Yesterday at church, there were sacks and sacks of lemons that someone had brought because their tree produced so many lemons that they couldn’t eat that many in a lifetime. We snagged a bag, and then at work today, the same thing happened. Co-workers are bringing their lemons in droves. I knew that West Texas was famous for its citrus, but I had no idea that Houston had a talent for it. These lemons were as sweet as Meyer lemons from California, almost sweet enough to eat without needing sugar. Because I knew it would use a lot of lemons at once, I made whiskey sours for Dana and myself. They were the best whiskey sours in the history of the world. In case you’re wondering, I used Old Overholt rye.

However, you can only drink one whiskey sour with the juice of two and a half lemons. Since there were five lemons in all, I added a cup of Splenda… and even that didn’t stop our esophageal tracts from feeling like they were being ripped out… slowly. I took an acid reducer before I went to bed, and another one this morning.

Hell, yeah it was worth it! I am a good mixologist, but in this case, there was nothing that could go wrong. I used the freshest ingredients I could possibly find. The lemon juice and the pulp were so cool against my tongue and so sweet. It was the kind of bliss that can only be captured by William Carlos Williams:

This Is Just To Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

I am sometimes quite prim, but if I wasn’t, I think I would have been squeezing lemon juice into my mouth, drips on my cheeks and chin be damned. I used my lemon as a reminder that the solstice is coming, and that we will once again be returning to the light. My lemon was a symbol of summer, of sunshine, of carefree play in the sprinklers and sand between my toes on Galveston Island.

I took it as a sign of change.

Grieving the loss of an important part of my past has been the darkness. My lemon reminded me that it won’t always be that way. What I have noticed is that the solstice doesn’t mean very much physically in Houston. Literally right now, it is sunny and 73 degrees. In Houston, the solstice is metaphorical. Advent is a time to turn inward, to think about what we’re going to do with all the hope that breaks into the world.

I have no idea what I am going to do with mine. Yet.

It’ll come to me… probably while I’m making whiskey sours.

Today is just one of those days where the grief that runs under the surface of my emotions has bubbled up and is at the forefront of my mind. The friend I lost is a musician, and nearly every piece of music that my current conductor has pulled for Advent is something that we’ve done together at some point or another. Music stays in my memory longer than anything else in my life, so for me, a choir folder is not a choir folder. It’s a scrap book from the time I was a teenager, reaching into my future with its blank slots in the back.

I often don’t know what to do with this type of grief, because it affects my technical ability. If you’ve ever felt like you were going to cry while you were singing, you know what I mean. The tears don’t even have to flow before your throat starts to close and your “mask” gets congested. I tell myself something that James, one of my former choir directors, always said; “when you are performing, it is not your emotion to have. Your presentation is for the audience to have emotions.” He’s right, and using that as a mantra helps me when I think I’m going to lose it.

When that doesn’t work, I switch into “fake it til you make it” mode, which generally means that I pretend that everything is fine and that there is no conflict. She was at the earlier service and I just got there after she left. It’s not that there’s been a fight, it’s that today we’re just ships in the night. It seems ridiculous that I put myself through such a charade, but at the same time, I really don’t have another option… and I’m not talking about years from now, when the wound of loss has faded into a barely noticeable scar. I’m talking about right here and right now. In this time and place, I am not capable of singing the music we sang together without completely breaking down. I pretend that there was no fight, there is no grief, and then I can stay present and focus on the technique of the piece instead of how earth-shatteringly terrible it is that she will never sing it with me again… that she will never again sit beside me and put her elbow on my shoulder so she can hold her head with her hand. There won’t ever be another time when I get to walk her out to her car after choir practice, so we can have five or ten minutes alone. There won’t ever be another time in my life where singing for her brings tears to her eyes and she looks at me the way she’s looked at me since I was a teen and said, “it’s like watching my little girl grow up.”

There are reasons, good ones, that these simple things are gone. But that doesn’t make me hurt any less. I had a chance to get away from our relationship and it was a good move. I started to heal, started to write about healing, started to think that I could take the Band-aid off and just let the wound breathe, and then she sent me the equivalent of a “U Still Mad, Bro?”

And yes. Yes, I was.

It set me back emotionally because I’d put so much faith in the fact that we were done. So much faith in the fact that she couldn’t rattle me anymore… which was true right up until it wasn’t. I try to be so strong, and then Joseph (current conductor) pulls out something by John Rutter and all of the sudden, I’m 13 again, and she is 24. We’re writing notes back and forth, teasing each other while my dad preaches. My chest tightens a bit at the memory and my breathing gets shallow.

I have a friend that’s been talking me through this, and she says that my abuser doesn’t deserve anything. Not my heart, not my mind, not my soul, not my guts. I think that, too.

Just don’t ask me how I feel, because that is a totally different matter.

 

 

I actually brought my lunch today, so I don’t have as much time to write as I normally do. I’m down to the last 20 minutes of lunch, and then the last two hours before I come back on Monday. I think that the food is making me sleepy. Note to self: maybe you should write first. I don’t know whether or not eating actually influences my writing, but it can’t be good to concentrate on birthing an article and a food baby all at once.

Yesterday got deep because that’s just where my mind went. It goes all over the place, and fortunately or not, this is just my catch-all receptacle. In all of my writing, the thing that came up at the forefront was shame. I wasn’t ashamed that an older woman was turning me on. I was ashamed that I wasn’t pretty enough for her to do anything about it… because that was the unintended consequence of all her attention. All of this sexual information was coming at me, and I did not have the capacity to see that this woman was hurting me emotionally. I only saw myself as unworthy of her advances. For years, I saw myself as not good enough, not attractive enough, not well-behaved enough… to the point that I would literally fight for her attention because maybe someday, some way, I’d be able to prove what I’d thought all along. She was giving me sexual information for a reason, because it was me. It was always me.

Years later, I went to see “Memoirs of a Geisha,” and the entire movie just hit too close to fucking home. I cried at the end, and because the friend who was with me has the most deadpan humor in the entire world, she leaned over and said, “are you crying at the part where he’s a pedophile?” I burst out laughing at the same time my heart dropped into my stomach.

I grew out of wanting to be her lover/girlfriend/wife, but the behavior where I was constantly trying to get her attention to prove to her that I was worthy of her time stayed. It was completely second nature, to the point that I didn’t even realize I was doing it. When I figured it out, and I figured it out several times before it stuck for good, she’d all of the sudden become interested in me again. The big blowout was when I realized that I was tired of being the mouse in this scenario, because the cat would only chase me if I moved.

It feels good to release some of this shame, because the true feelings of abused kids are in the dark spots… the ones we don’t talk about. Like when you engineer a response in a 14-year-old, she knows it isn’t right, but her body goes on high alert before her brain catches up. It creates guilt beyond belief that we know we’re not supposed to want what we want, but we can’t undo what you’ve done.

But we can try.

I have no idea what to write about today, but I have about forty minutes with which to come up with something. Maybe you should just come back later. I am not feeling that interesting today.

Well, that’s not ever true. I’m lying. I think I’m a riot. It’s just unfortunate that sometimes people don’t agree with me because I have no interest in making people think that I am polite. I have been a wallflower for most of my life… too shy to engage for fear of rejection… and then I got over it. I realized that I was living in a comfort zone thisbig, and I had to stop being afraid of confrontation. I am allowed to take up space in the world. I am allowed to disagree.

Once I gave myself that permission, I got a lot funnier… to me. And then when horrible things would come out of my mouth, I knew to just apologize if anyone was offended and MOVE THE FUCK ON. I didn’t have to shrink in my fear that no one would like me after X joke. X joke can be on any subject, especially since I spent a lot of my life up until now as a cook in a bar.

Nothing is off limits. Ever.

Humor lights me up, especially cringe humor so horrible that most people would vomit. I think that the world is so fucked up on its own that someone telling jokes *about* the horrible things that happen is one of the only things that saves me from freaking out over them. This time in my life has been filled with jokes about child abuse, because it is the marble in the pasta pot that keeps it from boiling over.

What’s the best thing about having sex with 27-year-olds? There’s 20 of them.

This joke works a lot better aurally, and I could give a thousand fucks if you don’t like it. It made me laugh.

Again, pasta pot. Boiling over. You don’t get that image, then maybe you’ll get this one. My childhood abuse (even though it wasn’t physical) stayed inside me until now, because I couldn’t bring myself to tell anyone that they were right. Our relationship was inappropriate, but I lived for it. Couldn’t and wouldn’t walk away. For over 20 years, that abuse has been sitting over my head like a Mento over a Diet Coke. A couple of years ago, I couldn’t hold it in any longer, and the Mento dropped.

Anything I can do to make myself laugh is worth it, even if the humor is as black as tar.

Apparently, this phenomenon is not uncommon. The worse the experience, the harder it is for stupid jokes to make us laugh. You have to dig deep, and find a way to laugh at the pain already inside you so that you have a way to release it.

It’s time to give the journal back and I’m standing in front of her, asking her questions about what I’ve read. There’s clearly a menage a trois, and at 14, I don’t even know how that’s possible between a group of people at least 10 years older. I want to ask more, I’m so turned on I can’t stand it, but I’m confused. She said “it’s not like that,” and I don’t know how the hell it’s not. I have no idea what she wants me to know, or why she would give me this information if she wasn’t planning on using it.

I wanted her to use it…. desperately. Because the game wasn’t that she was going to hurt me. She just knew how to pull my strings so that I was so high on teenage hormones I could have lit a Christmas tree. I didn’t learn what sex physically meant until I was much older, but I assure you that I discovered blue balls early. It was confusing in a “do what I say, and not what I do” kind of way.

…Guy is walking through a deep gorge and sees a little girl crying. He says, “what’s wrong, sweetheart?” She says, “I just watched my parents’ car go over this cliff!” Guy pulls down his pants and says, “well, today’s just not your day, is it?”

I am again sitting in the huge leather chairs in my company’s break room, because it’s my favorite place to be when I’m writing to all of you. I put my feet up, take a load off, and drink Coke Zero to my heart’s content. I’m listening to Jason Moran, a pianist friend from HSPVA who made it big. The album is called “Same Mother,” and is truly amazing. Different styles, some electric guitar… you really can’t go wrong.

Listening to an album called “Same Mother” seems appropriate, because someone left a comment on one of the posts re: my childhood abuse that said if I stopped paying attention to her, she’d find someone else. I believe she already has, because I was very clear that until she climbed the long and winding staircase toward resolution, we were going to continue being broken beyond repair. I have defined my standards; I will not put up with pretending that the way the dice rolled when I was a teenager was a random throw. When the die were cast, they were weighted on one side.

Plus, the abused part of me is the first one to say, “but if I do take it, then no one else has to.” I know the game. I know how to play it. The unsuspecting victims in the next round are woefully unequipped. They just don’t know it yet.

I don’t write about this stuff to figure out how I can get or give more attention from or to someone else. I write it out because I am slowly discovering who I really am. Who I might have become without this form of sunshine and chill… why my childhood was so wrapped up in an older woman, and not because I was crazy, but because it was engineered that way and no one could’ve caught it, because we were both very sneaky about when and where we saw each other. When and where we talked on the phone. I waited by the mailbox for her letters, because I knew that if my parents got them, I never would. I deceived my parents for the longest time, and do not regret it anymore. I had to work through the regret, because there’s nothing I can do to change my past. It’s just wasted energy at this point.

I wonder what would have happened if she’d gotten caught, or if she did… because no one (least of all, her) would have told me. I was almost 15 by the time she left town, and I am sure that those closest to me breathed a sigh of relief. I, however, was miserable. I didn’t want to start high school without her, and I walked around most days with her graduate recital playing on my Walkman. I missed her so much that there were times I couldn’t breathe, because coming out at school was not left up to me. Someone close to me ratted me out, and I was never the same. All I wanted was to be able to run back into her huge hugs and reassuring words.

My sophomore year of high school, I found out that my Wind Ensemble was giving a concert at the school where she was getting her Master’s. I found out when the bus was leaving to go back to ‘PVA, and we spent the afternoon together. It was one of the best days of my young life, because I was a jazz freak and she’d gotten me a t-shirt from the most famous collegiate jazz band in the state. I got to see her office, because she was getting to teach.

At the end of our time together, I thought I was going to break in half. I didn’t want to leave, because we’d have to go back to sneaking letters and phone calls. I wanted her to be real and present in my life, without having to hide the fact that I was her friend. I hugged her one last time, making sure to breathe in her familiar perfume and snuggle up into her neck. It might be years until next time.

It was.

But that’s another story for another day.

Harlem
Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

---

We walk arm-in-arm down a bustling sidewalk, fast and “with a purpose,” as her mother has always said. We have to get going, get started, because this project has been a seed in my mind since I’d turned 19, the same age as my dad was when he began a similar journey. I’d just turned 36. Enough time had been wasted, and it was time to get down to brass tacks.

We turn into a coffee shop that looks forgotten, shitty folk songs overhead that she seems to like but somehow come across as whining to me. Maybe it’s a generational thing, I don’t know. But it doesn’t matter. It’s not why we’re here.

The barista comes by the table because we are so engrossed in our work that we haven’t even ordered… and it’s kind of bad form to take up space in a business without paying for it. I look over and order the most expensive thing on the menu. It doesn’t matter what it is, I’ll drink it. I just don’t want to be the douche that orders drip and stays for three hours. She orders drip… not because she *is* that douche, but because it really is her favorite. Overly strong, cream, no sugar. It is a trait we now share, based on the first cup she shared with me. I’d never had anything like it, so far above Folgers that there weren’t even words to describe it.

Me: What are you planning for the offertory?
Her: Nothing so far. What is the text?
Me: It’s Advent I. We’re waitin’ for the baby.
Her: So, basically anything I want?
Me: Should I trust you?
Her: Are we talking about all things, or just this?
Me: Just this. I already know not to trust you with buying your own jeans.

We laugh and decide on something we both like from back in the day at St. Mark’s, before she was in the unenviable position of working for me. I’m a complete Type A control freak when it comes to upholding the title of Senior Pastor, not afraid to pull rank when push comes to shove, because unfortunately, the buck stops with me and I’m not going to take the fall for something that was never my decision in the first place.

Luckily, this is only a problem every minute of every day.

In a weird way, we have grown up together. Sometimes she’s the older one, sometimes I am, but we fumble through life together. She is the Rhoda to my Mary, the Laverne to my Shirley, the Gayle to my Oprah… at work. Outside of work, I am content to let her run me like a shell script (shout out to the nerds… holla). We’re not a married couple, but we bicker like one. It’s the give and take of companionship without the messy hardship of trying to figure out truly difficult issues, like sex, money, and which one of us is eventually going to smother the other one with a pillow and try to collect the insurance. She votes on me. I tend to agree with her on most days.

I really can be an asshole, especially after having worked in several kitchens. She vacillates between annoyance and acceptance at my truly foul mouth. I’m not fit for mixed company, but her dad was in the military. It all comes out in the wash, because I have things that annoy me about her, too. For instance, she likes the shitty protest songs playing overhead.

I give her the outline of my sermon. She hates it, so I know it’s perfect. She’ll forgive me by the time she’s finished getting her choir ready in the morning and we meet for the last minute huddle. There are so many details to running a church that routinely draws 2,000 people a Sunday… not counting the 300 in the choir.

We pray together that this Sunday will be a magnificent tribute to a simple idea. We’re waiting for the baby. The cigars are ready. Clocks are synchronized and phones are on us at all times. Any moment could be THE moment, the one where hope and light and peace breaks into the world…

And we are once again united with the child that will lead us.

Trying to figure out what I look like without my abuser’s influence is a lost cause, in a lot of ways. The personality I have is the personality I have. The facial expressions I have are just the facial expressions I have. It can’t matter anymore where I got them, because I am not as moldable as I was back then. I can’t change me, but I can learn to live with me instead. Learning to live with me is a slow process, because I go through stages of anger where I want to slash and burn everything about me that reminds me of her, and there’s no way to do it without destroying myself as well. Because of this, being reminded of her every day is not the blessing it once was, but I’m trying to reach that place again.

I have to, because the more I remind myself of her, the more I hate me.

It used to make me so proud that I was so young when we met that we had some of the same mannerisms and speech patterns. Now, I’ll be talking to someone else and something will come out of my mouth so pitch perfect it’s like she’s standing behind me… usually at a time where it’s inconvenient to feel that level of pain.

Once I know that a thought has me in a tail spin, I know I can stop it. However, I do not get to choose when the initial thought appears, or how. I know how to mitigate damage, but not how to prevent it. It is in that way that my body plays tricks on me. I can tell myself all day that I don’t want to think about her, don’t want to be in grief, don’t want to dwell… and then in a conversation something that I always say that I picked up from her comes out of my mouth in the way that she would say it and I didn’t mean to but BAM!

It is a continual process- learning to trim branches without killing the trunk.

The hardest part about recovering from someone else’s emotional abuse is trying to rediscover who you are without it. Like, which parts are actually me, and which parts were instilled at such a young age that I don’t know if it’s me or not? It affects everything from my serious reactions to my outlandish humor. It affects my facial expressions and my speech patterns.

I was told by her partner that my relationship with this woman was just “this big bag of shit I’d been carrying around forever.” I am sure that truer words have never been spoken, but in order to get rid of it, I had to find out how it got there. I knew her partner’s answer wasn’t right… that I was trying to steal her life, her friends… as if I was just this bad Single White Female remake waiting to happen.

No, she promised me a family, and I was completely sucked in. A few years ago, I e-mailed her and said that I was tired of being called a family, when we really didn’t exist that way. So she called a meeting. We’ll get together, the four of us, and discuss what kind of family we want to be to each other.

Was this finally the conversation we’d been waiting to have for over a decade at that point? Dana and I brought our best bottle of wine, because we knew that this was a celebration… right up until it wasn’t.

“The kind of family we’re going to be to each other” didn’t exist. We showed up to cheese, crackers, and a large helping of “I don’t need anybody but my partner.” I had no words. At first, I felt like I couldn’t *really* breathe, I was in such fight or flight. I didn’t know what was happening. I could see her in my mind, in all her iterations, from 1990 on. “Ties closer than blood” couldn’t be nothing. I was sure of it.

I am also not sure whether she was coerced to tell me that. In fact, I am not sure how much her partner even knew about the seven years our relationship existed before theirs.

Any sweet or sentimental memory that I tried to dig up so that she might remember who we were to each other was cast in an oddly-hued light… an abandonment issue that no longer served me, or some equally disturbing response to something like “watching you leave Houston was literally the worst day of my life because I realized that I couldn’t protect you anymore.” I wasn’t bringing it up because I felt abandoned. I was trying to say, “how could we go from this to nothing without you telling me it was gone?”

And she didn’t.

Everything I thought I had was gone in an instant, but I held on because I didn’t know any better. It’s not like I got any notification that the series had been cancelled… so “held on” is a pretty strong term for someone who didn’t know they were doing it. I was just crazy because I couldn’t divine the cryptic messages I was getting and act accordingly. It’s funny, when someone needs me to know something, I generally require that they say them out loud, because my telepathy is pathetic.

I called her on it, and she didn’t want to meet with me, but said I could meet with her partner instead. That worked about as well as it sounds like it did. To add insult to injury, I said something about my abuser being too angry to meet with me, and her partner said, “no, she actually prayed with me this morning.”

Well, how nice for you.

I’m starting to see just how fucked up this story is, and how I’m so sad that I couldn’t see it until now. I could have saved myself a lot of heartache, and had so much more energy for the people in my life that would never think of playing such a large-scale game.

Now I just pray my hanging-onto-the-end-of-the-frayed-rope prayer…

Shit, God.

My hair looks nice today. I’m wearing a sweater that looks good on me. My jeans fit. Black cowboy boots change my step just enough that my body carriage feels good. I have nothing to complain about. I have taken care of my own needs.

If yesterday was about feeling empty, today is about feeling full. There is so much in my life for which I am grateful, and I am leaning in to those things more and more as I realize just how much I’ve changed for the better. I am not walking around with a cloud above my head that threatens to storm when I least expect it. I have taken back my power, and doing so has given me some control over my thoughts that wasn’t there before.

I can choose to stop the spinning. I can choose to stop the negative thoughts. I can choose life. I always could, but I didn’t know it. I mean, I knew it, in that way that you know things logically but can’t put them into practice emotionally. Now everything is starting to snap together so that I don’t feel held hostage by grief and pain.

I can concentrate on Clarence (the toad that lives under our house) and Skippy (the squirrel in one of our backyard trees). I can concentrate on remembering to check Jake’s**** backpack for his school work (that little bastard didn’t tell me he had a Thanksgiving luncheon coming up). I am amazed by the wonder in the world, and the bright sun that seems to follow me whether or not it is raining.

****For the uninitiated, Jake is our fake child. It’s a long story, but basically an elementary school automated system kept calling me about a child being absent because they were trying to reach the owner of the phone before me.

I am sitting in the big leather chairs in the break room. There’s some horrible daytime TV on, but I’m listening to Spotify, so at least I can’t hear it. There are no words for how empty I feel. The e-mail I sent where I completely laid bare what it would take for me to forgive her took a chunk out of me, and so did posting it on my web site… but there’s several reasons for it.

First, I want this story to be bigger than just me. I want my recovery process out there in the world, because I might never know how many kids I might help that are in my old shoes right now. Abuse doesn’t have to be physical for it to be devastating, and I am just now starting to figure out all the reasons why and how. It’s taken me some distance and time to be able to look at the game from the outside, because I could not see its negative impact from the inside.

Even when I figured it out, it still took me several years to get angry about it.

Second, because I didn’t figure out that I was abused until I was an adult, the statute of limitations has run out in terms of going to mediation in a courtroom, so I’m trying her in the press. It sounds mean, but I don’t think it is… my story is not about revenge, it is about redemption. If it was about revenge, not only would you know her real name, it would be cut into topiary hedges in front of my house. NOT saying her name is simply a kindness, and the only one I will give her until I get what I want in resolution. If I never get what I want, so be it. I haven’t gotten it so far, so I’m not missing anything… and definitely not holding my breath. It is REALLY hard to apologize for something if you’ve convinced yourself you didn’t do it.

I hope that I am writing this story in such a way that you know it is mine. I have no need to know what she thinks, and I am way past caring about it. I have to take care of myself, whereas before, I didn’t think I was worthy of it.

There are so many people around me that have been waiting for this moment a long time. 24 years is a long time to hold in a secret this big, and my friends could see that it was stopping all kinds of other growth. I only ask that people have patience with me, because 24 years of programming can’t be undone overnight. It’s just going to take as long as it takes, and one way or another…

I

Will

Be

Free.

I cannot shake the picture you sent me. I have written so extensively about the ways in which you manipulate and abuse me that I thought the message was clear. We are no longer connected. You asked me not to contact you, said that we were beyond reconciliation, and I was satisfied that the end was really the end. Then, after absolutely laying all my cards on the table with my readers (because most aren’t connected to either one of us), you contacted me. I don’t know if you’ve read everything that I’ve written, and maybe you are blissfully unaware that I now think that the whole family thing was a ruse. You were attracted to me, and maybe even attraction isn’t the right word, because it wasn’t the type of love I could return. It had a malicious intent. It changed me in ways that I wouldn’t have chosen to be changed. The love I could return was just as pure as yours was tainted. That’s why a simple, sweet e-mail isn’t possible anymore. It’s too cryptic, because it doesn’t come across as genuine. It comes across as “you only get to love me when I say you can, bitch.” The message I get is that I will always be your bitch. I will always be that person, to you, that is lesser than and you can use me to prop up your ego.

I do not want to be that person anymore.

I do love you, deeply, but in such a pure way that I’m not sure you’re capable of it. If you were, there would not be such denial on your part about who you really were to me, and how you feel free to drop in and out of my life at will. You wouldn’t continually toy with me.

I don’t know that you’re listening, and honestly, it doesn’t matter. I’m going to do what I want regardless of your input, because I cannot live my life in reaction to you anymore. If you want solid steps toward reconciliation, I won’t lie to you. They are going to be steep.

1. You must admit to yourself that you abused me. You must admit that there was an element of pedophilia to it, because I did not need to read about your sex life the day I turned 14.

2. You must admit those flaws and failures to Dana and to me.

3. You must come to Houston to meet with me. Portland is your “turf.”

4. You must admit that you care about what has happened to me, what is happening to me, what will happen to me in regards to the abuse that I endured from you, and <name redacted> by extension.

5. You must come up with a cash settlement that you think is fair for the years and years of long distance phone bills and plane trips to go and see someone who I thought loved me and who was actively just playing with me. I don’t care if you think one dollar is fair. The amount of money isn’t the issue. It is honoring my sacrifice. I spent a lot of money to be caught up in your game, and that wasn’t when I was on my own and independent. That was money scrimped and saved from babysitting jobs and after school working at SuperCuts. A $300 phone bill is a lot of babysitting… and that was just one month. I got so far behind that I never babysat enough to pay it all back. Again, it’s not about the amount of money. It’s about what might go in the reference line.

6. I know I don’t have to give you a chance at all, but grace and mercy mean a lot to me.

I would not have come to Portland on my own. I was visiting some friends in 2002, and while I was there, one of them said, “you look really happy here. You should look for a job.” So I did. The disconnect was that those friends weren’t really my friends. They weren’t very good at communicating it in words, but they were great at calling me family and being the last ones to respond if I needed them in that way. The disillusionment set in almost immediately, and the family I thought I was going toward sent me emotionally backward… with just enough connection to confuse me. In fact, for me, the entire time I lived in Portland can be summed up in that one word- confusion. I didn’t know which way was true north, couldn’t get my bearings, lived in survival mode like a cat backed into a corner- claws extended- for way too long. It wasn’t that I didn’t have a life there; I met Dana and that made Portland worth every single sacrifice I ever made. Outside of that, though, I was an emotional wreck, and in a lot of cases, inflicted damage that way.

In many ways, coming home to Houston has made me remember who I was before living in Portland was a thing. I am a musician, and a damn good one. I listen to jazz. When I am listening to jazz, I am jazz. It is in me around me beating living sensing…  In Portland, I forgot that about me, and last night, I rediscovered it.

Every day, I discover a different part of myself that I left behind… as if it was being stored in my parents’ garage. Old and musty, but once you get the dust off, priceless.

This post is not really about church. It’s just that “What I Know for Sure” is already taken. With that in mind, here goes:

• Your life reflects your attitude, and not the other way around.
• Demons are internal.
• So are Angels.
• The smell of coffee wakes me up just as much as the caffeine in it.
• You really can do amazing things with vegan food; don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
• You don’t have to be a vegan to enjoy vegan meals.
• Linux is what you make it. You can’t pigeonhole it as “too hard,” especially if you haven’t used it.
• You don’t have to be a devotee of any operating system. Firefox runs on everything. So does Chrome.
• You don’t have to spend a lot of money for a computer if you only want it to run Flash games, check your e-mail, and troll Facebook. People at box stores will try and get you to believe that you need the latest and greatest technology~ and you don’t, unless you are editing EXTREMELY large photo files (like RAW), editing HD video, or have a penchant for buying the latest games. Anyone who tries to sell you a multi-thousand dollar Facebook machine is snorting something.
• I would also recommend buying a netbook or a laptop, because if you want a big monitor, you can buy it externally. A computer that fits in your bag will be a lot more useful to you. If you’d rather have an iPad or a Nexus tablet, spring for the Bluetooth keyboard case if typing on the screen is annoying (I cannot stand touch screens. They are of the devil.).
• Even though Kurt Vonnegut didn’t say it, you really should wear sunscreen.
• If you feel depressed, the faster you admit it and get help, the better you’ll feel. Don’t lament over the number of years you didn’t know how bad you felt until you finally decided enough was enough.
• Spending time outside is more and more satisfying as you do it.
• If you have a desk job, you don’t need as many calories as you think you do. Humans were not designed to be stationery.
• My handwriting will never be the same now that I type almost exclusively. This is because I used to have nice penmanship until repetitive strain injury beat it out of me.
• Do not stay one minute longer in a relationship you know is failing. Your life is worth more than feeling miserable every day. Marriage is a blessing. So is divorce.
• Do not job hop with reckless abandon, but at the same time, nothing is accomplished if you feel worthless every day and it is hard work not to just get up and walk out. Eight hours a day is a long time to feel miserable at once.
• If your brain is feeling lazy, listen to jazz.
• My favorite proverb is “a man can do any amount of work, as long as it is not the work he is supposed to be doing at the time.”
• I do not think that mashups ruin my opinion of the original version of the song. They make your mind work in different ways.
• The same goes for new versions of old music, like the self-titled album by East Village Opera Company.
• Being angry is really overrated.
• So is avoiding being angry at all.
• Truth is relative, and I differentiate. Your story is truth. Universally true is Truth.

And let the people say, “Amen.”

My friend Scott gave me the idea of writing about culture shock and moving from Portland, Oregon to Houston, Texas. It was so much harder the other way around. I had no idea about bottle deposits, recycling, holier-than-thou vegans, or how much the lack of sun would simply suck the soul right out of my body. Over time, I got used to it (well, except for the condescension). Coming back to Texas has been an enlightenment of a different kind. Living in Houston is so much better than I expected, because it’s not the same city that it was when I left.

First of all, Houston has a lesbian mayor. I do not say this because that fact in and of itself is significant. It’s not. To me, it’s like saying we have a green-eyed mayor. To a lot of people, though, it’s a lot more complicated than that… and they voted for her, anyway. That says a lot about any Texas city, or any Southern city in general. Gay teachers coexist in even traditionally religiously conservative areas. My city has changed. My state has changed. It is more welcoming and warm than I thought possible. I am so elated that we have seemed to stop fighting over gay and straight and started fighting about something else. Gay and straight just isn’t that interesting anymore, and to me, that is the best thing that could have happened while I was away.

There are still parents around me that think it’s a bad idea to let their kids watch SpongeBob, but thankfully, those people are known to the rest of us as “idiots.” In fact, there have been several moments in my time here where I just couldn’t process all that stupid at once, but thankfully, they are isolated moments and not the norm.

The norm is that my next door neighbors on one side are Hispanic- a straight couple with a little boy and possibly an abuela (I can’t tell whether she lives there or just comes over so often that it seems like it). My neighbors on the other side are Matt and Robert, anglo straight boys sharing a house who adore us and have since the day we moved in. My neighborhood is majority Hispanic (I think), and so I speak a lot more Spanish and a lot less English than I thought I would. It is clear that Dana and I are a couple no matter where we go, and even in traditionally heavily Roman Catholic neighborhoods, we are welcomed without incident.

But maybe it’s not really Houston or my neighbors or my neighborhood. I have learned that it’s possible to create your own reality by ignoring what you think people are going to say and just putting them in the position where they don’t want to be an asshole back to you. As prejudiced as some people are against lesbians, the easiest way to shut that shit down is to be welcoming to them so that the friendly or not response is on them. ESPECIALLY with business owners. They may fucking hate gay people, but know it’s ridiculous to lose a sale over it. They, above all things, know that there’s no such thing as “gay money.” They just wipe it off when we leave so they can’t catch it.

The funniest moments have come in terms of race. I have no problem with just waltzing in and being the only whitey in the place. This morning, Jose Garcia, behind me in line at the mercado, said that he’d never seen a white lady in that store before. That is because even though my Spanish is bad, I want a damn pineapple empanada in the morning. Although there is one lady that I have decided is dumb in any language. Every time we’ve gone there, I’ve given our order perfectly. Two tacos with eggs and salchichas. Two tacos with eggs and potatoes. On some days, I get nopales. She gets confused and I have to say our order three more times and she still doesn’t get it. The man behind me says EXACTLY THE SAME SHIT and all of the sudden, our order appears. I would think she was fucking with us if she didn’t seem so disoriented.

White’ll do that to ya.

If your love were taken from me
Every color would be black and white
It would be as flat as the world before Columbus
That’s the day that I lose half my sight

-Suzanne Vega, World Before Columbus

Whether I had anything to do with it or not, I am glad that the e-mails stopped. I didn’t say “go fuck yourself” because I never wanted to talk to her again. I specifically said “we haven’t talked since June and this is the first thing you want to say?” Before we talked last summer, we hadn’t talked for two years. This is because I had to learn that my indoctrination was false. It was never my fault. I couldn’t be held responsible. It was 6 years after we met that I was even old enough to vote. I had to learn to let myself off the hook, and I’m still learning, because one of the hard parts of being abused (no matter how) is that it teaches you that you’ve done something to deserve it.

Deep down, there is a well of shame because if you’d only…

I’ve had to relax and realize that there’s nothing at the end of that ellipsis. There’s nothing I could have done that would have made me less attractive to her personal brand of emotional violence. There’s nothing I could have done to prevent her from inwardly manipulating me into coming toward her and outwardly wondering why I wouldn’t leave her alone. That was the disconnect, and apparently, the reason *I* was crazy. I wasn’t abused~ she never even touched me. I just got it in my head that there was more to what she was saying and completely overreacting. It was all such a big misunderstanding.

I have lived with that lie since I was 14 years old, because I couldn’t bring myself to show anyone the sexually charged material she had given me. I thought I was being groomed for something- I watched Oprah- and instead of being disgusted, this was someone I really loved. It was exciting. You know it’s wrong, but you’re too curious and excited to think about that part of it. At 14, you’re young enough to be molded into whatever someone else wants you to be, and at the same time, just coming into your own sexually and starting to wonder what it might be like.

Our relationship was never the same after that, because she could see my reaction to the journal and the door that seemed open was slammed shut. She held me responsible for my reaction, but I couldn’t be, because I hadn’t started thinking about other girls my own age like that. She shook me awake, and for the longest time, she was the only one in my life that was in color.

I was held at arm’s length because I was obsessed with her, or at least that’s her story and she’s sticking to it. She has no culpability, won’t *allow* herself to take responsibility, because it is so much easier to tell herself that I happened *to* her.

So easy, in fact, that she even convinced me of it. I have thought that I was sick since I was a teenager with these horrible mental health issues that just caused me to freak out on her. It wasn’t that she’d emotionally abused me, it was that there was something wrong with me that made me chase after her.

I was immediately put into what I now recognize as “the friend zone,” and told that I was her family… that our ties were closer than blood… while at the same time, continually told with actions that it wasn’t true. My phone calls were screened. My e-mails went unanswered. Her partner sat me down and said, “when she meant that you were her family, that’s not what she meant.” This was after singing and being told that it was “like watching my little girl grow up.”

The princess of mixed signals had managed to engineer an entirely false reality, and raged that I was out of touch with it. Now I know why I am glad that the contact has stopped. It means that I value my own reality more than I value the one created *for* me.

I sound like a broken record when I talk about this because it does circle back around like that. There have been too many years where I have just been coerced into believing that I’m the sick one. In fact, I had a friend with a 12-year-old that when I age-appropriately befriended her, my abuser sent her an e-mail and told her that she thought I was being predatory with her daughter. PREDATORY. My abuser went behind my back and accused me of being a child molester. Where would she even get that idea? Why would it even occur to her? Was I going to repeat the cycle she instilled in me?

It never even crossed my mind, but it crossed hers enough to reach out to the teen’s mother a propos of nothing. She didn’t even ask me what happened. If she had, I would have told her a scintillating story about helping with homework.

I was humiliated, and in front of a very good friend, no less, because she didn’t know my abuser as well as I did. She had to paint me as the villain, because she couldn’t look in the mirror.