Pri-Diddy is coming back sooner than I thought, and she’s not actually moving to Seattle that long. It’s more like a sabbatical. She’s going to spend a few months in Seattle, then Eugene, then San Francisco, then Colombia (where Elena is from). She’s keeping her job, doing some work remotely and if the money runs out, can come home and pick up where she left off. It’s one of the coolest, craziest plans I’ve ever heard, and I’m really excited for her. She said, “I even get to stay in a yurt.” I said, “in Eugene?,” barely containing my laughter. Because of course if you’re going to Eugene, you’re going to stay in a yurt. I also came up with a new nickname for her, because she wants to run on the track at U of Oregon……… wait for it…….

Pri-fontaine.

So my little guru is headed for an entire tour of the Pacific Northwest, including the hippiest place on earth.™ Although you really can’t say you’ve been on a complete tour of the Pacific Northwest until you’ve been to Saturday Market in Eugene, complete with potheads singing anti-war songs that look like they’ve been sitting in that exact spot since 1975.

I just told her to be really careful on the trip from Eugene to San Francisco, to make sure she had chains for her car, and to call ahead and make sure the mountain pass is open that day. The first time I drove to Portland from Houston, it was November and the pass was open, but it was in complete whiteout conditions and I couldn’t even see the end of my car. The hood just floated into nowhere. I went 15 miles an hour for what seemed like an entire day… and then when I looked down at the clock after white knuckling the steering wheel, it had been five hours.

Prianka showed me a video of driving in the Himalayas on the Indian side, and I said, “oh, it’s just like that… except with a guardrail… but it doesn’t matter because you can’t see it anyway.” And as I thought about it, it’s not exactly the same. Mt. Shasta’s passages are much, much steeper. So much so that I never had to use gas while driving back down.

The next time I drove the passes, I was astounded at how beautiful they were… like, enough to just want to pull over and build a house. It was summer, so the flora was in its fullest form, and it was finding where God lives (in a yurt, probably).

After that, I became all about the pagan celebrations as well as the Christian ones. I’ve done Solstice and Beltane and all the rest, for thou art the same God…… and if you can finish that sentence, you’re probably an Episcopalian.

Prianka is also going to do some running. Hood to Coast was already full, but there are plenty more, and her trainer is wanting to get her out on steeper terrain to prepare. Good luck, God bless. Come get me when you’re ready to eat chocolate.

All the anxiety and panic I had that Pri was never coming back melted in an instance, because I knew it logically, but I had to sit with her and hear all about her adventures before I knew it emotionally. Pri and Elena eventually want to have children, and they want to be with their families when they do. It’s not forever. It just may seem like it. 😛

Sometimes you just need to go to Starbucks and write with a Venti Italian Roast in front of you to try and get so wired you’re not going to cry. I’ve taken all the medicine I can take in terms of anti-anxiety, and physically it is helping as I roil on the insides with memory. My guru, Pri Diddy, is moving to Seattle of all places. Seattle. Three years ago, I would have been a little over three hours from her. Now I am going to be a lifetime away, as Bryn can attest, because the time difference is killing us. In order to keep my routine going, I am usually in bed between 6:00-7:00 PM her time. If I call her before work, it’s 4-5:00 AM her time, and she works as well. With my family, it’s different because it’s only an hour. Three is pushing it, just like when Diane and I were on opposite sides of the country and trying to make room for each other in our lives. It’s never gotten any easier, and that was 15 years ago. I do like Seattle, though, so maybe a visit is in order after some time has passed. I don’t have much vacation at work, but eventually I will, and there’s a few old haunts that I’d like to visit, particularly the EMP (Experience Music Project). It won’t be so bad. Prianka knows that DC is home, and wants to come back to be with her family at some point, but I’ll be waiting a little minute. I found out on Instagram, but I know that social media is the easiest way to get information out to everyone at once, so I wasn’t angry. Just sad. She owed me a phone call just as much as she owed everyone else, which is no one.

When you get into the cycle of trying to call people, you invariably run into the people that want to talk you out of it, and the decision was already made with finality. The people that wanted me to keep working on my relationship with Dana alternated between “think of all the years you’ve already had together” and “it’s ok that she hits you a little bit.” That might be overstating a little, but at the same time, it wasn’t a fight I could just look past and pretend it didn’t happen, especially since that fight didn’t start emotionally. It started over money and devolved into emotion, something I never wanted. I wanted facts. I didn’t find out that we weren’t financially stable until I’d already left Alert Logic, and I wanted to know where the money went. Her answer was to beat me over the head with the amount of attention I gave Argo and never answer the question at all.

It was bait-and-switch, and I fell for it. I was so tired. I was so tired of Argo being Dana’s go to emotion when we were fighting, as if our relationship didn’t matter anymore, when in fact, it was everything. Just everything. Writing to Argo in the middle of the night was not the same as being able to go for beers and hug each other at the end of the night and say, “I had a great time. Let’s do this again sometime.” As my relatonship with Dana and with myself spiraled out of control, so did the relationship with Argo, because I was mad at God and everybody without the tools to deal with that anger appropriately. Plus, I was losing the one person that would listen to me as I tried to process the enormity of the situation, because both Argo and I are a handful, especially when talking to *each other.*

Our relationship was easy give-and-take until I opened my big mouth and said that the rabbit hole we were lost in was creating different emotions in me than it was in her and taking an incredible toll on my marriage, because she was the one I was confiding in, for better or for worse. The better was being able to get a different perspective on my marriage. The worse was trying to push her away before she could push me. It worked masterfully well, obviously, because when I came here, Argo thought she needed a restraining order and I thought that was batshit crazy and go ahead and do what you need to do, because I didn’t come here to cramp your style. Even if I’d moved closer to her, the Virginia side where I’d lived before, there was still plenty of room for us both to be us without running into each other accidentally. I know her address, but only because she used PayPal to support my writing and I sent her a thank-you note in return. She hasn’t moved since then, and I still don’t know exactly where the address is in relation to where I used to live, only that it is not anywhere near my old house…. and I have no interest in finding out. It wouldn’t work out well for either one of us, because I am not prepared to be rejected again. I am not ready to cause her even more hurt, intentionally or not. The intentional hurt was a product of “the way I was raised” and the wet cat claws extended feeling of anxiety that said, “push her away, because it’s too hard to ask for what you want.” Because what I wanted at the time was to be left alone to my own devices, and I couldn’t bring myself to ask her to ghost in hopes that Dana would see that I was willing to do anything to get away from the hold she had on me. And the thing is, I could have just said calmly, “could you ghost, because Dana is threatened (without cause) and I cannot be in relationship with both of you because it causes more problems than it solves. At that time, I was not thinking of moving to DC, and my vision was short and impaired for all sorts of reasons that I am still wading through one at a time. The problem with this is that when you tell the truth about yourself, you have to tell the truth about everyone else, and there is too much confidentiality between us to process here. But what I can say is that I stepped into it up to my ass in this latest go-round, and I didn’t even mean to.

As my dad would say, “mean not to.” Sage advice I did not take, when I clearly should’ve. Because maybe those shoots of green would have continued to grow, and we both could have taken off the suits that made us Leslie and Argo. ™ And maybe they wouldn’t have, but at the same time, I lost a precious piece of my life over the last three years, which was having a safe space to say what I wanted, even when the response was negative. I wish I had taken more time to sit with each letter rather than jumping on it right away. I wish I’d been taking Klonopin long ago, because the fight-or-flight would have been beaten out of me long ago. I wonder all the time what would have happened had I gotten the tools to deal with escalation and how to diffuse emotional bombs without escalating right back… because we may never have made the deal to meet in person, but I might have had that friend I could write to for longer than I actually did.

Having Prianka in my life didn’t cure all of that, but it made enormous headway. She is all about the self-improvement, and showed me lots of videos on how to release shame, how to move into the future, how to let go of relationships in which you hope the other person will change and they just won’t. I tried to change everything about myself for the better, so that I could learn to deal with those escalated e-mails in a different way than I had before, and what I learned from that is when those hot buttons came back around, I would regress into my former self rather than being able to apply everything I’d learned. It hurt beyond belief, not because I hurt her, although I’m sure I did. It was more that I’d put an enormous amount of work into myself with therapy and new drugs and yet, when Argo got on her angry bandwagon, it wouldn’t show anymore because of the lens in which she saw me, and acknowledged she always would. Perhaps she was testing me to see if I meant what I said about changing gears, and if so, I failed… mostly because e-mail can only show so much.

Sharing a bacon cheeseburger would have wrought extremely different results, but I cannot help that it will never happen. I can only regret. When I asked her what more she could ask of me, all I basically got back is to “have a nice life.” The only thing I can do from here on out is to have one.

If there is any hope in this garbage dump of a situation, it’s that I’ve made new friends who don’t see me as the person I once was, and enjoy me for who I am. I am doing my best not to ever return to the angry, judgmental dickhead I was to Argo, because it was a side of me I’d never seen before or since. I am almost (almost) happier without her, because her shitty observations of me aren’t running through my head all day, every day… and Prianka was a large part of changing how I saw myself. She reminded me of the loving heart I have always been, hugging me through my darkness and putting it in perspective in terms of how successful I am and how stepping out on a ledge and moving back to DC was brave and strong and all the things I really am without the tint of Argo’s enormous influence on my thought process. For a long time, because she was so smart, so gorgeous, so grounded within herself, I thought her opinions of me mattered more than my opinions of myself. Her reality was not mine, and never would be. I did things that were bad, but at no time did that make me a bad person… that I would recover from the mistakes I made and go on to be the enormous personality I was meant to be. Because mistakes are not the sum total of my personality, and I don’t know how I got there.

In the beginning of my relationship with Argo, she thought I had amazing insights and as we got closer and closer, that devolved into me trying to see the perosnality behind the suit, but she didn’t want to show it to me anymore… and that’s ok. But what was not ok was seeing those shoots of green and not taking them for what they were… an enormous I’m sorry and I never want our relationship to be what it was.

But again, when my buttons were pushed, I didn’t take enough time to sit in her words, reflect on them, before the cortisol and sin began racing through my body and The Incredible Hulk had nothing on me. It was the definition of the word regret, and I couldn’t live my life with that much of it. I had to step away for my own sanity, and probably for hers, because I doubt that she liked being that person to me any more than I liked being that person to her.

I sat in the cold of winter hoping for spring, and in some ways, I won’t stop hoping that as I get further and further away from the person I used to be, that she’ll see it. But I am not counting my chickens before they hatch, because I don’t want to fall into old patterns with Argo any more than I want to fall into old patterns with Dana.

So tonight I am going to dinner with Pri-Diddy, in hopes we can work out a way to be the virtual friends we were for many years before I was folded into the family, knowing that a real friendship will come back into play when she and Elena make the decision to move back.

I know I’d be out after one or two Seattle winters. The weather literally made me sick, and while I would not wish that upon anyone, I do know that it’s hard not to let the months and months of darkness get to you. So perhaps they’ll move somewhere sunny, and I can meet up with them then, as well.

It’s nice to have enough money to dream…. and dream bigger than I ever have before. This is not the end, but a great new beginning. I just wish it hadn’t come so soon after I moved here, because there is nothing like going to lunch with Prianka and coming away like I am six feet tall and bulletproof, not allowing anything to get in my way.

Amen.

There are very few things that I enjoy more than being a counselor for the youth group at my church, but last night was the best meeting I’ve attended so far. Not that the others are far behind it, but this one was truly amazing. The kids were engaged, and asked more questions than you can possibly imagine. I am glad that whatever negative feelings I had over not getting the youth director job myself melted into a mentor/student relationship with Susannah, the actual youth pastor, because she is teaching me a new way of moving about the world. Her style is completely different than mine, because she is always watching and waiting for the kids to respond, whereas I have a much more active style that sometimes lends itself to more control than the kids really need. I don’t want to make them afraid to speak out, and at the same time, there has to be a balance between discipline and freedom. For instance, if we’re doing something serious, everyone has to put their phones in a box at the front of the room, even Susannah and me. We all signed the “constitution of youth group,” and one of those tenets was to be present in an absolute way. It’s hard to open up to your peers and check your Facebook page all at once. I know me. I’ve seen me do it.

But what was different about last night was that a Jewish youth group came to visit and taught us about all kinds of culture. Our church would be the equivalent of Reform Judaism, the most liberal of liberal Christians. Theirs was quite different, representing Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform all at the same time. I couldn’t imagine a youth group that incorporated everyone from the Church of Christ to the United Church of Christ, which seem similar in name but are at opposite sides of the spectrum in terms of belief. If these kids can do it without clashing with each other, surely so can we… Someday. We shall see what we shall see. I have been approached by the nominating committee about joining Christian Ed, which does not exclusively deal with teenagers, but Susannah attends the meetings, so at least it is some sort of umbrella. I’ve also started putting a lot more money than normal in the offering plate, and am considering a tithe because our budget shortfall is to the point where we are considering cutting positions just to save money. It would be easy for me considering I don’t have any utility bills except my mobile phone and my car insurance, and any money I put in the offering plate or pledge in in essence, feeding my youth group as well, so we can offer programs just like this.

For instance, the Orthodox boy put on his Tefillin, wrapping the leather straps around his arm, and pretty much everyone in the room dropped their jaws with wide-eyed interest. He said that it was a reminder that he was in prayer, to keep him focused on the task at hand. He also said that he has special prayers in Hebrew that go with it, but if there’s something he has to tell God, he just says it. The practice is not limited to the prayers already set forth. The kids asked all sorts of important questions, like whether you could take the scrolls out of the boxes and look at them. He said no, because to touch them is to possibly wear them out faster, but that he does take his in to a professional every five to seven years to make sure that the scrolls aren’t damaged.

They also took turns describing the Jewish life cycle- that for boys, the circumcisions and naming ceremony have to be done within roughly a week after birth, and for girls, the naming ceremony has to take place roughly two weeks afterward.

Then, they asked for volunteers, and married two of our kids under a cloth Chuppah, explaining what goes on during a Jewish wedding. One of the things I learned is that the breaking of the glass when stepped on is not about supporting the marriage, but remembering the sadness of not having a temple anymore… that the Western Wall is the only thing left.

Lastly, they talked about death, and how the body must be buried as soon as possible, and that there is a special group of people tasked with preparing the body for burial in its plain wooden box, no adornments for the Jessica Mitford classic “beautiful memory picture” that funeral homes are so adept at selling. One of the most meaningful things to me is that a man is supposed to be buried in the same clothes in which he got married, completing the life cycle. Also, the body is never left alone. I quipped to Pastor Mark, “did they have to start that before or after Jesus?” I am guessing it was a thousand years before, but at the same time, it was hilarious to me that the people might have to sit with the body to make sure they don’t get away. Obviously, it’s been done.

One of the questions that Pastor Mark asked that I thought was poignant and relevant was during the Q&A afterward… “is there anything you’d like to know about us? I was amazed at how much information our kids were able to pass on, considering that as a youth minister, you never know what’s going to stick and what’s not. We talked about the difference between commercial Christmas and religious Christmas, and I think we opened some eyes that way. You mean it’s not all about Santa?

They also wanted to know if we had special prayers before and after meals, in the morning, etc. Great questions, and truly insightful.

One of the girls was named Arial (pronounced ARE-e-el), and I told her to look up whom I consider “my Rabbi,” because her congregation rented space in Bridgeport and I loved going to schul on Friday nights. In their congregations, they do it a bit differently. At sunset, they have prayers and dinner with their families, and go to schul on Saturday mornings. “My synagogue” did schul on Friday nights and Torah/Talmud study on Saturday. It was an interesting thing to learn that not all synagogues do it the same way. The other thing I learned is that the bar/bat mitzvah readings are not based on each kid, but the portion of the Pentateuch that is being read that Friday/Saturday.

The hardest part for me was when they read the Kaddish in Hebrew, because there is so much sadness in my life right now… relationships that dig deep into my soul because they are deaths of a sort. The people didn’t die, but their relationships to me did.

And then we switched topics to learning the alefbet, and being able to write our names in Hebrew. It was just an amazing evening, and even the adults were blown away by the kids’ poise in talking about their faiths. It reminded me of the documentary Trembling Before Hashem, where gay Jews talk about their faiths and the way they’ve been rejected by their communities. Of course, Reform Judaism is completely fine with the gays, but Orthodox is not. It is just as frightening to come out as a gay Orthodox Jew as it is to come out as a gay Southern Baptist… but at the same time, it teaches all kinds of Judaic beliefs in the process. It was a documentary that I would have liked to recommend, but I couldn’t remember if it was kid-friendly or not. I think it is, but I wasn’t going to recommend it if I didn’t remember clearly.

The point was to learn from each other, and it worked masterfully well. We decided that this was just the beginning of the conversation, and we’d be meeting again later. Youth group does not meet in the summer, so perhaps when we start up in the fall. It gave me a lot to think about, and for that, I am extremely grateful. The one joke I didn’t make is that perhaps they should read a bit of the New Testament just for fun, because the sequel is just as good.

When I study scripture, I have a Jewish annotated version of the New Testament, and it has been invaluable to me in terms of commentary and learning the Hebrew words for things that Jesus would have used, being a Jew himself.

I also think that we need to invite a group of Muslim kids to visit as well, because even Jesus used the word “Aalah” in reference to the Abramic god. In Islam, it is spelled “Allah,” but that is just a translation from the Aramaic. Interfaith dialogue is just indispensable, both for me and the generation of Christians I’m trying to shape. It is so much more satisfying to focus on everything that we have in common, rather than the things that blow us apart. We all come from the same point in time, when God chose Abraham as the father of both Judaism and Islam, and later on, when Jesus’ new church emerged as a sect of Judaism and slowly created a revolution of its own.

The revolution was not televised, and yet, here we are, quoting Jesus thousands of years later. Quoting the same prophets that Jesus himself would have read. I imagine him as a young boy asking the four questions at Passover, and possibly opening the door for Elijah. I remember when I did it. We had a seder at our church in Naples, and for some reason, I was deathly scared that someone was actually at the door. Oh, the things that little kids think…….

And after last night, I realized that I thought I knew, but I really didn’t know anything… a teachable moment from those younger and wiser.

Amein.

Ok, so the last hymn is listed as “Londonderry Air,” so I looked in the back of the hymnal in the hymn tune section, and it wasn’t there. So I got out my phone and looked it up.

Big. Mistake.

I start laughing and I can’t stop. Tears are running down my face and no sound will come out. My nose starts to run and I cannot stand it. I am just about to die of asphyxiation from trying to stop laughing when David, the guy next to me, asks what’s so damn funny.

The last hymn is to the tune of “O Danny Boy.” When I tell him, the laughter starts all over again.

So it gets to the end of the service and when the last phrase comes around, several people around me miss the high note by A LOT, and I just collapsed onto the pew, laughing so hard that David is clearly trying not to kick me. I can’t see, I can’t breathe, I just cannot even. And of course, when something is not supposed to be funny, it makes me laugh even harder because it’s inappropriate.

Who in their right minds wrote a hymn to the tune “O Danny Boy?” I don’t know my hymnody, so perhaps it was a hymn long before it became a bar song that makes Irish drunks cry… but that is not a song you give to non-singers and make the last phrase hit a high F or something crazy like that… and then modulate a whole step higher. Even the tenors in the crowd (and I use that term loosely) are having trouble with it, so none of us are safe.

I finally got my snot together and finished it, because I knew I could help keep everyone on pitch…. and then my voice cracked and I fell over again, unable to keep the tears of laughter from running down my face.

This is only something I would do if I was trying to punk the senior pastor. I look up, and he can see me, and he’s trying not to laugh… not because he knew what was funny, but because laughter is contagious.

I think next week the last hymn is “My Way.”

I was looking at my memories today, watching Kristie and ___ and me duke it out over privacy issues that spanned from the first to the fourth amendment. My take on it that day was that you could say whatever you wanted in the privacy of your own home, and not in the public forum… but someone recording it released it to the public and therefore, violated right to privacy.

But I don’t care about that. I care about the name that goes in the space… another friend I lost on Facebok that I sit in the muck about, hoping to grow flowers in a rich, alive soil. After telling me that she was going to deactivate her Facebook account, I blocked her, because I didn’t think it mattered anyway. I was tired of getting in trouble at work for too much chatting, not enough paying attention. I wanted to fly under the radar with g-mail, but she flipped her shit. I also knew that not seeing her status updates, not seeing her name in my Facebook feed was the right thing to do, so I wouldn’t be tempted to comment on damn near everything. Being tracked on social media by your job is not my idea of a good time.

This was years ago, and so I’d gotten over it by now, but seeing her name in the comments was a way to rip off the band-aid and scratch off the scar. It’s only a flesh wound.

But starting shit over something that benign was unnecessary and petty. If you tell me you’re going to deactivate your account, what does it fucking matter? It was benign on my end, but not so much on hers… and it wasn’t like we ceased communication after that, anyway. We just switched platforms, for what I ws grateful. All I really wanted to do was block her from chat, but I couldn’t figure out how to do that without blocking her from my friends list. I probably should have looked into that a little more.

But I can’t stress enough how much it hurt that she thought I was doing something to hurt her.

So be careful with that social media crap. As I have learned, people tend to think what you’re saying is all about them, when in reality, it’s all about you and what you need to convey. But perception is reality, and I don’t pay much attention to that rule, because I know myself. I know that I am a lot clearer in writing than I am when I am speaking, because I’m not on the spot.

Writing: You are such a beautiful soul that I can’t imagine life without you.

Speaking: Ummmm, ahh… stammer stammer “you want some chili fries? I have a coupon.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Does that play to your emotions at all?

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

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

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

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

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

Natalie Sleeth

One year ago today, I was running late.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Words bite.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And on that note, I’m off.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In my jersey. With brown shoes.

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

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

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

Tomorrow is just for kicks.

See what I did there?

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

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

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

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

-Mary Oliver, Felicity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because I’m almost 40.