For a lot of my life, I have been the kind of person that stays up all night and sleeps during the day. For the past few months, I have been going to sleep early and waking up early. My job takes a lot out of me, so even though I don’t *have* to go to bed until ten or so, I find myself getting sleepy at about eight. Reminds me of a story that my dad told me when he went to Daily Franklin training in the ’90s. Guy says, “Every morning, I wake up the whole family at 4 am for a planning meeting.” Audience is baffled. One member says, “how do you get your kids to wake up that early?” Guy says, “I put them to bed at 8.” Audience member says, “How do you get your kids to go to bed at 8?” Guy says, “I GET THEM UP AT FOUR IN THE MORNING.” Point taken. It surely worked for me.

I finished work at 4 yesterday, and I don’t have to be back until Monday at 11:59 pm. In my infinite wisdom, I thought, “I’m going to go to bed for a few hours, then wake up and try to stay up all night as a trial run.” I fell asleep on the couch at about 8, and didn’t wake up until 4. So much for that little experiment. I’m going to try napping several times today and see if I can get my mojo going for tonight. It shouldn’t be that hard… I mean, it’s my natural schedule, right?

Well, maybe not so much anymore. I am an annoying morning person now… and by that, I mean that I come in to work and EXPLODE the place with laughter when other people are still wiping sleep out of their eyes and telling me to go the fuck away with their eyes. I’m naturally outwardly friendly anyway, but the difference is what I see in myself. My energy level actually is higher in the morning, and I never would have noticed if I hadn’t been forced to find out. I also don’t have a lot of the morning problems that plague most Houstonians. I live five miles from my office, and can get there by surface streets. I rarely, if ever, get caught in traffic. It is amazing how cutting out road rage keeps me happy.

When we were still house hunting, we looked at houses in old Sugar Land, off Hwy. 90, and I am blessed beyond all measure that we stopped thinking that was a good idea. My friends who commute look ragged when they get to work, much less at the end of the shift.

And Dana. Oh, my God. I could not have done this without Dana. Because we only have one car, she takes me every morning and picks me up every afternoon. Even if there *was* road rage involved, I wouldn’t have to deal with it. The most I have to do in the morning is play with my iPhone while she drives. We’ve gotten into the Raw Comedy station on Pandora, because we find that if our brains are engaged, it works better than music at distracting us from the annoyance of getting stuck behind a bus. There are also five, count ’em, FIVE school zones around my house, so we can only go 35 miles an hour for about a third of the trip.

Yeah. Comedy helps.

My new schedule will not have school zones on either end, because I won’t get out of work until 9 AM. However, I am paranoid about getting hit by a drunk driver. Besides the possibility of physical injury, it seems most of the people in my neighborhood go to the “Just Don’t Give a Fuck” insurance company.

So, not problem-less, just different problems than I would face during the day.

It reminds me of when Dana was working nights at the airport. I drove her at 2:30 every morning, and we’d stop at a 7-11 to get coffee and snacks on the way. The clerk was lovely, an indian woman that I still refer to as “She.” I am not sure that’s her name, but that’s what it sounded like when she gave it to me. I noticed that She marked time by when we would come in, because we arrived at the same time each day. Dana always wanted energy drinks and sandwiches, but I am the coffee junkie. She made sure that there was always fresh Brazilian Bold- literally, she would make it ten or fifteen minutes before we got there- and would make sure that the Splenda, marshmallows, and Stok coffee shots were full. In such a small way, she made my life easier, and I was so grateful. So grateful, in fact, that when I went to a soft skills training on customer service, I was asked to provide an example, and this is the one I gave.

It occurs to me that the thing that might make my transition to nights easier is finding a Houston version of “She.” But a “She” archetype does not exist. You create them. You become the person they want to take care of, and they do. I have to believe that by laughing, joking, making her smile, that I made a positive difference in her life, too.

It’s the comfort I have that I couldn’t express my gratitude properly in the middle of the night.

Trying to figure out where I should even start today. That’s the issue. I can talk for five pages if I have something to talk *about,* but when it’s just a regular rainy day in H-town, I think “maybe I should go watch TV.” I have no energy for writing when it’s rainy. I’m all like, “you mean I have to talk to people?”

Yes, yes you do. This blog does not write itself. But oh, how I wish it would.

This is the first week I’ve been in Houston where I haven’t constantly been thinking about “her.” I don’t use her real name to limit the damage to the people who already know the situation and both of us. I am trying to drop this story line completely, as if I can just move on to a different show or channel. However, there are days when I just feel guilt and pain, one of those shallower wells of emotional injury that I talked about in Death and Loss. The bruise is healing, but that doesn’t mean that when I accidentally hit it on a table, it doesn’t smart.

Usually, the table represents a church. It doesn’t matter which one. When I walk into a church, I can hear her voice as clearly as I could the first day I met her. It feels so strange to be without her that I will myself to concentrate on something else. She used to put her elbow on my shoulder and lean into her hand, and if I sit just right, I remember how it felt. I remember that she sang beautifully but could never remember the words to anything. If she didn’t know a hymn, she’d just make it up. Who would know the difference? Barely anybody, but I’d laugh to myself. I also knew that even if she didn’t hit the very top notes, she’d just say she did. No one noticed that, either, but it made me cackle. Focus on something else… focus on something else…

But in a church, there is no something else to focus on… just an ever-present reminder of how it began and how it came to an end. I had to start my own church just to reinvent and re-frame my beliefs. For me, church is in the middle of the backyard, with no music at all. It’s a Quaker Meeting and I’m the only attendee. Sometimes, I’m not there, and the squirrels just forgive me.

The squirrels have to forgive me for a lot, but they’re far less judgmental than a Vestry and I don’t have to attend any committee meetings. So, all in all, a plus.

I have stopped giving people advice unless they ask for it… and, in fact, when people come to me for that ear to listen, that’s exactly what I do. Before I respond, I actually say, “do you want my opinion, or do you just want to vent?” I do not get offended when people say “I just want to vent,” because sometimes the best advice comes from not saying anything at all. By saying nothing, you are just agreeing to be that sounding board for someone while they work out their problems on their own. It’s magnificent because they’ll still thank you for “helping them,” even though all you did was sit there.

The change has come from the extraordinary amount of time I’ve spent sitting by myself, letting the air around me support my deepest thoughts. If you sit long enough, the answers will come. It is excruciating at times, because you’ll get impatient and want an answer RIGHT NOW… but maybe a problem doesn’t need one hour of sitting there. Maybe it needs ten. Maybe it needs ten months. Only you can decide that, but if you let your impatience take away your serenity, you will still be in the same place you were when you started.

It’s like when I start a movie and I’m already tired. I fall asleep before the end, and then I feel like I have to watch it from the beginning so that I can actually understand it. Believe it or not, that movie for me is Return of the Jedi. I saw it in the theater when I was five, but the only thing I remember about it is the scene with the Ewok battle. As an adult, I fall asleep every time they come on the screen.

Dana didn’t know this about me, and about eight years ago we were hiking to Angel’s Rest (in the Columbia River Gorge) and talking when she said, “it’s like that scene where Yoda dies.” I said, “YODA DIES?!?!?!?!?!?!??!” and promptly fell into a bush. Seriously. No preparing for the fall, just outright ass over teakettle.

I didn’t sit until the end. I didn’t finish the story.

When you spend time alone, you are finishing your story. The things that happen to you are the rough draft. Thinking about it is crafting the edges, making the changes, taking the behaviors you wish you could retract and thinking of ways to correct them.

Giving someone advice is robbing them of the chance to finish their own stories. Not only that, if they try what worked for you and it doesn’t work for them, now you’re up for the shitty friend award without even knowing it.

Avoid winning the shitty friend award. I have come in first place a few times in my life, and it’s just not enjoyable.

However, there are those times when you wish you could give advice because you care so much about the person that needs it. Think those things in your head. In fact, think them all you want… but you’re better off giving pseudo-advice out loud. By pseudo-advice, I mean things like:

• If you just sit there long enough, the answers will come.
• Take care of yourself- you’d be surprised at how much a bubble bath helps.
• Do you ever just walk, with no particular destination?
• Have you read any good books lately?

These are the things that people remember as helpful without giving you the chance to be right or wrong… because the truth is, your story is your own.

You crafted it yourself.

Oh, so this is what it feels like to have a body again. I feel strong, stronger than I have in ten years, and I think it has a lot to do with forcing myself to sit outside. My Vitamin D level was so low in Portland that it made my bones go soft, and any depression that I felt ranged from “I’m a little under the weather” to “I just want the pain to stop.”

When I got to “I just want the pain to stop,” I knew it was time to come home. I had fallen too far to help myself up, and I did not expect my friends to shoulder the burden of being untrained therapists. Besides, it wasn’t my friends that gave me problems. It was the woman that abused me when I was a kid and refused to face the music when I grew up. I flat-out ignored her behavior until my dreams became so terrifying that I would wake myself up… a repeat of what happened when I was little, but something that I hadn’t thought of since then.

The mark of an excellent abuser is the absolute denial that they’ve ever done anything wrong. I screamed into a black hole of seeming indifference until I thought I would die from emotional laryngitis. I am bipolar and I take medication for it every day. When I take my medication every day, the chemical imbalance goes away and therefore, I have the diagnosis, but not the behavior.

Instead of taking that into account, my mental health provided her with a fountain of reasons why she couldn’t possibly be held accountable for my pain; I mean, obviously. I’m just a crazy woman.

A crazy woman whose crazy started when we met. I didn’t know how to handle what she was telling me, and I didn’t have anyone to tell about our conversations because they were a secret. She had the audacity to tell me that her life was an open book, and even then it was insincere. Even when I was young, I learned how to turn the pages. I learned how to evoke reactions, and how to keep her from reacting at all. It was a game. It always had been… and not only that, it was rigged so my only choice was to resign.

The analogy of “an open book” is apt, because for my fourteenth birthday, she gave me her college journal. I read about everything college kids do, including sexually.

Learning to break the cycle of emotional abuse was to entertain that she knew what she was doing when she gave it to me. I fell for it hook, line and sinker. Other people were so worried about me that they tried to get me away from her, but it didn’t help. Because she was a lesbian, I thought they were just prejudiced and I willingly drowned in quicksand. There was nothing on earth that could get me to walk away.

She had me, and she knew it. For the next quarter century, our relationship looked like a game of tug o’war. I would run toward her wholeheartedly, and then she would emotionally shut down. I would try to run away, and she would bring me back in. At no time were we ever equals, but there was a lot of lip service that I was. In fact, what broke me was her insistence that I couldn’t, wouldn’t grow up and act like her equal… but there was no set of instructions, and even if there had been, the rules would have been changed daily just to make me feel even more worthless than I already did.

…because if I felt worthless, I wouldn’t leave. I couldn’t. I didn’t have the strength, because I knew that her Siren call would be ever-present in my life unless I drove my own ship into the rocks. Getting out of this situation has been the best thing I’ve ever done, because what I had to realize is that I grew, but she didn’t grow with me. She tried to keep me in that one-down position, had to feel like she was in control, because when she wasn’t, she felt powerless and railed against it. It was all or nothing, with no happy medium.

I’ve done this before. I’ve walked away before. Like many, many abused women, I was foolish enough to think that if a little bit of time passed, that I could go back… in reality, it was just more of the same, except that it got worse and worse. Selective memory took over so that not only was I crazy, I had made the whole thing up.

Because that’s how you treat people when you’re running away from yourself. I know it because I’m so good at running away now. The blessing that has come out of running away this time (and hopefully, the last) is that I’ve finally hit the finish line. All that’s left is the victory celebration, but a very quiet one.

There are good memories, too, and I’m sorry that there won’t be new ones. So I grieve that part. I grieve the loss of a future that won’t happen…

As I sit in the backyard with strong bones and a healthy mind and a zeal for whatever is next. Dana and I are starting to ask the big questions, and it’s fun receiving the big answers. Before, they didn’t have a wide enough road to drive through. Now I’m installing a highway.

Buccee’s and I are in negotiation.

Today has been a relatively busy day, and it’s nice to have a chance to relax. It’s just you and me and a bottle makes three (of delicious Coke Zero). I’m sitting in a very expensive black chair that I wish came with a matching ottoman. But hey, you can’t have everything you want in life. I have a team lead and a boss that like me. Ottomans are optional.

I found out that we have all the study materials available for the GCIA in our Security Center wiki, which is nice because I hear they’re very expensive to buy. It’s my first certification, so I am very excited about it. I’m not degreed in anything. I’ve never done anything academically with computers. I’m completely self-taught. My philosophy is that if you’re going to go into computers, just do it. Skip college. This is not because I hate college or anything. If you go, study something you’re just interested in, as opposed to it being a ticket to somewhere else. The reason a computer degree will not help you with jack or shit is that by the time the textbook is printed, your course material is already out of date. Things change too fast to wait for a textbook cycle.

However, this is not to say that my life has been easy being trained on the job. In a lot of ways, you’re on your own, kid. Go to college if you need to be taught something, because on the job, you’re the teacher. You have to be self-driven and completely willing to pore through thousands of pages of documentation… that’s usually hastily written and most likely incorrect because what’s in there is two versions ago. You’ll have to dig down into applications trying to break them, because it’s better for you to break them than to release something that’s customer-facing and just can’t hang (as is so prevalent in our news media right now…).

Learn as much as you can, as fast as you can, because the money’s not in desktop support. The money is in being able to build things, and alternatively, learning to tear them down. Threat analysis will start with me learning to crack my little ass off, because if I know enough to hack into a mainframe, I know enough to learn how to block it.

It brings morality into the light, but thankfully, I’ve already answered that question. When I lived in Portland, one of my neighbors was a high-level Black Hat, the kind where the FBI knows who you are. If I’d ever wanted to destroy anyone, anywhere, all it would have taken is a cold beer for bribery. And by destroy, I mean obliterate. Wouldn’t be able to walk across the street without getting picked up by the police and bank accounts suddenly on empty.

I learned what kind of person I am.

I am the kind of person that is capable of learning how to destroy so that safety and security can rise from the ash.

Which is interesting, because that’s exactly the path I’m walking in my personal life as well.

Amen.

I am sitting at lunch with my trusty laptop, earphones in and classical music blaring. First, it was O, Silver Moon by Antonin Dvorak. Now, it’s Petite Piece Concertante, by Guillaume Balay. Next, perhaps a little Bach Goldberg Variations or Handel’s Let the Bright Seraphim. I love anything that connects me to my past, or makes me dream of the future. For that, I count on Hindemith, Ives, Cage, and Glass. I also (obviously) have a tremendous crush on trumpet virtuoso Alison Balsom. I listen to her, and I think, “if I’d only practiced a little more.” And then i think, “I will never be a leggy blonde.”

I was wrong. The next one is Procession of the Nobles by Rimsky-Korsakov. This is one of my favorite pieces of all time, because from the time I was little, my grandfather would play me the record of it in which my father was the star. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this or not, but my dad made all-state band three years running, and his senior year, he was the best trumpet player in the entire state of Texas. He got 26 scholarships, including one to tour Russia with Frederick Fennell.

I can’t even find my car when I park at the mall.

And now we’ve arrived at the first movement of the Hummel Trumpet Concerto, one of my favorite pieces to play of all time. It’s not that hard, and sounds so much more impressive than it is. I’ll have to dig out my copy and see if my mom will help me make a video. Did I mention that my mom is an accompanist?

Boy, did I get lucky.

My mom is not a pianist. She’s an accompanist, and it takes a musician to know the difference. You know, the kind of piano player that will catch your ass when you’ve accidentally skipped a measure? She’s worth her weight in platinum.

And on that note, I have to go back to work.

Oh, wait! One more thing! I had my first review today and I’m doing great. They asked me what career track I wanted to take, so I said that I wanted to do threat analysis so that I can make Linux Ninja my official job title. They said yes. I have to start studying for the GCIA immediately, which is good because in three weeks, I’m moving to nights. I can spend literally nine hours studying at a clip.

It’s a great day to be me, y’all. You just don’t even know.

Dana and I have a huge back yard. It is so lovely that I rarely want to come inside. Living in Portland, Oregon for so long has made me realize that the thing Houston has going for it is that I can be outside, most of the time in short sleeves, in October… so that’s what I do. I sit on the back porch, drink beer, and reflect on how lucky I am that when I said I wanted to rent a house, it turned out to be this one.

In this back yard, I sit and try to understand my grief. I watch birds, squirrels, bats, and toads… wondering if I sit here long enough, will the pain ever go away? My instinct is no. It will ebb and flow, but never disappear. She will never disappear. It is losing a parent, a sibling, a limb. It will be a lifetime of phantom pain. My saving grace is that every time it aches, it aches a little less than it did the day before.

But it still hurts every day.

Every. Day.

Yesterday, a dragonfly landed on the arm of my patio chair, and I sat and talked with it, as if it could take my messages of love and care with it and land on your patio chair, too…

They’re messages of love and care that no one else wants me to send, because they know, looking from the outside, that I am only hurting myself because even if they showed up, they would go unanswered. To me, your reaction is not the point. I am saving myself one day at a time because if I can send you messages of love and care, I am not bothering to be angry anymore. I am not wasting this one “wild and precious life” by dealing in rage to which I am certainly entitled but do not care to entertain.

This space I have to write and reflect and hear others’ opinions is enough. People that comment rarely have any idea who I am, who you are, who we were to each other… as if even we know. I wonder what it feels like to look at us from the outside, wonder about the pain I’ve put Dana through and hope that I am not hurting her by letting her share in our stories. The cruel truth is that our stories hurt. Of course I’ve hurt Dana. Of course I have. You cannot listen to me tell them without seeing my vibrations of pain. I am enormously lucky that Dana agreed to take it on when she married me, and to this day listens even when I know that the story is getting repetitive.

Now I’m getting to the place where I wish I could tell myself to snap out of it. I want to be over it. I want to be out of it. I work hard every day to focus my attention away from my grief and it works but only so much. I have to force myself into distraction, because when I don’t, I end up like this. Sitting in the back yard on a beautiful day engrossed in how much I hurt instead of how much awe there is in the glistening piece of spider web next to me.

I have a stack of pickle salt envelopes in my car. I’ve meant to send them since July. 

Wortham Center has to be one of my favorite places on earth. The first summer that I lived in Houston, I had a friend who was in the adult chorus, and my sister was in the children’s chorus a summer or so later. I spent those years as a brooding Salieri, because I wanted to sing opera and they were the ones actually doing it.

So when the opera season last night opened with The Star Spangled Banner, I couldn’t help myself. Even though I was in the audience, people for three rows were turning around to look because they thought that I was a plant and that somehow the show was supposed to start in Orchestra C. Dana just looked at me like, “stop this right now or I may be forced to kill you.” The music stops and I look over at her… “I’m not a whore. I didn’t take the high B flat. Besides, when am I going to get these kind of acoustics again? Besides, I have to let Theresa know I’m here.”
Dana rubbed her ear. “I think she does!”The only thing I didn’t do, and I now see this as a flaw in my character, is yell “PLAY BALL!” at the end.

And in an instant, I am done being funny and the overture starts and I am right back in that place. The emotional place where all of this is so familiar. The seats that scratched my butt 25 years ago still do today. After about half an hour, my lower back went completely numb and I thought to myself, “some things just never change.”

The curtain goes up and the sets are kind of weird. Cool, but weird. There’s a certain whimsy to it all, as if the backdrop has been illustrated by the same guy that did “Oh, the Places You’ll Go.” The magic of opera has begun. I am completely enchanted.Of everyone, I am most impressed with the guy that played Aida’s father. I do not think that he necessarily had the most difficult role, but his voice was outstanding.

The role of Amneris was filled by an appropriately bitter mezzo, complete with claw hand gestures, and by far a better voice than the woman who played the title role.It wasn’t like she missed any notes or anything, and in fact, had some beautifully lyric lines. It was just that the mezzo had more depth and breadth to her voice… so many more colors and emotions that she managed to paint violently across the canvas. I watch Scandal on ABC, and I had to blink to remind myself that I was not watching First Lady Mellie Grant. The languages were different, but the context was the same. “I have to scream at the top of my lungs that I am in love with a man who does not love me and I am very very upset about it! In fact, I am so upset about it that I have to manufacture a scenario in which I can rub my competitor’s face in the dirt for the fulfillment of my own dark and twisted fantasies! And as a bonus, all of the people here tonight can watch!”

In the opera world, that never works. True love will end with two people declaring their undying love for each other by singing and lighting candles in a tomb with no air.

It’s a wonderfully stormy afternoon, per Houston’s normal this time of year. However, it does not have the effect of making me homesick for Portland, because it’s just not that kind of rain. In Houston, rain is sort of a “dump and run” philosophy. In Portland, rain seeps into the soul… quietly, with no realization of the day you invited it. In the Pacific Northwest, rain is a deep, ever-present reminder of life’s inevitable valleys. It is as if problems become tangible, because on most days, there is no light at the end of the tunnel. There are things you can do to lighten your mood, but there’s never any call to bring it down.

If there is light, it is that Portland is a city of Easter people in a Good Friday world. Don’t quote me on that. I didn’t write it. But I would like you to think I did. I just added the Portland part, because it is an image that works very well in this context. When there is no sun, and seemingly no hope, people bring it to you (in bags made of natural, substainable fiber by the women of some Third World country in publicized crisis).

In Houston, I use the rain to reflect. When it’s sunny, I am usually in the backyard, soaking up rays like they’re going out of style. I have no worries, no responsibilities, no anything to weigh on me except the level of my beer. In the sun, I party. In the rain, I ponder.

In these moments, my weaknesses and insecurities present themselves, and, like Dana in front of LOLCats, I have to view them all. In fact, I will refrain from even linking to the site, because I know that if you click it, what I write next will cease to matter. It’s ok. I know. They’re just so damn adorable (No, they’re not. Well, ok. One or two. But after ten, my eyes begin to glaze over and I feel like my brain is running out of my ear.).

What was I talking about?

Oh, yes. My weaknesses and insecurities.

When I was fifteen, I felt deeply and utterly married to someone in an adult kind of way, but not because of anything romantic. It was as if the relationship skipped over all of that and went right into “let me share my secrets and lies.” Because I held them, she never knew what kind of effect her secrets had. To someone of equal age, they probably weren’t even secrets. To a kid, though, they were tantamount to a fire alarm someone’s in trouble move move move… fight or flight breath can’t go deep can’t breathe coming to get us…

I thought I was the only one who knew the only one that could possibly do anything to help it was all up to me or she was going to get hurt someone was coming someone was coming someone was coming,

A sentence with no period, just a comma, because a period indicates that things end.

And that’s what’s on my mind when I ponder. How did I keep all of those secrets without going mad then, instead of now? Maybe it was some sort of body memory trigger… remembering a place and time we’d been years earlier, but not verbally. Maybe it was the recurrence of nightmares I hadn’t thought of since then. Whatever it was, I fell, and I fell hard. I had to get out of there. I had to breathe deep and I hadn’t for such a long time.

I wanted my city to be my own, because maybe if I couldn’t enforce emotional boundaries, I could enforce physical ones.

It worked. I left and I took a breath and out of the deep I emerged and only when it is raining do I try to dive back in swim down grab an ankle a wrist a belt something to hold onto when I’m coming back up because I left and the nightmares did not in my dreams I berate myself for having a hold and letting go it’s my fault in my darkest place I let go and it’s my fault.

In my waking hours, when it’s sunny, the rain cannot touch me.

This open letter is in reference to an article I read about Maya Keyes, who told The Advocate that when she came out to her father, Alan Keyes, he told her that she was no longer welcome in his home, as well as providing no financial support for her education at Brown.

Dear Alan,

One of the best phone calls I’ve gotten this year is from my friend Meagan, who excitedly told me that she and her partner are expecting a daughter.

By the time I hung up the phone, I was already off on a maternal tangent- what would it be like to have a child? Would my child look like me? Would she act like me? Would I be able to teach him the fundamental principles of being a Lanagan? Would he or she like being a Lanagan?

What if she didn’t? What if my son or daughter didn’t want to believe the same things I do? What if, God forbid, he wanted to be a Republican? What if I had a son or daughter that proudly wore t-shirts claiming his/her place as a charter member of the vast right-wing conspiracy? What if, all joking aside, my child espoused virtues that I thought of as morally reprehensible? What kind of parent would I be then? Could I, if times got tough, say to my son, “as soon as you are 18, I would like you to pack your bags. You are no longer welcome in my home?” It was then that I verbalized something my parents had taught me all along- there would be no situation on earth capable of limiting the love and support I had to give. The decision to bring a child into the world would be permanent- with no thought, word, or deed that could reverse it.

In other words, I want to love my child the way my father-mother-creator God loves me… the kind of love that the apostle Paul writes about in his letter to the Romans in verses 38-39: “I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus.” These are powerful words that seem too good to be true, especially when it feels like God is distant. But for me, life and breath are given to these words every day when I see the way that my father loves me.

…and I believe that it is the same way you love your own daughter. You just haven’t yet realized that the connection running between you carries more similarity than difference, more agreement than not. I pray that a quick turning point comes for you- perhaps a realization that because of your shared genes and history, that your daughter is indeed created in your image… and that you are both created in God’s.

Sincerely,

Leslie D. Lanagan

Dana and I have been hanging out at a little bar in town that specializes in socializing after work. There’s no liquor, and no wine. This is Texas at its finest… just beer and conversation. Robert (remember Robert?) recommended it to us, and we’ve been there just about every day since. It’s not about the beer. It’s about the people. Dana and I are the only women in the group, which I love. Men make excellent friends because there’s no tolerance for petty bullshit. We talk about stuff that *matters,* like football.

Last night, though. Last night was a little different. One of the guys asked me about the feather tattoo on my left forearm (which is totally the only reason I have tattoos… conversation starters). I explained to him that it was a quill dripping blood into a paragraph, and is based on the quote by Paul Gallico, “It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader.” I gave him my URL. I think I bleed just as much in that moment, because I have yet to see the writer that doesn’t wait on pins and needles wondering if the feedback is going to be positive or negative.

Additionally, these are the type of guys that wouldn’t seek out relationships with gay people. It’s not that they’re opposed to it (obviously), it’s just that there hasn’t been an opportunity. One of the guys even said, “I think you guys are my first gay friends.” If you’ve never heard that before, it’s a gorgeous moment. It says “I accept you for who you are in a way that I didn’t know I could do until right this moment.”

He went on to ask about our families, and whether they accepted us or not. That led us down the path of conservative religion and its power to destroy relationships and divide families. This was not from our end. When you start talking about gay people with conservatives that really want to listen, that’s when you hear the stories of what happened in their family when X relative came out and all hell broke loose… literally.

They knew I went to church, and they asked me how that was even possible. When I started talking about “my Jesus,” their eyes lit up. They were all like, “you make some very excellent points!” I told them that I was thinking of starting my own church, because Houston needs more places to worship that are non-judgmental, accepting of all…

It makes sense. I’m in network security, and I cannot think of a network I would like to keep more secure than the one supporting all of us in our need… and when we have all we need, the network that encourages to look outside ourselves and see what needs to be done.

I am still in that place of weakness, that place where I know I have a lot of work to do on myself before I get too far down the road with this journey. Last night, though, I took a step, and landed on solid ground.

I talk a lot about how I hope the universe holds my stories so, in a way, I don’t have to. Today is one of those days. I am striving to stay present and real while my mind wanders around in the ether. Grief is so weird that I always think I’m over it, and then something happens, and in an instant, my current self disappears and I am lost in the shadows. This week it was the death of a mutual friend, someone that I wasn’t close to, but she was. On the day that he died, she left me a voice mail telling me how much I meant to her. I listened to it in order to hear her voice from across the years, and I cannot say that I’m sad that I did it. The lilt in her voice that was home, to my relief, still is. There may be no future, but there is a beautiful past… rich and full like a tapestry in a museum, and woven just as tightly.

It allows me to keep a small flame alive that all of this is a distant nightmare, that the reality I knew as a child was actually a shared one instead of an elaborately ornamental fantasyland. The hardest part of this whole thing is not losing the present and future. It is losing the past. It is the feeling that my entire childhood was a practical joke, with unplanned and dire consequences for the woman I would become. I was too young at the time to even conceive of the possibility that she didn’t love me the way she said she did, that hugs weren’t contracts and letters weren’t friendship. As an adult, I am just shamed beyond belief. In my darkest moments, I cannot forgive myself for being a teenager without this kind of foresight. It is ridiculous, but it has also been expected of me. The game has been to convince me that I should have been able to see it coming. I should have been reading her mind all of this time and taking copious notes on what meant something and what was just a “daily event.” I am not sure what that means, but I have come to realize that her emotional overatures were the equivalent of being a divorced dad who won’t come to dinner consistently, but will take you to Six Flags once in a while and try to buy your love. It’s over the top, it’s more than you’ve ever dreamed, and it reinforces to you how much they love you… when it’s convenient for them.

What’s convenient for you is the least of their worries, but it is the crux of yours.

The peace I hope for in the end is about receiving her if she shows up, and at the same time, killing all expectation that it will ever happen. I cannot ignore the possibility, because it is what takes away all of my anger. I have been angry, and it is over. I retreat with all of my memories and have forgiven the future that never happened.

However, that being said, there is still a whole lot of present. I have said before that it is a major emotional surgery, and I wish I was just kidding about that. The end of this friendship would have been easy for me as a healthy, whole adult. Because I was so young when we met, it has taken my foundations of love and trust and slashed all the tires. My inner teenager is crying the crocodile tears of injustice, while my outer adult is trying to comfort and console.

It would be so much easier if I could get mad and stay that way, but our narrative is more complicated than that. We have both been terrible to each other. We have both been tender, real, loving. We have both done things to the other that we wish we could forget, and given each other intangible gifts that we’ll always want to remember.

I am one of those people that believes relationships never end. This is because way before Facebook was invented, I would try to end relationships with finality and then the person I was mad at would end up sitting next to me in English. The world just isn’t large enough to retreat to separate corners, especially now. Gone are the days of thinking, “whatever happened to so and so…” They’re probably mutual friends of yours and you see them once a week in your “Friend Suggestion” list that Facebook so lovingly provides. So even if you want to get away from someone, those days are gone.

There should be a form letter for situations like this:

Dear _____,

I apologize that I was a shitty person to you. I assure you that it wasn’t personal. I am a shitty person to a lot of people and on (X Date and Time), you were just the main target. This is not to excuse you for your shitty behavior, just to say that I own my half.

Can we be trusted not to fuck each other up anymore? Are you still the same shitty person you were? I assure you that I will try not to be the same shitty person I was. However, I can only change so much in one lifetime. The best I can do is hope the good outweighs the bad over the next, um, 50 years that I am alive.

Love,

Leslie

I have to assume that if you are the type person that would actually respond to a letter like this with as much honesty as I put forth, then you’re the type of friend I should forgive. Anyone who replies to this letter that they’ve never done anything wrong and they’re sorry it’s all you has got to be immediately disqualified. Problems between people do not crop up in a vacuum. People rarely have the ability to be as shitty to themselves as they are to everyone else.

I think it should be a scientific theory… we’ll call it “Survival of the Shittiest,” because the people that succeed in life are the ones that can accept the fact that they engineer things to be better for themselves than they do for their friends. We all do the best we can, but when push comes to shove, we’d much rather push someone else in front of the bus than have to play the music we wrote.

Humans are all alike. We just like to pretend that we’re not.