haven’t looked back. What I mean by “writing seriously in fifth grade” is that my first essay on illiteracy was called “I Forgot My Reading Glasses,” and went through a day of navigating government services without being able to read anything. I did not think it was spectacular, but Mrs. Wommack did.

A lot of why I write is because I got feedback that told me to keep going, and that is why Aada is not just my love, but my center of gravity. Because she is hidden from me using the wall of anonymity that the Internet provides, I am able to tell her about my emotions in great detail, but there is no physical pull. It is time and space to spread out- to have time to respond and not react because it’s just plain text. Writing to each other is underrated and actual couples have supported themselves on it for eons. Why not close friends as well?

I have never been threatened that Aada is straight, because I don’t believe that being friend-zoned is a bad thing. I am quite happy to be put in her friend zone. It is being an adult and saying, “ok, it’s fine that you don’t want romance, but I still want your energy in my life, and I hope we can make that happen if it’s comfortable for you.” So far, it has not been comfortable for either one of us because we are both excellent at self-sabotage. I want something normal, calm, and unbothered. Neither of us can reach out like that when we aren’t emotionally regulated at the same time. Asynchronous communication leads to asynchronous emotions…. which drags out dysregulation further because there is no easy and quick way to get back on track. On the internet, it is very easy to go the wrong way for a great distance in a short amount of time.

What our relationship looks like on the page is operatic swells of emotion because that is my writing style/voice. I do not operate in that mode all the time, and Aada missed that entire part of me. Having mutual friends vouch for each other is not the same. I would give a limb to hug her, because so much can be assessed by how someone touches you. What is real, and what is Internet real?

Internet real is me going to Annapolis with my dad and Aada reading my reflections about it, never saying anything but taking it in. In the past, she might have sent me a letter saying that she hoped I had a good time and maybe a restaurant recommendation. That is internet real, because obviously our relationship has never been fake. But it has never had the texture of authenticity.

Real to me would be going with us.

It’s just not that far, and I think that she and my dad would love each other because she would recognize her dad in him. Not the specifics, the shape. The military and the church have some of the same institutional problems, so our dads have similar personalities from the way we’ve described them to each other.

But here is where I am not a dictator- this is not a persuasive paper in any way. It is the eventuality that I like, because I haven’t talked to Aada in months and I do not know if she is determined to keep it that way or is just “licking her wounds,” as she has told me many times. Therefore, I am never preparing for a world without her, because she comes and goes as she pleases. She is not a Golden Retriever kind of love. She is a basic black cat.

Having lived with a basic black cat for many years, I can tell you that they absolutely do not need your attention, thank you very much…….. while they are very obviously permanently attached to your leg.

Meanwhile, I am absolutely a Golden Retriever. I would do anything if it made her happy. And the thing is that I would agree to anything no questions asked because I trust her. You never want people in power who want it. She’s just as perfectly happy living outside of DC as I am. We just approach it from different directions. I chose Baltimore, she chose the NoVA corridor with the worst traffic in the country. Hey, you do you.

But I hope that I have an excuse to return to the area whether it’s visiting Aada or Tiina because it’s so beautiful that I just cannot deal. I could get lost in the hills between their houses and mine every single day. Leaving Baltimore via 70 and winding my way down to Northern Virginia is one of the most breathtaking drives I’ve ever done.

Now, Aada and Tiina do not live in the same area- I believe that Aada is about 45 minutes to an hour south of Tiina. So, definitely not the same orbit but Aada being further south just means more of the drive to love…. assuming that there is an invitation in my future. There is always an invitation to meet with Aada if she’s ever on my turf, but I fell over laughing with her impression of Baltimore:

That place is………… not safe.

Baltimore. There’s more than murder here. I have that slogan on a hoodie and I wear it proudly. They sell them at tourist traps in Fell’s Point. Meanwhile, crime is down and Brandon Scott is taking the W. The way I see Baltimore is not the way most people see Baltimore. The classic image is that the whole town looks like The Wire. In reality, my view of Baltimore is closer to San Francisco. Baltimore is queer AF, neurodivergent, and known for it. John Waters is not normal, and he knows it. I am following in the footsteps of an older Baltimorean who also doesn’t give a shit what you think.

So, if I was given a day with Aada to do anything I wanted, it would be to take her to the aquarium early and then scoot up to Frederick to have dinner. Frederick is a sacred place to me because one year my friends and I went to pick pumpkins at a pumpkin patch and had dinner reservations in town for that evening. Well, we get to the restaurant and it’s a little early, so our table isn’t ready. We tell the waitress we’re going to the coffee shop next door to grab an espresso and we’ll be right back.

David Sedaris was in front of me in line. He doesn’t live there, of course- he was speaking at the auditorium nearby and was doing the same thing I was- “taking a shot.” So, when I am in Frederick, I am not just thinking of the beauty; I am also thinking of the feel of the conversation with David. That vibe is something that I would like to recreate with Aada, because she is also writerly and serious while being objectively hilarious.

I also want her to have my new student email address and all the other things that are really important to me. It feels like a loss not to get her input before my classes, and I have to remember that I set all this in motion with my own inability to cope with Aada’s lie. I crossed a line that saved me and hurt her. I was so sick over it I checked into a psych ward just to make sure I wouldn’t do anything irrational, because that much weight was on my head. I watched the Scottish play on repeat for a while. Thank you to David Tennant for making me feel slightly better about my situation; I assure you that I could not feel worse.

The object of the game is to metabolize her hurt because I am also dealing with my own. I do not want complete individualism, I want compromise. I do not want competition; I want good communication. I want everything everyone wants after a relationship has had a major fracture… the ability to move on because the problem has been repaired. We have not simply reset. Pretending that nothing is wrong is the root of all evil, because pain compounds behind your back.

I do not entertain people that hurt me and instead of working things out, just decide to disappear and then come back two years later with “hey.” That is because when I express the same hurt from two years ago that they noped out on, it’s “you’re throwing things back in my face” and “why can’t you just move on?” I’m sorry- why can’t you see that you have no standing with me if you can just hurt me and blow past me like that? Why should I give you the time of day if my feelings are that unimportant to you?

My feelings go here because you have to type in the address or click a link to be here. No one is forcing you to care about them, you have to make an effort. Many people do.

So on the advice of my beautiful girl, I’m never going to stop. If she thinks it’s important that I don’t, then it is. But my writing will change as I move forward at University of Maryland. I’ll be discussing what’s going on in my classes because my audience is already intelligence community (IC). But here is how my audience differs from the image of IC overall…. the future is female.

But I will still flip them shit and call them the “cloak and dagger boys” anyway. Making those jokes is dealing with reality, the black humor needed to survive the stories coming out of Langley. Trigon took his own life less than two months before I was born, so I am deeply interested in The Cold War and continuing Jonna and Tony Mendez’ mission to tell the story of intelligence as it is.

And that story vibrates with pain.

“Never fall in love with your asset.”

Marti didn’t know.

Tony did.

Tony was wrecked when Trigon was made and Marti was arrested. But here is where Marti is actually a success story. She was Trigon’s contact for seven years before the KGB made her, and because she was female, she got to come home. It is a miracle that we even know Marti’s name.

So now I have a lineage and tradition to my writing, the kind that I used to have in jazz and have migrated worlds. Falling in love happens when you least expect it, but the way you cope is by leaning on the systems that brought you up. Jazz, intelligence, and theology are the main drivers of my creative engine. It’s not focusing on the ache I feel that Aada won’t be with me on the beach. It’s focusing on being Dr. Lanagan, so that when we walk on the beach I’m someone she wants to know.