The featured image is a coat I got for Tiina’s grandson, who is going to be born in the middle of August.

I have a place of belonging and I am tied to the land yet again. Of all the places in the world I expected to want to take root, the Fredericksburg area is the one that practically makes me nauseous when I think of all the implications. And then I realize who I’m talking about and calm the fuck down. I will never see her again because she knows How Not to Be Seen………….. Don’t Stand Up.

Monty Python references aside, now I know what will happen when I see her in person because I saw a woman at 6 Beers and a Goat that looked like her, and it is not an impossibility but the last thing I would actually want because it is not welcome on her end. But, this woman didn’t look enough like her to be freaked out for more than a moment, but in that moment my stomach clenched and my teeth tried to go down my esophagus. But what did not happen is that I did not feel the itch in the palm of my hand that sharing our trauma created, and I didn’t feel like it would be a bad thing to run into each other, it would just be awkward until we realized the other was a real person.

She does know me, and I do know her…. but we don’t know all of either one of us. The cognitive dissonance would make both of our brains bluescreen, but the point is that I was willing to let the bluescreen happen and she wasn’t because she lied. Full stop. She proved to me that I did indeed apologize enough to be worth something as a friend, so I know that she was not punishing me. She was hiding, and there’s a big damned difference. Our friendship just turned to shit because I imagined a life she didn’t have and gave her personality traits not attributed to her, but to me. I know that I provoked her into a lot of words that sounded more like a mirror than anything else. But all the blowback she was getting was due to context error.

She will never understand why I exited our relationship in the way that I did because what she failed to understand is that she was wrong a lot of the time. Like, a lot. And she couldn’t hear criticism so anything I needed was constantly ignored. My opinion did not matter in the slightest, because goddamn everything was met with “I don’t owe you anything.” She caused my anxiety to spiral out and would not do anything to help me get better. This is because she:

• isolated me from everyone I knew with secrets I couldn’t handle without support that she had access to and I didn’t
• was not emotionally equipped to provide the support I needed and constantly stated that she did not know what she could do for me even though I was constantly giving her a map and explicit directions

I couldn’t love being in the relationship nor could I leave it while all the bullshit was an albatross around my neck. That’s because things couldn’t die and they wouldn’t get any better because she could reach me and I could not reach her. Once her secrets became mine, there was a hardcore power imbalance that I could not get out of for love or money.

She was always The Doctor, and I was but a mere companion.

But telling my story was not trying to sell her out. It was trying to reclaim what had happened to me for the people who actually did show up and watched me turn into a shell of myself while she remained remote AS FUCK. She was willing to laugh and joke with me on the Internet, but couldn’t manage seeing real emotions, even on the page. Anything negative was a prick on her skin, and anything positive was a clue in a game. You cannot win under those circumstances, ever. My story is impossible to understand without all the systems running underneath my public persona.

I had to fall apart in order to come back together, and to make it make sense.

Life makes sense with Tiina.

I was starting to wonder what I was doing wrong, because making friends is not generally hard for me, but all my masks are failing now. I’m just weird and socially awkward without even understanding why…… and then Tiina comes along with her whole brood of people exactly like me and is like, “you are not hard to love.”

The image I had in my head of who I was evaporated, and I began to connect with the kids because before I felt like I was some sort of bad influence. It was drilled into my head that I was a dark character, but it was only one person’s opinion and I let it color my whole world……. now, I just unplug the computer because who cares what someone who has never met me thinks?

It is a process of returning to my own body, realizing that I loved someone else so much that I forgot about me. I didn’t fight to correct the context error as hard as I should have and focused on the fact that Aada’s frustrations with me “proved” I was difficult and unlovable.

This cannot be true, because it’s very hard to get a 16yo to love you. You don’t pick them. They pick you. Teenage boys tend to love me because I give off “youth pastor” energy….. like, a lot of it.

I found out that 16yo loves ’90s music because I had it running in the car, so I took note of that. I try to keep a list in my head of things where I can contribute meaningfully to the conversation. With a 16yo, it is mostly that I have a car. I am okay with this.

I don’t know how it is that we bonded, but often when the other car is full, he’ll want to ride with me and he’s the only one that does it consistently. Although he got very annoyed by the navigation and was all “I can tell you where to go.” My nervous system fell apart for a second but I decided to trust him, anyway. Who cares if we got lost? I had a phone. It was fine, I just didn’t have notifications as to where to turn until we were *right there.* But it was relatively late in the day so it was fine. I didn’t have to cross three lanes of traffic or anything.

“Kevin,” the name I have given to the male voice I use for Siri, is very polite when interrupting the music. I do not know what 16yo’s problem is, but I am sure I will find out. I do appreciate that he doesn’t like complex noise, though, and that’s probably why the nav was an “absolutely not.”

We were going from Ayalla’s baby shower back to the house to drop off gifts, then out to Six Bears and a Goat. I had a blackberry beer named after the baseball team and now I forget what it was called…. but it was delicious. I also bought a t-shirt and sunglasses. I have been looking for good sunglasses everywhere and these were five dollars.

I collect t-shirts from breweries and always have because I worked at The Laurelwood in Portland and we had an excellent graphics design team. Having 6B&G stuff is in the same tradition, just Mid-Atlantic coded and not the Pacific Northwest. We of Maryland and Virginia are also dear to our craft beer t-shirts and performance fleece.

But long before it was time for beer, I got to be Mary Poppins.

I went to 7-Eleven yesterday and their Pepsi products were on sale, so I got three 20 oz Cherry Pepsi Zero and three Mountain Dew Zero. I didn’t know whether I would have time to hit a Wawa on the way out yesterday morning, so I put a Mountain Dew Zero in my backpack…. I just didn’t end up drinking it.

So, we’re sitting in the restaurant and Tiina orders a Diet Mountain Dew. The waitress says that they don’t have it and I say, “do you want one? I have one in my bag.” And I pull out a fresh, unopened Mountain Dew Zero. Like, not exactly what she asked for, but close enough that it felt like, “I did not know I was showing up this prepared today.”

And that is how I know that I moved forward in the right direction, and I am sorry it was not the right direction for me to move in order to keep Aada safe. I am certain that the reason she ended our relationship was to protect me from the consequences of everything she had to do after my meltdown and burnout….. and also to have her anger out in private, without my knowledge.

That’s all okay, as is not wanting to re-engage. But it makes me so sad that we could never find a relationship that served both of us, so it was impossible to have parallel lives.

But it prepared me for the one I’m capable of living now.