I thought that “Be Thou My Vision” would be the anthem for a couple of Sundays ago. Not so much. It’s this Sunday. I decided that I couldn’t be weak about it any more, and as the accompaniment started my hand balled into a fist and my nails involuntarily dug into my skin until it hurt. Having something to focus on other than being mired in memories kept me from flooding and I made it through without having to leave and come back. The first time, I ran to the bathroom to throw up. The second time, I went into the workroom and cried my eyes out. I was shaking and shuddering with grief and the church secretary came in. She was startled beyond belief, but not more than me.

My eighth grade history teacher saw me and validated my pain. I let that wash over me as the tenors began their cascade. Then Wayne showed up. And Sherry. And Matt. Then Stacy, Melinda, Lisa, SarahAnne, and all the rest just showed up and stood around the room and I could hear their voices and it was heaven in a moment, just like I needed it to be. I needed something to cut through the tape that causes my nerves to lose myelin and my face to lose blood.

The lifeline on my left palm looks like hell, but I was able to give my section the support it needed, and it was more important to me than feeling my own pain. To me, it is a hallmark of rising above survival mode.

It can only get better from here.

This article explains it all.

The comparison that the author draws is to an old friend you run into at the grocery store, and are surprised by how she looks. The comparison I draw is what would have happened if you met me in the grocery store when I was 11 vs. when I was 14.

By 14, I was the same absolute shell of a person, and 99 percent of my processing power was used for two things. The first was trying to predict everything she was about to do or say so that I could be prepared for it- positive or negative. The second was how to keep my feelings running underneath the surface so that no one could tell I was doing it except me.

I am a terrible fucking liar, because my words seem sincere and you can look at my body and tell they’re not true… but you won’t, because you don’t want to get that deep and even though I’m a bad liar, I am a beautiful one. It’s ok.

I don’t want to get that deep, either.

I want to protect myself from the outside world, because even though what I have is a big ball of emotions that torture me all day, every day, I know them. I walk them daily. They are mine, and we get along now. To introduce a different emotion is scary. I am doing what I can to maintain and I cannot do any more. If you change one thing the house of cards comes tumbling down and I will not forget it was you that threatened my house.

The friends I have now are the ones that kept torching my reality even when I said I couldn’t take it and please for the love of God, stop.

It was so wrong, and so comfortable.

Last night Christine changed liturgy for me forever, and taught me why I like being an Episcopalian so. damn. much.

She said, and I’m paraphrasing, that sensory perception is the seat of worship. I said that it didn’t matter to me whether God existed, because I wasn’t here to change God. I was here to change me.

She said that Episcopalians believe everything matters. That touching the bread, touching the cup….. IT. MATTERS.

And then I thought about how my knees automatically bend when I hear, “we do not presume to come to this thy table…..”

I’m Rite I. Yes. I am THAT Episcopalian. A very member incorporate of the mystical body….. bitch.

I started working on this solo when Hannah Graham went missing. It is my gift to her today.

Celebrant: Give to the departed eternal rest.
Congregation: Let light perpetual shine upon them.

Celebrant: We praise you for your saints who have entered into joy;
Congregation: May we also come to share in your heavenly kingdom.

-Book of Common Prayer, Prayers of the People, Form III

A few weeks ago I was talking to one of the parents of a kid at Hannah Graham’s old high school, and she said that in trying to heal all the kids, the parents are still trying to be strong, not really getting to grieve on their own terms.

I told her that she couldn’t control the kids’ grief or her own, but she could use Hannah’s light to comfort others in their distress. That she was one of the people who couldn’t control what was coming at her, but she could definitely control what got through, and let those positives lift her in ways that would help children understand the enormity of loss.

In order to recreate order during chaos, Hannah’s death has to serve some purpose. Her death cannot have been a random act of violence. It was, and because there is no purpose, we are lost and mired in what was. No one on earth should ever try and be responsible for that. Thoughts of what was flow through your mind every day in the presence of grief- to dam them is to die your own death instead of absorbing their light into you and shining it on those who need it.

I didn’t know Hannah Graham, but from what I’ve heard, I wanted to. Her amazing kid-light matured into bright, beautiful sunshine that seemed to come from deep within.

That light is the essence of what Hannah gave to the world. What you do with it is your gift to Hannah.

What does it mean to give Hannah gifts even though her body isn’t physical?

Have you ever made a friend over the Internet? If you’re just e-mailing them late at night, chances are you get into the same space as when you pray. You feel connected to that person, even though they’re not physically in front of you.

My gift to you, those sitting in the light of Hannah Graham, is to write to her. Every day if you have to. Because what does it matter if Hannah writes back? You can tell her your innermost secrets, because she will never tell. In that way, because your connection has changed, it hasn’t died.

Thinking of her, writing to her, and doing things that you think she would have wanted to do with you are all ways of keeping her close to you- carrying her light inside you instead of trying to push it away and pretend that bad things don’t happen to good people. With random acts of violence, God is not the Actor. God is the Responder.

As Fred Rogers famously said, “In tragedy, look for the helpers.”

There are going to be a lot of people that tell you your grief is justified because this was all part of God’s plan.

Because I want people under age 18 to read this, I will not tell you what I really think of this type theology. All I will say is that God is not against you. God did not take Hannah away because “it was her time.” God is the one you can go to because this is so outrageously unfair. When you cry, when you scream, when you beat the walls in solitude, God is the one who listens, because my God is not the classic image of a Father in the Sky, but a piece of myself that when I feel the smallest, talks back.

Take your grief to your still, small self. Sit with it. Eventually, you will know what to do, because your brain will literally divide itself in two and you’ll have someone to argue with. I call that God, because if I think that every person in the entire world has that same still, small voice, I realize that we are all God together.

Sit with God, and remember Hannah.

The longer you sit with God talking about Hannah, the more you’ll feel like you’re actually talking to her. Your mind will recreate her in 3D, and it sounds crazy….. but so is grief. I have found that water does not put out every fire. Sometimes, in order to defeat chaos, you have to be more chaotic than what’s going on around you so that the bigger fire smothers the smaller one inside it.

Going into your small space will give you a relationship with Hannah because all of the sudden, she is one of the many faces of God with which you can have a conversation, and decide what you really feel. She will guide you, because you remember things that she would have said in similar situations when she’s alive.

And the miracle occurring is that you’re not shoving memories of her away, you’re waiting for them to appear because you want to know what she thinks.

Let her light perpetual shine on you, because I promise, it is already happening.

She told me.

Yesterday, I helped Dana learn her programming… and then I sent her to Code Academy.

She kept saying to me, “I don’t think I can do this… I can’t sit still long enough…. etc.”

I told her that programming would be the key that unlocked her life if she would let it. It didn’t even occur to me to tell Dana to try Code Academy, but why didn’t I tell her to pick up a fucking PHP book when they were lying all over the house? I could have made her so much happier, so much quicker, with so many fewer tears. And by that, I do not mean that I personally could do all that. I mean that someone had to have the book lying around, might as well be me. My sister (because in my family, words like step and in-law are offensive) did that for me. She literally saved my life just because she bought some books.

I just looked at her and SAW how dumb I’d been. I could have reached her so much longer ago, and she would have been making seven figures by now. That is because Dana is ADHD, severely so (with hyperactivity), and hasn’t been able to find THAT THING. That thing that unlocks her brain with a passion of a thousand suns. For me, it is writing.

I don’t care if I’m good at it or not- my writing is not so much for other people as my comprehensive reaction to life. I write because if I didn’t, my stories wouldn’t matter… because typing is the only medium through which they fly, and seeing people’s real reactions as opposed to my imagined ones seems somehow more grounded than not saying something because I’m the one that’s afraid to rock the boat. Being afraid of her disorder kept her from experiencing the medium through which she could FLY.

She listened to me talk about her ADHD brain because I can. I thought that I wasn’t hyperactive until I had this conversation with Dana yesterday, and I realized that my constant movement is my fingers. I do not fidget or move because I type nearly a hundred words a minute when I’m thinking. It is as if my fingers are merely a voice dictation tool, because I can type just as fast as my brain puts words one in front of the other.

The conversation was short, but direct. “Your hyperactivity will go away once you are sitting there thinking in seven different brain spaces all at the same time.” She looked at me like I’d grown three heads.

Stay with me. This is cool.

There’s the brain space of “what am I making?”

The brain space of “how do I make it?”

The brain space of “which part comes first?”

The brain space of translating that into if, then statements as fast as you can think them.

The brain space of learning a new language and constantly having to apologize for your accent.

The brain space of high energy music and your fingers trying to keep up the intensity during the entire piece of music (my personal favorite, which is why you guys usually get the length of a song in blog entries- about 5-7 minutes worth of typing, or about 700 words).

The brain space of having a working desktop in your mind, where you can drag windows along the x, y, and z axis to organize and prioritize your work. My brain is a linux box. We are currently using Gnome Shell, but it keeps crashing, so I’m going to do a clean install of Linux Mint: Cinnamon Edition next week. 😉

It all swirls together so that the absolutely manic energy of being on sensory overload all the time MAKES SENSE in a way that it never had to Dana before or since.

She finished the first 29 lessons in one hour.

The air was cold and wet the day of my first protest against the war in Iraq. Since it was my first protest, I didn’t know what the hell to think. Christopher Hitchens made some reasonable assumptions and so did Hilary Clinton. On the other hand, I, like everyone else from the middle of the nation, didn’t know shit. It was January, and I’d just moved to Portland the last November. Sights and smells were burned into my brain- the fleece of my jacket and the wet rain penetrating the cheaply made water resistance in the fabric. Holding a man’s hand like I meant it for the one and only time in my life it made sense.

I loved him because he soooooo wasn’t her. I was newly divorced and it woke up my brain for the first time in months. It allowed me to feel something when what I’d grown used to was nothing but someone dedicated to beating down my soul, but less than she was beating down her own. Her reaction was to lash out and cheat, my reaction was to run as far away from Washington, DC as I possibly could, mentally and physically. Seeing this in retrospect is cleansing. Up front, it was terrifying.

All of this was running under the surface of my skin as I walked toward my group of friends. Every single one of them. Every. One. looked like they had seen a spaceship land and little burritos walked out. To be fair, I’d never come out as bi. I’d always identified as gay. I looked like a fuckin’ dyke and I knew it. The thing they didn’t know is that it was truly ok with him. He didn’t care what I looked like because intellectually, we were soulmates in the Elizabeth Gilbert definition- someone that gets so close to you that the relationship begins to burn because it is so intense.

In that moment, my bisexuality became real (Dad, I owe you five bucks– called it Junior year). It was the first and only time I’ve ever had a bisexual relationship as an adult, which made it even more super weird. The lesbians in my life were catty to the point of de-evolution. During that time, I was very close to a woman that had never fallen in love with a woman before. She decided that plumbing didn’t matter, and so did I. We went to a Portland Lesbian Choir concert together and one woman was wearing a t-shirt that said, “100% Lesbian.” We sat there for twenty minutes trying to decide what percentage we were.

At the end of the day, though, I knew I could date him now, but I didn’t know how long I could keep up the attraction. I decided it was better to break someone’s heart after a few months rather than trying to be the woman he really needed, which was someone who could *see* spending a lifetime with him when I knew that most likely, my life partner was supposed to be a woman… which is not really all that bi, but bi enough to know that I am an open-minded sapiosexual when I want to be.

I call myself a lesbian not because I do not have the capacity to love men, but because I am married to Dana and my energy is not supposed to go to anyone but her, anyway. When it leaks, we have ways of working through it that are quite effective and the equivalent of several “Hail Marys.” Not like, the end of a football game. Confession and prayer. Explosive, passionate lovemaking to ensure that the leaks are stopped cold and the connection is renewed. Our focus becomes the one thing in our lives that will ever matter- each other. ADHD people are so sensitive to sensory perception that even touching Dana’s skin grounds me and sends me over the moon at the same time, like I own all of time and space every time we kiss. Touching Dana, even in the slightest way, is the best cold shower I know.

That level of emotional connection never happened with him, and I wanted it to, and that was running under my skin as well when we started singing.

We are marrrrrrrching in the light of God
We are marching in the light of God.
We are marchiiiiiiiiing.
We are marchiiiiiiiiing, Woo-Oooo
We are marching in the light of God.

Siya Hammmmba yuken yeni kwenkos
Siya Hamba yuken yeni kwenkos.
Siya Hammmmbbbbbbbbbaaaaa.
Siya Hammbbbbbbbaaaa, Woo-Oooooo
Siya Hamba yuken yeni kwenkos…….

Walking through the streets of downtown, lost in my own thoughts, like the smell of his neck and the warmth of his kisses…..

Siya Hamba………

Marching through the streets voices loud singing for freedom from oppression and coming out as a bisexual for the first time. So trapped. So free. So lost.

My voice carried me that day, even the words I couldn’t say out loud. The music kept the train from running off the rails, but at least the train of thought always moves forward when it’s repaired.

I have a lot on my plate emotionally right now, so today I took some time to just sit in the quiet without any noise– lounging in the quiet looking up at the ceiling fan.

———–

My eyes have never learned to track together. My brain chooses one eye and the other drifts. I am right-eye dominant, but there are some times when my field of vision has shifted and I have caused vehicular damage. I have brought shame on my people, because I am the stereotypical woman driver you love to hate. I have been the “oops, my bad” of my generation. I’m not proud of it, I drive like a grandma to avoid it most of the time, having gotten older and somewhat wiser. I relax to the music (She’s So Mean, Matchbox Twenty) and just stop thinking about how many people are passing me on the right. It is wonderful that I have an amazing inner landscape, because I am so lost in conversation with myself that I forget to have road rage. It isn’t worth the energy. I have better things to do. I would rather talk to Sarah, Rebecca, David, Daria, Gregory, Kermit, Keela, and someone you haven’t met, Det. Sage Mallory-Weiss. Sage is a bastard that verbally wrestles me to the mat until my arm is behind my back, but at least we go out for drinks afterward… and if you get that joke, go to the head of the class (Let me Google That For You).

Sage because he thinks he’s God. Mallory as a salute to Carol O’Connell, because Sage is much like Kathy Mallory. He leads charges into hell, but sometimes metaphorically forgets to bring the right shoes and falls ass over teakettle without even trying.

Sage is Rebecca’s across-the-street neighbor. The kind you invite over for tequila and Cards Against Humanity because you’ve run out of beer. He’s kind of a filler character, comic relief more than anything else, but in his gruff, funny-as-crap way, owns a large part of Rebecca’s heart. She’s grown up her whole life with people like that- Texas good ol’ boys who’d die before they’d let you know their pain. She’s been bred to act the same way- genteel and hilarious, vetted as “one of the boys,” comfortable in Doc Martens AND high heels. They’re connected at the brain, because even though Daria is clearly Rebecca’s hetero lifemate, Sage is the grandfatherly smartass that will flip you shit just ’cause.

————————

As I sat there burning Sage into my memory, my eyes started to drift toward each other so that I could see my nose in 3D, and in the backgroud, two ceiling fans turning like cogs in a watch. I thought about my non-fiction book, planned as the last one I want to write because I believe it is my magnum opus. Staring at Myself is the title of my autobiography, because I want to go on the journey toward stereo. With the work of Susan Barry, MD I have a shot at being well… being able to see through the spaces as well as pray on them.

It was the right thing to do.

Telling Tony it was over, I mean. Most of the time, you don’t do that with friends. You don’t have those official break it off words. But this time, I had to, and not for her. For me. Our relationship went to such a dark place in me that I had to admit what I was doing and come clean. I was living with her in her stories, and ignoring anything that had to do with my actual life, the one where my wife lives.

Dana’s jealousy was never that I would leave her. It was that Tony was taking up so much room in my life that she started to wonder if there was anything left for her. I just didn’t worry about it until it occurred to me that there might not be enough room for me, either… and please don’t misunderstand. Tony is not the problem here. I am. I stopped taking up room. Period. Her stories became more important because that’s what I’ve always believed- that others’ stories are more important than mine. My past history says that when you suit up, I’ve done something wrong. That obviously you are suiting up because I am a bad person and you cannot trust me.

That exact thing happened. I sent my sister a snippet of an e-mail that I wrote her, and when she found out about it, she automatically assumed that I was sharing *everything.* Her words and reactions including mine.

The problem was that I hadn’t.

She started treating me as if I was guilty before she even knew whether I was or not, and that feeling never went away… even when I said I hadn’t done anything wrong and she claimed it was “water under the bridge.” It’s not water under the bridge if you’re acting like your friend is suspect even when they have flat out said that no one will ever be able to get information out of me. No one. Ever. I would die first. Literally. I’d take a gun and blow my brains out to protect anything she told me if it was ever serious enough it required that kind of protection.

She blew away a piece of me. That piece that says I am a capable and good secret-keeper, because I’ve been doing it all my life. She attacked my integrity, the piece of me I try so hard to keep together even when the rest of the world is falling apart.

Stepping down onto firm ground and saying, “no more,” was my only shot at being able to heal the part of me that broke.

There’s a great rock song called “Inside of You” by the band Hoobastank. It was popular in the dark ages, when I was in high school or college or something. It’s about sex. All rock songs are, in some way or another… well, the good ones, anyway. But what happens when you aren’t having sex with the one you want to get inside? It becomes a metaphor for being able to hold her brain in my hands. The guitar cuts into my ruminations and reminds me to car dance the fuck out and LET IT GO. I broke up a friendship, and a good one, because I felt as if it was only honest on one side… and that’s not fair. Let me re-word that. It was plenty HONEST on both sides, but very little recognition until it was much too late that I was in deeper than she was because nothing that happens in my life would ever threaten Olivia Pope, let’s just put it that way. NOTHING.

So, to extend that metaphor, I realized that I was signing on to a lifetime of being Jake… that guy Olivia loves beyond all measure and at the same time, would drop him in a hot minute if Fitz had a free hour.

In this metaphor, Fitz is not another lover. It’s her job… which makes it doubly difficult because it’s not a matter of “I won’t tell you.” It’s a matter of “I can’t.” My way of dealing with that was to absolutely understand, drop comms immediately, etc… and then while she “goes to the bank and the post office,” I become so short of breath that even my coworkers are starting to ask if I’m okay because they can see the tears in the corner of my eyes for hours at a time.

I went to her and said, “I can’t handle this, I need help.” And she said that she would no longer be communicating about certain things. Period. Because that was the answer. To make it where the anxiety I already felt didn’t have a place to go. As I told her, there is no future. There is only right now. I feel anxiety right now.

And yet, even that wasn’t why I left. I left because there were so many things outside the purview of what she could say and she couldn’t that she wouldn’t talk about anything without SUITING UP, when in the beginning, it never felt like she was doing it. Perhaps she was, and I never noticed. I’ll never know, and that’s ok with me. What I know on my own is that in the beginning, we were both in jeans and t-shirts…. or at least, IT SEEMED THAT WAY TO ME.

Later on, it became clear that she wears bullet proof vests under her t-shirts, and I, however, do not. Our relationship became a great habit for her, and I was so glad to help- to feel like I was helping- until I realized that it was getting impossible for me to love a gladiator without wanting to be one myself. I disappeared into this relationship into an entirely different way than I did with Diane- with Tony, it wasn’t that there was the promise of sex. It was the lure of soft power. I don’t get to be a power player, but I get to hear about them, get to know them third party, and excoriate them in novels based on juicy bits of information I just happened to find on my own, like it dropped down in the middle of the street.

Don’t worry, it looks insane from the outside that I’d throw it all away, too. I just realized that I didn’t want to be a gladiator unless she needed me to be that, because otherwise I am a shy, quiet writer in love with her wife who is content to stay home and watch Scandal on TV, because having Scandal in my living room was causing me to split into two separate and distinct personalities- the Leslie I’d always been, and the new Leslie, who wasn’t afraid of anyone or anything.

I am a gladiator because she helped make me into one. She helped turn me into the gorgeous woman I am today, because she taught me how to use emotional separation to get what I wanted in a positive way, like being able to separate out emotions so that I don’t just explode all over the place and have to apologize for it later.

I wish I could do that in this case. Nothing would make me happier than to go back to her and say, “this was all a mistake. I love you and I couldn’t have been more wrong.” I did think that at first, and then the more we started talking the more I realized how incredible our relationship was for her.

Yesterday’s sermon on “render unto Caesar” got me thinking about my church and what I can do to help. You cannot even imagine how large our budget for ministry is, and there have been a series of unfortunate events which has caused that financial security to be in jeopardy. It’s hard for me to hear- extraordinarily hard- because since I love Epiphany so much when I hear we’re in trouble it’s just like “shut up and take all my money.” I wouldn’t have made it this year without Douglas. He is literally my light in the middle of the mess, because his 13-year-old voice and his 13-year-old hugs are as beautiful as prayer, because he has something that I don’t…. a childlike innocence that feeds my soul.

Douglas has a brother and a sister, so I feel horrible that I talk so glowingly about him when his siblings activate my mother lion just as much. Douglas is special to me because we’ve spent time together, not because I don’t want to spend time with other kids besides him. 🙂

I have been going through a very dark period in my life, especially in my writing, because I’ve had to have a way to exorcise some demons that could never be talked about in reality. I need the separation of fiction to be able to explain the unexplainable in metaphors. My church family, especially the children, pull me out of that dark place and into the light. It was actually at my friend Nicky’s suggestion, because we have a few of the same dark spaces and his kids keep them in check, too. Since I don’t have kids, my church kids are ALL my kids.

And don’t even get me started on Joseph.

Joseph is my choir director, but that’s his professional title. His personal title is closer to dragon slayer, because he takes care of me in a way that no choir director ever has. I finally sat him down and said, “this is going to sound crazy, but I need you to believe me the first time.” I laid out everything. It has given me the flexibility to be able to say things like, “could you switch the rehearsal order because I cannot sing “Be Thou My Vision” under any circumstances tonight. It is literally one of my biggest triggers. Normally, I am fine, but I need to Messiah and get the hell out of here.”

He didn’t make the rest of the choir rehearse it, either.

And then there’s Frances. My heart literally flips when she walks into a room, because we have that friend love like nobody’s business. I don’t know how old she is, just that she has more gray hair than me, and I cannot even tell you how much that doesn’t matter. We have shown each other that we are the same age in more ways than one, like passing notes down the aisle in the choir stalls.

Plus, we’re Episcopalian. Stephanie, Dana’s sister, is an Episcopalian. Dana and Steffi’s parents are Anglican. Stephanie is in California, we are in Texas, and the parents are in NoVA….. and yet each Sunday, for exactly one and a half hours, we are in communion together, saying the same words that people have been saying together for hundreds and hundreds of years. I know that communion will outlast Dana’s parents lives, and then Dana, Stephanie, and I will kneel every week and STILL have communion with them, loving them in their “light perpetual.”

Lastly, my love for Christine and Lisa is legendary, but only from the standpoint that they consistently theologically hit it out of the park and leave me thinking, “Keep. Up.” I grow with them and write about them because they give me so much spiritual food to chew on that I am in theology nerd heaven. I also love that Christine invites people to the pulpit that excite me just as much- that the level of theology nerd doesn’t drop when she’s not there.

I don’t have any monetary suggestions yet, because Dana and I need to walk through what tithing would look like and if not tithing, how much CAN we give? I decided to look past money and tell you with my heart what I see in this congregation and just hope that one or two of you will decide to show up with a hideously large sum of money.

I’m just kidding (no I’m not).

Being in a relationship with someone over the Internet, no matter what kind, is dangerous. There’s an element of that “Stranger on a Train” feeling, where you can tell anyone anything and there are seemingly no consequences. Adrenaline is jacked up because you’re talking about things you wouldn’t necessarily talk about with anyone else- that you’d feel safe enough. That’s because in an Internet relationship, you don’t know each other’s friends, their families, their work colleagues…. you don’t know anything except what you’ve been told. Once the rabbit hole is established, things come through it at an alarming rate.

It becomes a relationship built entirely in the cloud.

And by that, I mean that you don’t necessarily think of real world consequences when you’re giving away things about yourself in the first place. I have been doing this Internet thing a very long time, so for me, there is no separation between physical and virtual. I have friends who I’ve only met via Facebook who have come all the way from DC to Portland to spend the weekend with Dana and me (Pri Diddy and Nina, take a bow). It would never occur to me that my Internet friends aren’t my “real” friends, because enough of them have met me in the flesh to know that there’s no issue with them, either. They stepped off the plane and literally started talking about the last time I’d pinged them, like 20 minutes before they boarded.

In this relationship, I never could have done that because I never had the safety of knowing whether our Internet relationship would transfer or not, and it became apparent to me that it had better. There were real life consequences for our future that neither of us really talked about…. like what would happen if our Internet trust was ripped to shreds and even though we don’t want to talk to each other, we still love the rest of our families beyond all measure. And honestly, I’m not even sure that she doesn’t want to talk to me. That was unfair. What I know for sure is that I don’t want to talk to her, because our relationship robbed me of something precious, which is the feeling that our “Strangers on a Train” relationship quickly devolved into first children who always have to be right, even at the expense of feeling safe.

I told her that it was starting to feel like an emotional affair because it felt so clandestine. I’m not even sure she knew what I meant by that, because it wasn’t romance. It was the fact that she kept saying that she never asked me to keep her a secret, that our relationship has always been above board, that all she wanted was for me to keep a few things back because everyone is allowed to have a personal life, etc….. while at the same time, saying flat out that we have no connections except Facebook. Those two things in the same breath undid me, because it was cognitive dissonance. Is it ok for me to tell everybody we know each other, or are you going to flip your shit when our families find out? Is everything above board, or do I have to pretend that the only thing I know about you is that you like dogs and books, in that order?

My emotions were getting so jacked up that I couldn’t live in two worlds anymore, because Dana was on the ground and she was in the air. I had to choose. Where did I want to build my house? I chose the ground, because I could *see it.* My trip through the air was salting my ground, and at a rapid pace. I was giving the air more time, and my crops were withering.

I finally realized what I was doing to myself, and I had to stop it. I didn’t want any more cognitive dissonance, I didn’t want any more of Dana feeling left out, and I didn’t want any more of Aaron (my actual best friend) rolling his eyes every time I brought up her name because he knew it was going to be some kind of obnoxiously long and involved rumination.

Most of what that rumination contained was feeling like I was in a relationship on two fronts, and handling both of them poorly. With “tony,” it wasn’t sexual. Just tender beyond belief. When I felt things that made me go all starry-eyed, I knew she was doing it without even trying. If you let them, straight girls’ll do that to ya. 🙂 She never did anything, anything that ever made me feel like this was a romance. The fault was in our secrets, not our behavior.

The secrets we didn’t have, because outside of Facebook, we have no connections.

The friendship I was trying to resurrect was a worthless endeavor, and it pains me so much to say it, because I don’t mean that I got so angry that I don’t love her anymore. I mean that she has every bit the inner landscape that I do… more so, even. When that inner landscape became threatened (on both sides), we each did things to push each other away that cannot be fixed. The reason that it is so incredibly permanent is that we are first children. I don’t know what that will mean for her, but I can tell you exactly what it means to me.

For the purposes of this essay, we’ll call her Tony just so I have a name instead of long blank spaces. That’s boring.

The long and short of it is that because our inner landscapes were threatened, we can never go back to being leslie and tony. There are too many defenses to keep that from ever happening again, especially as voices across the Internet with no context *other* than that. We needed each other desperately when this started, and now the mission is over.

She told me that she had enough to worry about in her actual physical life to worry that she was dragging me in, too. I feel exactly the same way, and also, fuck that noise. I didn’t love her like she was virtual. I loved her because we’re not related by blood, but we might as well be. The piece that you don’t know is that Dana has known her since she was a little girl, so that’s why there’s no thing about me being absolutely, 100%, over-the-top in love with someone’s mind that is not Dana’s. She knows Tony. They’ve met. Let’s just say Dana thinks that my attention is………. justified. 😛

Or, well, it was until it became too much, too close, too fast. Neither of us were breathing through the choices we were making, just allowing each other an all-access pass.

Or were we?

As time wore on, it became clear that something was very, very wrong. I was still leslie, and she had become Tony, Trademark. tony was gone.

I allowed her to walk around in my inner landscape because I *thought* she was letting me walk around in hers. Turns out, I only have a very surface perspective and I would like to keep it that way. I cannot know any more because I do not want surface platitudes. I want her inner landscape, and it was seeing my entire world disappear when she said that what I knew wasn’t really much at all.

While she knew everything. Everything.

When you are friends with me, the moment you start walling off your feelings, I’m out. I’ve been in that relationship before, except that time, I was never told that I wasn’t getting the whole story and waited around for a quarter of a century before I figured it out on my own. This relationship is different because when tony started paying attention to me, it was the best thing that had ever happened to me, and I smiled like I’d been knighted. I’m not sure exactly what she does for a living, but it’s something Olivia Pope-ish. Who doesn’t want to know Olivia Pope? Who doesn’t want to crawl around inside her brain like it’s a transistor radio?

The thing I liked about being tony and leslie was getting to know popcorn and wine Olivia, and not the GLADIATOR in a SUIT.

All of that went away when the fixer broke me. It cracked my reality. You mean I have given you access to anything and everything and you’ve repaid me with telling me a version of the truth?

No. No. No.

It feels too close, too personal, too beautiful a way to keep me on a leash, wondering if tony will ever reappear.

I am cutting my losses to save my sanity, because I feel violated. I feel like I did everything to become a powerful woman’s secret-keeper, because she told me that publicly, we had no connections beyond Facebook. What I realized last night is that I’m not sure it ever should have been more than that, because we each torched each other as only first children can, because we’re both exceptional at it.

I honestly don’t know what I have in me in terms of writing about sex or violence. Let me flex my muscles. I am so, so sorry if this is the literary equivalent of beginning oboe. I already know I don’t know how to do this. I am not offended if you decide to go back to Dooce.

Violence

My tools are laid out meticulously- mise en place for murder. Bourdain would be so proud. There’s a cigarette lighter, a 12-inch flexible boning knife, a scalpel, and a blender on the table next to me. The blender is mostly for intimidation.

Mostly.

I’ve been thinking about this for so long that I can’t decide which way to take it. The man who continually abused my abuser raped both of us emotionally by robbing us of normal growth and development. For her, it was physical. For me, I never felt like I was enough, and over time my emotions dwindled into shades of rage so intense that now I can literally disconnect my id, ego, and superego. Every decision in this room is a measured conversation, and we’ll all fight to the death. It’s not a question of whether we’ll fight, only how long.

I decide to start with his hand and see how long it would take me to find inspiration for something truly memorable. I take the flexible boning knife and tease it across his palm. When I see the droplets of red gather in his lifeline, my metaphorical penis stands at attention. It used to bother me that I got off on violence, and then I realized that I didn’t want to apologize anymore. I wanted to use it. If delicately filleting human beings for information doubles as a sex toy, well, then, we’ve just used the tools we’ve been given to accomplish our goals, now haven’t we?

Blood is pooling in his palm now, and it’s starting to look painful. He’s sweating, and there is nothing soaking up the pools gathering at his feet. Slow, humiliating exsanguination has become my style. I take the knife and lay it on the table, then reach into my right breast pocket, where I’ve been hiding the ace up my sleeve. Two pills. One aspirin, one Warfarin. I have just allowed things to get quite a bit more interesting.

My hand is steady as I force the boning knife down into the meat of his cheek, saying in a sweet, childlike voice; “come on baby… just the tip.” He’ll take this blood thinner one way or another. He’s starting to whimper. The more he whimpers, the more I disconnect. Just because he’s in pain doesn’t mean I have to do anything about it. He didn’t. I pictured the woman I loved giving him a blow job and when he came the knife slid from the corner of his mouth down past his jaw and into his neck. I didn’t hit any major veins, just cut him enough to make him severely wish there was a drink to be had. I smirked. There was Lone Star in my trunk and I’m not the sharing kind.

I told Jack this was a good place for a “mindful pause” and handcuffed him to take him to the car. He could sit and spin until I finished. Like I cared it was a hundred degrees. Fucker wanted sympathy, he should have thought of that years ago.

I take my longneck and drink it til my mouth feels like it’s been kissed by an angel, as Texas beers are wont to do. I’m starting to hit my limits in terms of options. I need accomplices so that I have more eyes on this thing. I can keep him alive, but it’ll be close. I need to call Daria. Now.

Sex

-frog.- had just turned 15. Keela, or as -frog.- liked to call her, “kee,” was 18. -frog.- called her “kee” because it was emotional shorthand for the little girl that lived inside his hero, and Keela deserved his reverence. “kee” was his equal.

-frog.- was in the unenviable position of having met someone he wanted to marry at a time when the odds said it was impossible. He was a freshman in high school. Keela was a senior. The only time he ever saw “kee” was in his backyard, on the hammock between the oak trees covered in shade where she would take off her t-shirt just to let him listen to her heartbeat and reassure him he was real. It hadn’t been sexual- to hear her heartbeat was a miracle, and had been since he was 12. Today, though, something was different.

He was lying on top of her when he felt her quicken, and had to think. Keela was so strong, and “kee” was so weak. How could he tell them he loved them both? He looked down at her with new eyes. “kee, if this feels right, choose where you want me.” -frog.- saw her eyes flash, and then she was on top of him, guiding him past the temple gates, teasing him that the extra half an inch he’s been hiding from her will come in handy… and it did, for ninety whole seconds. He’d worshiped at the temple and only had time to offer one prayer.

-frog.- felt guilty. He hadn’t done anything, just let her ride him until his penis literally felt like it might need rehab, and he thought that sex should be more than that.

For those ninety seconds, though, she was screaming and holding her hair in pleasure, and when the earthquake stopped, she kissed him deeply, as if the rest of the world were in black and white and he was the only one in color… and then she came again, squeezing him into her further, and in that moment, -frog.- knew he’d found his religion.

The real meat of my novel will be in the relationship between Kermit and Keela, the son and daughter-in-law of Leila & Gregory Doyle. By then, Rebecca has been missing for almost ten years. Kermit was 20 when he watched his “stepmother” get into the back of a cab and never come back. It’s been ten years since his last hug, kiss… he thinks of his stepmother’s touch, her fingers tangled in his hair, and for a moment he is happy and for a moment he can forget the possibility that she is dead.

Keela is the only person that knows his pain… that knows his joy. She has traveled into his inner landscape and back out, willingly diving again so that -frog.- never has to feel alone.

-frog.- struggles to understand the depth and breadth of Keela’s love his entire life, because every time he thinks he does, she surprises him beyond belief.

That will never be more evident as -frog.- overhears “the plan.”