Sam finally got back to me and told me that she hoped I could move on because she couldn’t be a part of my life. Now, I’m not waiting on a response and I absolutely can. I don’t know why I thought Sam would want to be my friend after all this time, but it was worth a shot. I sowed a lot of chaos with her and I can fully understand why she wouldn’t want to revisit that time in our lives. I don’t have to like it, though.

I think it’s ironic that she told me she hoped I could move on when I have been radio silent for three years and just wanted to catch up. I literally haven’t thought about her except when her address popped up on my phone when I was driving around town. But we’d have to have more of a conversation for her to understand that, and neither one of us wants more of a conversation now that I know where she stands.

I don’t have to go six rounds over “why?” I’m too old and I don’t care.

Progress has been made with Aada. She told me she had no idea why my email was deferred and everything is A-ok between us. Let’s just let things lie. I got all the clarification and closure I’ll ever need, keeping our connection pure if we ever want to pick it back up where we left off. The peace of interim is a beautiful thing and it was great to talk to her even for a bit.

I sent her the blurb from Copilot and told her I couldn’t have done it without her and she’d turned me into a beautiful writer.

It’s true. If you have a relationship on the internet for 12 years, you’ve got to be doing something right in the writing department. Writing to her was training ground for the big gyms, because she was a writing major in college and I…………………… wasn’t.

Writing to Aada is a whole mood.

I sowed chaos with Aada as well. That’s why we’re not #friendshipgoals either, but there’s a better chance it will happen with Aada than it will with Sam and that’s the way I like it.

In fact, when Sam broke up with me the first time, Aada metaphysically kissed my boo-boos and gave me a lollipop. She is always kind when someone breaks my heart and offers to break their kneecaps. There’s no need, but I appreciate having a pet monster on a fraying leash.

I hate reaping what I sow, and I am paying for writing about her publicly, I know it. But I pay for the fact that I write about my life all day, every day. If I’m not going to be shy and have a public opinion, that means being able to take the arrows that inevitably come with it.

I now know what it means to sacrifice for my writing. People are starting to self select whether they want to be in my life because they know that anything they say might be remembered years down the road. That even if they aren’t in my life, they will appear here as memories.

I am learning that there’s a lot of truth to the phrase, “I’m not everyone’s cup of tea, but I’m someone’s shot of tequila.”

It’s hard to pick yourself up from nothing, which is why I have no close friends in Baltimore. In fact, my nearest local friend is in Stafford, Virginia. I have had more fun than the law should allow gaping at the fall foliage between my house and Tiina’s. So much so that I look forward to her taking days off because that means hanging out in our pajamas watching anime or playing video games is a viable option.

Picking myself up from nothing means that I have acquaintances in Baltimore and haven’t lived here long enough for it to graduate into friendship. It would have been nice if Sam had wanted to reconnect, but I made her uncomfortable. That’s the last thing I wanted to do, so I won’t be reaching out to her again.

Hearing that you are forgiven, but that doesn’t mean things are good again is always hard no matter the situation. In this case, my heart was not tied up in romance. I had already been through the wringer once with Sam and wasn’t eager to participate in it again. But we had such fun that I thought keeping it light and going for coffee was advisable.

The queer community in Baltimore is small. You don’t want to have beef with anyone, being scared to run into them at events. Every person in which you’re interested was somebody else’s partner before you, which among women creates territorial high drama. I am not interested in high drama. I am interested in coffee.

I know within myself that I thought reaching out to Sam was a shortcut to making more friends in the city. That if she wasn’t angry anymore, she’d introduce me around and it wouldn’t be long before I had a network again. I don’t know why that isn’t possible, but I don’t ask these questions. That is her story, and she hasn’t allowed me to read it.

The thing is, though, I met Sam through Facebook dating. There is nothing stopping me from getting back on Facebook dating and seeing who might be interesting around here, and, this is important…. ACTUALLY CONTACTING THEM. I swear to Christ, Leslie…. stop with the attitude that the perfect partner is going to drop into your lap without any effort at all.

My standards are extraordinarily high.

I ghosted one woman who said she didn’t like British people because she couldn’t understand them.

You’re welcome, Britain. I’m sure you’re very grateful.

I run quick because I compare everyone to Aada, Mummo, and Heytch.

All aliases, all people I have never dated and way out of my league. I could have had lifelong friendships with all of them, but one by one they all fell away as I became too obnoxious for some and too weird for others.

They’re not wrong. I get it.

But they’re the gold standard. I know what I want, and I seek it out. They all had the capability to bend my mind like a pretzel and I blew it in favor of fuckboi jackass antics. I’m the kind of person that if I was weird to you once, I’ll think about it for 20 years. I am MORTIFIED every time I think of what happened and it was 12 years ago…. but Aada came back to me because our relationship was so much deeper and richer than the others. I am so glad that she did not run away from me, but carefully turned me into someone she could tolerate. 😉

I’m so much older now and realizing that I should have taken more care with the network I had. I obliterated it at my own hand because I was shooting my mouth off on the internet.

I am much more relaxed and focused now than I was. I honestly and truly believe that my life was a shit show, so my behavior became erratic and unpredictable. It isn’t rocket science. I was overwhelmed in every direction and covering it up with bravado. I acted like a typical man and I deserved it when we separated.

It feels like I’ll never get over it because I’m not tapped into something large enough to replace it and I never will be.

This is one of those days where I just don’t feel so good about myself and I’m glad that I already have a built in plan for getting out of the house and going to my cognitive behavioral health group.

Speaking of which….. time to take a shower.

I realized that I didn’t feel strongly one way or the other about Sam romantically, but that I wanted her to participate in my life on some level if she was open to it. I thought a handwritten note would be the best way to show apology, but I didn’t want her kids to read it before she did and receive intel.

So, I just put my name, address, and phone number plus a short note saying I’d love to see her if she was interested. No hearts.

But I meant them.

That is all love- realizing that someone was so dynamic in your life that you’re over the hurt that a breakup caused and just want their energy around you. We only dated for three weeks before Sam flipped out and dumped me. Yet her personality had such an impact on me that it was worth forgiving her for it.

I’ve thought about reaching out to her since i got here in December, but I hadn’t had the confidence to drop something in her mailbox until today.

I think that has a lot to do with being tired of being lonely on every level. I don’t even have a buddy to go do things with, and Sam would be a great one. She’s tapped into every musical outlet in the city. She’s a social butterfly, going to concerts often. What worked well was that an extrovert was willing to drag me out of my house. That’s how introverts manage.

And if you read anything into ink color, I was a dumbass and wrote everything in pink. I am not ready for *anything* having to do with pink letters. Sam actually hurt me pretty bad, and it took longer than three weeks to get over it, which was definitely not amusing.

Bryn said it best. “You’re not really angry with her. You’re angry she busted your fairy tale.” She was right. Anger at Sam faded quickly compared to the loss I felt that I was not going to be a girlfriend and have her kids around me.

Now, I am immune to fairy tales, but maybe one day I’ll be able to enjoy them again.

It was another instance in which I am humbled after popping off and I’d like to make amends for it. Just because my heart was broken doesn’t make my words okay, and I am also humbled that Aada said them to me long ago. It’s a message that resonates with me today because Aada reads and writes fairy tales. I am guilty of busting my own with her and constantly asking to be forgiven for things I said when I was in many kinds of moods.

I put her through a hell she didn’t deserve, and I know that because again, I don’t have to remember what I did that was so awful I drove her away. I wrote it all down. There’s 12 years of history of us getting close and blowing out, the pattern that needs to stop.

Recognizing that pattern is the first step to creating healthy relationships in the future. Secure connections require being careful with what you say and even more careful with what you do. Your actions and your words have to line up. You cannot lie in any way, shape, or form. Covering up the real issue because it’s hard for you to get the words out only leads to more and more trouble down the road. You can read all about it starting in June of 2013.

So, I am choosing to be healthy with Sam and be as sincere as I can, not letting her in too fast and being diligent about it because I let her in too quickly before and our relationship turned mercurial fast. I am done with mercurial relationships because I’m too old for it. Aada and all our drama was too much for both of us. We both need to redirect our attention into relationships that feed us and stop hating on each other.

Just because I was hurt doesn’t make my words okay. It doesn’t matter that they were directed at an audience and not at her. It made her feel bad because she could not trust that the loving things I said about her were also true.

My friends on the ground will always know that I love them because they have more to go on, and I believe in that fact. I’m now trying to nurture it where I didn’t before. I thought of Aada as some kind of authority in my life and she is, puffing herself up and being really hard on me (historically. This time being hard on me was justified.), sometimes scaring me into a type of submission because I was all of the sudden afraid to bring up issues.

She explodes when you bring them up, and distances herself while she licks her wounds in private without realizing that you get more accomplished by increasing communication and understanding after conflict so that it doesn’t bubble up again. You have a solid shot at changing a pattern the more you understand each other.

I am starting to get tired of these toxic relationships, and it takes two to tango. I can only realize I’m the common denominator, and establish more self-respect. Learning more about how to de-escalate a conflict than I already do, because to some people the way I do it is pedantic. I need to know what it is about me that makes so many people understand me to an enormous degree, while others fight me in defense. Maybe that’s just my win/lose rate.

Where I got tripped up was making Aada so high on the totem pole that no other priority mattered, and she didn’t have that much energy for me. I was lost in a world of rumination because as a writer, she lit my brain on fire.

I am looking for that kind of chemistry, and Sam sets my brain on fire for music. I think we’d work well together as long as we weren’t competing with each other for anything (she’s a mezzo, I’m a lyric……. eye roll…. how did we not know this wouldn’t work out? It’s not like there weren’t signs. Plus, I’m a trumpet player. Between my diva status and my lead trumpet background, she joked that my ego wouldn’t fit through the door.

It doesn’t, but that’s all social masking and trying to have a good time despite the fact that I’d rather be home reading… I cover up how I really feel about myself in person because in person, that person doesn’t have time to hear me like they have 10 minutes to read an entry.

That’s led to my detriment in a lot of ways. Because people read me, they hear my voice in their heads regularly. Therefore, they think they talk to me a lot more often than they actually do. Our communication suffers.

Other people see me suffering and think it’s not a good idea to intrude. It’s always a good idea to intrude, because I might need the interruption. I’m trying to interrupt myself frequently and take breaks, walking away from the Internet entirely and going out into the world.

I felt bad that my handwriting was SO TERRIBLE. Yet, I wanted to approach Sam with the least amount of investment on her part. That I wasn’t putting her on the spot to say yes or no. She’s got my number. If I hear from her, great. If I don’t, it will be sad, but I will have my answer and that’s worth celebrating all on its own.

I want to start a new chapter, but this time, it has to be a nonfiction.

I am still reeling from Aada’s torrent of emotion, because while I did not agree with all of it, I heard it. I pondered it. I read it many times. I am still stuck on “checking for assaults.” That she wondered if she’d have to “check for assaults” her whole life.

It messes with me because assaulting her was the last thing on my mind. She told me that she was never going to read again, that she wasn’t my friend anymore, so I stopped monitoring her feelings.

She told me (and has since apologized) that I was the only manipulative person in our relationship and that she needed to get away from me to achieve peace. I thought she had gotten away from me to achieve peace already. I would have written everything differently if I hadn’t truly thought, “oh, this is really over now.” Not knowing that she would keep reading through all of the grieving and gnashing of teeth made me word things differently than I would have if I thought I was trying to impress or please anyone.

The whole point is that I was moving on when she stepped onto the hot stones to correct the record, Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ, and started the grieving process all over while still contradicting herself as to whether it was all over.

She says that my writing is designed to be provocative, which of course it is… To my entire audience, because I am trying to get them to feel things with me, feel things because of me in this sacred black & white space. It is not supposed to be “All Pick on Aada Day.” She knows that beyond a shadow of a doubt when I am talking about other people, because when she reads that I’m hurt, she goes into Mama Wolverine mode (That motherfucker! Let me grab my purse.!”). She also does not assume that just because I’ve said something negative happened, that doesn’t mean I no longer love that person. She seems to think I do it to her, though, and I cannot break her of the habit.

My writing about all my relationships is three dimensional, and Aada is captivated by every character except her. She cannot see how much I love her because she is dedicated to feeling that I don’t. She responds with too much defense and not enough empathy, often calming down when she’s realized she’s made a mistake. I’m right. I didn’t actually say that.

I am guilty of the exact same thing. We fight as only first children can.

Aada feels that I have this wall of anger built up around her, but I don’t. I’m frustrated, but accepting of consequences I made happen and I have said that I ended up in this place with Aada at my own hand so many times it’s not worth repeating, but according to Aada I am all about the guilt and punishment.

I am, because I am constantly feeling guilty and punishing myself. It comes across in my writing. When it’s about another person, Aada would say something like, “I can feel your computer vibrating with pain.” When it is her, she feels like I am purposefully being vindictive. I have never wanted to take her down, but explain how her world colliding with mine affected me. And in fact, it disgusts me that she thought taking her down was a thought in my head.

I exposed hypocrisy and how it affected me over 12 years. She held me to an incredible standard in terms of truth telling, and had been lying the entire time. To impress me.

What would have been impressive was for her to tell me she was lying 12 years ago, because the longer I lived in DC the more involved this lie got. It greatly affected my mental health and still does, because the last time she doorknobbed me she insinuated that she was watching me in a not-so-nice way after being very nice for several pages.

But I don’t say things like “she doorknobbed me” to punish her. That’s just my take on the situation. My response was utterly appropriate and I did not spin out. There is no punishment, just what happened according to me.

I was ready to close the book, and she opened it again without listening. Just wanted to ream me out and leave, then confuse me by coming back. I want her to stop confusing me by coming back and just communicate. I want her to stop thinking that my blog is all about her. It’s not, it’s all about me.

Yes, she is a subject, but she is not the author. She doesn’t get to dictate what I remember and what I don’t, calling it “cataloguing everything I’ve ever done.” It’s why I’m a good writer- you know her character intimately, but only in reflection to my words…. The things I remember that slowly become precious as people forget.

She says that she takes in the positive things that I say, but it doesn’t feel like it when she takes a chunk out of me for an entry.

It’s at that point I know all the madness needs to stop, and the internet is at fault. We’ve never gotten to have a normal conversation, because I never pushed it.

So all of these things that she would pick up from me just from knowing me in the flesh are going to be lost…. Like the way I glow when I think about her, surprised that she’s capable of lighting me up from the inside after all these years. Just once, I wish she could see that love on my face. I wish she could hear that love in my voice…. And she does.

I just don’t send them anymore because I’m trying my best to just take everything in stride. I think it’s really shitty that we didn’t have a conversation or even a voice clip to close out our relationship, choosing to gut each other in text.

I need to go back and delete all those emails, because what I find is that if I keep them, I will fixate on them and the grief just lasts longer. I’m not ready yet, because she’s such a good writer and the first round is completely gone. I was a moron for deleting everything, but a hero as well because I was injuring myself by getting lost in them and replaying my own bad decisions.

I know that Aada wants peace for both of us, and so do I. We just have completely different ways of getting there. She needs space after a fight, I need closeness. I need reassurance that a fight doesn’t mean the end of the world.

She has been very clear that she wants to end our relationship and has come back every time she has turned away. We do work very well together, and I would like to see more writing come out of us when we’re not amped up by cortisol.

I am trying not to ever get amped up on cortisol, because anger makes me feel like The Incredible Hulk. I am well-versed in both verbal combat and not thinking before I speak.

I am just a treat, let me tell you.

In order for Aada to feel comfortable with me again, she has to feel that the slate is indeed wiped clean. The only thing that will do it for her is time. Now that I know she feels bad about what happened and thinks that I constantly punish her, I hear that.

I don’t want her to feel punished. I want her to feel like she’s the most beautiful woman in the world, complete with flaws and failures but that doesn’t mean that imperfect is bad. Imperfect is imperfect.

She doesn’t know the excitement I feel when I see her name in my inbox. Her real name has a musical sound, a waltz written only in my head.

Those are the things I wish would really stand out to her in my writing, because I cannot make everything perfectly comfortable for her all the time. Neither can she make things comfortable for me because she can go toe to toe with me over my writing and I accept her criticism, maybe a little too much.

I really don’t know who I am right now, because Aada has always been the ace up my sleeve. I begged for Aada not to do this, not to end our relationship permanently, because it was a relationship that colored my entire world after 12 years.

That’s honestly why I think I’m maybe making a little too much out of saying that she was saying goodbye to me for good, and why I have tried so hard to be loving even in the midst of anger. I didn’t get everything right because I was so damn hurt. I walked around like a zombie for months. We’d just had a wonderful time together chatting on Signal when it all went to hell.

I should have breathed more and said less.

I do go back to that Signal conversation often, though. It’s just so rich and we were full of love for each other at that time in our lives.

It’s the relationship I keep thinking of when I want her in my life, this snippet of text that I wish was longer.

I just know that my interpretation of her words would be less harsh with some better cues. I have never been able to read one of her emails in her own voice due to hearing it so often.

Meanwhile, my heart is so tender where she is concerned despite it.

Listening to our music has made all of this spill out. There are so many things I would change about our relationship, which is why I don’t focus on the past. That our relationship is over now, and I will be happy if she shows up but I am no longer preparing for it. She knows that she is invited into my life at whatever level she would like to participate, including meeting my friends and getting a real impression of me. I might even be impressive again in a different context.

I have failed in this relationship so many times, and that’s what I have been trying to get across. Remembering everything Aada has ever done does not come from a bad place and it never has. I was a blogger for many years before I met Aada, she was just the first to really believe in me and put down earnest money.

“You must have custom fonts” is the sexiest thing she’s ever said to me. Write it down.

I don’t want to dwell on anything negative, but to treat her like the gift she is to me. Unfortunately, it is not up to me whether that gift is received.

But unfortunately, trying to say all that makes my writing repetitive… Even to me.

When I think about Aada these days, I don’t think about rehashing all that we’ve been through. I’ve written so much that if I need to look back, I can go there, but I have no need. I think about her when I think of traveling in my future, because she’s the one I’d like to bring on some of my adventures. And in fact, she has been invited on every single one, from Viet Nam to Virginia. I want to take her to see the world, not punish her.

I see me renting an apartment in Helsinki and inviting Aada for a few days, maybe driving up to Tampere to see Moomin World. I see me moving back to Portland and driving her down to Coos Bay, the original road trip we were going to take when I lived in Oregon before. I’m here to take her where she wants to go. #drivingmissaada

Never mind that I’d be safer with her driving. She can put her life into her own hands if she chooses.

I don’t know that I’ll ever have the chance to build up that much trust with her, but I would like to if the stars aligned. I’d like to show Aada that her perceptions of me are off, that I’m not my writer personality. I’d like to see if she’s the same way. Surely she is not as prickly in person as she is over the internet.

We have each reacted like we’re trying to hug a cactus.

I want to take all my spikes down, clarifying all I’ve written so that things will smooth over between us. This smoothing over is not to ignore anything that happened, but to give it air. To give each other grace. To start the neurons healing.

In order fora relationship to have new growth, you have to allow for it.

All of Aada’s scare tactics don’t work on me anymore, because she’s revealed herself to me too many times for me to be afraid. Even this last go ’round, where she meant to leave my toes curled, didn’t last long. I just attributed her need to get back at me to her own insecurities, which are large. She cannot have a conversation where she’s open with me, because she cannot trust me. She has to intimidate me instead. Her biggest problem with me is that I am not intimidated.

I am one of the few people that can go toe to toe with her intellectually, so her usual games and manipulations don’t work. I have cut through a lot of bullshit in this relationship and it has served both of us well. I have gotten to the heart of the matter quickly and been thanked for not taking the stonewalling, being brave enough to call her out on the carpet.

She knew that her lies would cost her, which is why it took her 12 years to admit to me that she lied.

But I’m not intent on making her pay for those lies forever. I don’t have the energy, and never did. Once I wrote about it, the anger was gone. I was ready to move on.

I want to take her to walk the Bible with me, because she’d have so many interesting tidbits about what happened where.

I want to take her to Galveston, so we can walk the beaches I walked when I was a child.

I want a new relationship between us to sing, because the last one moaned in pain a lot of the time.

I would like to have a meal together, even if it’s just dino nuggets. You’d be surprised at how much common ground can be accomplished just by breaking bread.

Especially when I’ve fallen on my face.

Because Aada does not trust me, she cannot see but half the story. She only sees the part where I’m angry, not the part where I’ve worked through it because I wrote about it. Old news is old news. It is not surprising to me that Aada went through and catalogued all the things she didn’t like and called the things she did “suspect.”

None of the things I say are suspect, they are my real thought processes. If I say something positive, I mean it. If I say something negative, I mean it. But no thing is true all the time as a situation progresses and changes.

I think of taking Aada to Ottawa, because I have always been impressed by the French Gothic cathedral architecture of Parliament, and the cats. I doubt I’d be showing her anything she hasn’t seen, but she hasn’t seen my version of Ottawa yet. 🙂

I have all of these dreams that have nothing to do with our present situation because I’m so eager to let it go and think of something happier. I want to be a part of making Aada’s dreams come true, and for her to be a part of making mine come true, too. And in fact, a lot of the time her dreams have been more important to me than mine.

I have talked a lot of shit about being in love with this woman, and I’ve failed her more than I haven’t. I am eager to do better, be better. She is a yellow string in polyamory, emotional support and not romance, and that string cannot be cut for love or money. It just can’t. I have tried. If Aada never picks up her end, it will be dormant but not gone.

I think she does pick up her end, often, and that this is just as hard on her as it is on me. She didn’t want me to make our relationship unstable, and I did. I have not made this relationship easy on her because I’m a public figure and she’s not. Thus, why I’d be excited to work on books with her rather than blogging- it would take the “public figure” thing out of the mix. I don’t look at it as giving my blog up for Aada, but growing as a writer into something different.

It was all my idea, because I knew I would not regret it. That relaxing into the easier pace of having an editor and not having a daily deadline would be better for me in the long run, anyway.

One day, if this site disappears, you’ll know I have a multimillion dollar book deal in the works.

I want to take Aada with me to Portland, because I want to show her my old stomping grounds. We could eat at Hopworks, and I could drive her around to the Big Yellow House, and the apartment Dana and I shared across the street.

I’d like to drive Aada home, and meet the family I haven’t after all these years. Aada says that her husband knows about me, and I don’t doubt that. But knowing about me and knowing me are two different things. Just like people who know Aada are different than people who just read my web site and get an impression.

I know the impression that strangers get of Aada due to my web site is different than what she gets when she reads, because my readers don’t weight the positive and negative.

They have been with me through all the explanations that Aada and I met virtually, so butterfly feelings came up for me that didn’t come up for her. I unfortunately fell for a straight girl incapable of returning those feelings, but I cannot undo it. She’s happily married and I am happy for her. I’m not bitter and jealous, because I do not want more than Aada can give. I send her husband good thoughts all the time, like “take care of her or so help me God.” 😉

No, seriously. I send her husband good thoughts because I am better for it. I want him to be the best partner for her because I want what she wants. Saying that I love her if and only if she changes to be what I want her to be is not love.

I have always called myself the Lord John Grey of our relationship, because she reminds me so much of Jamie Fraser in Outlander.

John struggled his whole life with being in love with Jamie, but he never let it stop him from being a good friend.

I could have learned a lot more from Lord John Grey had I been paying attention, but I wasn’t. I’ll have to go back and read the entire series again.

I want to take Aada to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, because she knows the area intimately and can show me all the good places to go.

I feel that I should say Aada’s husband is invited on every trip I ever invite her on in perpetuity, because I am not trying to get her alone. I am trying to include her, and including her means including her whole famn damily. I would even trust either of them to drive my car and just ride in the back.

I only want alone time with her if she wants alone time with me. There are many conversations we could have behind closed doors that would be enlightening, but I think that we’ve enlightened each other enough and it’s time to go back and do surface level things to bring each other into the fold.

If you always do what you always did, you always get what you always got.

I’d like to take Aada to Hawaii, because I’ve never been and think it would be the perfect vacation for us. That’s because there’s hiking and biking and mountain climbing, or we can just be bums on the beach and do nothing. I don’t know if Aada is a thrill seeker or a beach bum, so I am covering all eventualities.

But it’s things like not knowing whether she’s a beach bum or a thrill seeker that would be fun to know, and the kind of thing you don’t get to know if you’re only friends over the internet. As far as I can tell, though, I’m 12 years younger with a quarter of the energy and I need to keep up.

I wish I could take her with me to pick out my dog, because it’s an errand that would mean a lot to her. She’s a dog person and would love to see me happy with one. In fact, getting a dog was the first thing she mentioned when I said I lived in Baltimore now.

Well, she actually said I needed a dog and a gun, but I have a very good reason for not getting a gun. I don’t want to.

She can have a gun if she needs it to feel comfortable staying over, but I’m not a gun person and I don’t live in a very dangerous neighborhood, anyway. Baltimore gets a bad rap because people view it as violent but then you get here and it’s just a neurodivergent jumble of weird.

Baltimore is off the chain if you’re neurodivergent because you’ll find community in a hot minute. DC is the same way, and has the highest number of LGBTQIA people in the country according to the last census in which such data was taken.

So I’d like to take Aada to Baltimore and show her all the quirky weird she missed in thinking “that place is…. Not safe.”

And yes, my apartment is big enough that she and whomever she wants to bring can crash with me.

I am all about being different in the future, because the past was closed off.

I would like for Aada to meet my dad and sister as much as I would like to meet her husband. Being each other’s emotional support doesn’t go one way. I would like her to see into my real life as well.

I have always trusted her judgment on the people I date, and it would be fun to actually introduce them to Aada vs. describing them when I got home. And in fact, there’s this funny scene in my head playing where Aada and her husband sit me down and say, “we don’t like this one.”

Bye. I’ll miss you.

I think Aada was pleased when she asked why I was dating men and I told her that I was kind of over women because I already had my hands full between her & Bryn.

I would like Aada to meet Bryn in the worst way possible, because they are two peas in a pod. The dog trainer and the dog lover would bond instantaneously, and there’s a few other things that would tie them as well, I think, outside of me.

I have shortchanged myself in this relationship from the beginning because I focused too much on my own inner turmoil and not the turmoil I was creating in others. That’s why I want my sunset years to be filled with relaxation, travel, friends, and family.

I would like to be more of a travel writer, and I can only think of one companion I could tolerate.

If things are different in the future, the way I want them to be.