Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrong-doing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.

This was originally a Facebook picture sent to me by Bryn, saying that it would make a good writing prompt. I agreed with her, and told her I’d give her my take on it.

I disagree with this statement wholeheartedly, because sometimes the bad behavior is not resolved without sitting in it. Knowing it. Seeing all sides to all stories. Ruminating on everything that’s gone wrong and what you could have done to make it go right. I think that you cannot move forward without exorcising your past, and to box up those feelings of remorse is to repeat them regardless of your good intentions.

Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. Cliche and true…. as in, there’s a reason it’s a cliche.

I agree with the self-improvement part, that you should work toward wholeness, but it doesn’t come without a period of mourning, because most of the time, when you behave badly, it strains or ends a relationship altogether. Because where would the conflict be if you were only hurting yourself? Most people aren’t even aware of self-sabotage, but they for damn sure recognize when they’ve hurt others, because the reaction is not limited to internal turmoil.

I also think that in the present society, people package emotions the same way they clean up when guests are arriving in five minutes and they haven’t had time to clean all week… just stuffing everything into cabinets and closets and forgetting the mess is even there. And then, two years later, another guest needs to use the linen closet and opens it, unaware of the bale of hay that’s going to be dumped on them when the door arcs backward.

Diving into the wreck is the same idea as Marie Kondo’s The Magic of Tidying Up. When you clean up your house, it should be all in one go because there has to be a dramatic change in your attitude- that if it is nice, you’ll want to keep it that way… and that only cleaning small messes at a time will keep you from relapsing, because you’ll never want to go back to the way you’ve lived before.

Does that play to your emotions at all?

Not everything you do is going to need that amount of cleanup, because once you’ve excavated your inner demons, you won’t want to go back to living the way you did, which I’m sure is this person’s point of view. But you cannot acknowledge your own inner angel if you do not acknowledge your own inner asshole.

Some people do relapse, because we are all human and fallible and messy and divine at the same time. Our range of emotions is not small, and very few people are willing to spend time with it. How you feel on the inside radiates to your circle of influence, and if you treat yourself like crap, you’ll treat others that way, too… another selling point in not berating yourself, but at the same time, how do you get out of the muck if you’re not willing to tell yourself the truth? How do you even know what to repent for? How do you know what amends you need to make? How do you deal with the sometimes inevitable truth that amends don’t mean shit? I mean, you’ll feel better, but they might not.

Sometimes the deep, dark recesses of our minds need to be explored. You can’t grow flowers without tending the muck to begin with.

To me, the quote above makes everything too simple, because it doesn’t address how you’re supposed to address the task of behaving better next time… the process and hard work it takes to break a cycle that may have lasted for years. Promise does not come without pain.

In the bulb, there is a flower.
In the seed, an apple tree.
Unrevealed, a hidden promise
butterflies will soon be free.
In the cold and snow of winter
there’s a spring that waits to be.
Unrevealed, until its season
Something God alone can see.

Natalie Sleeth

One year ago today, I was running late.

I know this because today in the “memories” section of Facebook, I was behind in getting to the Supreme Court to be with the people on both sides of the opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges as arguments took place, the case which would establish marriage equality. It was an interesting day, because an antigay protester got under my skin and told me he’d beat the gay out of any of his children. Having been bashed myself, I can tell you that physical violence has not once caused me to stop loving women. When I realized that I needed to fold and walk away because nothing was going to be accomplished, he told me it was just like an angry dyke to run. In actuality, I was running because I wasn’t as big as he was and I wanted to punch him in the face, and physical violence wouldn’t have changed his mind, either. However, there would have been many years’ worth of anger behind that punch. If Jesus really did die for all our sins, I would like to believe his was one of them and that Jesus would have chosen to eat with me, just like he ate with lepers and prostitutes and all of the other margins of society. I don’t remember the part in the Bible where he got together with the Pharisees and Sadduccees just for drinks.

I was also really interested in keeping me from being the story, or getting arrested at what seemed like a party just for me on the other side of the equation.

And no one likes a party more than me… when I’m in the mood for it, anyway, and the marriage equality side was full of rainbow banners and overflowing love. I needed that overflowing love, having shown up to a marriage equality party and going through a divorce. It was a moment where I wanted/needed Dana in the worst way, because it was a party I wanted to share with her. Going without her seemed like showing up with a missing limb. Reality hit me like a car accident that day.

I am still waiting for the day when the dissolution of our domestic partnership arrives, and I hope the Nassers are home when it does. I dream that Dana is procrastinating (she wanted to handle it) because she doesn’t want to get divorced, and that is not reality, just a dream, but it’s comforting nonetheless.

I am still lost, hurt, and somewhat angry that this happened, and I am not putting any of it on her. I choose to believe that my own actions are mostly responsible, and I carry that weight. It was her choice to make it a physical fight, but at the same time, our divorce wasn’t really contingent on it. She made the choice to betray me, but even that is small in the light of what happened over the next two years. I choose to believe that after that fight, I saw her differently and took my own actions to grieve and move away emotionally so that eventually I’d have enough strength to really leave and not look back. Of course, that is over many months of reflection, and not what it felt like in the moment.

It took two years for our relationship to really dissolve, even though in the fight where she betrayed me, I told her she had enough money to do what she wanted. To go back to Virginia or whatever it was she wanted to do. Instead, we resolved that issue, or I thought we did, but in retrospect it just allowed me to wander further and further away from her, because if I didn’t trust her ability to hold a secret before, I really didn’t then. And I wasn’t even that angry that she blabbed it, just that she went back on our agreement while I wasn’t there to see it happen, or to change our agreement beforehand.

Falling in love with the idea of Argo was just a shitty catalyst for comfort as I moved into the world not knowing what to do. I was reading my old entries and realized all over again the truth of the matter… that Argo the character was way different than the real person and that in some sense, I’d fallen in love with my words about her rather than the person she actually was to me.

Because I really do love her, but not like that… because once I’d had that epiphany, I couldn’t go back. I did in words to get her to retreat, but my shitty commentary was as much real as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny all rolled into one.

I also learned the difference between really forgiving someone and not letting it go on both sides of the equation, and why I believe that this parting of the ways will stick with both Dana and Argo because I forgive what happened now, but I won’t forget it. Argo didn’t deserve what she was handed to by me, and I don’t think I deserved what she handed to me, either. We were both lost and afraid for very different reasons, because the way our relationship started was not the way it ended and oh God. What have I done?

A few days ago, I went to the beginning of our conversations with each other. Just re-felt everything and bathed myself in the light of it so that I could forgive both of us, for real instead of holding on to everything that’s been done… because I truly don’t believe that we left anything undone. I feel that we each did the very best we could to hurt each other so that neither one of us can say that further interaction is necessary.

I am still somewhat paranoid that we will accidentally run into each other, but that is fairly impossible as I don’t even cross the Potomac anymore. Everything I needed to see or do is done, with the exception of picking up and dropping off my parents at the airport and taking my mom to Mt. Vernon. I am comforted by the fact that I might not even recognize her, anyway, but her face is burned into my brain and I talk to her in my head all the time because I am determined not to talk to her in any other way.

But it’s not because I don’t love her. I just love me more, and I want to stop my own heart from bleeding out in pain. I had a lot of dreams that died when we hurt each other, and I doubt I’ll ever forgive myself for it. I can forgive her, but forgiving myself will take a lifetime.

The line I wrote yesterday about how “if the bark is big enough, I never have to use the bite” and “words bite” have stayed with me and run like a freight train all night long. It has started the tape rolling of my entire life, my relationships with everyone, and just how deep the rabbit hole goes in terms of the times I haven’t been able to walk away from a fight because I’d get so angry I couldn’t exhale. Years ago, I was filling out one of those ridiculous blog memes that are all the rage, and one of the questions was “how do you release anger?” Tongue in cheek, I answered, “you’re supposed to release it?” Now I’m not sure that was very funny.

I am one of those people that when I’m angry, you really don’t want to fight with me, but at the same time, I believe I also have the world’s longest fuse… apparently the exception to that being when I’m typing. I am much harder to rattle in person, using humor as a reflex because I don’t like confrontation and I’d rather joke my way out of it than just have a fight. I thought the way I popped off at Dana’s parents was in the moment, and last night realized that fight had been building for over a decade. It took me ten years to finally tell Dana’s parents what I thought of their treatment of her, and how that affected me as the best friend/daughter-in-law that they wouldn’t recognize as such. White-hot anger that had built from a single match overflowed, and I would have been dead before I let them “win.” However, I didn’t win a thing. Just cemented in my wife and her parents that my anger was dangerous in their world of using the buttons on their clothes to hold in their feelings.

In a way, though, I’m really glad it happened, because sometimes anger is exactly what needs to happen to get bullies to back down. They may never want to speak to me again, but they for damn sure started treating Dana better, and since that was the whole point of my anger, anyway, I suppose its purpose was served even as I was pushed out of family pictures. What it doesn’t serve is being able to reconcile, because I doubt that I would ever truly be accepted again by any of them. I spent our entire relationship worried (not without cause) that they thought I was a deadbeat, that I’d never make anything of myself, and when Dana said that, too, I didn’t know if that was her reality or theirs that she was parroting and I didn’t want to stay around to find out.

Dana minimized my writing, and if getting retweeted by Margaret Cho wasn’t impressive enough, I don’t know what would have been… I guess I need to start working on a novel that will win the Pullitzer Prize or something. But I hate writing fiction. I will get out a first chapter and realize there are plot holes all over and give up, because I’m not sure I’m wired for it. Lindsay is begging to know what will happen to Sarah Silverman, and honestly, I was thinking about her in the car yesterday, wondering what she was up to and if there was a storyline waiting to emerge. The only thing I know for sure is that Sarah is straight, because I don’t want her story to be about coming out, a reflection of me at that age. I want Sarah to be her own girl.

I love young adult fiction, and have never stopped reading it. For instance, I think I’ve read Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet at least 25 times, and that is not an exaggeration. I also read The Giver and Number the Stars by Lois Lowry frequently. Perhaps I don’t need to work on a Pullitzer, but a Caldecott or Newberry. I’ve never been unimpressed by reading a novel with that stamp.

But the entire point of this entry is that words bite, and the ones that say I’ll never amount to anything took a chunk out of my soul, and I am doing everything I can to refute that statement. Getting away from Dana & her parents’ shitty observations were the first step. The second is trying to meet people who’ve already accomplished great things as inspiration to keep going. The third is finding people who are interested in what I’m doing and who I am… relationships that aren’t tinted by the “you’ll never amount to anything” lens.

I would like to thank my glasses for that, because once I started to see differently, I began to see differently. I remember Dana saying that they made me look so hot that I was going to leave her, and that was the least of my worries… although now that I am beginning to start thinking about dating someone else in a dreamy, faraway sort of sense, it doesn’t hurt.

I am more than the sum of my parts, and am unwilling to let those words bite anymore. Those words that reinforced my belief that I was worthless, or at least, unworthwhile. I move into the future knowing that at heart, I am a good person with lots of potential, and the things done to me in the past to make me capable of such fight will melt over the years as I get further from the enormity of realizing that I was emotionally abused and now I’m an adult that needs to grow the fuck up and stop acting like an arrested teenager in an adult’s body. It was the key that unlocked every door to me, because I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. I knew something was, but I couldn’t put my finger on it, and when I did, the dam broke. Anger spilled forth at people who never deserved it, or at least, even if the words were true didn’t need to come out that way.

Because my words bite just as much as everyone else’s.

 

 

Woke up this mornin’ with my mind stayed on what it means to move into the future. Eighty times a day, I find things that I want to tell Argo and Dana. And all of those eighty times, I have to remind myself not to do it. I could, but it wouldn’t hurt anyone but me. Sending a letter into the ether with no chance of reply is something I just don’t want anymore, especially when I might get a reply that is just damaging and not fruitful. I am all about the fruitful these days. I would rather focus on the friends that will reply, that will give feedback, that will love me despite all my enormous flaws and failures… thinking that I am smart, kind, funny, etc. All of the things that I am that don’t send me to a negative place. I have to watch how I feel about myself, because most of the time it renders me incapable of seeing myself for who I really am, and when that happens, I don’t even want to get out of bed. I don’t want to let how others see me become the way I see myself. It hurts to contemplate, and I don’t want to do it anymore.

When I do, I fail to see how successful I am, how this move was great for me (or at least, it is *now*), and the fact that I am truly dedicated to self-improvement one day at a time… mostly by putting my feelings here so I don’t have to carry them around with me all day long. It’s like, “I’ve thought about that already. I don’t need to think about it again.” There are some mind worms that won’t go away, but they will as I get further and further away from them.

I am only a year and change out in terms of an enormously damaging divorce and a friend who made this move all about her, even though it was completely unnecessary and caused me to believe I was this horrible person for coming here, when in reality, all I wanted to do was change my life. It was my dad who said, “do you really want to remain in Houston?” And no, I sure the hell didn’t. I couldn’t create an emotional boundary with Dana to save my life, so I wanted a physical one until I could cope with the enormity of loss. She was my world, in the very best sense of the word… and it is only now that I can picture a future without her.

A lot of puzzle pieces had to come together for the move back to DC, and I am grateful for them. It was my idea to move to DC in the first place, and I never should have left. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking except that I wanted to get away from Kathleen, not the city itself. And, in truth, September 11th scared the everliving hell out of me, and that went into leaving as well. I remember the pictures rattling on my wall just as clearly as I can see the coffee cup in front of me right now. I remember ExxonMobil getting a bomb threat a few days later, wondering if Kathleen was ever going to come home again.

It was out of fear that I left. Fear of Kathleen, fear of terrorists, fear that I really didn’t have many friends outside of Kat and therefore, a very poor support system. I wonder all the time if terrorists are going to hit DC again, but at the same time, I’ve lived enough not to be scared of it. I have to trust that intelligence and the military are doing their jobs, and just like then, they”ll start the fighter jets flying over my house every ten minutes should something actually happen. Better to be in the place with the fighter jets than no fighter jets at all.

And as I have said before, I wanted to go back to a setting I knew. I wasn’t just going to take off for Minneapolis and hope for the best… the exception to that being that there’s a great seminary there and I would have found a way to be happy in the way that I always do… by being malleable enough to accept the circumstances around me and just go with the flow. I would not have been unhappy moving to a place I didn’t know, but I did want to feel secure in a setting where I felt comfortable.

When Argo absolutely flipped her shit, it was when I was just looking for a job here, and I told her that wherever I got a job was wherever I was going to move and WHAT IS YOUR DEAL? The city was big enough for both of us to move in the world without crossing paths, and because I’ve never seen her in real life, I doubt I’d recognize her, anyway. I internalized her flip out and I felt about thisbig, even though nothing that she said was reality. So I ended up coming to DC just about as broken as a person can be, and it was through the grace of God that I ended up at the Nasser’s, who loved me until I could stand on my own.

My family has visited me since I’ve been here, and that’s really helped. My cousin Nathan lives here as well, and that was another factor in deciding to move here as opposed to anyone else. He’s a psychiatrist, so I figured he could help me get set up with services in Virginia, but as it turns out, Maryland was the much better choice, although I didn’t know that until I got here. Nathan and I talked about Montgomery County services, and I realized I had hit the jackpot.

I only wanted as much contact with Argo as she wanted with me, which at that point was none and I was okay with that… which should have said “calm the fuck down.” But it didn’t, because the way I’d pushed her away in the past said to her that I was dangerous… when anyone who really knows me knows that I am way too meek and mild to want to cause anyone fear… plus, I’m little. She could take me. 😛 However, how she feels is how she feels. Period. She can believe whatever she wants, but it doesn’t mean that I have to participate…. anymore.

The point is that I was going to move here with or without her support, but what she thought of me resonated hardcore… and now I’m really quite tired. I said some things that were absolutely beyond the pale, and I greatly underestimated how much words could hurt… on my end, as well. For every crappy e-mail I sent, I got one in reply. Why I kept reaching out is beyond me… probably because I didn’t want to end in enmity and anger, and wanted to keep making it right. But then another fight would start, and I’d start apologizing all over again. We’d just gutter snipe each other into the ground, and I can’t believe I was willing to do that to myself for this long. I feel like I should have known there was nothing I could do and to leave well enough alone. In a lot of ways, I feel so stupid. Not for moving, though. For not being able to just walk away. We can play each other like violins by now, knowing just what button to push to get the desired reaction… mostly on my end, because I have trouble walking away from a fight. There have been a lot of times that a fight has started over one line in a page of words. I’d write a page intending to be thoughtful and truthful, but if one line came across as negative, it would escalate. My fight-or-flight reflex is so entrenched that I’d just lose it and pop off, because I haven’t really gotten the “flight” part through my head.

It’s trauma and self-preservation all rolled into one… stuff I haven’t dealt with that needs to go away but I’m just not there yet. I learned that in this last go-round, because every single time Argo starts in with her stalker shit I get so angry that I can’t even breathe, because if there’s anything I hate, it’s injustice. I might be a judgmental dickhead, but that’s about it. I have a huge bark and no bite… because if the bark is loud enough, you never have to use the bite… or so I thought.

Because words bite. I should know that by now, and I do know it logically. In the moment, though, it’s quite different. Cortisol and sin race through my body in trying to survive… because that’s how deep I feel threat… not by Argo. By anyone. Anywhere.

Words bite.

Yesterday Scales and I met at Starbucks after I got out of church, and then went to breakfast at a little pub in Dupont Circle, where we were planning our “tourist day.” I said in an earlier e-mail that I’d like to go anywhere, as long as we were incredibly naive about it. We were going to go to the Newseum, but we didn’t have quite enough time, so we went to see the actual Star Spangled Banner and the first lady gowns before we went back to Starbucks. I don’t normally have a two tea a day habit, but the Royal English Breakfast is everything. Everything.

We are both going through situations that are still “extremely loud and incredibly close,” and it was nice to have some pal-ing around time. I was telling her that I was caught between someday wanting to date, and my standards being so incredibly high that I thought I’d never meet anyone… I mean, why does she think I picked her, even as a friend? She’s passed five bars. FIVE. With a 170 on her LSAT, and you only need 163 to get into Mensa. I couldn’t do that at gunpoint. Thus, my belief in “kick my ass” smart is intact. Plus, she used to work in medicine/insurance, which gives us a lot to talk about as well.

I kidded her that I was just glad a blonde got through law school… and was there a lot of Wite-Out on her screen?

God, we have so much fun, because even the moments where we’re broken, at least we’re broken together. It’s great to have *that* friend. I am hoping that we are each encouraging the other to be better people, because that’s the best you can hope for in a friendship.

I certainly feel better, especially about myself now that it’s not being drilled into my head that I’m not some creepy stalker. The truth is that the things I did were to get Argo to go away, not any closer. I couldn’t bring myself to break her third grade BFF heart again, or mine, so I just acted like a jackass, taking the shortest path I knew to her thinking I wasn’t worth her time. It was my passive-aggressive way of not wanting time with her anymore, because I misguidedly thought that if I pushed her away, I could come back to Dana a few months later, Argo free and healed from the wounds I’d left. That wasn’t reality, either, because every time I had good news, she was the one I wanted to tell. Every time I had bad news, she was the one I wanted to tell. Even with a virtual friendship, every minute that we were fighting and away from each other was pure torture, mostly because I know I was the aggressor, the one that deserved punishment.

I just beat myself into a bloody pulp. When I first got here, I barely left the house, as if she would somehow know if I did. I hid from the world because that’s what I thought I deserved, self-inflicted house arrest. I went overboard, and I know it, because the more I sat there, the more I had time to ruminate and get even more situationally depressed about the situation rather than making room for other good things to enter my life. It is only now that I allow myself happiness, however fleeting, because sometimes there are days when I just cannot even… leaving Dana out of this because even though I am situationally depressed about that, too, I am more at peace with Dana than I am with Argo. Why? Because I wanted out of that relationship, and I didn’t want out of this one. As much as I may say that I don’t want her in my life, know that I am lying through my teeth and hoping one day I’ll believe it.

Because at this point, I don’t have a choice. I want to stop the fights, the tears, the dysfunctional relationship that didn’t start out that way, but devolved into it over time. She waffles between “say what you want” and “shut it down.” I am taking the “say what you want” side of her face, because without saying what I want, I don’t release the thunderstorm that leaves me walking through life wet and cold without allowing myself to change into dry clothes.

I need space to figure this shit out. What I want out of life and what I don’t. What I believe I deserve and what is reality and what’s not… when I’ve punished myself enough and it’s just time to get on with it.

It’s amazing how much of each other’s souls we saw, considering that there was never a third dimension of our relationship. I cannot speculate on what would have happened had there been, but what I do know is that there have been days where I wanted it and days where I didn’t… scared to branch out on my own regardless of what she thought about the matter. If we’d made plans to get together, it would have been a combination of OH MY GOD I LOVE YOU EVEN MORE IN PERSON and I THINK I’M GOING TO THROW UP… nervous to the point of exhaustion.

But what I do know is that there are days in which I wonder what it would have been like to be able to give her a hug, because what I do know from pictures is that her body seems warm, and her hugs would be memorable… if only for the chance to say thank you. I am grateful for this life experience, no matter how it ended. The roller coaster has come into the station, and it’s time to leave the park.

And on that note, I’m off.

I thought that it would be easy just to come home and write about the game, but it’s not. There are so many things I need to process. The short of it is that we shut them out 3-0, but there’s more to it than that. So many shots on goal, so many moments where the crowd was to their feet. The game was disappointing in some ways, great in others. I’ll write more about it later, but it seemed like they were playing very lazily until we hit minute 81. I want a game where it is wrestling it out for all 90 minutes, every player giving 110 percent. I also like it when the entire game is 0-0 because both teams just Will. Not. Give. and it comes down to penalty kicks. I said that to the kid behind me, and he said, “nuh unh. It’s overtime and THEN penalty kicks.” I laughed and said, “you’re RIGHT.”

There’s more little anecdotes like that, but I’ll save them until I’ve had some time to think about what I want to say in depth, especially since this could be for DC United’s blog as well. I asked the new member team how people get press passes, and they said they didn’t know, but they’d find out. I don’t know if bloggers are allowed, but they are in some markets, and it doesn’t hurt to ask.

It’s also hard to believe that I’ve gone this long without contacting Argo, because like I’ve said before, usually what happens is that within a few days of each fight, we’re back in contact making up. But I realized that this time, the “make up text” must come from her, because I’ve had enough of feeling like I’m imposing on her life. You talk to the people you want to talk to, you make time for the people you need as much as they need you. I am walking away not because I don’t want her in my life, it’s that the relationship has lost its equilibrium and I’m not going to beg…. again. 😛

It’s hard to care and not care all at the same time. I am not waiting for anything, just trying to process the past as I know it, which is enormous unto itself without further need of contact. That’s the part I really care about- comforting myself, self-soothing until this feels like a part of my life that has passed, but not for the worst.

I’m sitting in my seat, watching warm-ups about 50 yards from the net. DC United is closer to me, and they’ve changed all their numbers to “96.” I am both pleased and annoyed by this, because I don’t know anyone’s real number. It’s my first game, but no matter. The speakers overhead are very, very loud. I will be able to hear each player’s every move. They just announced that designated drivers get free soda. All of the sudden I am very interested in finding some drunk people. Diet Pepsi is five bucks a pop, no pun intended, but it works.

I broke down and bought a jersey for myself, because I wear a boys’ large and they were half as much as the adult sizes. I look *amazing,* and I know it. I got the home jersey, which is black, and I am wearing pants in a color that Dockers call “Fog.” I also bought a slouch hat, because it’s supposed to rain and the hat I was wearing was blue. It drives me crazy to clash, and with soccer, it’s all about the outfit. My hat is red, and it wasn’t any more expensive than it would have been at any other store, and I know that just because it’s red, I’ll wear it all the time. The last red baseball cap I had, I wore out. Literally wore it into the ground, because it was a pun. My linux distribution of choice was Red Hat, and it had Tux on the front. Plus, my wardrobe is almost entirely red, white, and blue. I look like a walking advertisement for DC most of the time… not intentionally, it just is. I have become somewhat of a preppy hipster, with my Dockers and Chuck Taylors and fitted Oxfords.

Damn it. I just realized I’m wearing brown shoes. Well, so much for “the outfit.” I should have worn my Gazelles, because they’re green and black, and so is my first-timer bracelet. I think I’m going to keep it on until it falls off. It’s one of those adjustable wristbands like you get at an amusement park, that paper/fabric hybrid that’s all the rage. I find it odd that it’s green, but the DC United logo is repeated all the way around.

The forwards are taking turns kicking toward the net, and if this is any indication, we’re in trouble. 😛 One kicked a ball so high over the crossbar that it almost landed in the upper deck…. which are painted in Redskins colors.

They’re playing 90s music overhead, and Cake’s The Distance is blaring.

Wait. The anouncements just started. We’ll talk later. I just want to soak this up, every moment of it.

In my jersey. With brown shoes.

Tomorrow I am going to the thing I have nicknamed my “20th high school reunion,” because DC United is going to be celebrating its 20th year at RFK, also my senior year at Clements and thus, my introduction to soccer when I dated Meag, the much-lauded goalie for the Rangers. I am going by myself, because I realized that if I invited someone, I would be interested in whether they were having a good time, and talking instead of observing. In this case, I just can’t care. This is a story that needs to be written, and I will write in my head the entire time. I might even take my iPad and Bluetooth keyboard so that I can jot notes that won’t get lost and crumpled in the bottom of my backpack. For not knowing a lot about sports, I actually am a decent sports writer, because I focus on little details that others don’t pick up. For instance, the last time I wrote about soccer, it was seeing Canada shut out China in a friendly at PGE park in Portland. I wrote about the discipline of the warm-up, and how different they were. Canada was all over the place, and China was rigid rows of windmills the entire time. In high school, it was my dream to see Meag play for Canada, because that was her dream as well. She was tapped for the Olympic development program, but a combination of a bad coach that treated her like crap her freshman year of college and a right good case of Osgood-Slaughter’s disease (eight surgeries on her knees before she was out of grade 12) grounded her. I could never remember “Osgood-Slaughter,” so I always told her she had “Oscar Schindler’s disease.” But I was a rabid Rangers fan, even cutting school (like most of us) to go to regionals in Katy. There was only one time that I absolutely lost my shit at one of her games, and that was because a forward kicked her, HARD, after she’d caught the ball and the whistle had blown. I ran down the stairs of the stadium and jumped over the rail onto the sideline as she laid there in pain. This was when we weren’t “out” as a couple, and I am sure that I confused the hell out of a lot of people, including her mother, as to why I was so broken in that moment. I also remember that she was thumbing through her yearbook and saw a photo of herself on the pitch in front of the net, and she said something about how the placement of her foot was going to shoot the ball in the wrong direction and I was AMAZED that she could tell the direction of the ball just based on the way her leg looked. It gave me a lifelong passion for the game, and 1996 was a banner year, especially for the two teams I’m seeing tomorrow. We’re playing the New England Revolution, home of whom I call “the original flying tomato,” Alexi Lalas. If any of the players from that year are at the game, you’ll be able to hear me screaming from wherever you are. I PROMISE. I seriously picked this game over the others because I don’t care who wins. Although since the tickets are cheap, I may look at the schedule and see if either the Dynamo or the Timbers are a home game. In that case, I will stick out in either my Houston scarf or Portland scarf and Timbers jersey ensemble.

Plus, since I am a first-time ticket buyer, I am getting a tour of the stadium before the game, even getting to go out onto the pitch. I seriously can’t wait, and it’s going to be a long day just because of it.

The man that called me about the pre-game tour, Ryan, told me to send the piece to him once I was finished, so it’s possible it might get legs on their blog as well. I’ll keep you “posted.”

Tomorrow is just for kicks.

See what I did there?

For Tom Shaw S.S.J.E. (1945-2014)

Where has this cold come from?
“It comes from the death of your friend.”

Will I always, from now on, be this cold?
“No, it will diminish. But always
it will be with you.”

What is the reason for it?
“Wasn’t your friendship always as beautiful
as a flame?”

-Mary Oliver, Felicity

Last night, I went to Scales’ house, where we had a great time eating and watching Doctor Who. Then, we walked over to Kramerbooks/Afterwords and spent some time browsing. I picked up a lot of books, but put them back down because most of them were really heavy and I have a Kindle for that very reason. I found a book on the Korean War by David Halberstam that was easily over a thousand pages… and I still almost bought it because the front cover brought tears to my eyes that did not fall. The cover said something about “David Halberstam’s last gift to the world.” Anyone who knows me well would know that when David was alive, I literally would have followed him into the ocean. My first Halberstam was “The Best and the Brightest,” recommended to me my freshman year in college by my 101 government instructor. I ended up writing a paper on McGeorge Bundy for the class, not knowing that my friend Steve’s dad is mentioned in it and at the time, Steve was alive and I could have written a better one.

My second Halberstam was “The Fifties,” where I cried so hard that I thought the people at Barnes & Noble were going to ask me to leave. It starts in a classroom, with Diane digging her fingernails into her desk, willing the bell not to ring, because she knows that after the bell, it will be time to go to Woolworth’s for the sit-in.

I have read nearly everything he’s put to paper, and it crushed me when he was going to an interview with someone for his next book on football and was killed instantly in a car accident.

Because there were tears in my eyes, I walked to another section and noticed that Mary Oliver had written an anthology of love poems, and I was thumbing through it when the one quoted gutted me like an axe in light of my present situation… that both of the women I have loved with blue-flame intensity find me too hard to love in return… or at least, that’s how it feels… that the price of my friendship and my fidelity are both too high.

No contact with either of them has been the styptic pencil to stop the bleeding and start the scabbing-over process, but there will always be two scars. Nearly 20 years ago, I had choir practice on Thursday nights, and I made the fatal mistake of coming home before the end of ER, Kathleen’s dire obsession. She loved that show. It was real and it was deep. I forgot my keys and couldn’t let myself in the door, and Kathleen wouldn’t get up to let me in until a commercial. In retrospect, maybe we shouldn’t have gotten married… but that is neither here nor there. What is important is that while she was watching, I was wandering around in our front yard in the dark and I tripped over a tree stump, splintered at the top in a thousand pieces. I was cut and scraped pretty bad on both shins, and again, it’s almost 20 years later and I remember that story every time I shave my legs, because the razor has a hard time fitting into the narrow trenches left behind.

And interestingly enough, the episode of Doctor Who that we’d watched earlier in the evening is where The Doctor and Clara travel to Trenzalore, where he is buried. He is not in a human body, but a rotating helix of energy, and he says that they are the scars of traveling through time.

Time itself does not heal wounds. It just moves them further down the z-axis so that they are far enough away that you can look at the land mines without standing in the blast radius. They become the emotional scars of traveling through time. And my legs aren’t so much scarred as is my mind. How did I let a woman who thought a TV show was more important than I was have so much power over me? Why didn’t I just keep knocking until she relented? Why didn’t I call a friend who would have said, “this is bullshit.” It would have at least helped me to feel validated in a moment where I felt utterly discarded.

I don’t feel discarded by either Dana or Argo. I feel that I have proven to them the worst side of me, the one that was waiting to get out and exorcised like a demon. The problem comes in when I think that is all they think of me, when I have proven to both of them over the years that it simply isn’t true. Especially with Dana, there were far more years of goodness than there ever were of strife, or perhaps I was just unaware of it because Dana tends to keep her cards close to her chest where no one can see them. I wish I had been more patient, more kind to Dana, because she felt like her feelings were always going to be invalidated and it wasn’t worth talking to me at all… when I never felt that was true, because even if I disagreed with her, that didn’t mean I wasn’t listening, wasn’t taking in her words, wouldn’t come back to her and say, “I’ve thought about it, and you were right.” Because of course the post-mortem took way longer than the disagreement itself, even if we’d come to a resolution.

It was the same with Argo. I had to learn to listen, really listen, but we were both so justice-oriented and convinced we were right that neither of us would fold until we’d had some time and space to think about it. Our inner eight-year-olds were attractive, because I think we would have made just as much headway with repeating “nunh UNH!” to each other as the words that were actually said. No fight was just a fight. It was mutually assured destruction in a race to be even more right than the other one. I think it’s one of the reasons I love her so much. She was the first person to actually stand up to me and call me on my bullshit and 9 times out of 10, she was correct. It gave me a lot to chew on, and laugh about. I write often about the day she called me a “judgmental dickhead” and no sound came out, I was laughing so hard… tears and snot running down my face because I knew it was Truth.™

And because that’s how she knows me, that’s how she treats me, regardless of all the therapy I’ve had to learn to listen and communicate, so of course when she pushes my old buttons, I just regress into my inner eight-year-old because those patterns are entrenched now… regardless of how much peace has been established since the last time I did something she didn’t like.

I mourn the future as much as I mourn the past, because I moved here when we were fighting and I didn’t have a lot of hope that it would resolve… but when it did, I began to have dreams of an actual pizza night, someday taking the woman I was interested in to meet her because I knew she’d tell me the truth about whether I’d found someone amazing or an equally judgmental dickhead and we’d kill each other inside of six months. I dreamed of meeting the man that would make her heart beat faster, the ending to her fairy tale as well. I dreamed of our friendship making us better women than we were the day before. Mostly, I dreamed of context… the thing that would lift her off of the page because people who care about each other on the ground have completely different reactions to each other than people who have virtual friendships. I dreamed of learning and teaching over and over our lives, the tumble and roll of easy give-and-take… the way it was before we started emotionally bombing each other… Hiroshima and Nagasaki in black and white.

All of those dreams died in an instant as I read that poem, stunned into silence. I was going to go home and crawl into bed sobbing, but I knew I that I had the power to direct my own emotions, so I grabbed Scales and said, “is it time for chocolate?” We got in line for Afterwords and grabbed a table, where I ordered the “dysfunctional family sundae.” When I ordered, I said, “I want the dysfunctional family sundae, as long as it doesn’t come with an *actual* dysfunctional family. And if it does, could I have it ON THE SIDE.” And then I proceeded to eat nearly the whole thing, until the theobromine kicked in.

THEN I went home, crawled into bed, and slept like a baby.

4/20 is an international weed holiday, thanks to 420 being the California penal code for consuming marijuana. It got its start from a group of kids at a San Rafael high school called the “Waldos,” who decided that 4:20 was the acceptable time of day to start smoking. “School let out at 3:00, but some of us had after-school activities.” They were called the “Waldos” because they hung out by a wall (brilliant).

Marijuana being legal is a mixed bag for me, because while I am liberal on decriminalization, I am not a huge fan of walking through the Metro station in a cloud of smoke I can’t get away from because hey jackass, it’s a fucking tunnel. Vaping. Look into it.

When people want to smoke with me, I generally look at them and say, “I’m almost 40…” Kind of like when my friend Karen made fun of me at Starbucks by saying “flavored coffee is for young people.” But, as Cher Horowitz pointed out in Clueless, “it is one thing to strike up a doobie and get laced at parties, but quite another to be fried all day.” So I can’t say that over my lifetime in DC that it will *never* happen, but what I do know is that when I think of pot smokers, I think of people in their 20s who have time to burn (as it were). I got shit to do.

It’s not like I’ve never tried it before, but it’s way more annoying to your senses if you aren’t smoking it yourself… cloying to the point of nausea, which is ironic because the first truly medical use of marijuana was to relieve nausea and lack of appetite in cancer patients. And actually, one of the reasons I think it should be legal recreationally is that I have a hard time wrapping my brain around any doctor saying, “you know what would be good for that? Train Wreck. If it gets worse, we can bump you up to Pineapple Express.” I also like the idea of being able to go to a store and buy it, as opposed to meeting up with a dealer that probably bought from a cartel, unless you live in Oregon, where it was either grown in town or in Humboldt County, CA.

I think it finally started making sense to legalize pot when they realized they could destroy the cartels much easier if “we” just started growing it in-house. Plus, for the Portlanders in the crowd, how else are you going to make sure it’s organic, fair trade, and only grown a few miles from you to cut down on carbon emissions? 😛

The first time I smoked pot, I was 26 years old. My friends still tell that story… that Matt handed me a broken lighter and I set my acrylic fingernails on fire. It did nothing for me except years of teasing, because that’s the kind of thing that would only happen to me. I would say now that I would much rather smoke than drink, because I am almost 40. Between acid reflux and not being able to bounce back from a hangover after two martinis, pot’s just better all the way around.

However, I don’t really do either. I’ll have a drink now and again, but most of the time I am happy to be completely sober, because it makes my medications work so much better. Plus, I am just as much of a daredevil/ham sober as I am on any substance.

Auna: Are you drunk?
Leslie: No. I’m just like this.
Auna: ……..

So while everyone else is celebrating, I’ll be at Scales’ house, eating dinner and then walking to Kramerbooks/Afterwords.

Because I’m almost 40.

This morning,the Facebook status that made me laugh was, “Dana Bamberger Lanagan is going to KILL me when she wakes up.” It was a joke, and I wish I could remember what it was about. I did say that there would be sushi penance later, but it could have been anything from rearranging the furniture to something I posted on Facebook. I’ll never know, and that’s ok. It was great for a laugh.

It’s interesting how much she makes me laugh every day even though she’s not here, thanks to the Memories section. It’s like little morsels of remembrance, especially since I moved here almost a year to the day. In fact, I think tomorrow is my “anniversary.” It’s had its ups and downs, but for the most part, very positive. I am not glad that it took me such a long time to find a job, but I am glad that I had the time to make every appointment, both psychiatry and psychology, and that I had a chance to recover from most of the grief I felt from the divorce and continue my journey into wholeness. It didn’t take all at once, and still creeps up every day, but it is not the fustercluck it was when I first got here.

The best I was hoping for was a kitchen job, and the fact that my CEO took a chance on me is something I will never forget. They’d combed my blog and my Facebook page and they wanted me ANYWAY. In fact, that was one of the things that drew the company to me, that I was capable of crafting words and coming up with good ideas.

I am also learning SQL in leaps and bounds. I started a Virtual Machine with Ubuntu installed so I could learn to use a LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL Python) stack, and install my own local version of WordPress, because that’s the backbone of our web site. I also use PHPMyAdmin to add databases and manage them, which makes my life a whole lot easier for those of you in the audience that actually knows what that means to me. I don’t have a static IP, so I run everything on localhost, which works out nicely because I don’t want to work on a production machine. I have done that before, and it is like walking on a tightrope across Niagra falls without a net or a balance bar.

And then afterwards, I come home and get some rest for the next day, so I’m fresh. Last night, I watched Star Trek: Into Darkness, and I thought it was awesome, although you should have seen my face when Mickey (Doctor Who) and Sherlock appeared onscreen. Also worth it for the Leonard Nimoy cameo.

Plus, Zachary Quinto. Seriously.

I really thought Kirk had had it and we were about to get a new captain, but I should have known. Chris Pine is too much of a box office draw for them to get rid of him that quickly.

Tomorrow is dinner at Scales’ house, and SO EXCITED. I would give up a little extra sleep for that. I cannot underestimate how good I feel when I am with her, because it is a solid move toward getting away from the past and making room for whatever the future holds. I am still not ready for anything more than friendship with anyone, and so this is not a pick up chicksth sort of situation. But it *is* the best thing that has happened in a long time in terms of my self-worth. Having that person who is my go-to e-mail and phone call and visiting person is amazing in and of itself. It gives me confidence one day at a time that I am worthy of more than the depression I feel at everything that has gone on for the past several weeks (years?).

I miss Argo and Dana more than words can say, in that order only because of the alphabet, because it’s hard to say which one has meant more to me over the course of the divorce and aftermath. Of course Dana wins at being a spectacular wife, but once that relationship broke down, it was Argo who helped pick me up, even though we’d spent a majority of the time fighting and we reached out to each other despite it. It’s how I know that our connection transcended the bullshit we levied toward each other in the moment and she was willing to get in the weeds with me, something I won’t forget even as I let go.

There are so many things that I won’t let go. I can let go of future contact, but I will not give up my memories, especially the amazing ones. I have a lot to be grateful for, more than I can say grace over, and those are the things I will take with me…. just like Dana and the way she makes me laugh instead of cry on a daily basis.

I don’t want to focus on unpleasantness, because the way to wholeness for me is not processing all of the negative feelings I have toward both of them, but the amazing laughter and intimacy we shared, which Harville Hendrix rightly called “into me see.” Intimacy with a friend is different than intimacy with a wife, but they both meant the world to me, and not something worthy of putting away. I just don’t want to feel sad anymore. I want to feel all the joy they brought into my life as I move forward, because it is fuel.

When I think of bad memories, it puts me on the floor. When I think of good memories, I imbue myself with a sense of peace. Things will never be the same, but perhaps that is for the best. If I cannot get either of them to see who I really am, there is no point in trying.

I should have moved on with Argo long ago, but it took me until now to really be able to process it…. what it would mean to me to lose her. It’s enormous. Simply enormous. In a way, it hurts more than losing Dana, because of the two relationships, at the time I thought mine with Argo was the healthier of the two, fights and all, because we are both so justice-oriented that I thought we were well-matched in terms of our mutual fuckedupedness. And in the end, it blew us apart rather than bringing us closer together. Even if we never met on the ground, I would have loved to be that person she could count on, because sometimes letters carry just as much weight as hugs and an arm around your shoulder when you’re depressed.

Not meeting on the ground is its own baggage, but there’s no way it would have happened without an enormous amount of work that I’m not sure she wanted to do. I proved myself to be a right jackass, and that’s the image that stuck, when in the beginning, I was the one with great insights and I will never forget the day I lost that weight in her heart.

But perhaps I never did, given that when I reached out honestly, she’d come back around. I just didn’t realize how much it was hurting me to do so, because inevitably we’d go back to fighting and it would just rip me apart all over again.

I finally had enough, and enough to call it good and start to bless and release the relationship into the ether. However, I did not want to go out with anger, so I sent her a letter saying all the things I’d learned from her over the years, and how much she meant to me.

And if that is all there ever is, I appreciate the fact that we were once friends who could open up to each other, even though it was painful and real. You don’t get that with many people, and perhaps our opening up to each other was what caused the rift in the first place, because we could only handle “into-me-see” up and to a point.

It’s ok. I understand.

It’s been 13 days of no contact with Argo, and it gets easier with each passing night. I have decided that I am not dark and twisty, I am adorkable, something I couldn’t see when the thing that was being reinforced for me is that I was some kind of dark and twisty stalker, which I never was to begin with, but it made a great story. We both e-mailed each other really shitty things that neither one of us could have said had there not been a wall between us that led us to see each other as Internet trolls and not real people with real feelings. There are so many things that I wish we could have talked about face-to-face rather than trying to pick up what the other was saying over mere black and white text. I went way overboard trying to push her away, and it is something that I’ll have to live with, because mentally ill people have a habit of needing love and support and asking for it in the most inappropriate of ways. We turned on each other, rather than learning to take care of each other, and I have said this before and will continue to say it until it finally clicks in my brain… that so much of this strife was caused by not being able to see real tears, real emotions, real anything. For instance, there have been times I have cried like a wounded animal, alligator tears because of everything I have done and left undone. I would give anything to put back together something that will not go. So, no contact is best for me, because I feel like I got shafted. I was moving forward in leaps and bounds, and it only took one conversation to undo it all and I was put back in that big ball of anxiety that no one has ever had the ability to create in me. People cannot “make” me do anything, but that was my reaction…. to crawl into a hole of depression and wish like hell that I hadn’t been so damn independent. That I’d done more to consider her feelings at a time when I really, really should’ve.

But there are things that you only see in retrospect that you do not see in the moment, and this was one of those times. Thoughtlessness does not equal dark and twisty, but had I taken the time to realize that it might come across that way, I would have found other ways to grieve…. other ways to process that didn’t include discomfort on the part of others. I am normally one of those people that considers everyone else’s feelings first, putting others ahead of my own needs, and in not doing so this time, I really stepped in it without even knowing what I was doing.

Going exploring was not meant to hurt anyone, and knowing I did hurts me. But I cannot ignore the fact that when I came clean, honestly and truly, it wasn’t enough, and it never would be. I don’t want friends in my life who constantly harp on my bad side without recognizing the good, and it took that huge of a recognition to realize it…. that I don’t feel happy when Argo comes down on me, that I don’t feel happy when I regress into the person she wants me to be, because I do get angry at being mis-identified and it only takes a few words of dripping sarcasm and condescension to make me go to that place. Being pinned inaccurately is the easiest way to tap into my feelings of injustice, and once that happens, I cannot release myself from anger easily. I pop off without regard to others’ feelings, especially when I have already taken them into consideration and it does no good whatsoever. I couldn’t apologize for something I didn’t think was wrong. Period. But I apologized over and over for not taking her feelings into consideration, and I thought that was the whole point entirely. I recognized how she felt, but it wasn’t enough.

I struggle with the concept of “enough.” Both when I feel I haven’t done it, and when I’ve had it. How long was my past going to be held over my head? How long would it take to be recognized as a friend instead of a foe? How long would it take for both of us to just fucking relax? How long would it take until others’ words meant just as much to me as hers did? I feel like this year was a lesson in “enough,” because I expressed my feelings of unhappiness and all I really got back was “have a nice life.” It wasn’t the response I expected, but it wasn’t out of character, given the fact that when I’ve tried to be vulnerable, I’ve gotten RPGs designed to hurt, and they do…. immensely.

I don’t move on easily or quickly, and all of these feelings are swirling within me as I try to piece together how shoots of green came apart in one day flat. And then I decided that whatever impressions she had of me were ones that took place over a medium that only projects seven percent of a person at best, and the other 93 were going to be lost to history. I had to regain my sense of confidence that I was funny, lovable, and the last person who’d ever want to hurt someone else when I am feeling well and healthy.

I was not feeling well and healthy, and as far as I can tell, she was pretty emotionally crispy herself. The right thing to do would have been to have coffee and cry it out, but I am not invited to that, and I’m ok with it. I have had enough of trying to glean information that would help me on my journey with her as opposed to the “you’re a shitty person” bandwagon that has been held over my head. I have this feeling inside that if we’d ever met, none of this would have happened, because there wouldn’t have been this wall between us in the first place. There wouldn’t have been this anonymity that allowed both of us to freak out at people we didn’t know, but thought we did. Reading people is not the same as seeing them, truly seeing them for who they are.

Argo said something about it not being a good idea to go by her house just to see it, and I said honestly that I would never want to do that to myself. Not having that relationship where I could knock on the door and say, “let’s go for a beer” would emotionally wreck me even more than I’ve already allowed myself. I feel that I have proven over and over that I do not want any more of a relationship with her than I already have without it being mutually agreed upon, and those words haven’t sunk in, even though they are God’s honest truth.

But I can’t make Argo feel anything, just like she can’t make me feel anything, ether. My responses are my own choices, just as hers belong to her. My response now is nothing. I wouldn’t hurt a fly, much less someone I care about as much as I care about her. Getting angry and popping off like an Internet troll is just one of the many services I offer, but it doesn’t come without a huge amount of regret and deep sadness at the way I behaved. I pushed her away, my heart broken at my own hand, and I accept it wholeheartedly. But what I do not accept is that being angry is the only part there is to me.

We both hurt each other, deeply, and I don’t think I recognized how much.

Making new friends that see all of me is important, because they see that 100 percent… taking in that I am sad and grieving and hilarious all at the same time. Because grief is hilarious if you let it.

I am just not willing to open myself up for more. I promised Argo that I would always be an open and loving heart for her, but it was up to her to use it…. that I didn’t feel like I had the right to ask for anything, and I wouldn’t. But there is no hope in that statement, because I know what she thinks of me, and I know what I think of her, and they don’t match… and perhaps never will.

I promised that I would keep working on my hot buttons, so that if they got pressed, I wouldn’t react in the same way. But that is my work to do without her, because again, you cannot own that you need no contact and then go back across the river for comfort…. because it won’t be. It will be more button-pushing to get me to go away, and of that, I am sure. It will be more grief and rage and silence at good things and johnny-on-the-spot with e-mail if I’ve done something wrong. Even being nice to her is fraught with the possibility that I’m still wrong.

I can’t live like that anymore, and I won’t. I care, deeply so, but not enough to put myself in that kind of harm’s way. I divide myself in two and talk to her based on the tapestry of words we’ve already said, going back two or three years to avoid pain altogether. I miss her hilarity, and I miss the days when checking in meant real conversation and not idle chitchat, although that was fun as well.

But what I do know is that it’s time to stop wrecking myself.

It’s been 13 days.

Siri, set the timer for one hour.

Ok, Leslie. I will… and the suspense is killing me.

I got home around 11:30 last night after going for a pedicure and dinner with Scales. We talked for four solid hours, and it was amazing. In terms of the polish, I couldn’t decide on a color, so I picked out black with red glitter and said, does this look like DC United to you? And like that, we were off…

Which is why I was so surprised when a propos of nothing, my eyes popped open at 5:59. I was out the door and at SBUX by 7:10, had my coffee by 7:24 (took me a few minutes to set up the app) and set my timer for an hour so I could get lost in my writing and not forget to go to work. I have given up on Starbucks cards. They generally get lost in my car, my room, etc. So much easier to log onto the web site and add them to my phone. Plus, SBUX is now cheaper than 7-Eleven, because the price of the coffee is about the same and with the number of rewards I have, I get free refills (not that I should use them… at least I don’t have an office mate to watch me spazz out all day). I was going to get some tea, but the bold pick today was too amazing to ignore… Cafe Verona… yum. Plus, I have Stash™; at the office in both Earl Grey and English Breakfast should I need to spazz out again this afternoon. Starbucks sells Teavana,™ but it’s more expensive and to my mind, just not as good. But perhaps it is not the tea itself, but the package that comes with the tea. Stash is a Portland company, and when I drink it, it’s the equivalent of going back in time. Sometimes I wish Dana & I had never left, but at the time, it made the most sense. You have to have a Master’s to teach in Oregon, where in Texas, it’s just a simple exam if you already have a Bachelor’s.

Plus, living in the city of Houston, it’s very possible that Dana would have been placed in a school where we could be out… not true 20 years ago, but certainly a possibility now. Of course I wanted her to teach at HSPVA. Of course I did. Her BA is in technical theatre, and not only that, I think she would have been one of the most popular history/geography/senior English teachers in the history of the entire school. This is because senior English is all Brit Lit, all the time, and Dana has an encyclopedic knowledge of Shakespeare and Rain Man when it comes to geography and history…. where as MY geography knowledge is limited to They Might Be Giants.

Of course, because schools need math teachers so much more, I think she would have been excellent at that, too. I was the creative diva basketcase while Dana’s brain works on a more logical axiom…. which is why I think she could also be a six figure programmer in no time if that’s something she wanted to take on. But it’s not my job to think about Dana’s future anymore. I just want the best for her, and I believe that’s how I know I’m really getting over it. Seeing her happy no matter what she does is important to me, without the weight of the past. It’s been long enough that I forget how bad it got and focus on how good. There will never be another Dana, and the sooner I recognize that, the easier it will be for me to think about accepting someone else.

But right now, I don’t want anyone else. I want her… in all her flaws, failures, successes, and hilarity. I have always thought of Argo as a completely separate compartment than Dana, and they never overlapped. They fed different parts of my brain, and the thought that I was on my way out the door because I loved Argo’s brain was laughable. The lesson for me in all of this was learning to love someone’s brain without thinking that translated into needing to be with them to enjoy it.

Dana used to say that Argo was an X-factor, that if I was capable of falling in love with her brain, I was capable of falling in love with someone else’s, and that person might actually be a lesbian and it wouldn’t be so easy to crush out and stay married. I personally thought that was bullshit, because I know what threat looks like. I recognize it. If Argo had been bi-identified, I would have run from her like a house on fire from Day One (also my favorite track on John Tesh Live at Red Rocks [shut it]). Argo being so incredibly heterosexual allowed me to feel all giggly inside like a teenager, an injection of dopamine that just made me feel good without all the messiness of shit getting real. There was no one that could make me blush easier, no one that could get under my skin with her words the way she could, for both evil and for awesome (thanks, Strongbad). But I felt that if my feelings for Argo stayed in the Argo box, I was perfectly capable of having enough love inside me for both of them, because as those giggly feelings faded, philia took over and eros got stronger with my wife, the one it was supposed to go to in the first place. However, I could never convince Dana of that, and perhaps that was a throwback to our past memories. I will never know, and that’s ok, but perhaps being married and falling for her best friend back in the day convinced her that’s what was going to happen in this case… that it didn’t matter what Argo’s orientation was, that our relationship was so tight that gender and sexuality didn’t matter anymore. But of course they did. OF COURSE THEY DID. I am a huge personality in a tiny body, but I have never once been able to “turn someone gay.” It doesn’t work like that, although I did make the joke back in the day that I didn’t think you could catch homosexuality from Gmail and Facebook Messenger, but you might want to check your license agreement. Shit happens when you don’t read the fine print.

In retrospect, I wish Dana and I had moved to DC at the same time, even as broken as we were, living apart so that we could make our own friends and still see each other every once in a while… but that is my bag, not hers, because she found what she was looking for in Houston and I, put quite simply, did not. Plus, I didn’t want to be a Houston-based writer. I wanted to be a DC-based writer. Too much to write about with too little time… although I don’t want to write about politics. I want to write about the city. Everyone focuses on Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court. But how many people focus on what it’s like to really live here? Muriel Bowser (mayor of DC) and Eleanor Holmes Norton (shadow Congresswoman) are doing the best they fucking can with a garbage dump of a situation. The founding brothers never really intended for people to live here, and it shows. Though DC is becoming more and more gentrified over time, the reality is that there are tourist areas and ghettos right next to each other, with the middle class only now emerging… and the upper end of middle class at that, because very few people can afford to live in the city proper. When Kathleen and I were looking for an apartment, the best we could find is a tiny box for $2,000/month, and that was 15 years ago… although if we’d had enough money to buy a house in a shitty neighborhood, we’d be rich by now. Again, gentrification is happening. Columbia Heights has been completely overhauled in the time that I’ve been away, as has the SW waterfront.

My favorite house that I saw was on the Potomac River, close to the marina on the NoVA side, and it was only $880,000. We didn’t have that kind of money, but I assure you that was cheap for its location, and now it’s worth over $2 million. We ended up in a small townhome community in the city of Alexandria, behind Landmark Mall for those who are familiar. The rent was reasonable, and we had all the amenities inside the house, like a washer and dryer in the kitchen so we didn’t have to schlep our clothes to a Horn & Hardart. But like I said, that was 15 years ago…. that same townhome complex probably charges twice what we paid then.

I am glad that I went the group house Craig’s List route, because I do not do well living alone, and my rent is less that $800 all bills paid, including cable and high-speed Internet. Now that I have a middle class job, it is allowing me to put away more money than I could ever save if I had a place of my own.

Plus, Sam, who still calls me “Mark.”

For those of us just joining us, a few months after I moved in, I got a “Share a Coke with Mark” Coke bottle at 7-Eleven and joked that now I only needed Luke, John, and Matthew. That was almost a year ago, and “Mark” has stuck.

One of my favorite stories about Sam is that her family took her back to Lebanon to see where Hayat grew up, and she and her sister tried to find the actual “Jesus tree.” If only there was photographic evidence. One of these days, I want to make it over as well, especially if Beirut calms down. In fact, I want to explore all of the Middle East, but I have to do it in a certain order, because the rules about traveling between Muslim countries and Israel are frightening. I also want to go to Turkey, the site of the original Mt. Tabor, and swim in the ocean at Antalya, thanks to the pictures my friend Brian and George posted of it.

Travel is at the top of my list in terms of interests, but in muslim countries, I swear to God I would wear a burka the whole time. I’m a lesbian and I look like it. I don’t want to take a chance that it could be used against me, and a burka allows me to watch people without being noticed, important as a writer. The place I want to see the most is the mountains of Afghanistan, thanks to The Kite Runner. I also want to see JoBurg and go to a Springboks game and perhaps try to find a way to meet Desmond Tutu. And oh my God, what if I went at the exact time the Springboks were playing the All Blacks?

Bliss.

And on that note, my timer is done and I have to leave. See you on the flip side. 🙂

I ran across this graphic on Facebook today and tears came to my eyes. These past few weeks have been a shitstorm of enormous proportion, and when I am alone, it’s all I can think of, especially when I close my eyes. I have medication that helps me to sleep soundly, but one of them gives me extremely vivid dreams, and the other makes it where I don’t dream at all, but the hangover is extreme. And the thing is, the one that’s got the worst hangover is not the one that helps me stay asleep, but the one that is supposed to help me fall asleep and then wear off. With either one, I keep a bottle of caffeine pills (200mg) on the other side of the bed and take it when my alarm goes off at 0600. I then hit the snooze button once or twice, and by then, I am ready to jump out of bed and get shit handled. For instance, this morning I got in the bathtub and shaved my legs, got dressed, and then went to CVS for an eyeglass repair kit and fixed my own glasses. I shaved my legs because Scales and I are getting together tonight, which may or may not include a pedicure. I’m not sure I can get to a nail place before it closes, but if I can, I am definitely interested. I am wearing my black Airwalk flip-flops today, which I love because they are so warm. I could practically wear them in any weather because the pads soak up my body heat so easily. I used to have a brown pair as well, but I lost them in the move…. somewhere. Trying to decide what color polish I want, because I will probably be wearing the same flip-flops to the DC United game. Maybe one set in black and the other in red. If they can airbrush, I want black with soccer balls. Meag would be so proud. I also want a DC United jersey, but that will have to wait, because I don’t want a fake one from Target. It’s something I’ve wanted to buy for myself since I was in high school, because at that time, the Houston Dynamo didn’t exist, and DC was the closest team to me. I am dyed in black, white, and red…. and have been since 1995. I also want a National Team jersey, but yet another thing that will have to wait. I have to get glasses, first, or else I won’t be able to see the game properly. 😛

Fixing my glasses was a new thing for me. I’ve never had to before, but I can’t get an eye appointment until Saturday morning. I would just order glasses from Warby Parker or Zenni, but my prescription is one month out of date, and doesn’t have my PD on it.The measurements have to be exact, because otherwise, the prisms won’t work. I also have to have small glasses, because again, the prisms can’t be too far down. I used to have two pairs of glasses, but the other pair was plastic and they didn’t last long. I also need prescription sunglasses, because I don’t want to drive without my glasses on…. it at least gives me a fighting chance. I did get a pair of regular sunglasses because they generally dilate your pupils for an eye appointment, and it was recommended that I bring some. I asked Scales if she could drive me, and if she can’t, then I’ll ask Sam. I’d just rather spend time with Scales. I am not underestimating the gift of her friendship, which came along at the perfect time. We’re very much alike and very different at the same time, which makes for great and long conversations about everything from relationships to what’s going on in the world. We’ve decided on taking turns hanging out in each others respective areas, and it’s my turn to go to her. Excited to see where she lives, because setting means a lot to me. Remember, Virgo. Earth sign, tied to the land & all the settings that come alive in front of me. It’s one of the reasons I was excited to see Dana’s apartment before I left, because then even if I was sitting in my room in DC, I could still picture where she was.

We only talked a few times after I moved… too painful for both of us.

And in terms of setting, it was a large part of the reason I moved to DC. I didn’t want to go anywhere I didn’t know. It’s taken me some time to figure out Maryland and DC, because I am literally ON the line between them. But if I had moved to NoVA, I wouldn’t have gotten nearly as much help as I needed, because Montgomery County has a fabulous mental health safety net, and Medicaid made everything free, except for my medications, which were a dollar a bottle. Getting private insurance made my health care more expensive, which I am not happy about, but I don’t qualify for Medicaid anymore, anyway. I make way too much, and I am passionate about reserving Medicaid for people who really don’t have the means to pay. Although if we go the single-payer route and Medicaid is opened up to everyone, it would make me extraordinarily happy. I am quite content at my job, but for those who aren’t, it releases you from the “golden handcuffs” that keep you in a job you hate because you’ll lose your insurance if you quit… and COBRA is just prohibitively expensive.

I just found out that my PCP doesn’t take my insurance anymore, and it makes me so sad, because I didn’t have to make an appointment to see him. I could just walk in and wait if I got there before 3:00. I hope that I can find something like it that does take my insurance, because it made getting medication refills so much easier, especially since they have Saturday morning hours.

I also need to make the time to see a massage therapist, because as a computer geek, it’s one of the few things that really makes me feel better after a long week of sitting in a chair that’s almost comfortable. I am also getting to the point where I need carpal tunnel surgery on both wrists, but that will have to wait until I can accrue enough vacation to be able to do it. Realistically, I need a week for each wrist, because I remember when Dana went through it, and though she was better in a few days, she couldn’t get back to the repetitive nature of her job right away.

Which reminds me of another funny story. They only do one wrist at a time so that you can still do things like wipe your ass. As the surgeon said, “I’m not doing both wrists at the same time for Dana. I’m not doing both wrists at the same time for you.” Additionally, he used a blue marker to indicate which wrist he was doing that day, and I can’t remember who said it, but one of us said, “he should have used a black marker. Black is slimming.” When we repeated it to the surgeon, he laughed… and as I remember, I think it was one of the few things he laughed at during the ordeal. Some surgeons are just not built for humor.

Scales just got back to me and she’s on for Saturday. W00t!

This whole having a friend thing is working out. It’s really allowing me to focus on my future and stop beating the crap out of myself. Especially for single people, friendships are life-sustaining, and Tinder has been excellent for that. I met Auna that way, too, and we are still friends to this day. I miss her all the time, but she is just a phone call away, one of the few people I will talk to on the phone because her personality is just too big for text. She reminds me of a t-shirt that my friend Jala used to wear all the time……. DANGER: EDUCATED BLACK WOMAN AHEAD.

I really like that Tinder allows me to meet people. Not chat with them over the Internet, but actually have a cup of coffee and see if it’s a friendship I want to continue. I think that my relationship with Dana really made the impression on me that skipping the friendship part and dating right away is taking away an essential piece of a relationship.

Thank you for that, Triple D (Darling Dangerous Dana). It’s just one of the things I learned from you that really stuck, along with a thousand other things, but this one is at the top of the list.

But right now, I am not charting the path toward dating with anyone. I can’t. It’s just too much. I feel that I am still too broken, that I am still one of “those girls” who can’t stop talking about their ex, but not in a bad way, ever. Just that the funny stories I’ve had over the years mostly include her.

And although I put my feelings for Argo away long ago, there is a part of me that needs to process that friendship all the way through, as well. Every lesbian on earth has that story of falling for their straight friend, and having to get over it by themselves, because it’s not the straight person’s fault they’re just not wired that way. I don’t have to deal with those “in love” feelings, but I do have to dig deep and figure out how it happened and why in order to move on completely…. why our relationship became so bipolar at my own hand, and how to avoid something like that ever happening again.

I decided long ago that Argo was the last one. The last friendship in which I would ever deal with Eros, because it wasn’t real. It was a byproduct of “the way I was raised.” As real as it felt at the time, it was an illusion of enormous proportions.

But God’s honest truth is that I do love her. Not in any kind of shady way, but the kind that is ever-present Philia and Agape rolled into one. I may never get the chance to express it, because I have done enough to kill hers for me. And that’s part of processing all this loss, as well. For a long time, she was my person in the Grey’s Anatomy sense of the phrase… and I would like to think that in that place and time, I was hers.

But that was then, and this is now. Regret has no place in the present, because all it does is drag me down deep into the recesses of myself, hiding from the rest of the world in grief and shame. I don’t have time for it anymore, because there are too many things I miss when I am that blue.

I am looking for things that help me to feel happy despite my grief. But that grief is my journey to take now, without either Dana or Argo looking over my shoulder, judging the process. It’s just going to take time not to feel so empty, and things like getting together with friends are the best medicine, because it’s the thing that really allows me to laugh. I should also start exercising to get my endorphins up, but one thing at a time. The first step is to feel good enough about myself to realize I deserve it. I don’t need to lose weight, but since I’ve been in the morass of grief, my muscle mass is dwindling to nothing and I can’t run up a small flight of stairs without getting winded. It’s probably from not eating, but I’m not there yet, either. I eat when I feel good, and when I don’t, food is the last thing on my mind. You’d think I’d have enough energy with all the caffeine to multi-task… you know, eating and thinking at the same time.

Well, not so much. I drink everything in sight (non-alcoholic, right now a Coke Zero and a cup of tea), but that’s really all I can manage. I need some Carnation Instant Breakfast or something. I’ll buy a case tomorrow. That should help. Much better than walking around the grocery store close to tears because I can’t find anything that looks good.

Again, I just need time. How much, I don’t know. But I do know that as long as I keep putting in the work toward wholeness, I will reap the rewards. Surely it can’t get any worse (famous last words).

Paraphrasing Dorothy Parker, this hasn’t just been terrible. This has been fancy terrible, with raisins in it.

I just have to have faith that things will continue to get better as I branch out into the world instead of hiding from it.

Amen.

The quote from Dana that I’ve been waiting for arrived in my memories this morning. It made me happy to an enormous degree, because like I said yesterday, there is something precious about going back far enough that the divorce fades and just how funny we were together takes its place. All of our conversations in the humorous vein are tennis matches, and if there’s anything I miss about our relationship more than anything else, it’s that. Dana picked up all the parts of the conversation I forgot, or corrected me when I didn’t get a line just perfectly. I regret not taking more pictures. I regret staying home too much and not creating fantastic memories, because they say that money can’t buy you happiness, but it can if you spend it on the right things, experiences over objects. Most of the time, we were broke because either I didn’t have a job or she didn’t, but in the moments where we were doing really well, we didn’t take advantage of our middle-classness… and how I wish that we could bum around DC, because nearly everything is free.

Perhaps that will come in time, after we’ve had enough life experiences apart from each other that the pain of divorce will ease. I desperately miss being married to her, and getting away from her was the right thing entirely… but that doesn’t ease the fact that it was almost always amazing while it lasted. I don’t want to get back together, but in time, I’d like to be comfortable with friendship again. I’m not right now. You can’t grieve someone and go to them for comfort. You can’t cross a river and look back, wondering if the other person is still behind you. In the days after our divorce, when we were still living together, it was a mistake to try and roll back into our friendship immediately, because I couldn’t do it. We’d have an intimate moment (friendship-wise), and either my heart or my ovaries would explode. In retrospect, I am glad that we did not have children or buy a house or any of the things that would have made our separation all the more difficult.

I am still on the fence about having kids, and I have never once doubted that Dana would have been an awesome co-parent. But at this point in my life, at almost 39, the pool of women available to date have kids of their own, and I wonder if I’d make a good step-parent. It’s also not inconceivable that I could get pregnant (see what I did there) if I met someone, but going to the OB/GYN with Dana wrecked me, because our doctor said (when I was 35) that it would be considered a geriatric pregnancy. Now, while that may be a medical term, emotionally it made me feel 80 years old. And, of course, that was before I discovered all the ways I was truly mentally ill, having gone through teen drama/trauma and wondering if I’d be a good parent…. although I do have excellent role models for the task. My mother and father already have grandchildren of their own due to remarrying, but I cannot imagine how thrilled they would be if I did find the right family structure and I did decide to conceive. My sister and Matt have already decided that they don’t want children, and not only that, their last name isn’t Lanagan. I worry that I am the end of the line sometimes, and though it doesn’t weigh heavily, it is a thought that crosses my mind.

Though my possible future step-kids wouldn’t have the same last name as me, having kids who live with me (even if only part-time) would definitely be fun. It’s something to think about as I start to dip my toe in the dating world, because now that it’s been a year since the divorce, I have decided that I am not ready to date unless that person comes along that I simply cannot ignore; there’s a spark that’s not worth denying. My favorite plan is that it won’t happen for at least another year, but it doesn’t work that way. Life is what happens when you’re making other plans. I didn’t write it, but it’s no less true.

I also wouldn’t mind dating someone older than me, with the decision of children already made. That’s what on-the-fence really means to me… that the direction of my life will, in some ways, not belong to me, because it is a shared vision instead of a solo endeavor. There is also the looming question in my mind of whether I want the life I had as a child for either my own children or my steps, should I ever have them. Being a preacher’s kid is tough, moving a lot and having all sets of eyes on you all the time. Your family is your refuge. At the same time, I do not want to sacrifice the dream of being ordained and starting a church plant, so I have to wait for that person who will seriously consider those things with me, and in the best sense, not mind.

My dream for St. James is that it is on a river, with a huge parking lot on one side and a deck that leads down to the water on the other. That way, people have the option to choose how they’d like themselves or their children to be baptized. Don’t think that O Brother, Where Art Thou? didn’t go into that decision. 😛

I haven’t started fundraising as much as I’d like, but I am constantly “paying myself” by putting away savings, because in order to finish at University of Houston, I’m going to need money…. and then I’m going to need more money to finish at Howard.I would like to do all of this without graduating with a mountain of debt, but there are programs for that, especially for people who intend to enrich their own communities with non-profits. One of the local Congressmen has even suggested a program that will erase school debt by entering civil service. I dig it.

In my own mind, it is never too late to get my shit together, and getting the divorce and moving to DC was the first step in doing so. It is an exordium of enormous proportions. As I bless and release the past, I am making room for the future. It’s so big it needs a room of its own. It’s time to be the visionary my personality type dictates, instead of hoping that everything will come together with a knock on my door.

Nothing worth having comes without an enormous amount of work, and this is no exception. Jesus and I have the same personality type, given his extraordinary visionary qualities and the scene in which he loses his shit at the money-changers in front of the temple. I love the snarky quote, “in thinking about What Would Jesus Do?, remember that getting angry and flipping over tables is a viable option.” I don’t know who came up with it, but it makes me laugh every single time. You know how in the Bible, there are little descriptions of what you’re about to read? It would please me to no end if that particular scene was changed to “Jesus Loses His Shit.”

I personally think he’d get a kick out of it. Remember that he was a common man raised up into divinity, which means that there was nothing that the people around him did that he didn’t do himself. He was a joiner… a community organizer… and got people to follow him not because he was preaching from a place of judgment, but a place of, “I’m just like everyone else.”

In the end, not so much. And for that, I am grateful. I take all of him. His humanness, his divinity, his holy authority, and the lens he provides for me to look at the world.

In a country where laws are being passed that would affect me directly as a lesbian, I only have to look at Jesus to know how wrong they are. It is a table-flipping moment, and I applaud those who are doing just that.

Amen.