Here is my Valentine’s Day present from Dana. She had people read it for two days at work to make sure it was perfect. She made some big hairy guys cry, let me tell you.

Are you crying yet?

Boom.

I talk to very few people. I rarely pick up the phone, because I have what has become a phobia. I stepped out on a ledge to send Argo a voice mail because for whatever insecure reason, I didn’t want to let her hear my voice…………………… I am so much bigger on the page than I am on the phone or in person, so maybe I didn’t want her to hear me that small? I am a writer- I do not function well without a delete key. Conversation makes me feel put on the spot to dance like a monkey, even though it is the furthest thing from reality. Living in the world requires interaction. Not realizing this has sabotaged my life, and it is a huge problem that I can only now name and address, hoping to move forward.

Even if Diane didn’t physically abuse me, her emotional abuse made me think that lies and secrecy were the way of the world. That light was how people who didn’t think about the world worked. The mask was there for others’ protection, an idea that naturally appealed to me because as a preacher’s kid, the idea of having a mask was long ingrained. The difference is that before Diane came into my life, the difference between my “show mode” personality and my regular personality was small. Afterward, outwardly I was the painted face of a china doll, while my soul settled itself into a lifetime of thunder. And, of course, there is nothing easier in terms of getting me to do things than by appealing to my sense of self-importance. I felt needed. I got to know things other kids my age didn’t. I got to know things about her that other people didn’t. I got to laugh behind her friends’ backs when she said that they didn’t seem all that interesting and laughed because I thought it was funny, because of course I did. I wasn’t one of them. I was hers.

Or, at least, I thought I was. That is the essence of my abuse as a child. Diane was such a brilliant manipulator that she could make me think I was the most important person in the world with her words and COUNT on the fact that I wouldn’t see her actions and believe them instead. If I could’ve, I never would have come to Oregon, and my parents would have had the evidential proof they needed to believe they weren’t crazy a long time ago.

Oh, wait. No, they wouldn’t. I had to wait for “Jesus,” in a sense. Jesus is only in quotation marks because in today’s world, you don’t wait for him personally. You find people that embody him, those that walk as Christ on earth whether they profess Christianity or not. You know those people. They are thoughtful. They abide. They listen without judgment. My Jesus is a white woman. No one is more surprised than me, because I have never been changed before to such a degree without tripping and falling onto a woman’s vajayjay. I can sum up our love with one line from a letter I wrote last year sometime (I think). The setup is that to me, gender and sexuality are not binary, and I’ve talked about why I think that a lot. The line from the letter is that “the hottest woman I know taught me to be a better man.” I only mean it emotionally, as all people have male and female character traits inside them, but I hope I made my point. Her other-ness in being straight feeds the husband part of me that wants to protect Dana and keep her safe, because Dana doesn’t need protecting for shit, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not entitled to those feelings. It especially comes in handy that  she’s straight because I’ve had to ask things like, “am I just being a militant dyke about this, or is this the same daughter-in-law crap anyone would go through?” Emotional shorthand for “am I allowed to be mad about this?” And just for the record, because I know who’s reading, she hasn’t accused me of being a militant dyke ONCE. Well, perhaps she has, but not about this. 🙂

If there is anything that I feel guilty for over the last 25 years that I could have changed and chose not to, it’s that I waited so long to talk. I chased after her for so many years hoping that our patterns would break down and we could create life-sustaining patterns for both of us. Writing to Argo has been the self-actualization of those realized patterns when I am mindful and pay attention to this fact. In this relationship, I am fully in control of what is happening. Argo is not older than me in the traditional sense. We are both in that nebulous adult age where lack of life experiences show childishness and not simple chronology. In some ways, she is older than me. In others, I am older than her. Where we shine is when we both accept our humble and vulnerable parts, and where we falter is in both being first children who want the last line.

But it’s a relationship, not a stork. It doesn’t come to you fully formed.

I don’t really have a topic for today. Just want to see what’s in my brain this morning that needs to come out. First, I should probably post Dana’s Valentine’s Day present, because since she’d shown it to people at work, I asked her if I could post it on “Stories.” Here is the Facebook post I wrote on Feb. 15th:

I see a lot of bitching on Facebook about Valentine’s Day and how it’s so commercialized and all. Valentine’s Day is as meaningless as you make it. For instance, Dana and I did the grocery shopping we were going to do, anyway, and did some wine/liquor tasting at Spec’s. It was so simple, and so memorable. Later that day, she handed me two pages of handwritten notes describing her love for me on plain white notebook paper, saying that she had worked on it for two days and she hoped it was just right and that it had made people at her work cry so she was pretty sure it was good……… Crying just thinking at the memory of her words before she handed them to me, because it was just the most amazing, bare moment. A girl laying her heart in my hands and hoping it was enough.

Dana completes me, which sounds so co-dependent. I won’t lie. It does sound that way. However, I do not think of it as co-dependence so much as interdependence. It is not that we do not have skills within ourselves and use each other to fill those holes. It is that we have tried through trial and error what the division of labor looks like in our house and we know which way it functions best because we’ve tried every single one that doesn’t work, I assure you. I think part of staying married for both of us has been “we’ll get it right this year. Surely we can’t fuck it up any worse.” I think every couple on earth feels this way- that there is a Right™ and Wrong™ way to be in relationship with each other and we are all failing to live up to the mythical standard that “they” represent, whoever they are.

For some people, it’s the perfect representation of Biblical marriage. For others, it’s the marriage of their parents. For me, it is not a mythical standard. it is the supercomputer drive in me to succeed, and to keep working on the unhealthy tapes in my marriage until they are gone. I believe that Dana feels the same way, because the longer we work on those unhealthy tapes (especially the ones in which we are not emotionally tied, like our own first family “stuff”), the more we discover that we like the new person we’ve just uncovered even more than the previous iteration. Relationships don’t magically fall from the sky fully formed. It’s a relationship, it is not the stork. Relationships are the work of your life, and because it is hard, you will be rewarded. If you do not feel rewarded, then you are not gaining intimacy from being able to see your person in a different light. You are stuck in their old iterations and cannot stop thinking about that person, rather than the one your person actually is. Or perhaps they are stuck in old iterations of you. The reality for the relationship is the same.

Relationships break when one person loses faith in the other, but not because of lost faith. The relationships break with a door being closed without realizing how many layers of thought processes are being interrupted on both sides. When one person loses faith in the other and is not open to resurrection, they are taking fate into their own hands and saying that they know better than time what a relationship should hold. Submitting to Dana wholly (and in part to Aaron and Argo) for me was realizing that I needed to stop trying to control time. That all relationships have a 50/50 shot of making it no matter how hard I try to do anything, positive or negative. In order for our relationships to all go deep enough to sustain us, we have to be willing to take time and regroup, and avoid saying those words that end relationships permanently because I AM TOO ADDICTED TO TRYING TO CONTROL TIME. It is in these moments that I have to breathe and remember to just abide.

Does anyone else feel like going bowling now, or is that just me? I remembered that I can’t find my phone and you’re just going to have to sit on your hands until I can find it, because that’s how I’m going to upload pictures of Dana’s gift. I like the idea of leaving you with anticipation. Go pop some popcorn. If you love my words, you will absolutely go apeshit for hers.

One of my favorite songs is called “Angry Anymore,” written and performed brilliantly by Ani DiFranco. It reminds me of my childhood. “She taught me how to wage cold war with quiet charm, but I just want to walk through my life unarmed.” The problems snowballed when the cold war grew civil and I lost part of my emotional spectrum, and I struggle to heal daily. I was walking through life armed to the teeth, emotionally laden with so many lies that I could not keep track of them all. I wasn’t someone who made a career out of that sort of thing, just an amateur with too much imagination and too little sense.

Two years ago, I stopped seeing the forest for the trees. I woke up to a bigger picture, and do not think that I say this lightly, because it was hell on earth. Someone held my hand as I explained the details, and at the end of my story, told me my reality instead of asking for my opinion. In that nanosecond, it was out of my hands. Someone had taken an interest in my story and proven the Occam’s Razor in it. Let me assure you that it slit my wrists emotionally. I could barely breathe for weeks.

My resurrection came in the letters after I wrote The Cost of Shame. Many were words of encouragement, some were friends of Diane’s that thought I was being dramatic. I assure you that I have been accused of being too dramatic about things since this relationship started, and I will also assure you that line of questioning amounts to a tall dose of horseshit. The thing I struggle with is “how come it took so long for me to get here?” Diane told me when she moved to Portland that I could come and live with her in Portland and go to Portland State. She told Susan that she thought I “would just go away” when I was 18.

Even if she meant it as entirely appropriate, friendship-type love, the the lie compounded because Diane told us each what we wanted to hear and freaked the fuck out when I held her accountable to those words. Eventually, I did move to Portland, and while sometimes we were close, the rest of the time she was distant and cold. I never knew whether I was going to feel awkward and cold-shouldered or whether I was genuinely going to have a good time with her. I again, tried everything I could think of to keep her happy so that she wouldn’t emotionally shut down and railed when it stopped working. Jesus CHRIST how much did I have to beg, plead, and apologize even though our fights were never about me. They were about me hating your ability to absolutely draw me in, intoxicate me, and the moment I reacted in a way she didn’t like, she would shut down like a trap and I wouldn’t hear from her again until I was useful to her in some way. Because I’d loved her my entire life, it took me 25 years to realize she was taking advantage of me. The rest of the time, I’d thought I was taking advantage of her.

Maybe I was. I don’t know. Maybe there was something I could have done differently, and I’m sure there are a thousand. But I don’t think that any of those things were supposed to happen. I think I was meant to freefall into acceptance of who I am and the gift I gave myself in this web site.

That being said, I will also remember that I stand on the shoulders of giants, Diane included. Her place in my heart is secure……………. but so is her place in my rage. One day, I’ll let go of it. But that day will not be today or tomorrow, I assure you wholeheartedly.

Mostly because I have found that I am stronger when I keep Diane far enough away not to let her bother me and close enough to be able to describe her as a three-dimensional character. Not good, not evil, just human. Full of flaws and beauty for which I am grateful to have loved in any capacity, much less just one. When I do not send her love and light, remembering how beautiful life felt when she walked into a room, I cannot function. I am laden with dark ruminations and the homicide that’s happened in my dreams since I was just shy of 15. I choose to love the everliving hell out of her because when I don’t, IT KILLS ME. DO YOU HEAR ME? IT KILLS ME.

It’s just easier to love her from wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy over here, made even easier by letters like this one, received when I was trying to decide which entry to send to Paul Gilmartin of Mental Illness Happy Hour:

Hey Leslie….There is an entry or entries in your blog where you really explain emotionally how your abuser has affect your life…..you talk about her actions and your thoughts and feelings at the time about her actions and about how the words she said to you didn’t match her actions or your feelings/feedback you were getting from her. You talked about her manipulation. These are the details I remembered because my gut was turning because I could feel the pain you were expressing through the writing……AND I had never seen/heard this kind of behavior from a female/female “romantic” relationship. This is the kind of behavior that we hear about in the news all the time where the man is the older abuser but you are the first one I have heard express it in the lesbian version where a woman is really a villain. Even though we all know (from female friendships that women can be master manipulators). I also thought because your/your abuser’s story is all wrapped up in religion/church that this makes it even more interesting and complex……any way….I can’t find the exact entry…..but I wanted to share these thoughts….

Thanks for letting us be a part of what is on the “inside” of you…..it is beyond courageous.

It floors me how generous people are with their analysis of my writing. I don’t take compliments well, but I’m learning. To hear that I am courageous is humbling to an embarrassing degree. I saw something on Facebook that made me start to asphyxiate with laughter this morning. It is so me that you’ll laugh because it sounds like I wrote it. “Writers are people that spend the entirety of their lives in solitary confinement all in the name of communication.” Dead accurate, according to me. I mean, I know me. We’ve met.

Right now it is 9:00 AM and I am sitting at my desk in the same clothes I would wear to a business meeting. I have learned a lot about myself as a writer, and one of the things I’ve learned is that there are two levels for me of being ready to write.

Nothing can interrupt my thought process, and this includes the itch of a tag or a watch that cuts into my wrist just right. Therefore, before I write, I dress to the nines. It’s a new thing that I do (as of about three weeks), because I used to write in my PJs and dress for the day afterward. I realized that I felt better if I did it the other way around, because then I could shed off the day before and start writing without worrying about my itching scalp or bad breath or any number of things that will drive me to distraction. It really wasn’t a shame thing- I was getting up at 5:30 to write. It wasn’t like I was lying around idly. I write early in the morning because entries come from directed dreaming the night before. It just feels so much better to continue that directed dreaming haze into my shower and shave time, because it adds to the editing time before I sit down to write.

When that is accomplished, I sit in front of a blank page and spill out the tapes that have been running since the last time I hit the pencil icon (the one in WordPress that creates a new post for the unfamiliar). Sometimes, I put on the Argo playlist, one originally created so that we could share tracks across Spotify and has now become a catchall for everything I listen to when I’m in the car, writing, etc. It is seriously everything. Aqua, Tupac, Ed Sheeran, Indigo Girls, Cake, Fiona Apple, Eminem, Wilson Phillips………. it is music that reflects the nature of our relationship, which is that we’re different in every possible way and yet combined together, harmony rather than discord………. when we don’t skip any tracks.

I’m digressing because I don’t know how to describe the second level. It is the part to which no one is party, because it is unexplainable even to me. When I am lost in my music, I am often singing and typing and one energy feeds the other in a beautiful way. Right now, it’s “The Wood Song” by The Indigo Girls. In my mind, I am dancing around the house, because as Emily sings melody and I stretch my vocal chords down into “ballsetto,” my nickname for the range that Diane calls the one you have to “cigar and vodka down.”

I’m a soprano, but never with them, My mind is too fascinated with the mathematics of harmony to be bothered with the simplicity of “only singing the melody.” My sound fills my office and something clicks that I said yesterday that needs some clarification and all of the sudden, I am literally. LITERALLY. typing 100 words a minute trying to describe what I feel to you.

When I am not dancing and listening to music, I mentally take someone out for a beer and try to further the conversation. I particularly love doing this with dead people. It really cuts down on their ability to react in ways I don’t want them to. The music comes from my own head- trying to create peace out of nothing and have resplendent Rutter-like chords come from Charles Ives dischord.

With people that are alive, I still try to send as much peace as possible and hope that their world explodes with my agreement to do it.

I have always been an empath, and yesterday I learned the depth and breadth of it. I was reading an article about Kayla Mueller, and as I sat there, I studied the face that launched a thousand ships. We’d been trying to rescue her for so long that she’d been mostly forgotten in the news. A footnote as the months went by…………. until yesterday. I realized just how long she’d been in captivity, and the range of emotions that everyone involved must be feeling.

It was similar to what would have happened if the movie Argo hadn’t gotten to end with a piece of music called “Clearing Iranian Airspace.” I’m listening to it, channeling the peace of the violins toward the eternal flame that is her personality. She leapt off the page for me, an aid worker with no fear and a sacred sense of what was laid at her feet. I can only hope that I show a quarter of that kind of courage on this web site. It is people that are capable of these gargantuan feats that get me out of bed in the morning, excited to start my day. There are others like me, so sensitive that they want to save the world and get frustrated when they simply cannot.

Which is why I am sympathetic to the plight of all the people who hung their heads in grief yesterday. I do the same thing when I alienate people with my own behavior. I cannot even imagine the type of grief that something like this would trigger, but I can imagine a fraction of it. I have been the Lanagan Search & Rescue operation since before I could drive. People’s emotions wreck me. I have mentioned before that it’s the worst in large crowds, when there are too many people in pain and not enough ability to clinically separate unless I properly prepare for “battle.” By this, I do not mean that I am itching for a fight. I mean that it is a struggle not to cry when I see service members in uniform, or couples fighting and I can tell within 30 seconds what each of them is trying to say in body language and fucking it up with words.

So, I sat at my computer with the story of Kayla Mueller’s life writ large on my 17-inch iMac and tears of loss inched down my face. Dana came up behind me and kissed my head. “You didn’t lose her, Leslie.” I know it. I’m just not capable of clinical separation.

This is my Facebook status right now, and I have a visceral need to post it here:

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

George Orwell

Writers are not lazy. They’re not lazy a day in their lives. This quote made me FURIOUS and I have to tell you why. It makes me crazy that people think I am indolent and unmotivated at times, when that is so far from reality that bass ackwards doesn’t even begin to cover it. Writers are the people that do all the serious emotional work of finding the human condition and describing it. It’s backbreaking work. Just tears and frustration all over the place at times, and euphoric at others. Carrying that inside yourself is a burden. Don’t kid yourself. The tapes of things I need to write down are enormous and run through my head all day long. Just because you cannot see work happening does not mean it is not there. It is cerebral and cellular. If you are a writer and you constantly hear the message that you’re lazy and you believe it, cut that shit out right now. You do the work that most people don’t have the chutzpah to sit in for five minutes, much less the entirety of your life. Selfish and vain are adjectives on which I do not have the right to comment.

 

I am REALLY going to have to let Argo know how much mileage I’ve gotten out of judgmental dickhead. It’s like someone validated that I am every bit the jackass I’ve always known I had the capacity to be, and it’s good to have a skill.

As we go into Lent, the penitential season in Christianity (Advent, not so much, although some theologians disagree with me), I turn inward and evaluate my very soul. It sounds so dramatic, but in a way, it is. My words on this page are as large as I can make them so that 20 years from now, I remember how integral it was to my development. It is also one of my favorite pieces of music, because Diane’s voice turns me inside out. It’s my favorite memory of Diane and my mom, because at St. Mark’s she was Diane’s accompanist. They were greater together than they could ever be on their own, because Diane’s voice makes her the star of a concerto and my mother her private orchestra. Hearing them together is one of the greatest blessings of my life, because when I get into a bad space about Diane, the accompaniment starts and I remember sitting in the austin-stone cathedral and beauty filling the room. I submit to the music in a wonderful way, because I sit down in grief and get up renewed for whatever lies ahead.

My life got so much better when I realized that what I thought of Diane was none of her business. I took the emotional space I had to explain my feelings to myself. If she has picked up anything from reading, I hope it’s that my divinity forgives her and my humanness disappears in some moments. I go to my nothing box and allow myself to feel what I would do to her if her body and my rage were to meet each other.

It’s the spectrum I have struggled with for the last two years. I was so angry I was nearly dead inside trying to hide it. It felt like the pain would never end, because 25 years is not exactly NOT permanent. If you were a member of St. Mark’s, you probably tried to rescue me because you could see farther than I could in all 180 degrees. My escape from her control was being able to see it myself. Catching up to what you knew 25 years earlier than I did. If there is anything that makes me swell up with pride, it is that she did not allow her abuse to physically abuse me. That if I was a factor in her decision to move to Dallas, I commend it. I hope that she saw what she was doing and had a change of heart. That she loved me enough to give me up, if that makes any sense. Then, I felt angry and utterly abandoned. The night before I started my freshman year of high school, I was so distraught with grief that I regressed to the point of waking up and getting into my parents’ bed. I was a few weeks short of my 15th birthday, grieving the loss of a physical (as opposed to virtual, not sexual) relationship so intense that an adult would have gone psycho ex in a fraction of a second. I didn’t have that option, because we weren’t dating. I didn’t feel I had the right to expect or demand anything. I withered into myself for the rest of high school, desperate to keep what we had on the ground strong in the cloud. Remembering just how desperate I was is painful even today. When Diane left town, it took me three years to start dating someone else, because I felt it. We loved each other as if we were made of the same blood. There was no way that I wasn’t going to have a long recovery process from it.

When I did meet someone else, it lit me up from the inside. I called her my light in the middle of the mess, because she’s blonde. These past two years, I’ve had to forgive myself for all of the misplaced energy that went to Diane instead of to her. I could have loved her so much better than that. I could have stopped those ruminations where I got lost in my own thoughts about Diane and couldn’t make it back into the present…… as has happened with every relationship since. It wasn’t right or sane that I had my heart broken to that level three years before I could vote.

I think Susan was hoodwinked into believing that I had this cute little girl crush on Diane. No. That is not the truth and I will not accept it anymore. It was never cute, and it was never little girl. Diane set my body on fire and according to someone who makes a career out of this sort of thing, told me quite plainly that I had been groomed by a predator. I also want the people of my church at Bridgeport to know that I am telling the truth, that it is not my lie to tell, but the truth handed down by a professional who made me hold on to my chair with my nails until all the evidence was in her possession so she could make the call.

I believe that Diane was a predator, and you have the right to know it. She has the right and responsibility to tell you whether there were any other teenage conquests, either by fucking with their brains or their bodies. What I know is that if it has happened, it’s never been reported.

Do you think there is an unrelated reason that I am so fucking hard on Bill Cosby?

Aaron and Josie spent the night last night, which was fun because I got to give J-dog a bath with extra bubbles and sit with her while she played with her fishes and duckies. I wish I could tell you the first ten million of my thoughts, but they are gone now in a cloud of energy long released. Only one stuck. I am still confused over whether I want to have a child………….. or I was until this morning (leave your eyebrows where they are). I did not decide to have a child today. I decided to stop saying no. To open the door to “if it happens, the world will explode with my agreement.” That being said, I’m not sure that I want to put any effort into it. I like Dana’s sperm count where it is. She tried wearing boxers for a week or so, but……………….

I am not saying we’re having a kid. I’m saying that we are starting to pray on the spaces a little harder than we used to about it because I will be 38 in September and Dana will be 40 in June. We are praying for clarity and discernment, not wishing for the stork to just drop one off, even though we are somewhat prepared. The house already has a built-in nursery. We can tell because one of the closets is lifted off the ground and it has layette drawers (are those what they’re called?). We found this awesome, unusual piece of furniture and didn’t realize it was a solid oak changing table until we started decorating it. Now you have to tilt your head to the side before you realize it’s a changing table. We put Beyonce on it, a ceramic chicken named, of course, for Jenny Lawson.

Wi-Phi can still use it, and it’s not like we don’t have friends who are parents or parents to be. Nice to have in a guest room, that’s for sure, especially since we put Wi-Phi size diapers and wipes in it to trick it out for Kelly and Will (and us when it’s just him).

We’re not even going to justify the Baby Bjorn (I am SO kidding).

We’ve gone through this several times before. It’s not our first rodeo. I’ve talked about it before, but the basic rundown is that we got dressed up to meet the doctor that would carry us on our journey and she was so snide and aggressive that we went home and put the idea away, because her advice was frank………………. I don’t think you can afford me. I think you should just find a friend and go home.

She didn’t know us from Adam. She sized us up by the clothes we wore. In one way, she was right. We couldn’t afford her. She was also wrong. There is just no limit to the amount of people that would shit a brick if Dana and I announced that we wanted to get pregnant or go all Angelina, giving money and sperm (which, I have found, is extremely expensive despite its overabundance) hand over fist to see what a mini-Lanagan looked like (just FYI, if you are planning to conceive, count on about $3-500/month until you get pregnant ordering from a catalogue and having it sent frozen).

Also, every relationship with every man who has offered to give us sperm has ended in complete disaster, save one………………… the one queer. The concept to straight men is foreign and emotional. Gay men in touch with their feelings about children don’t think of their sperm as children even though other characteristics are the same because they don’t have eggs and are in the exact same boat we are.

One did not understand the concept that he was giving away genetic material. He wanted a bebe and two tias. One set up a meeting with us saying that he’d bring his girlfriend, and they stood us up and never talked to us again.

All of them (again, save the gay) thought I wanted to sleep with them. Because of course they did. If you think that I am exaggerating, if you ask a man for sperm his mind does not go to a bathroom with Juggs and Big Butt. This does not happen exclusively to guys we’ve talked to about conceiving. This happens every time there’s a man in the room when we talk about trying to conceive and he just happens to walk by. I am not singling anyone out- I have had hundreds of male friends casually slip into a conversation that if I’m looking for sperm, they know where I can get it. I am sure they do. I feel demoralized about it sometimes, and then I think to myself that it’s kind of fun knowing that anything they’ve pictured is is ten times worse than I actually am in bed….. or that is what I have to believe in order not to feel grossed out about the entire thing. I tend to emotionally shut down and walk away. When it’s in person and not over e-mail when I am put on the spot to respond, I have a variety of one liners and quips designed to rip ego to shreds because I am not playing around. I do not want you to think I am anything but Dana’s (and you would have to kill her to get to me, because I guarantee you that she would go mama gorilla on you and she fights dirty).

When Dana and I talk about pregnancy, it’s not the child that scares us. It’s getting pregnant. For us it’s clinic visits and fertility specialists and taking basal body temperature and charting my cycle and all of those things that add up to TAKING OVER OUR WHOLE LIVES. We are not prepared to jump off that ledge.

But we’re prepared to think about it.

What opened the door was the checker at Family Dollar. He was young, Hispanic, with eyes that marked him as an Indigo, a soul as old as The Doctor in a 21-year-old body. We were just trying to make conversation as he worked and I said, “I have a little girl staying with me and I needed some emergency supplies (ponytail holders, etc.)” He said “do you want to have children?” as quietly as I have ever heard anyone speak.

I started and looked at him. Really, really looked at him. Restrained myself from giving him a hug. I knew that look. Parental exhaustion was written in the lines of his face and his carriage. I knew that anything I said could be misconstrued and I didn’t want to ruin the moment. I just said “I don’t know yet.” He said, “you should do it. Your kids pull you into being better people way faster than you could do on your own.” I looked at this boy deeply and remembered what it was like being 21.

Having no words of wisdom, I just said “that was really profound. I think you’re older than me.”

And walked out.

As I have mentioned before, Aaron has a three year old daughter named Josie. We don’t get to see each other very often, so we make that time count. I have learned that if I just treat her like a small adult and ask her what she wants, she has no problem giving answers. She is opinionated about everything, because duh. She’s a Leo. My favorite little lion girl to add to my collection of leonine life teachers. Leos are special. They shine when you get quiet. They want to fill the spaces in between with their own life energy, and nowhere is this more apparent than at three going on four.

Because she has such a strong personality and I don’t (in terms of taking up every available space with my sound) unless I am in show mode, I just let her drive the bus. Whatever she wants to talk about is perfect. I don’t want to break her confidence, because it is precious. All I will say is that my silence is better than my words in these moments. She loves her world, and she wants me to know EVERYTHING ABOUT IT.

Because Josie is my friend, I want to hear it.

I want to know how school is going, what she’s been doing since the last time she came to my house, and could I have another cup of pretend tea because it is delicious?

Josie asked me to hold her cup and saucer, but DON’T DRINK IT. I said, “Josie, I would never take anything from you without asking first. You wouldn’t ever have to give me some of yours unless you wanted to.”

We got into a discussion about school and at the end, she took her teaspoon, and put some tea into the bowl. Tears started to well up as she placed the teaspoon into my mouth, and whispered “I want you to have it.”

From the moment I met I met you, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was irritated by you, and there is simply no other word for it. Who was this woman that was so loud and obnoxious? Why couldn’t I walk away from her? It was because the quieter I got, the more you sat silently and listened like no one in the world. You took on my pain as your own, and within a month of being a huge pain in my ass I knew that we would be together for the rest of our lives. I just couldn’t tell you.

The timing wasn’t right for either of us right up until we realized it would never be the right time if we didn’t make room for it. For lack of a better term, by being best friends we “courted” for three and a half years before our first kiss. So many secrets whispered to God and no one else. We sat in one place emotionally for a long time because it was easy. We took hands and jumped off a cliff when the connection between us ran greater than anyone else for both of us. We moved heaven and earth for each other, because we knew the other one deserved it. We’d each been there, all day, every day, in moments when most best friends would have bailed a long time ago. I’d spent so many years throwing emotion down a hole. Having someone who could match me, love feeling for love feeling until we Just. Couldn’t. Even. Love feelings that run so deep that they often don’t get expressed because the letters will not rise from the river.

The blessing of my life has been the invitation into your silence. The whys and hows of you. The moments where the conversation is in our eyes because it’s the gift you get when you’re willing to work out tough issues and hold the relationship to a higher standard than you hold yourself. We knew that when we met. We knew we were both lobsters, even though we’d like to pretend that all women find us incredibly desirable just to feed our street cred.

We don’t give each other love because it’s a requirement. We give each other love because it feeds our power like oxygen, acting as jet fuel as the world makes room for us to fly. Being tempered by your fire allowed me to relax, and adjust my seat and tray table.

My world exploded with our agreement. I can only hope I’ve been half the woman to you that you have been to me over the years. I look forward to praying our future into existence with you. I look forward to fighting it out, merging our directions not by assumption but by choice. When Ben Affleck said to Jennifer Garner that “there’s no one he’d rather work with,” I smiled to myself. Ben GETS it. It is a yes you make every day.

Thank you for being my yes, every moment of every day.

Blessings on this, our seventh anniversary.

I do, with everything that I am and ever will be.

Love,
Leslie

Having a pen pal is seriously cutting into my blogging time. You’ll just have to deal. As I have said before, our relationship requires trust, so I don’t feel good about discussing us in public, if that makes any sense at all. Most of the time, I have no issue with talking about my friends on my web site. But we do not have that kind of relationship. In order to create long-term relationship with pen pals, they have to feel like they’re a stranger on a train. Doing anything to jeopardize that would put me at risk for a whole host of maladies, mostly because she’s bigger than me and not afraid to use it.

And just to apologize for saying she’s bigger than me, which I mean in terms of sheer muscle mass, I will also say that for a straight girl, she’s pretty hot. For a straight girl. I mean, not everyone is perfect. :P~~~~~~

She is making me a better me, one letter at a time. Wait for it. Savor the spaces in between the blog entries, because you’re going to see changes that I never thought possible in this lifetime…. and that is what I am trying so hard to create. A lifetime of friendship, which as you all know, is so difficult to achieve….. however, not so much for us.

We write letters. Letters can happen at any time of day or night, so there’s no time constraint on either one of us. And whether the letters are three sentences or three pages, they MATTER to me. The words, the spaces, the silences where we think and regroup, the conversations where we redirect into something even more fantastic than what we had the week before. It all matters.

Because we have never met physically, my other friends call her The Doctor. I can’t think of a more perfect image of all of who she is. She watches over me from her house, and I watch over her from mine…… the blessing is that our journey was turning me from Amelia into Amy.

Amen.

Dana and I have been working on what it means to slip into truly long-term relationship with each other, and what it takes to keep that connection unbreakable. February 4th, we’ll celebrate our 7th anniversary as a married couple and almost four years of friendship before that. The success of this relationship is that I went into it with absolutely no expectation except lamb, because that’s what Dana said we were having for lunch.

We didn’t go into our relationship with any balance of power issues at all, so there was no reminder of the struggles I’d had with trying to create relationship with people who couldn’t get in touch with their feelings in the first place. My pattern was to conclude that I needed direction and I couldn’t provide it, so I would let my girlfriends absolutely own me until I couldn’t stand it anymore, because the problem with people getting a little bit of power in the relationship is that unchecked, they have all of it. Depending on the person’s personality, they probably like it a lot….. while you’re struggling with what kind of pillow with which you want to smother them.

Avoiding this whole scenario has taken a lot of previous roadblocks out of my way.

Argo, whom I lovingly refer to as my “wine and yoga pants girlfriend” to differentiate from my “I want to scratch my nails down your back” girlfriend, also took a lot of the roadblocks in my way and blasted them with dynamite so that I couldn’t even find the pieces. It was then that I found out just how big my heart could be.

Once my personality started to feel bigger due to lack of shame, allowing myself to need things allowed me to need space. I moved out of our joint bedroom into one of the other bedrooms in the house because just like when I was a kid, I want and need my own space with a door that locks. That way, all my papers and effects are secure…. and it doesn’t have anything to do with keeping Dana away from them. She can rifle through my desk and computer all she wants, because I’m not afraid of what she thinks of me. She’s my wife. I trust her to tell me when she thinks I’m doing something wrong and I listen. Dana and I have been together long enough that neither of us want to stop the other from being the best individual they can, while still having enough unity and strength to be entwined like tree trunks.

Moving into separate bedrooms is not a way to chop through that core. Just a way to ensure that the external branches don’t wither and die. For instance, I work nights and Dana works days. When we’re both working, it is an empowering feeling to have our own bedrooms, because it says, “I have my shit together all on my own.” It also says, “I have a naughty neighbor fantasy.” There aren’t even words to describe the fact that I have a single person’s life in a married person’s house, because it shows that Dana and I can each accept the fullness of the other person’s being. That her space is just as important as mine.

She says that her room is more “importanter” than mine because it’s bigger. Mine has a nice window on the backyard, bitch.

There’s also that single person feeling after a night of flirting and dancing that you are about to invite a woman into your bed. I get that feeling all day, every day. Inviting a woman into my bed. Just saying it makes me shiver with anticipation.

So many people ask what happens when we die. Very few ask what happens when we pray. I do not have all of the answers, but I was thinking about my prayer life and I had some thoughts that needed to be verbalized to make them real. I have done it all of my life- before Argo and I ever had our probably million words between us I wrote Diane notes in the back of the class, my first blog entries before I could type. I need all the words I say to be real, or at least as many of them as possible. I don’t keep track of them for you. I go back and read them daily to see if I’m progressing or not.

I mean, I’m glad you enjoy this web site, but the real deal about it is that this blog is my prayer life. I made that connection when Dana and I were talking one day and I said, “one of the reasons that Argo is so sacred to me is that it feels like she gets into my God space. She listens to my thoughts so that when I’m weak and don’t know if God is listening, I know for sure that she is.” Dana looked at me with tears in her eyes and said, “go tell her.” I did, and I’ll never forget that moment her reply landed in my inbox. I literally stared at it for an hour, filled with so much love I could barely stand it.

A compliment with so few words and enormous consequences for who I am and will become…….. “I don’t believe in God. But I do believe in you.”

What happens when you pray? Depends on what you’re asking for. If God answers prayers through human interaction, it doesn’t help you in life to isolate in pain. God is in telling people what is causing you to suffer and giving thanks for those who respond to it. I think Jesus would agree with me on this- I don’t think he would ever lessen a chance to widen the net (because the Disciples were fishers of men, GET IT???). The more you open up about your problems, the more access you have to solutions. The more access you have to options. The more right you feel you have not to live in shame.

I was asking God to change my heart by hoping that I could change before I went out into the world. Using this web site to communicate instead of through speaking allowed me to change while still locked in my office. As the responses came in from my posts, I would sit in amazement as the numbers solidly went up at an enormous rate. People’s responses were and continue to be huge, because when I’m willing to lay out what I need, PEOPLE can hear my voice. It is not me that moves them, but a higher calling to be benevolent of themselves.

As my self-worth has increased, so have the things I pray for. I used to pray for strength. Now I pray for humility. I used to run when people asked me what I thought…… now they run because I tell them. 😉 When I allowed the people of earth to replace the classic “grandfather-in-the-sky” image of God, it changed the archetype for me so that God is literally one body, and there is no way you aren’t a part of it. You can see it with your eyes. God is the struggle of getting different people to believe different things and yet still achieve a common goal. That common goal, the good that came out of all that struggle, is every resurrection story ever told.

In the bulb there is a flower; in the seed, an apple tree;
In cocoons, 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.

There’s a song in every silence, seeking word and melody;
There’s a dawn in every darkness, bringing hope to you and me.
From the past will come the future; what it holds, a mystery,
Unrevealed until its season, something God alone can see.

In our end is our beginning; in our time, infinity;
In our doubt there is believing; in our life, eternity,
In our death, a resurrection; at the last, a victory,
Unrevealed until its season, something God alone can see.

-Hymn of Promise, Natalie Sleeth

Yesterday was the greatest day of the year (so far). The one I have waited for returned with kindness, love, grace, and mercy. We are not the same shitty people we used to be, and we are trying to trust each other not to fuck each other up in the future. Trust is a big issue in our relationship, because obviously, I require it. I am about to go into a huge profession. I need someone who can be brutal in their honesty to me, which is why I trust three people, and the rest fight to get in.

She is also an agnostic/atheist, the kind of boundary I need to question my own in terms of faith and how strong it can become against a true friend who has no official tie to theism or church politics in the slightest. It is a marriage of ideas in my mind, and gives me so much food for thought that this is why she is THE friend I’ve waited for my whole life. Someone that holds me accountable to my words and actions in all things, not just the ones that go in the chord that runs between us.

I have a friend in Portland who is a healer. When she looks at people, she can literally SEE the chords as auras and not just sense them. The one that runs between Dana and me is brighter than anything I ever imagined, as is the one to Diane. The one to Argo started as a string and is now a mooring rope, tensile strength enough to hold an oil tanker.

Because as I mentioned in the entry about L-train, it takes scar tissue to create better, stronger healthy tissue in its place. Our scar ripped me open to let Argo in…. to create healthy dynamics where they were once damaged. To, in a sense, marry her in the way that all long-term friends do, and like I’ve been reading about in the books I bought about long-term female friendship. I had to. I don’t have a very strong sense of what it means to be a straight girl’s friend.

I had to look it up.