I’m on autopilot today as I go through the motions of working. Since I work in IT, that is all that is really required of me, because IT does not require soul… which is good, because mine is broken and bleeding. People talk all the time about their hearts being broken; this feels like much more than that. All of my internalized homophobia triggers are being set off at once.. all of the things that tell me it is dangerous to hold hands in public, that a kiss could have me beaten… that hiding in the world is better than not.

I haven’t truly felt this way since 7th grade. It’s too late now, of course. Everybody and their dog knows by now that I love women… all of them. Straight, bi, gay, MTF… it doesn’t matter. If you were picking lesbians out of a lineup, I’m betting I’d be first. But there is nothing more that I want today than to be able to crawl back into the closet and stay there, akin to being afraid of the monsters under my bed.

No, the attack didn’t happen in DC, and I have found that DC is one of The Gayest Places on Earth.™ It doesn’t erase my fear, though. I was born in the late 70’s, came out in the early ’90s, and all of that goes into the perspective I have on how safe it is to be “out…” There were “kids” in that club born after all the hell I went through, never thinking that something like this could happen to them. It was just last year that marriage equality was announced by the Supreme Court, and I cannot help but think that it made everything worse for the moment. Not five to 10 years from now, but in this very moment, when bigots are mad it happened at all and “gay Jim Crow” is dying a slow and painful death. If you’ve been keeping up with Twitter, you’ll know that I feel doubly safe that I got out of the South just in time… because yes, Maryland is under the Mason-Dixon line, but there is a palpable difference when you cross the line from Northern Virginia into DC and up into my small but mighty blue state.

Though originally I wanted to move back to NoVA, just because I was familiar with it, knew how to get around, etc., I cannot believe the opportunity that fell into my lap. Because even though NoVA has extraordinarily blue pockets, laws are controlled by “St. Bob’s country,” a nickname for all the people still bitter that the South lost the “War of Northern Aggression.” People who still believe that the war was all about “states’ rights” as if there was more than one they were fighting for than the ability to own people.

I would like to say that things are different now, but there’s just a new group of people to oppress, especially now that the federal government has become involved and the South has no choice anymore. I can’t help but think that this lack of choice is fueling the fire, one that will eventually turn to ash, but will not show signs of it anytime soon.

If it seems like this post is coming from a hopeless place, you’re right.

There aren’t monsters under my bed, there are monsters in my country. The good news in all of this is that if ISIS really does take responsibility for this bombing, there will be military, DIA, and CIA all over their asses…. as if they aren’t already. As Fred Rogers famously said, “in tragedy, look for the helpers.” As a progressive Christian, two ideas run through my head simultaneously.

The first is “kill them all. That’s just how I roll.” The second is “how can I become more loving, more forgiving, more Christ-like in a mess where he would be outraged as well?” In case you were wondering, prety sure that this is a table-flipping whips and chains situation. I know that my Christ-like side will win, but like everyone else, I am allowed my human moments of disgust and hatred as I work through my timeline of grief, because part of it is “it could have been me.” BUT I CANNOT LET DARKNESS WIN. There is too much of it in the world already.

Moreover, I will forgive the shooter, not because it changes anything but me. Right now, all I can muster is pity. Whether this was homophobia or terrorism or both, it does not matter. Sick minds are sick minds, no matter from whence they come. Mental illness has beget mental illness as the news reports more than one person saying “we brought this on ourselves.” That the problem is not a terrorist but Godless heathens who wallow in sin. Wasn’t it the “Lt. Guv” of Texas who said, “you reap what you sow? That God cannot be mocked?” He has since deleted the Tweet, but the damage has been done. Screenshots were taken. That tattoo will follow him forever, if there is truly justice in the world.

Because what I know for sure is that God is not the Actor in this situation…. and God never has been. Even in the Old Testament, which is full of stories of vengeance, the prophet Jeremiah writes, for I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Even in the Old Testament, there is a promise theology that is meant for gay and straight Christians alike.

If you are wondering where God is in all the tragedy, look no further than “the helpers.”

Amen.

Father, Mother, Creator God…

We are here in an intentional way. Our hearts are heavy and our minds are full of what might have been. Fifty people were killed in an Orlando night club, and the grief is overwhelming. What kind of brilliance was lost in that attack? What kind of creative energy? What kind of art, music, design has been silenced? What kind of scientific discoveries?

What kind of mind justified killing 50 people? And yet, even in our anger, we know you are with him, too.

In the news it is reported that it was a gay night club, but I do not dare think that all 50 people dead are gay. It is Pride Month, the time when all of our allies across the queer spectrum gather in support of our need to celebrate our escape from our past… and as we have learned that the past isn’t over, just like you led your children out of Egypt, please deliver us from this distress.

Remind us, O God, that you were there from the first moment that drag queens started throwing bottles at the police, trying to escape their brutality at Stonewall. Remind us that you were there with every epithet and punch thrown from then until now. Remind us that you are there with the victims’ families in Orlando today.

Remind us, O God, that you are the Responder.

You are where we go to scream and cry out our frustrations, our want to take out vengeance on the shooter, and our feelings that our justice has been denied because the shooter is dead. Our inability to wrap our minds over how this could have happened in the first place.

Take our lips and speak with them, take our minds and think with them, take our hearts and heal them… because it is such a human thing to feel all of these emotions swirling, even the ones that say revenge is right and good. Please wrap your arms around the Muslim community in Orlando, for you are not only our God, but their Allah as well. Help us to know that faithful Muslims and terrorists are not the same thing, and to know that their community is hurting as well, frightened with the possibility of retaliation.

Revenge is human, but not divine, and that is where our days go into nights… Nights that ask us to see more of ourselves than rage, even when we think we cannot get past it. Days that ask us to be Christ in the world, just as you have asked. Ones that ask just how our community is supposed to respond, rather than the knee-jerk reactions that grab our souls and try to hold on.

Please be with Barack Obama today as he speaks to the nation, because he has already said so many times over that he is tired of having to give this speech…. the one talking about national gun violence and how it keeps happening over and over and over and over and over…. this one now being the largest massacre to date.

Watch over the hospital as 50 more people are treated for their physical wounds, and stay with them as their post-traumatic stress gets in the way of living their lives, for this will not pass easily or quickly in the minds of the hurt and the helpless lookers-on.

Watch over our community as we resurrect ourselves.

In Jesus’ name,

Amen.

Write injuries in sand, kindnesses in marble.
-French Proverb

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by carelessness.
Hanlon’s Razor

Dear Argo,

I told you to change the channel long ago, and I doubt you’ll ever get this. But it is a letter that needs to go into the pensieve, not so that you remember it, so that I do. I learned this week that anxiety doesn’t always look like a panic attack, but flashes of rage. I cannot help but think that this is true. When you hit all my buttons, anxiety does not present as anxiety itself, but cortisol and anger racing through my body because I cannot stay calm enough to calculate my next move. I jump immediately into trying to knock over the king, when moving a pawn will do.

I get angry, I regret, I say I’m sorry, and it happens again and again and again. Sisyphus has nothing on me, and that person that pops off and regrets is never the person I want to be. It’s who I am when I feel backed into a corner, wet cat and claws extended. After our fights, I collapse as the cortisol runs out, and crocodile tears run down my face as I realize I have yet again hurt someone I love, deeply, but not in a way that I ever expected or thought I deserved.

I was telling Bryn that before I met you, and I realized that my relationship with Diane was going to fall to pieces whether I wanted it to or not, that I created an e-mail address for her called “fakeaudience@gmail.com.” That way, I could write to her without writing to her, and I think there’s a grand total of three letters in that account, because soon afterward, I met you and you agreed to listen. It was a wonderful thing, having fresh eyes on the situation, because it helped me figure out everything that was wrong with my life. Just everything… that’s because the emotional trauma I experienced as a youth had wired itself into every reaction I had to everything, not knowing just how unhealthy it was. That lies and secrecy were not the way of the world, that I didn’t have to hide, that I could be done protecting her from all that had happened. I think it was under my skin, but I refused to acknowledge it, because there was no way it happened the way my gut feeling said it did. The gaslighting was successful. She never did anything to create emotional scars, I just took everything the wrong way. It was crazymaking at its finest.

To the point that I began to pick up those tendencies as well. There’s a lot that scares me as I continue to explore my darkness in hopes of getting rid of it, because if I really want to stick to this dream of being a pastor, I don’t want to fuck other people up the way I was. I want to be a shepherd filled with the light of Christ, and not filled with the light of me.

In many ways, you directed that change, because when I began to see myself for who I really was, I didn’t like her very much, if at all. Things haven’t changed overnight, but they have changed for the better, especially in terms of getting out of Houston and away from all the memories that haunt me there. I was never a kid in DC. Memories here are sometimes painful, but they are all with people where I was on equal footing, and not the power imbalance of being a child trapped in an enormously damaging situation.

Going to Portland to find the family I thought I had was a disaster from day one, because I thought that as an adult, I could be a part of Diane’s life without it being some sort of undercover operation. I don’t know why I didn’t turn around and go back to DC then, without waiting around to see what happened next. Instead, I sold the rarest book I owned, a poetry book by Anne Lindbergh signed by her and Charles. I bought it for 50 cents at a garage sale, and sold it for $1,500. It allowed me a few more months of just wallowing in pain as I tried to figure out what to do next. Luckily, Matt was there to catch me because he was so different than Kathleen that I could rest and relax in him… but being good friends with Diane made me wary of confiding anything in him until you came along with your sweet words and Xs and Os of support as I waded my way through the worst mess of my life… but that wasn’t until years later, long broken up and married to the woman I thought I’d spend the rest of my life loving…. and in a lot of ways, still do. If you’ve ever been in the same room with Dana, you know what I mean. Curly-haired spitfire that will take a lifetime to get over, not just because of how amazing our relationship was at times, but because of the way I treated her on the way out… a product, I am sure, of my past… to make you a catalyst to let go of her “easier,” because it was clear that she wanted out, too, and wouldn’t say it. The reason it wasn’t really any easier is that I had this dream in my mind, that things would blow over and I’d get both my sweet Dana and my sweet Argo back, after I’d had enough time to work out in my mind which end was up. But the main reason I knew Dana wanted out and couldn’t say it is that she constantly used you as a bait-and-switch operation so that she could ignore the problems we needed to work on and redirect fault onto me. When she wouldn’t make room, or at least, consistently so, I realized that I could have one of you or the other, but not both, because it wasn’t worth trying to talk about money, sex, balance of power, you name it, without it being redirected into why I was such a douchebag for spending time writing to you.

She knew you needed me just as much as I needed you, and alternately understood it and used it as a weapon of mass destruction. My anxiety turned to rage at both of you, and I pushed both of you away, violently with words. It was Dana’s choice to make it a physical fight between us, and I will never forget how bad it got, and how that was the last straw for me, even though my abused nature eventually swept it under the rug and wished I hadn’t told her it was over in the madness of the last punch… because, I reasoned, I’m not sure she was fighting with me at that point. There was so much rage behind her fist that I wasn’t sure it was all meant for me, or if there were years and years of anger that had never been expressed and I just happened to be a convenient target… childhood rage compounded with teenage rage compounded with anger at me all in the same broken blood vessels on my face.

The bitch of it was trying to think we could handle our communication issues on our own. I wonder every day what would have happened if we’d gone to a professional mediator that could have explained both sides to us in ways we had never thought of before. Things like explaining why my rage was so intense, why my communication style was so much different than hers, and why the Argo thing would go away on its own, especially if we’d met in person and not goddamn everything was an operatic swell of emotion on the page… no relaxing with beers in the backyard. I wish every day that we’d come to DC or you’d come to “Youston” early on in our relationship so that everything would have been normalized butt-quick.

I don’t know what it would be like to see you, to touch you, to know that you are real. But what I do know is that it would never be the touch of a lover, just a concerned friend who loves you beyond all measure. Someone who’d take your arm as we were walking down the street, someone who’d give you a hug when you needed it, someone who’d bring you bacon if you were sad.

Because anxiety is everything beyond the rage, beyond the pushing away, beyond the loss of light in my eyes. It will never be the way I truly feel about you, and it should never have been. I feel like these fights have been because we are cut of the same cloth, bulletproof until we both walk away in pain and confusion at what we’ve just said to each other, not knowing what the right thing to do might be, but knowing for damn sure that fighting like that wasn’t it.

Your name is stitched into my heart, sewn so fine it might as well have been done by a cardiologist. That will never go away, whether we speak again or not….

…because your injuries are written in sand, and your kindnesses are written in marble.

I was stupid and careless with your heart when the final blow came down, but I hope that one day you will see that I was not trying to be malicious, just lashing out because I was so anxious I didn’t know what else to do. It was a panic attack of enormous proportion, because I thought I was being treated unfairly and it caused my inner 14-year-old to come out instead of the grown woman I’ve become. Nothing that happened the day our relationship broke came from a malicious place, and the insistence that it did broke me. I was lost and angry that my injuries were not written in sand and my kindnesses written in marble, and I took it out on you, when the proper response would have been just to walk away… not to let words escalate yet again.

I was so invested in those shoots of green that I did not see how angry and hurt you still were, and how I’d never be able to calm it, no matter how hard I tried. That my sweet, small a argo had been replaced by Argo, Trademark. That I’d never be able to see into your heart of hearts again, because I’d done so much to break it over and over… ignoring that in favor of thinking that things were getting better and confiding in you as if nothing had ever happened.

But too much had.

I will always pray that you are blessed over and over in the richness with which you have blessed me, and I will always keep a door open for you whether or not you walk through it… because I can’t not. I am moving on with my life in leaps and bounds, but there will never be a time in which I forget what it was like when we were good for each other and anger never won.

Your kindnesses are written in marble. Sin cera.

Leslie

A memory from today’s date in 2013:

It’s Bridgeport UCC’s birthday today. Crescendos of blessings all around and at the same time, history is what history is. Today I remembered how I have fallen short of the glory of God by not being as Christ-like as anyone would have wanted, really. I rejoiced in everything that has been given to me at my church. Dana Bamberger Lanagan came to me through church. I said I wanted to become a preacher and at Bridgeport, I was getting up in front of people in no time at all. No degrees except a dad that went to SMU Divinity and I don’t think people let you claim other people’s educations. People came to hear me and I grew. People came to hear me and I have fallen on my knees in that church in complete anguish more than once, the bulwark against the storm. When I stand facing the congregation, nearly everyone I love is in one room. When you say, “and also with you,” I know you mean it. When I say, “may the peace of Christ be with you,” what I’m really saying is “I never in a million years thought that I would feel this loved by a congregation and this is the best I can do without absolutely flooding out and boohooing.” You are the dimmer switch to my crazy and I couldn’t be more in love with you if I tried. P.S. Again, thanks for Dana. That was really sweet of you.

It’s such a blessing receiving these memories every morning, even when they hurt. I am all about feeling my emotions as they come up, instead of stuffing them down and pretending that everything is fine, because it’s not. Sometimes I just want to kick Dana’s ass into next week, and sometimes not having her by my side makes me feel as if there is no air in the room. But we both made our beds in that department, and now we have to lie in them.

Speaking of which, I still haven’t gotten the paperwork for the dissolution of our domestic partnership in Oregon, and I’ve reached out to Kathleen on multiple occasions, and nothing. With Dana, I understand. It’s difficult. With Kathleen, holy shit it’s been 16 years. Let. It. Go. I never should have married Dana in the first place, and not because I didn’t want her day-in, day-out love. It’s just that back then, gay marriages/civil unions/domestic partnerships were decided on a state-by-state basis, and I never thought I’d see national marriage equality in my lifetime. It made sense then. It for damn sure doesn’t now. The legal advice I received (from an actual lawyer as opposed to my friends ragging on me at a coffee shop) in terms of the civil union with Kathleen in Vermont was just to let it go. We didn’t live there, so what did it matter? But again, that was 16 years ago… any advice I would have received then would have been in a completely different context than now.

Speaking of which, DC Pride is this weekend, and I can’t decide if I want to go or not. I have two offers to be *in* the parade, one from my church and one from DC public schools, because my friend Elena is a teacher, and last year Elena, Prianka, and I were the Three Musketeers. I just can’t decide if I feel pride comin’ on this year. Even in Houston, I didn’t go every year, and I think in Portland I went twice, maybe three times, and I lived there for ten years. Is it bad that I sort of feel too old? Like, I’ve already had all my coming out parties, and I live in a very post-gay neighborhood already- completely integrated. It has to do with being dragged kicking and screaming out of my comfort zone… loud crowds bother the shit out of me, and while last year was a blast, I don’t feel proud. I just feel empty. And maybe going is the answer to turning my attitude around, but I don’t know yet. If my dad and my sister were there with me, I wouldn’t bat an eye. If Scales and the colonel are coming, perhaps. Speaking of the colonel, the only time I really lost my snot at the parade last year was when I saw the military float. Full class A’s and flags from every branch, and I just stood in front of them, squalling my eyeballs out and saying, “thank you for your service” and “thank you for your sacrifice.” I’d been holding back a lot of grief for a long time, and that was the image that broke the damn dam.

Yesterday on Twitter, I noticed that the DIA changed their icon to rainbow colors and had a link to a conference in Austin called “LGBT Spies.” I sent a Tweet to @CIA saying that @DefenseIntel had already beat them to pride colors- where was their rainbow? The military and intelligence have really gotten on the GLBT bandwagon, and for that, I am truly grateful. It’s fun to see the world change, even if I am having trouble changing with it. There is no limit to the internalized homophobia I feel having grown up in an age that told me I was mentally ill. I mean, I am, but not because of that. 😛

But, I am going to be downtown this weekend attending a fountain pen show. Perhaps I will buy Eleven’s sonic screwdriver. I already got my dad the best present in the world for Father’s Day. So him it hurts, and I want to spill the beans SO BAD, but I won’t. SO. BAD.

And on that note, I should probably get back to work. It’s busy around here. Did I mention that? 😛

Today I am wearing my surfing bear t-shirt, and it makes me so happy. I paired it with my brown Dockers and my brown Chucks, with a grey hoodie just in case it gets arctic in my office (it often does). However, I do have a window, and opening the blinds seems to warm everything up nicely. I also think I have a fever, which helps…. no, seriously. At Alert Logic, I used to pray for the days my period was coming because with all the fans and the need to keep the equipment cool, there was no day that it didn’t feel like 50 degrees in that bitch. A fever was just the ticket to make me happy without complaining, even though I still needed a hoodie and several layers underneath. It’s always weird when you have to carry your winter clothes in your backpack in Houston because you know the air conditioner will freeze you out. DSI is not that different, but like I said, a window helps, even though it does look out over the junk yard next door… but there are also a lot of trees, which makes up for it a bit. As long as I’m warm, it could look over a nuclear waste dump.

I am hoping it will be a while before we hire someone else in ops, because I really like having my own office. It’s huge, enough to put in a conference table if they’ll let me, which would be nice because I could change positions, like taking my laptop over to the table and sitting in a different chair. If I can’t get my own conference table, maybe I’ll try one of the benches outside. We have a picnic table in the “backyard” that might be perfect.

Oh, and check this out. I was here by 8:50 and the door was unlocked. #smallblessings

Tonight is dinner with Pri-Diddy and I cannot wait. Any time we can spend together before she has to leave is golden. I just want to hug her and squeeze her and call her George…. but not too tightly, because she has a stomachache. 🙂

In other news, I feel like I’ve really had a chance to exorcise my demons where Argo is concerned, and I have healed so much just from staying away. I feel happier than I have in a long time, because the fight is o’er, the battle won… even if I lost, because the win was not fighting anymore. God, how I wish I had ended it before it became a thing with Dana, but at the same time, if it hadn’t been Argo, it would have been another individual friend as opposed to a couple friend that would have set her radar off. I have to remind myself that anyone who wouldn’t let me have friends of my own was trying to control too much. I am sure that I gave Dana every reason in the world to be jealous and angry, but I wasn’t trying to… just trying to be as honest as I possibly could, because I thought talking about it would help instead of hurt. Dana does not have the same story that I do, but she went through something similar when she was single, so I thought that she’d be the first person to understand that words carry weight, and feelings happen because of them. She did, up and to a point, but her past did not carry nearly as much weight as my present…. and honestly, that’s ok.

I needed to be single again… not because I was taking off after Argo to see what might happen, but because I was so worried about Dana that I couldn’t worry about myself…. and ditto for Argo. Taking on their “stuff” allowed me to ignore my own problems, to the point that one day I decided that I’d just had it. I cracked. I couldn’t get a new patient appointment for three weeks, and I worried that my situation was so dire that I wouldn’t make it that long… and in the end, it was Argo that gave me the strength to see it. She said “why do you think it’s everyone else’s job to fix you?” So I called the number on the back of my insurance card and it just so happened that I’m originally from Naples, Texas, and the person on the other end of the line was from Mt. Pleasant. She’d had a time in her life when she was just as depressed as me, and me being who I am, spent part of that phone call comforting her even though I was the one in trouble…. just like I did with the billing lady. She’d also been as depressed as me, and *she* asked *me* to pray for her. So, of course, me being me, I feel like this depression is going to kill me and here I am in the hospital taking care of THE BILLING LADY.

It turned out to the be the right thing to do, though, because I haven’t gotten a single bill from Methodist hospital. I know this because it doesn’t matter where you move on earth, the billing people will find you. If Osama bin Laden had taken out a loan from Sallie Mae, we’d have caught him a lot earlier. You think being a high value target is terrifying in the CIA? Wait until you’ve defaulted on a student loan…. which I never have, but I’ve heard so many horror stories that I think most of the people that work there are calling from prison. #nojoke

Speaking of which, I need to fill out a FAFSA for University of Houston, because Howard does not have a political science department, and none of my hours will transfer…. although before I check that out, I need to check out the junior college around here because there’s a couple of classes I haven’t taken that will be much cheaper there, like “Intro to Poetry.” I took “Intro to Poetry” in summer school once, and I had an A+ in the class when my professor dropped me for missing too many classes. At that point in my life, I’d never been so angry, but there it is. In summer school, you couldn’t miss more than three classes, and I was sick. Not that the professor cared. Seriously. An A+. It was a “fuck me running” sort of moment, and I am not prone to violence, but if looks could kill, she’d be dead and buried. It’s also good that Volfe wasn’t standing next to me when I used the k-word. 🙂

At this point, I don’t even remember her name (Melanie Jordan… funny how that just popped up).

I really can’t write poetry to save my life, but I can analyze the hell out of it… and I can write a paper in 20 minutes flat if I really know what I ‘m talking about. My last paper on a poem was about Diving into the Wreck, about which I had *A LOT* to say. It was a 500 word essay, and I ended up writing for 15 pages and having to edit it down.

I wish I still had that paper, because I can’t think of anything I’d rather read right now. Anne Lamott says that you should write the book that you wish was out there…. and while it seems egotistical to be comforted by your own words, she’s really, really fucking right. Perhaps that’s why I read my blog so much. It’s the words I wish were already out there for me to find. if I go back far enough, the things that are happening are happening to someone else.

And I can forgive someone else.

Please pray for me. This is such a hard time. Saturday, Dana will be 41, and I won’t be there to help her celebrate. Dana and my mom have the same birthday, so there will never be a time in my life where I forget. Holidays are the hardest, and my heart is still beating… p,q,r,s,t,u… over and over and over and over and over. But that doesn’t mean it hurts any less.

Amen.

I love my coconut tea so much…. although today I might have overdone it. Three teabags for a 20-oz and my heart is beating fast. I think I created a hot Monster 2x, which was perfect for me in the kitchen, but sitting at a desk is extraordinarily hard. At least my typing is faster. 🙂 I can tell you about a lot more things in a very little amount of time, like how the traffic was a clusterfuck this morning because of an accident and the Metro overhaul that’s causing so many more people to buy cars and/or take Uber. I believe that I got a car at just the right time, because the overhaul is going to take a year, and the red line is the most affected, as is the orange line, the two lines I need to take to get to work in the morning. Not being able to predict when I got to work would kill me, because I make it my mission in life to be early. Today I was right on time- 5 after- so the building was actually open when I got here. No having to go anywhere to kill time.

I notice that my queries are taking a long time to complete this morning, so I decided to break for lunch while they were running since I slept late this morning. I usually get up at 0600, but I just wasn’t feeling it today. For some reason, my medication had more trouble wearing off than it normally does, so I slept as late as I could until my Waze notification went off and said that traffic on 50 was going to add 15 minutes to my commute. I skipped having a shower because it was going to take more than 20 minutes to get here, but I don’t regret it. I had a shower yesterday, and especially in the summer, I don’t shower as often because it really, really dries out my skin. The only thing I didn’t do that I wish I had was wash my face and rinse my hair. No spikes this morning, just my Rice baseball cap… it’s really washing my face that matters, because I try to use salicylic acid twice a day to keep my acne/rosacea at bay. I also forgot to put benzoyl peroxide all over my face and bangs (free highlights), but no matter. I can do that when I get home, and put on a white t-shirt to do it.

I had to buy some new t-shirts yesterday because of this very problem. I forget that I’ve just “fixed my face,” put my t-shirt over my head, and voila! The color is now faded and my cool t-shirts turn into boot-polishing rags (speaking of which, that needs to get done PRONTO.) All of my heroes since 2001 have been military, and it was DrReval (he’s actually a major, but who can pass up THAT nickname) and Volfe have impressed the importance of boot shining on me so that it’s now a thing. I haven’t even worn my Docs in three weeks because I won’t wear them unpolished. I also need to take my brown Chucks to a shoe hospital because the stitching has come loose and I am not ready to get rid of them. This is because they are the only brown leather shoes that I own… throwbacks to the original Chucks that look AMAZING with either saddle soap or brown polish. The best analogy I can give as to what they look like is that they are made from the same type leather as the helmets in “Leatherheads.”

I also bought some black Chucks on Amazon where even the rubber is black, but they are cloth. I also put some heel cups in them when I read an article that said Chucks were as supportive as “glorified socks.” Next time I order Chucks, I’ll have to get them at least one size larger so that I can put sports supports in them…. which I meant to do this time and totally forgot…. but they go nicely with my TARDIS/Dalek suspenders, so I can’t complain too much…. and if you have to ask why they coordinate, you need to get on Amazon and watch Doctor Who. It will dawn on you in the second season. I won’t even wear my Doctor Who t-shirts without my Chucks, even though Matt Smith is my Doctor…. I doubt I would look good in a bow tie and fez.

Clara: One of these days, you’re just going to be able to walk past a fez.
The Doctor: Never gonna happen.

David Tennent fans seem to get very upset when I say that Matt is my Doctor. Let’s clear that up right now. Shut it.

I loved Matt from the beginning because he was such an underdog. When he was cast, no one said he could do it, and he’s made some of the most brilliant episodes in the entire cannon. If you can make it through “Vincent and The Doctor” without squalling your eyeballs out, you are officially a sociopath. My other favorite Matt episode is called “Nightmare in Silver,” because the Cybermen have found a way to implant small extensions into The Doctor’s face, and his real personality is fighting it out with his Cyberman personality in a good versus evil monologue that deserved an Emmy. Matt acting against himself was so amazing that I watched that one scene three times in a row.

And adding Alex Kingston to the cast was briliant because I’ve been in love with her since ER. Pretty sure anyone my age feels the same way.

Now that I’m done with my Doctor Who tangent, I have to tell you the funniest t-shirt I bought. It’s Darth Vader walking AT-ATs on a leash like dogs. Since I work in IT, I’m wearing it today and it is *very* popular. I got some other cool ones, but they aren’t characters. The second best one is in the style of Ocean Pacific and has a bear surfing at day’s end. The last two are both striped- one is highlighter yellow with grey stripes across the middle of the chest, and the other is navy with green pinstripes… all cheap because I shop in the little boys’ department, where t-shirts are usually between 5-8 bucks. I am not stupid. I am not paying $25 for one t-shirt, no matter how soft it is…. unless I am given a gift certificate. 🙂

Today the gift was being reminded of the “L___nator,” a Facebook memory where she helped me fix my car. God I miss her- my little ray of Internet sunshine.

it’s good to have memories like this every day. It reminds me that grief isn’t all bad, that sometimes there are lots of smiles held within. It gutted me like a fish when she said she was pulling chalks, but at the same time, I’m a handful. I don’t expect people to stay my friends if they don’t wanna. I’m not going to chase her down- the people that have stuck by me over the years mean so much more…. and that is the beauty of life… letting go of the people who don’t want to walk with you on your journey to make room for those who do.

But sometimes, just sometimes, when the question is asked, silence will fall… and what is the question? What do you do when you’re still sad that people have walked away even though the people who want you in their lives will make a point of reaching out? I suppose silence is the best answer of all, because eventually, if you walk in the dark long enough, you realize that it is a passage into light and darkness is not a permanent destination…. even when it really, really feels like it.

I was thinking about yesterday, when I said that the archetype for my new girlfriend is me, and just how narcissistic that sounded, just not in my head…. because I wasn’t thinking of me when I said it. I was thinking of someone else that looks sort of like me, and yet, is not me…. and no, Scales, I am not talking about your precious colonel, although I am sure she’s a catch and a half. No, I was thinking about someone who was standing next to Dana in a photo and Sam mistook her for my wife, saying, “I just thought your wife would look more like you.” And that’s when I realized that the woman in the picture did look a little like me, but it was more than that in terms of becoming an archetype. It was the way she carried herself in the world, which is not like me at all.

They say that opposites only attract in the short term, but I’d give anything to find someone that strong and that vulnerable all in the same package. Maybe that’s why I’ve gone out of my way to look for people in the military, because what I have found is that I like their strength in the outside world and that vulnerable space that’s only for me.

Perhaps that’s also part of leaving Argo behind, because she’s tough as barbed wire, but in our rabbit hole there was a vulnerability and poignancy to her words that still run through my mind a lot. The house I built for her in my head is slowly coming down, but there are still a a lot of bricks. Today the memory was her saying I love you for some reason or another, because the reason doesn’t matter. The fact that she was vulnerable enough to say it does.

I have two minds on that. The first is that she never should be expected to stay my friend no matter how bad it gets. The second is that love letters are the campaign promises of the soul. Even friends with an explosive connection have a honeymoon phase, and this was no different. She said that no matter what I confided in her, there was nothing I could do that would make her love/like me any less, and I tested that boundary until it broke, because I’m not sure that I felt worthy of her from day one. I pushed her away before she could even think about doing it to me, because I didn’t think I was worth her time.

But I was, and she showed it to me every day, and I was an idiot for not watching and listening much closer than I actually did. I have no choice but to move away from this experience, because she says that she really does think it’s better that we don’t communicate, and I see her point wholeheartedly and support it. The less we interact, the less chance there is for something to come out of either of our mouths that can be misconstrued as wrong or bad or any number of things that will set one of us off like a ticking time bomb.

It’s why I’m trying to look forward so hard, because I need to move into a different place emotionally now that I’ve had enough time to physically move and get my bearings. I am nothing if not resilient when it comes to moving, because being a preacher’s kid, I never lived anywhere longer than five years before my father left the ministry when I was 17. The place I’m in is sometimes happy, but as Aaron says, “I don’t have to make room for grief. Grief makes its own room.”

And in the fullness of blessing and releasing, God of the Universe, protect my precious Argo………………….#prayingonthespaces

I may have to bless and release every day for a while, but what does it hurt to pray for someone and wish them well even when they don’t talk back? It helps me to forgive me, regardless of what energy comes back…. but I would like to believe that the more I put positive energy into the universe, the more I open myself up to receive it.

And one day I will open my eyes, having woken up to the next great love of my life, because I will be at peace.

If you say it loud enough, I’m pretty sure it’s onomatopoetic.

The first person that tried to match with me on Match.com was a therapist in private practice. I don’t even know how to respond to that, so I won’t. But in my head, it went something like, “wow. Talk about biting off more than she can chew…” Although to be fair, most people in mental health struggle with mental health themselves, because that’s what made them interested enough in it to make it a career in the first place. So, there’s two red flags… the third is that I just wasn’t that into her. She’s working on a doctoral dissertation and seems hella smart, but the attraction piece just wasn’t there.

But to her credit, there’s an archetype in my mind already, and she didn’t fit it.

And no, the archetype is not Argo or Dana.

It’s me.

No, seriously. I want my next girlfriend to be about my size and about the same amount of genderfluid… because sometimes I like boys’ clothes and sometimes I like makeup and ho clothes. It just depends on the day. Sometimes I like looking sharp and crispy, sometimes I like making people’s jaws drop with my cleavage.

Now, because I’ve said this, I can assure you that my next girlfriend will be at least six feet tall. That is because a spark is a spark and I don’t get to choose when it happens… Except looking through pictures on Match and Tinder…. which will invariably be no help because I am way more likely to run into someone at Whole Foods…. and by run into them, I mean literally. Just trip over them and fall ass over teakettle because I’m not paying attention to anything but peanut butter.

I hate buying peanut butter at Whole Foods. It takes me at least half an hour, because I hem and haw and threaten to go to Safeway and then realize I am way too tired to put in that much effort and just try to find the one with the least amount of oil on top, because when it says “no stir,” they don’t mean it. “Less stir” is about as good as it gets. I finally settled on the smallest jar of 365 brand chunky I could find, because I was completely out of peanut butter, but didn’t want to buy so much of it that I would feel bad about throwing it out when my happy ass finally did find the SuperChunk.

I pretty much live on peanut butter and banana sandwiches, veggie hot dogs/sausages, and Daiya cheese. Occasionally I’ll throw some eggs into the steamer basket of my rice cooker because they hard boil in about 16 minutes. But I am too wrapped up in my own head to cook anymore. It used to be such a major part of my life, and now I can’t remember the last time I made something. Oh, yes I do. Last fall I made some polenta cakes with a dried cherry and balsamic reduction.

I also have both the cinnamon raisin and regular Ezekiel bread, for sandwiches and for toast. Cinnamon raisin bread is amazing as a brown-sugared ham sandwich.

I don’t buy meat or dairy very often because I generally won’t use it before it spoils. Thus the obsession with cheddar Daiya.

My one impulse buy was that I saw they had 12-packs of chocolate milk boxes that didn’t have to be refrigerated and I thought they’d be perfect for driving into work. I am sure that they are for children. I am also sure that I don’t care. I drive a Yaris. It looks like I’m playing with Hot Wheels, anyway.

I wish I’d met this therapist on Tinder (remember her?), because you don’t have to pay to talk to people. If I’d met her on Tinder, I would have at least said “let’s go for coffee.” Because even though she’s not someone I could picture myself dating, it never hurts to have smart people in your life. I should know. I have plenty.

 

 

 

Yesterday I talked to Bryn on the phone, and I was telling her how small my past made me feel, and then I allowed myself to get angry, because angry is easier to deal with than sad if you let it temper you instead of burn you from the inside out. I know I’m just a nerd with a journal, and so do my other friends. In terms of Argo’s feelings about me, I just need to stop participating, because when her words get under my skin, the worthlessness loop starts running and Boo Radley has nothing on me… and not because I feel like I need to be a hermit out of fear. I feel that I need to be a hermit because I don’t deserve happiness.

Or, as I so eloquently saw it put on Facebook today, never go looking for happiness where you lost it. This insistence that I am some sort of dark character has got to go, and that won’t come from continuing to worry about my relationship with Argo and how to make things right, because her mind is made up. What’s done is done, and I can change her mind as easily as I can change my eye color… and yes, I realize that I could get different-colored contacts, but it would be as fake a fix as believing that though there were lots of fights between Argo and me, eventually she’ll see that there were also a lot of good things and those good things will carry the day. Because what I realized is that as much as I care about her, I don’t trust her as far as I can throw her, and I’m sure the feeling is mutual…. although I am sure she trusts me a lot more because I’m so much littler and therefore she can throw me a lot further. 😛

So I reached out to Scales, Pri-Diddy reached out to me, and I’m looking forward to seeing Nate and Emily again as well. My sister is coming to visit on the 29th, and she arranged a free day so that we could actually spend some time together outside of all her meetings. I want off this roller-coaster of emotion, and I’m trying. I’m looking for another therapist since Vesta does not take my insurance. I created a profile on Match.com (one of the free ones… I’m not ready to talk to anyone… just baby steps into the future as opposed to giant steps). It really got to me that Scales could see that I wasn’t ready for the future. She wanted to date me, and almost said so, but for whatever reason, decided not to… and I believe that it was because I was still so interested in processing the past rather than moving into my future….. of which I am quite tired, and yet caught in, because my personality type is just that. Figuring out the future by analyzing past mistakes, and not knowing when to stop. It doesn’t help that I’m an anxious person on top of all this INFJ, but even if I wasn’t saddled with mental health issues, I’d still be me.

Bipolar II

Rule No. 1: Learn to tell the difference. I am not Sally Field from ER, nor am I Ted Turner. Sometimes I feel good and productive. Sometimes I want to crawl in a hole. I take lamotrigine (brand name Lamictal™) to make sure my lows don’t go too low. My highs are limited to being awake for a long time. That’s it. I got nothin.’ In the bipolar spectrum, I mostly just need depression medication to leave the house. Because of this, I also take escitalopram (brand name Lexapro™), which is just a basic depression drug that’s been used since, I think (and you’ll have to check me on this), George Washington was a boy. Again, keeping my lows from going too low.

Anxiety

I care about everyone and everything in the room and am powerless to fix any of it, but I will take on as much as I can until I can’t breathe. Being in crowds is physically taxing because there’s no way to escape the noise of other people’s problems. For this, I take clonazepam (brand name Klonopin™). I used to only take benzos as needed during a panic attack, but a low dose every day seems to work much better…. mostly because I’m not already in the middle of a panic attack and THEN taking something for it. Ounce of prevention, pound of cure, etc. Benzos are known for high addiction rates, but the dose I’m on is so low that I don’t even notice much of a difference when I don’t take it, so there’s no reason for me to exhibit the drug-seeking behavior of someone who’s been without it.

I also used to take gabapentin (Brand name Neurontin™), but when I left Vesta I didn’t have any refills and I didn’t think it did anything. Maybe for you, it works. For me, it says “does not work” right on the bottle.

ADD/Trauma

I lump these together because at this point, I’m not sure which is which. Most of the symptoms I face are also on a trauma checklist… it’s hard to pay attention to the future when the tapes of your past are so ever-present in your mind… and yet, I still work in piles, I’m still habitually late when I overload myself with appointments, and ADD medication works on me. It doesn’t make me happy that it works, because I lose all appetite and start looking like a ten year old, but it does work. I was not diagnosed with ADD as a child, and I think I would have done much better in school if I had. I certainly kicked some ass in college…. but to be fair, college is built for ADD. There’s no daily homework. You just show up and take a test every few weeks. Remembering to turn in homework every day (even if it was completely finished and at home) ate my lunch.

In terms of crazy meds for ADD, I’ve tried them all- Ritalin, Ritalin XR, Adderall, Concerta- except Stratera. No, wait. I tried it for a week. Every time I’ve been on a norepinephrine booster that wasn’t a methamphetimine made me jittery, nauseous, forgetful, and forgetful. The best analogy that I can come up with for the difference between Adderrall and Stratera is that Adderall is pure cane sugar, and Stratera is Splenda. They both do the same thing, but in different ways… therefore, everyone’s reaction to them is going to be different. For some people, Splenda is a wonderful thing, but I need real sugar.

Or, at least I did. Now I manage my ADD by making sure that I sleep a lot and am therefore very conscious and alert all day…. especially with a borderline case like mine, I don’t have to medicate it unless I want to… and I don’t. I’m done with having no appetite and I’m done with people knowing I take it and offering to pay me for it and not taking no for an answer until it is very clear that I am going to lose my mind if you ask me one more time.

I’m laying it all out here because as you can see, none of the problems that I’ve got mentally are ever going to stop me from being my personality type. I am still the overthinker, but perhaps my mind would be occupied with much larger things than it is now. Mental health is a lot to manage, especially when people think you’re lazy and you’re actually struggling to keep your head above water… and anxiety triples the negative perceptions other people have about you, and I truly believe that the normal, non-depressed person does not have a frame of reference for it…. which is where the lazy and the “snap out of it” comes from.

I’ve also always been a dreamer, looking out the window, but unable to see the future… just turning the past over and over in my mind…. starting in about 7th grade. In sixth grade, I wanted to be a professional trumpet player, and I could see myself on The Tonight Show Bandstand as clearly as I see the iPhone in front of me. And then I met a narcissistic sociopath and I couldn’t dream into the future anymore, only about how to rework the past, because it had to be solved somehow. That’s where the psychotherapy comes in. There’s nothing that was done in my past to create a chemical imbalance, but knowing the difference between healthy and unhealthy reactions is exactly where the rubber meets the road.

I don’t want to live this life anymore. I want a different one. Nothing means more to me than my mental health, because my dreams are too big to sit dormant forever. Ministry is a second career for a lot of women, and I am at least learning to dream that far. I’m going to wear it like I “stole” it. Nerd with a Journal doesn’t have to mean Boo Radley, but no one is going to do this work for me, and that’s the hardest part of all. Can’t I just hire someone and they’ll let me know when my brain is ready?

 

 

 

As you know, I don’t drink enough to actually mean sober living in the AA sense, but in the Marcia sense, who told me that sober is actually an acronym… Son of a bitch, everything’s real. Actually, my funniest Marcia story is that we were sitting in Swirl (yogurt place in PDX), and she was telling me that she counsels people who’ve just gotten sober in terms of finding work. When she asked a man about his previous experience, he said that he drank a fifth every day for 20 years. I told her that if I’d been in her place, I would have leaned really close and said, “do you get dental with that?”

Ok, one more funny Marcia story. I was telling her that I thought the Mormon religion was interesting because it was one of the few started late enough that there is actual documentation all the way back to the beginning. Without missing a beat, she said, “no, we have documentation all the way back to when Joseph Smith made it up.” Sorry if you’re offended, but I’ve met too many Mormons over my lifetime that when they become actualized, there’s a point in Mormonism where they just look at themselves and say, “well, that got weird.”

But back to the whole sober living thing. I think that Dana and I partied too much and pondered too little. So when I moved in with the Nassers, who keep alcohol in the house but don’t drink it, I became the same way. My mental state became clearer just from not being one of those people who has a drink every night after work… and damnit if Marcia wasn’t right. Feelings became more intense the less I numbed out, which is probably why adding anxiety medication to my protocol was the right move. I didn’t realize how socially anxious I’d become until I gave away the small amount of social lubricant I allowed myself. Even when I went to the Women in Their 30’s Meetup and drinks were two for one, I gave my extra coupon to someone else… which made running into the glass door at the end of the night even more embarrassing because I didn’t have anything to blame except my own clumsiness. That night gave me more sympathy for Argo than I’ve ever had in my life, because all of the sudden it clicked in my head what it was like to get unwanted attention. I mean, it was fun to be flirted with, but when someone actually gave me their number and wanted me to call, I ran like a house on fire.

My best scenario for that evening was just to have some fun. In reality, it was a meat market and I was FRESH.

That’s the thing about the lesbian community. It’s so small that even in large cities, chances are you’re dating someone that’s already dated three or four of your friends and you just have to be okay with it, because what choice do you have?

Just having moved here was appealing to many of the women there, and I am not kidding when I say that a few threw themselves at me, which is why I was so lost in thinking about what a dumbass I was to Argo… and to one other woman that shall remain nameless but I thought was so cute I walked into a door trying not to notice.

It did not go well, except for with Dana, because she was laughing her ass off. In that moment, we were both 15-year-old boys, in a sense, egging each other on.

I thought that since she was happily married and so was I that she’d know I didn’t mean any harm. She did not. But I will excerpt part of a letter I wrote to Argo about her here, because it illustrates my true feelings about her:

If ___ were actually a lesbian, I wouldn’t hesitate to call her a butch. But because she’s not, it makes me root for her even more, because the world has to know there is more than one kind of straight woman.

I meant every word, and I will add that the world also needs to know that there are men out there who can handle the swagger, and like it. There’s all this bullshit written about how straight men cannot handle strong/smart women, and won’t. I find the opposite. Every strong straight woman I know has met a man that not only loved the strong and the smart, but encouraged it.

It generally goes something like this, “I’m a handful, and he’s capable.”

I would give damn near anything to hear someone say that about me… that I’m a handful, but they’re capable of getting it handled. I had that with Dana until I got really sick, really fast, and it was not something I could help. My entire world had just gone to hell in a handbasket, even with the move to Houston, because I was proud of myself for going back to my family and tightening the fortress, and at the same time, miserable because I couldn’t escape any of the memories I had there. It was the wrong decision entirely, as evidenced by the slow death and dismemberment of my marriage from the moment Dana and I moved there. To be sure, I had no idea it was coming. I thought everything was going to be fine, because I always think everything is going to be fine.

Instead, we hung out at the local ice house, we invited the neighbors over for drinks, we painted our dining room with chalkboard paint so we could play darts in the house, we did everything we could to escape. And as all of that was happening, my mental state got worse and worse, until I couldn’t ask anyone for help. I needed to get it on my own… to admit to myself that I was too much for my friends and family to help and needed professionals to take over their jobs…. which they did, masterfully so.

Getting out of Teas and into Maryland while jobless was what I needed at the time, because I qualified for Medicaid and Maryland had a wealth of services that Texas did not. As I have mentioned before, all of my appointments, BOTH psychiatry and psychology, were free, and my medication was $1.00/bottle. I didn’t like not having a job, because it felt like not having a purpose… but at the same time, I don’t think I would have progressed nearly so fast if I’d had to work all of my appointments around my schedule. I just wrote and wrote, hoping Oprah would call (if she did, I wasn’t home).

My anxiety went down to a manageable level, except where Argo was concerned, because I didn’t know what was going to happen between us and I was hoping for a miracle… not that she would all of the sudden realize she was in love with me, because #nevergonnahappen, but that peace and love would win out over enmity and fear. It was funny, I knew that it was never going to happen, anyway, but it was a paradigm shift when I realized I didn’t want to be with her… that I had to know whether Dana was right or wrong when she said that Argo would end up falling for me, anyway, just based on words… and at the same time realizing that as friends, all we’d done was fuck each other up and I didn’t want that to get any worse. If we could fight like cats and dogs as friends, what would it look like to have that day in and day out? It looked like an unholy mess, that’s what.

And in a very real sense, it seemed silly not to send her gifts on things like birthdays and Christmas, because I thought we were getting better AND I considered it back payment on services already rendered. 🙂  She’d been incredibly sweet and supportive of my writing, so I wanted to be incredibly sweet and supportive of her as a person in general. I’m glad I got that chance, no matter where we stand now. It made me feel good to give of myself, with no expectation of anything, just the spirit of giving.

Where I got tangled up in reciprocity was “things have been going so well… why do we keep fighting like this?” It had become an entrenched pattern that we couldn’t break, because every time her language escalated, I took it as a personal challenge. “I will not let you be bigger than me this time. I will not let you railroad me this time. I will not let you step on my head this time, etc.” That entrenched pattern was something I had with her that I don’t have anywhere else in my life. There was nothing I was ever going to do in which we’d be on equal footing, and she’d make sure I was powerless until we were both dead (although she will die first, because she is SO MUCH OLDER :P~).

I’m not eager to keep that pattern going, because it doesn’t get me anywhere except into “more trouble.” In quotation marks because in a way, her power position makes me feel parented instead of accepted for who I am…. and I’ve never had to feel that way before. I can’t take back any of my power with her, because she’s determined not to let it happen. Sometimes I feel as if I should just shake myself and say, “I wrote a book for you…. Chapter One…. Get over it. Chapter Two…. get over it…. Chapter Three…. get over it.”

If you could look into my mind and into my inbox, you’d know why this is so hard. But you can’t, so just bear with me. One day it will just click, and I’ll read my own book, and I’ll take Kristie’s advice just to stop caring. But there’s just so much there there….. you know?

Son of a bitch. Everything’s real.

There was something wrong with my entry this morning before I left work, something I couldn’t even put my finger on, but now it’s lunch and I’ve had some time to think about it and I know what it is. I called out Argo on her sunshine and chill, but I didn’t call out myself, and that’s even more important. Because this blog is about me and the things that happen to me out in the world, but it is also an internal monologue designed to keep me thinking about how to move forward in the world. From the very beginning, it was shit like #myhero #teamargo, and then due to a whole bunch of factors, I pushed her away *first.* The first time was when I realized that I had feelings for her that went beyond normal friend shit, because when people have opened up to me in the past, I just want to fix everything. Make everything all better. I know exactly why that crossed my Eros wire, but it is too personal to talk about here and had nothing to do with the few bones she threw me in the way of flirting. That was just funny, and all it would ever be. It felt good to feel cute in her “presence,” but the real issue was much, much, much, much deeper. I cut off all contact, which she told me she never thought I’d do in a million years over e-mail, that I’d tossed a friendship away like it was nothing, and my only response to that was, “is this the kind of energy you want coming at you all the time? Maybe I should have asked that question.” Because, here, in order, are the things I did after I ended that relationship (the first time, anyway):

• write about it
• cry about it
• regret it
• feel ok about it
• write about it again
• cry about it again and wish I had more Kleenex
• create a Spotify playlist called “Argo” and have it play continuously in my head.
• Smile to myself that she’d probably hate it.
• write about it again

I needed to let go of a piece of me that was diving into waters in which the relationship couldn’t stabilize, and I thought it was better for me to be in the storm alone. I didn’t toss anything like it was nothing. Then, she and Dana did some processing and a few days later, we were back in contact because I couldn’t decide what my better judgment was. In some ways, we needed each other. In others, I know for damn sure that any heart she’s ever broken still isn’t over it. She’s just the sort of person that when her light shines on you, it is like there’s no one else in the room.

The compromise was that I would stop talking about those feelings if she’d just allow me to flirt with her in a non-threatening way. That lasted 40 minutes, because she stepped over my comfort zone and any work I’d done to be able to let go of those feelings returned tenfold. But I didn’t tell her that part until much, much later. I will say for the record that to her, it probably was an innocent flirt. But it was too much to handle for me- I could dish it, but I couldn’t take it, and I feel stupid now that I didn’t think of that when I said I wanted to flirt with her in the first place, because her wordplay is so sharp that what did I think was going to happen? That she was going to sit still while I had my fun? I don’t think my feet touched the ground for three days. What I meant was “let me flirt with you, but for the love of God don’t flirt with me.” Totally double-standard and shitty, but probably the reason I didn’t think it would be an issue is that I didn’t think flirting with me would ever occur to her. #dumbassattack

So my hot and cold came from those feelings, because I alternated between wanting her close and not being able to handle it.

I can, now, but this is after YEARS of sitting with it. It helps that she’s ghosted, because I don’t have to worry one way or the other whether there is sunshine or chill on either of our parts…. and because I’ve pushed her away so many times that I had time to think on my own without going to her for comfort. You can’t get over someone and keep looking back across the river to make sure they’re ok. I see her quite differently now, and for that, I am grateful… even if the reason why is a healthy amount of fear.

Why wouldn’t I fear someone who consistently saw the worst in me? Why wouldn’t I fear someone who’s threatened me with a restraining order even though the most that’s ever happened between us is lobbing shitty e-mails at each other and nothing else? I’d hoped that the message was clear. I want as much to do with you as you want to do with me, and the things she views as harassment were (I thought) ways to get her to retreat, not get any closer. If she wants to take all of my shitty e-mails to a judge and claim that I threatened her, I could do the same. We were angry at each other, with no way to bridge the gap, so we just upped the ante until I went all in and she came in Kings full over Aces because she was hiding one up her sleeve.

But the thing is, I wouldn’t. I promised that I would keep all of her confidences, and I have, except for the ones where I thought Dana was permitted to be in on them. She told me that she was going to pull back on telling me things I couldn’t share with Dana, and then got mad at me that Dana knew some things she’d said after that.

It was things like that which kept my tail between my legs, because of course I felt horrible for processing with Dana even though I could only plead ignorance. Pleasing both of us was a moving target, and neither of us felt like we could win with the other. But the thing is, I am not as hard to please as she imagines. I would have been happy with my e-mails being seen as an entire narrative, and not just bad or good. I would have been pleased for Argo not to pick out one line she disagreed with and just hammer me on it as opposed to taking my letters for everything they were. I would have been over the moon if Argo had remembered that I was trying to be kind to her when she cut off our shoots of green. It wasn’t that long ago that I sent her a tongue-in-cheek gift in which she said it was the first time she’d laughed since last week. It wasn’t that long ago that I’d sent her a present which she proclaimed divine. But none of that mattered. Not any of it. Nothing mattered except that something I’d done bothered the shit out of her, and instead of being willing to talk about it, she just said, “I’m done.” There was no compromise, there was no benefit of the doubt, there was no anything except the insistence she was right and I was wrong. Period. The End. She said something to the effect that just because I didn’t hear what I wanted to hear, that didn’t mean she was wrong. I didn’t want her to tell me what I wanted to hear. I wanted her to take both points of view into consideration, just as I had. I could acknowledge the “you bothered the shit out of me” part, but I could not get behind it being intentional, because it just wasn’t true.

Thoughtless, certainly, but not trying to cause harm or unrest or any of those things. I am tired of screaming into the void that I don’t want to bother her, and I’m sorry for anything I’ve ever done along those lines. I’m sorry for every second I was unkind. I am sorry for every moment I pulled away when she needed me more, not less, even though I needed it for self-care. I’m sorry for every moment she’s said she regretted ever letting me into her life, because her truth is so far from reality. When she told me I needed to get a grip on reality, I told her I thought I had a really good one given all the shit that’s gone down, and I think it’s the only thing I’ve said that really rang true to me. Despite all of this, I am still just me, trying to live my life in the unenviable position of the over-thinker.

I blame myself for everything, just everything, even though I’ve been assured it’s not all my fault. But that doesn’t help when I’m trying to fall asleep… which is why I take sleeping medication that knocks me out so I don’t dream, and I take it as soon as I get home from work so that the day ends and begins early.

My biggest regret is that kindness didn’t win.

But you can’t win them all. Sometimes you just get up from the table.

Today I woke up with my mind stayed on Jesus, an old hymn that runs through my head when I make the decision to be happy. Yesterday, I made the decision to feel grief, really feel it in hopes that it wouldn’t come back up and bite me in the ass later. I find that it is more advantageous to deal with grief as it comes, and just to let it. But today I realized more than ever that there is nothing I can do, and it’s just time to move on and be as reasonably happy as I can despite everything that’s gone down over the last three years. You can’t tell someone tha they’re a snake in the grass (no matter how true it might be) and expect that things will go back to normal… even though that is nowhere near anything as bad as the things Argo and I have said to each other in private and those things have rolled off as we tried to navigate what it would look like to be the type of friends that check in with each other.

For whatever reason, Argo is determined to be scared of me, even though there is nothing I could do that would rival anything she’s willing to do to me. To make me feel smaller and more afraid than I’ve ever been in my life. To send across escalated words that are designed to hurt and think that I’ll just lie down and take it. I generally don’t start fights so much as finish them, because generally what has happened is that a perceived threat comes across and not a real one. And then Argo takes all her shitty feelings towards me and throws them back in my face. She waffles between never having done so, and taking responsibility for the fact that she is also capable of creating negativity and shares much of the blame in what’s gone on. I don’t know what to believe, because while I can hold cognitive dissonance in my head for years at a time, I’d rather have it solved sooner than later.

Sooner has come, and apparently that means nothing. No check-ins, no “I’m sorrys,” no anything. And I will have to live with that, but it doesn’t mean that I have to be sad about it all the time. It is a letting go that probably needed to happen long ago, and yet we just kept trying… and yet, not. The best thing that she’s ever said to me was when I sent her a cool present, and she told me to stop sending her gifts because the best present I could have given her was getting well. It meant more than diamonds, but of course, it didn’t last long.

I told her that being in her life took an incredible toll on my marriage, but an even bigger toll on me because in the end, I couldn’t make room for myself anymore, either. I just worried about all her stuff like a mother hen, and ignored all the things I needed to do to take care of myself.

Three years ago, she told Dana and me that we should move to DC because with our smarts, we’d be imminently hireable… and “too smart for my own good” may have escaped her lips more than once. Those words stuck with me, and as it happened, they turned out to be true. I have a job that equals my salary in Houston, and no wish to spend it. I have more money in my bank account than I’ve had in years- not enough for three months worth or living expenses, but very close to two, and not living paycheck to paycheck is worth so much more to me than anything I could have done for myself.

This is probably because when I go out to dinner with my friends, I don’t feel the need to pick up the entire check just to make sure they like me… because now, I am not driven by impressing anyone…. and in fact, probably part of the reason I haven’t really started dating yet, because with it comes money. You can’t even go to the movies anymore without dropping a buttload. Even the movies that are non-3D are over $14 a ticket. With 3D, it’s over 20. Now, I can’t see 3D movies because I have monocular vision, but that’s not going to stop me from going to see something that other people want to see.

The only movie in which anything has ever jumped out at me was at Epcot Center, where they had a Muppets movie made in what’s called 4D, and there were prisms in the glasses. That was when the HSPVA orchestra played Disney World, and the movie was the most memorable part, because for the first time, I could see what everyone else saw. Sweetums is bigger than advertised, and the Swedish Chef threw food on me. I haven’t seen a movie advertised in 4D since, but I’m still waiting……. The funniest line in the movie, to me, was Kermit walking through Bunsen and Beaker’s lab, saying that they’d invited all the world’s most famous scientists to see their discoveries, but they refused to come.

The other funny part of the trip is that we played a suite of tunes from West Side Story, not adapted for orchestra, but the real Lenny Bernstein score. The reason that’s funny is that everyone behaved themselves and said “mambo,” when in rehearsal, it was “dildo, “gringo,” etc. We had a million of ’em, and I’m sure that any other PVA’ers that read this web site can fill you in on the horrible things we said. 🙂 Most conductors wouldn’t have let us get away with it, but ours let it slide, not even threatening us with death if we did that during a performance.

So today I am concentrating on memories that make me laugh, and trying to be as happy as I can be as I was sad yesterday… leaving the questions in my mind alone as I wonder what would have happened if I’d made the break from Argo stick so that I could, in a sense, have my life back.

But my last fight with Dana pretty much solved all of that. She put her hands around my neck and started to squeeze, and when she let go, finally, I returned the favor and that’s when I realized how little I was and to just give up. Dana was standing there just saying, “do it.” And I was standing there thinking that my hands couldn’t wrap around her neck, anyway. It was the second-most time I’d ever felt more powerless, and thankful that all I got in that fight was some broken blood vessels in my face and not bruises around my neck, because her hands were twice the size of mine and plenty more powerful.

But the hardest part of that fight was not recovering from the physical bruise, but the insistence that I deserved it. That for all of the emotional pain I’d inflicted on her, it gave her every right to come at me physically. The first most scared I’ve ever been is when Argo’s weird shit-o-meter went off and I had no idea what would be waiting for me when I got here… I even thought that there would be police waiting for me at DCA, unfounded and yet very real in my mind. It was by the grace of God that Argo realized that she was responsible for negativity in our relationship as well, and it wasn’t fair to lay all of it in my lap. In trying to push her away, I frightened her as well as she frightened me, and if there is anything I wish I could take back, it is that… on both sides of the equation.

It would kill her for me to say this, but I’m going to say it anyway, that our relationship had all the hallmarks of the same fucked up relationship I had with Diane… the sunshine so bright I couldn’t see, and the eventual discard. But by that time, I was aware of it… I just couldn’t erase our chord as fast and as easily as she could. Sunshine and chill were a part of our lives in equal measure, because sometimes escalated language came across to her in e-mails that were never meant to be attacks, they were just taken that way. I just never learned to diffuse the bombs, or if I did, they were taken as “not the real me.”

I had to learn to see myself in a whole different light, without her influence at all, because when I didn’t, I didn’t deserve to live life to the fullest. I was beaten down in just about every possible way one could be beaten, physically, mentally, emotionally, ecumenically, grammatically…….

Getting involved in my church’s youth group was the first time I was able to see myself as the lovable geek I’ve always been, and the kids responded to me in a way that I never thought they would- opened up the channels for more love, more support, more everything than I could possibly imagine.

So I choose to be happy, because I have those memories as well. I cannot even, so I won’t.

I learned from the “Memories” section on Facebook today that the blog post I published that introduced me to Argo was three years ago today. As you can imagine, a stone has dropped to the pit of my stomach and I’m kind of sweating out the grief. I made the fatal mistake of e-mailing her about it, but not fatal because she wrote anything back. Fatal because of the promises I’d made to myself… it let me down that I couldn’t keep them. She’s told me that I’d never hear from her directly again, and I’m ok with that. What I’m not okay with is being untrue to myself. I wanted this detente to last, to stop the fighting between two unhappy countries, and I haven’t done anything except make myself a sad sack’s worth of memories.

But I did tell her that to me, she was perfect despite all her flaws, failures, and vulnerabilities, and anything that happened after that was irrelevant. Those words may not resonate with her, but it made me feel good to say them. And perhaps that is why I needed to write- to ease the pain inside myself, rather than the pain inside her. There is nothing I can do about that, because her reactions are her reactions and I take nothing away from them. There’s also a chance that she’s not getting my e-mails at all, and that kind of makes me feel even better, because knowing I can write into the void of space and time without knowing whether I’m being heard or not is better than anything she’d probably write back. Although there was a time when she told me that she’d blocked my e-mails, and after writing to her regardless because I knew it was just going into the void of interspace, I realized she was indeed getting everything. Just everything.

However, I am lucky that I did not say anything in those e-mails that would have mattered one way or the other. I just talked. One was a 20-minute voice message in which she never said anything about, but was mortifying knowing she got it in the first place. Again, it was nothing. Just talking into space because I thought that if she could *hear* me, really hear me, it would be different than just seeing me in black and white. What I learned from that escapade is not to count on the fact that she tells me my e-mails are blocked. 🙂

Holidays are hard, extremely so, because those are the moments I remember back to the people we used to be to each other and wishing there was some sort of reset button in which we get to start over at flipping each other shit and leaving it at that…. or at the very least, a chance to give each other our hearts and mean it in the sweet and light it was meant to be. The kind where Dana wouldn’t have had to be threatened. The kind where I wouldn’t have had to be threatened. The kind that would have sewn our fabric with a double stitch instead of ripping it apart.

And then I think, “who am I kidding? Dana would have been threatened no matter what I did, because she didn’t like me having friends outside of her.” We could have joint friends, but individual friends just wouldn’t have happened on her watch. Her jealousy knew no bounds, because, well, I can’t tell you why, but it just was.

I could have Dana or I could have Argo, and I made my choice. It was the difference between “you’ll never amount to anything” and “I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in you.” Given those two statements, I doubt anyone would have made a different choice. It didn’t matter that Dana was my partner and Argo was my friend. I could do without being married if my wife was going to treat me like shit.

My friends are my lifeblood, and are saving me one day at a time as I navigate learning to live again. What I never counted on was Argo’s “oh-shitometer” going up as high as it did, because moving to DC only had as much to do with her as she wanted it to be, to cultivate real friendship instead of just knowing each other in the space we’d created over long e-mail exchanges. By that time, she wanted no part of it, and I respected her wishes.

Eventually we made up, but not to the point where we were comfortable enough to meet on the ground. Just enough that seeing each other’s names in our inboxes didn’t incite fear. Because the truth of the matter is that we were both afraid of each other in our own ways, not sure how to navigate being geographically close (but not incredibly so), and how I tried to meet her fear with braggadocio that covered up a million insecurities because I didn’t want to be in a small place of fear. I wanted to stand up to her, because the more she harped on me, the worse I felt…. and yet, there was nothing I could do to be equal. By God, she was going to be bigger and stronger than me no matter what I did or said, and the more she impressed upon me just how big and strong she could be, the more I folded into myself, unable to get light in my eyes again because I was again trying to take up as little space in the world as I could. I sat in my room and prepared to get owned.

For the first couple of months that I was here, I didn’t even leave my house unless I had to go to the grocery store or to the pharmacy. Occasionally, I’d let myself have a trip into DC, but they were short-lived due to enormous anxiety. Anything and everything I said was filed away as just another reason why she needed to be scared of me…. and had she looked at me, really seen into my eyes instead of into my letters, she wouldn’t have been scared of me at all.

Instead, we’d have a close moment, and then fight our guts out, and the close moments got ignored in favor of every fight escalating into cutting each other off at the knees. I got plenty tired of kneeling, but as a fixer/pleaser, it didn’t stop me from trying to erase all the fear and turn it into the goodwill I actually wanted for her…. but even being nice to her was fraught with being wrong. Even in trying to be kind, I felt small.

My other friends have rescued me from this fixer/pleaser attitude because clearly, it was only hurting me. I still hurt, every day, in fact, but the fact that the fights are gone are doing me a lot of good. I don’t feel so small. I am coming into the fullness of myself after having missed it for a long time. So much so that I realize writing to her is the biggest mistake I could have made, because it hurts so damn much that I couldn’t not. I couldn’t keep the most important promise I’ve made to myself in years.

Even if it was the anniversary of the day we met.

 

Scales is on Ocracoke Island this weekend, and her pictures are gorgeous enough to wish I’d thought of getting on Air BnB and going to the OBX as well. OBX is shorthand for the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and if the pictures are doing it justice, one of the most gorgeous places on earth. I would have picked a different location, only because Scales is with her family and all I would have wanted was to walk on the beach alone. I wouldn’t have wanted to crash her vacation, just saying that it would have been cool to create my own.

I forget that I have the power to do these things. You know, like book my own hotel rooms, drive to my own destinations, etc. Most of the time, I stay holed up in my room with books and movies because it wouldn’t occur to me to branch out… especially today. If I went into DC today, I would be mobbed with tourists from the train to anywhere I wanted to go, and if there’s anything I hate more than being alone, it’s being alone in a crowd so tight I can’t breathe.

I think that’s why so many people that live here go on vacation for Memorial Day. Having a “staycation” this weekend just sucks. It’s just hot enough to be uncomfortable and get sunburned even if you’re waiting to get inside a museum. There are beaches in Maryland, to, but if I really wanted to go, I should have thought of it yesterday. I don’t want to do two three-hour drives in one day…. because I think there are closer ones, but those are the ones that are going to be the most crowded with locals who hate tourists just as much as I do.

Sometimes I forget where I am.

NYC is less than four hours away. Boston, seven. And conceivably, you can drive to the White or Green mountains in one day if you leave early enough. Ottawa and Montreal are also not that far, but I’d rather save Montreal for when JazzFest is going on. Plus, I had a bad experience in Montreal, one that I’m not eager to repeat. The people at the gas stations were so fucking rude to me, but since I don’t have an American accent to really speak of, perhaps they thought I was a Canadian who couldn’t speak French, a much bigger sin than being an American in Canada. And besides, the only thing I really want to do in Canada besides JazzFest is go to a grocery store and load up on all the Canadian foods I love.

• Sugar Free Juicy Fruit.
• Grapefruit Trident.
• Ketchup chips.
• Mint Aero bars.
• Coffee Crisp.
• A trip to the beer store to get an Alexander Keith’s to drink while I’m sitting outside.
• A trip to an outdoor market that sells Beaver Tails, a pastry that we call an “Elephant Ear” here in the US, but taste inexplicably better.
• Going through the drive through at Tim Horton’s knowing they already have hot tea brewed that you can order with milk and sugar without having to wait for it to steep.

There are a few Tim Horton’s in the US, but I doubt they sell hot tea that way, because it is just not as popular here as it is in a British territory.

I also want to see the wilds of Nunavut, thanks to Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie, because “one fifth of my country…. is also Nunavut.” 🙂 The fact that I don’t know anything about Nunavut (or much else) has never stopped me before.

There’s so much I want to do that needs advance planning, and I am of the “not so much” variety when it comes to doing so. I get into the “it’s not worth the hassle” movement and slowly back out of plans. Just got a new book from Amazon. That’ll do, right?

I also downloaded S2, E1 of Outlander, and the first scene grabbed me. It was exactly as I’d pictured in my mind. I wish they’d stayed in the “present day” a little longer, because Claire and Frank’s interactions regarding their “starting over” marriage and the baby that would eventually become Bree was as close to the book as the movie that ran through my mind. I also realized that because of the scenes from the last season, I hadn’t watched all of Season 1. So perhaps I will spend my day flipping between Jamie and Frank, because the book that the second season is based on, Dragonfly in Amber, is probably my favorite of them all… although I will never forgive the cunning stunt that spoiled Claire’s pregnancy for me in an Amazon review.

And on that note, I will continue to look at Scales’ pictures with no small amount of jealousy and read in the sunlight on my beloved porch…. a staycation without tourists.

My favorite.

I wrote a blog for the first 3 months I was in Iraq (I called it 48 Mondays due to the amount of time I would be deployed) It was cathartic and exactly what I needed. I stopped writing just after Christmas as I used so much emotional energy just to get through the Holidays that I didn’t really have it in me to keep it up. I regret that. I should have written about the pain, the sorrow and the seemingly bottomless pit of despair I felt realizing that I still had 9 months to go.

I got this from my “Memories” section on Facebook, and I was too busy flirting with all my newfound readers to really pay attention to it (It was the day my marriage article EXPLODED). When I saw it again today, I was struck by the reality of Memorial Day in a whole new way. This soldier didn’t die, so by the grace of God it is not her Memorial Day, but I happen to know that she’s deployed again and I don’t know how many Mondays are left this time, but I am struck with all the waiting.

• Waiting to know if she’s coming home safely.
• Wondering if she’s in danger, and if so, how much?
• Waffling between whether I’d want to know.
• Knowing she couldn’t/wouldn’t tell me, anyway… Partly because of confidentiality in the military, and partly because I made a huge mistake that ended our friendship permanently, but it doesn’t stop the worry altogether. There will never be a time in my life when I don’t know her, and she doesn’t know me.

Struck by how real and vulnerable she was in typing that on my Facebook page in the first place, and regretting that I didn’t answer it quickly, because this is as real as it gets… as it will ever get in terms of seeing into the mind of someone who knows the pain of being overseas in a place where her family is safe at home and she’s stuck in some shithole in the Middle East while life goes on without her. Another re-integration. Another putting down of the luggage and hopefully the memories they contain, because I would imagine that it’s not the deployment itself that’s the problem. It’s everything that goes with the deployment.

I’d like to imagine that her rank makes her safe in a SCIF somewhere, in the planning and execution rather than on the front lines, but that is just a guess to make me feel better, when the reality might be quite different. But we as supporters of soldiers make all kinds of shit up in our heads to try and make ourselves feel better. You know, so we can sit here and have hot dogs on our day off because soldiers give us that right.

The truth is that what we see are the illusions of news, and not the reality of being the boots on the ground. It is more that we can imagine, more than we can reasonably wrap our brains around, more than we can process at any given time… which is why there’s a reason that the reality isn’t shown. It’s terrifying, viscerally so.

Although if you’re really interested, don’t watch American news. Watch the BBC or Al Jazeera. It will scare the bejesus out of you, but it is more than the American media are willing to part with as not to panic the American people. The American media “protects us.” But it is to our  detriment. In order to celebrate Memorial Day, we need to focus on what really matters. Disarming IEDs in the middle of the road. Snipers on both sides of the equation and soldiers caught in the crossfire.  And here I sit, drinking a cherry Diet Dr Pepper, staring at the screen while our soldiers give me the right to just sit here without worrying what’s going to happen to me, but it doesn’t do jack or shit to stop me from worrying about what’s going to happen to them.

The best I can hope for is that intelligence on the ground from friendlies will give us enough information to stop attacks before they happen… their own Claire Fraser (Outlander series) who knew which way the British were coming for the Scottish. Because of time travel, she wasn’t a spy. She’d read what happened in a lot of the battles and when she fell through the stones in Scotland and ended up 200 years and some change from the present day, passed on the little she knew from history books. But it is not the same. How do you know if you’ve really turned someone into a friendly? How do you know that the information they’re passing is correct? How do you know that they are helping you prevent an attack instead of leading you into the middle of the fire?

You don’t.

You just hope you got the right information at the right time, and that it’s actually usable. Otherwise, you could end up kicking in doors and instead of finding the right HVT, it’s just a woman armed to the teeth with explosives, ready to blow up three city blocks without even thinking about it.

And this is where my mind goes as we “celebrate” Memorial Day.

Good luck and godspeed  to all of their Mondays, and the Mondays after that.

Amen.