Tag: parenting

Audio for Untitled Entry

~ theantileslie ~ Leave a comment

Listen to Audio for Untitled Entry by Leslie D. Lanagan on #SoundCloud https://on.soundcloud.com/dPurY

It’s not any wonder why I’m a blogger. I prefer a world of two. I am one. You are the other. I run to you, my clubhouse. I feel safe here in this sandbox, because I built it. It is the finest construction, and will last eons because it’s digital. You can’t wear it out by rereading, and for better or for worse, it defines me.

I know so many people who love my blog and don’t want to talk to me for love or money, but it’s okay. How I feel? That’s none of their business, and their need to read is none of mine. I know I’m at least interesting enough to have made a highly respected doctor cry on the toilet. This level of fame is overwhelming, and I mean it. Words are powerful, and I can hit things in people both out of idiocy and purpose. Sometimes, I’m trying to elicit a reaction because I want you to feel what I was feeling while I was writing, or remembering.

Other times, my experiences are blending with yours and you’re bleeding out emotionally over something that has nothing to do with me.

For every bit as terrible as my emotional abuse as a child was, that disturbance brought me to a great place now, especially processing those experiences so that I could create new, healthy relationships later.

I have a relationship with a woman that resembles the one I would have had with my mother and my abuser had that love been pure and clean, the “rainbow mom.” Having the role of mother returned to just one person has been magnificent. It’s the first time in my life it’s ever happened. While my mother was alive, we did our best and she died. We lost our future. I have a lot of life left in which a mother’s love would be helpful, and she just shows up like a wolverine when I’m feeling the most vulnerable. It has provided a lens through which I see Cora.

I have a daughter adopted through the rainbow flag that’s giving me the ability to have clean, white, pure mother love flow through me, to give my child the love I should have gotten. And thankfully, I never have to worry about recreating that feeling of ickiness in her, that I was going to be telling her things too big for her age, because we met when she was 24 and I was 45. I didn’t have to work through what it would be like to actually relate to a child under 18 as “daughter.” I didn’t have to worry that I was setting up a bad pattern, that I was loving someone exactly the way they needed to be loved at the moment they needed it.

Mama Wolverine turned me into one, too, and not that I wouldn’t have gotten there on my own. It is that we are of the same mind regarding children, including us. Burn the world down to protect them. My relationship strengthened what was already in me, tempered it and made it shine.

Between having and being a Mama Wolverine, I don’t make a lot of time for other people. I like being a diarist, expressing myself the way I talk in my head, and not the voice I’ve curated over decades. I’m changing that now by recording my entries, but that’s because I realized that it was not really a bigger platform, just a convenience, especially for the seeing impaired, but not especially for them, because my friend Bryn said that she wished she could listen to me like a podcast.

It’s important that it’s not an actual podcast, unless Bryn (or another creator, hit me up) wants to do one. It’s important that I am writing my entries all the way out to the end, hearing them the way I’m supposed to hear before I put it out in the world. Because once it’s in my voice, it’s filtered through something. It’s vulnerability on a different scale, because on the one hand, my voice is a mask.

On the other, my voice gives emotions you might not have thought were there to words I didn’t want you to know contain them. Wondering if you can tell when Mama Wolverine and Cora and I haven’t talked in a while, or that Daniel is troubling me and not because we’re interacting, it’s just a hard situation to love a kid so much and to love her dad twice over.

I wonder if you can tell all that from one free .mp3.

My fates are not entwined with father and child unless we want them that way. Cora wants to be my kid whether Daniel is my husband or not, and it is a gift I never knew I needed. I needed someone in my life to love with such a fierce permanence it couldn’t be duplicated and to have it be an age gap where I was definitely “the parent.” I think I’ve learned enough to be trusted as a listener, and to know when I’m above my pay grade. My teenage years don’t feel like one large wound anymore. I get to take what I wished had happened in that relationship, everything that was good and right and helpful, and only pass on that much of it.

Everything else can be forgotten. Everything that made me feel too young, too helpless, too fragile, too shellshocked and broken…. all of it forgotten in favor of just remembering what it was like to have a person outside my family I could talk to that would act as a sounding board. Period. End of story.

It’s a little bit complicated when Daniel and I are together because I don’t want to tell Cora things that make her feel like anything she and I talked about has the power to end my relationship with him. It doesn’t matter to me that she’s an adult. The power dynamic is the same.

Being there for each other while someone we both love is in rehab is a very good thing, and I have so much love to give that exactly none of it has to do with Daniel. Cora can talk to me about whatever she wants, and it’s all right and good. Everything she says has so much value.

I wish I could do more financially and physically, but it has to be the thought that counts. You want to give things to your kids you didn’t have, right? So of course I want to do whatever it takes to make her feel safe as a 24 year old trans woman, pre-hormones and surgery. That kind of safety is expensive. It would at the very least require getting her into a more liberal part of Texas, when the best thing is to go to a blue state until Texas has better laws for her…. and I’m not holding my breath on that particular topic.

Too many Texans are hung up on having to change, especially the white men who’ve never had to change this much at once and it’s so hard, especially because you’ll be lucky if they give you credit for the fact that sure, their lives are hard, but they’d still rather be them than you.

If I have white hot anger at Daniel left, it’s over this very thing… not understanding that his pain and confusion at his daughter being trans was nothing compared to actually being trans. That his anger and hostility toward me for pointing out his homophobic and transphobic speech patterns is nothing compared to the pain I’ve felt over actually being queer since I was born.

My concern for “how hard all this is” for Daniel is approaching petty level 3000. It is an almost automatic reaction at this point for me to roll my eyes at cis straight white male pain. The fact that I’m even willing to try says more than I’ll ever write down.

Daniel gets to me in particular because he’s so masterful at using his writer personality to say that he doesn’t give a fuck how it feels to be me, I should have kept my mouth shut because he was in pain… and to have it make sense, so that I constantly berate myself into thinking that I could have been a better partner by saying a lot less… and not knowing how to explain that in this case, both things are important. If you can’t love me while I love you, no deal.

He couldn’t, and I’m glad to be rid of that temperature in my life. If I’m going to be with a man, it’s not going to be one that can’t admit when he’s being an entitled dickhead. Felt so beat up by a few days of me saying that things were not okay that he broke up with me permanently. So, here is what I know. Daniel can be mad all he wants that I called him on his shit, AND he’ll never be strong enough in a million years to actually be me.

He wanted to be able to act like a complete asshole with complete immunity from consequences, because he was sick and we weren’t. No, Daniel, love of my life. You do not get a pass because the things you say affect our mental health. In effect, the things you say are making us sicker because you’re hitting the same nerve that a thousand other homophobes have hit before you.

We are allowed to care about that. We should not have to wait until you get out of rehab to say that you have triggered either one of us in this manner.

And at this point, I’m starting to wonder whether this was Daniel’s master plan all along. That he could make up this wife and child fantasy with me and Cora, and then when it became inconvenient, he’d just get rid of it… or the part he could, anyway. For him, I was easily disposable, and I believe that even if it was hard. He couldn’t throw away Cora, couldn’t take out any of his anger on her, couldn’t emote in front of her without feeling fear.

So if my only role was to make Daniel mad enough to be a good father, then my work here is done. I don’t know what I want in terms of a partner, but I do know that Daniel isn’t capable. He’s out of the running, possibly permanently. He has a fight on his hands in terms of getting back to himself, because the man he is to me right now is weak-minded. Instead of being an adult and using his words, he pulled out Fox News language. That I was trying to “reprogram” him. That I was part of the “woke mob.” If that’s how he needs to think of me to get himself well, then by all means, bud. Go for it. I still get to be angry that you aren’t smarter than that.

And here is another reason I’m a blogger. I want to tell people what I think of them, often long after they’ve left my life for good. I don’t broadcast what I think. It’s just here if they’re ever curious.

I absolutely want him to know what I was thinking during this time, and that yes, I really was this angry and irate. You turned from Daniel, the thinker/writer boy into Daniel, former military from NE Texas and every stereotype that entails. Our story was worth more than that, and you made it on the cheap. Turned an arthouse flick into a segment on Fox news…. because there’s not enough content for a movie.

Never forget Aaron Sorkin’s warning about soundbites. “What are the next ten words?”

When I find them, I’ll blog them.

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Safe

~ theantileslie ~ Leave a comment

Click to stream/download this entry rather than read.

What makes you feel safe in a relationship, romantic or otherwise? How did you learn those are the things that make you feel safe?

This is a writing prompt given to me by my friend Bryn, and I’m going to start with what I thought made me feel safe over time, because it’s different over decades.

In the beginning, what made me feel safe was having my needs met, and it didn’t take much because I wasn’t an active kid. I’m not sure I even had a social life until Lindsay was born (this is not actually a joke). Before Lindsay, like now, I was the kind of person who had one friend (Justin). When Lindsay got old enough to have friends over, I was in charge of them most of the time. “In charge.” Yeah, like I wasn’t soaking up human interaction when my battery was full enough that now I’d isolated enough to feel lonely… I wasn’t in charge. I was an introvert, and Lindsay was the extrovert who adopted me. She still plays that role, and we don’t even live in the same city anymore.

It makes me feel safe to give everything to one person. Just everything. I want to tell you my hopes, dreams, fears. I want to show you my inner landscape and walk around in yours. It makes me feel important to know things about people… that they trust me with their secrets because they know I won’t tell them. It makes me feel safe because it is an agreement. I will take on your inner landscape if you will take on mine.

My childhood was idyllic, so this didn’t become a big job until I was an adult. The War Daniel is one of the last people that saw that version of me, before life had hit me in the face. It’s the biggest reason I feel safe in marrying him if he changes his mind. The War Daniel knows leslie, not Leslie D. Lanagan, Trademark. What makes me feel safe in my relationship with him is that I know my inner landscape isn’t too fucked up for him to handle. He’s a nurse practitioner. WTF does he care that I’m bipolar?

Between my knowledge as a patient and his as a Doc, it’s handled. We both have our demons. We both need each other, and he turned on me when I needed him the most. But he should have, and I support him. The only person Doc needs to worry about is Doc. If we’re going to fight this thing out, I need him as healthy as he can possibly be. I need him to return to that feeling he had when he said he’d been in love with me for 36 years. I do not think that I am crazy in the slightest for thinking that this breakup is actually Daniel just saying “I can’t handle a relationship right now.” I am trying to think logically through alcoholism and rehab… walking around in his inner landscape and trying to understand because he made the agreement to walk around in mine. That kind of friendship and love doesn’t go away with a few angry e-mails. We’re in each other’s heads and hearts. Addiction and recovery are not the time to be making life decisions, and if I was short-sighted about anything, it’s that I gave too much credence to what Daniel was saying right before he went into rehab and not the grand possibility that everything he said would change once he actually got there.

It doesn’t make me feel safe in a relationship to think about it ending before it even begins, so I didn’t. What made me feel safe was to look at every possible outcome. I planned for the fact that Daniel would break up with me, and asked myself if I could handle it. I told myself that I could. That the most important thing was keeping his spirits high until their docs had them and I didn’t have to worry about him until he was ready to start doing the real work in our relationship, which was massive. I’m queer. Cora’s trans. Daniel is sincere in his love and support of us, but wasn’t ready for the massive change in his behavior it would require to make us feel safe and wanted.

The reason I was so extraordinarily hard on Daniel is not because I was offended. It was hard watching him be a bad dad out of idiocy and not malice. I could have handled it had it just been between him and me, but the group chat with Cora changed our dynamic because I could see theirs. I have seen everything, and this is why I’m willing to hang on for the ride. I feel like there’s more here to mine, like this isn’t the end of our movie if I’m just patient about it. It’s going to be even harder for Daniel to prove to me that I’m safe with him, but just because it’s hard, it doesn’t mean it would take a long time. We both process emotionally at a very quick rate. We’re writers. What would make me feel safe is to start writing letters again, and then for him to come and visit, so that my other friends can see how closely what I have said matches who he actually is.

Nothing illicit, nothing shameful, nothing to hide from either of us, especially from each other. I used to love the darkness.

This is because my one person changed immediately and inappropriately to an adult when I was almost 13, and for some reason, I got to walk around in her inner landscape as well. This is where things get complicated. In addition to walking around in someone’s inner landscape, feeling safe involved secrecy. I liked keeping secrets. I was more emotionally intelligent than most adults by the time this happened, and the undercurrent was strong. It turned everything dark, because then I began to crave relationships that were under the radar. The ones that felt illicit and maybe a little cooler than I actually was?

Relationships that created their own little worlds apart from reality, and I could go there when life got hard.

It was being able to run to a secret clubhouse, small and intimate. Not as big and intimidating as the whole world, because the universe is the two of us.

I am blessed to have those friends now that the feeling of needing darkness is gone. It was a process to get rid of it, and hell while it wasn’t resolved because of course the relationships I paid attention to weren’t the ones in the room. I came by it honestly. I lived with my mom and dad for years without hearing a word they said without it being filtered through one illicit relationship.

When things got hard with Dana, I stopped thinking about her because sitting alone in my office, writing e-mails into the night gave me more peace than interacting with her. They got hard for a multitude of reasons, but Dana became masterful at the bait and switch, where I’d ask about one issue and it would devolve into “you like your e-mail better than me.” We stopped communicating about anything else, because any conversation that didn’t start there found its way there quickly. Just a self-destruct button, because I didn’t think that who I let walk with me through life should be her choice, and if she didn’t like them, she didn’t have to meet them. Even I hadn’t met them. Remember? E-mail relationship.

When it became clear that the e-mail relationship was grabbing my heart in a bigger way than I expected, all I wanted from Dana was patience. That these feelings would work themselves out, and it wouldn’t even be a thing anymore. How things actually shook out is exactly what I predicted. Those feelings went away, but not on the timeline she needed. I’m sorry about that, but I couldn’t get there any other way except mine.

Do I feel like I threw away my marriage for an e-mail relationship because it was under the radar and Dana was in the room?

Yes, I absolutely do. I also know with eight years’ certainty that it was the best move I could have made.

When I left Dana and moved to DC, again I was alone in my office writing, and it was delicious. What made me feel safe was no relationships at all. Remember that Dana and I ended our relationship with a physical fight, so I was running scared. I didn’t trust anyone, and I was alone by choice. I had people to call if I needed them thanks to having lived in the area before and my cousin living in Virginia, but I didn’t.

My sister works in Washington, luckily, and so she was always close by in terms of the telephone and within a couple months of being physically available to hang. Sometimes I send her concert dates and things like that on the off chance she’ll be here, but I don’t expect her to show. I want to make her feel included… like she has two homes instead of just one. Washington can be a lonely place if you don’t know a local to keep you grounded.

What makes me feel safe in my relationship with my sister is the vulnerability factor. I can tell her anything, and vice versa. But it’s a much bigger deal that she’s vulnerable with me, because she’s powerful and I’m not. I actually think that’s one of the reasons our relationship works so well. We live in such different worlds that there’s no reason or even path to compete with each other. We’re just there to make sure the other one has her head on straight. In fact, I feel safe and vice versa that we’re each telling our stories exactly the way we want to tell them, and just advising the other on craft. There’s no, “I think you should do this.” There’s only “where do you want to go, and how can I help you get there?”

What makes me feel safe in a relationship is being in one with someone like my sister, who understands people on a large scale. She’s a lobbyist for a federally funded queer health care group. Her view is national. She does what she does because of me, because I helped raise her. Of course she’s the cis, white, straight, beautiful blonde woman who uses her platform to advance queer issues in the Texas and federal legislatures. Of course she is.

I am starting to feel like a wizened old grandmother character, because my role in Lindsay’s life is basically that. I don’t know the policy details of her job, but I do know people the way she does. Exactly the way she does. We both picked up our diplomatic skills from being preacher’s kids. We knew who Karen was long before there was a word for her.

It makes me feel safe that the ways in which she knows people are the ways in which I know people, we just use those talents differently. I ran away from a public life in terms of something like lobbying or preaching…. and into a public life where I have enough clinical separation to pretend that this is just a letter to myself in the future and there aren’t really thousands of you reading every day……

It makes me feel safe in our relationship. 🙂

Now, what makes me feel safe in a relationship is honesty, even if it’s painful to hear. What makes me feel safe is being vulnerable and the other person having enough courage to hear me, to talk it out instead of walking off. A bubble with a universe of two still makes me the happiest, and I write letters all the time.

I suppose the last thing that makes me feel safe in a relationship is actually hearing the words “please feel heard.”

The last person that said that to me became the most important person in my life, my editor dragon (it amuses me to picture her in dragon form and her glasses still inexplicably fitting).

It makes me feel safe.

Eleven Dollars, Part Two

~ theantileslie ~ Leave a comment

I have gotten out of the creative groove lately, and I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s that I need to live a little more before I have something to say. Maybe I just need to turn on the faucet and write until I hit something good. I’m sorry for the wandering you are about to endure, but you might be able to take something away from it, at the very least that you’re probably not as mentally, obnoxiously up and down as I have been over the last few months.

I would never tell her this, but Sam broke me. In every way possible, she just ripped out my guts and handed them to me. Again, I don’t have to be mad about that, but it’s still true. She busted my fairy tale in a matter of a few minutes, as if I never meant anything to her. It can’t be true, because she’s going to hear me in her head for years to come. It’s just how I feel, because I don’t need to get together with her to know the things I did to alienate her. I just don’t care. My mother dying has made me stop caring about a whole bunch of stuff. Why someone outright dumped me instead of being willing to be vulnerable is beyond my comprehension and creates apathy. Grief is hard, breaking up is not hard, comparitively speaking.

After that, I just converted to “blink” decisions. I wasn’t having any luck being patient and/or sexy enough to warrant a message back, and I have enough friends that are willing to love me through all this that agreeing to marry Daniel was not a whim. It was a dream. He had it in his head that I already thought he had the perfect life. No, I was talking about the perfect life I wanted to create with him and Cora, our little rainbow family.

That rainbow family has been torn apart because I refused to apologize for having fights over equality with him. His point was that he was punching down, and only he had that right. He was going to rehab, and it was way more important than Cora and I feeling safe in what we hoped to be our home. If he gets it into his head that he can get back to learning about us, it’s a dream I still want. Daniel offered me everything on a silver platter, and because I thought the drugs to control his cravings had him sane, I believed him hook, line, and sinker.

That is why I believe that he wants to break up with me now. He’s living the hard, rock-bottom truth that he’s an alcoholic and no more medication to make that pain go away. It’s blatantly obvious that he’s an aloholic in recovery because of his PTSD, and I have complete sympathy for that. Because he’s furious with me, he’s said that he’s already found a new group of friends that accept him for exactly who he is. Apparently, he is also dating someone else in rehab, which I am almost sure was just a lie for two reasons. The first is that I don’t care. We never agreed to be exclusive during this time and people in rehab get horny faster than the nurses can catch them, but all hell will break loose if they find out. You’re not even supposed to have a relationship at all until you’ve been out of recovery for a year.

The second thing is that he is my primary. It’s not that I ever want to leave him. It’s that if he comes back, he’s it for me, even if I’m dating someone else. I tell people that. Sure, I’ll date you, but I have a primary partner and I will drop you like a hot potato. Your choice.

But the thing is, Daniel would never make me choose monogamy over polyamory because he’s scared that he wouldn’t be enough for me. That I’d eventually meet a woman and leave him. It’s what makes me lean toward polyamory because I can see it so clearly that I don’t want to cause him pain. I also know that you can open a relationship in the beginning, but you can’t do it later.

But the bottom line is that I don’t know what I want. I have to feel all that out. I can see never wanting to let him out of my sight. I feel our bond is too strong to spend a minute without him ever again. But that’s right now, not ten years from now. If it could happen to Dana and me, it could happen again. Our relationship was closed, but I fell in love with my best friend, anyway. It ripped us apart and caused no amount of enmity, because my best friend would rather have a root canal than be romantic with me. She never would have gotten any of my blushing teenage feelings if I’d thought there was a chance of an actual affair. It was frightening to contemplate. It would have wrecked us even faster if I’d actually been tempted, or I wouldn’t, because I would have seen the threat coming and headed it off at the pass. Actually, I tried, but that worked about as well as cutting off my own arm. I was her friend, too. Why did I think it wouldn’t injure her if I said I couldn’t be friends anymore with her because it was threatening to my marriage.

In short, the only reason I’d ever consider polyamory is taking the chance at agreeing to monogamy and failing yet again and having another breakup to sort out. I also don’t want to cheat. It depends on what Daniel wants to do, because I know he only wants me. He just knows how many relationships I’ve had with women and how they’re more intense sometimes than they are with men. I don’t want to lose my whole life over it.

So basically, I’d probably agree to an open relationship and then never actually do anything about it, but I will never say never because stranger things have happened to me that turned out to be wonderful, but it was hard to grow in that direction.

I’ve been dating Zach for a few months now, and Daniel thinks he’s cool as hell. Zach will return the favor when Daniel is ready to be a complete Doc instead of a complete dick. There will be interviews, because Daniel already trusts him and I’m not sending him to somone he doesn’t know (they haven’t met in person, but they will should the stars align). Zac just wants to know that Daniel has the mental and physical capability to be a husband.

Zac can, but he’s not the marrying kind. He is already full up, I think. I’m just one of the people who hangs out with him while we talk about life.

I hope that Daniel can get it together, though, because I want that conversation to happen. I want Zac to see that going through rehab and giving Daniel the chance to get well was the right thing to do. Cora says that my faith in her father is not misplaced. I hope she is right, and at the very least, I’m proud of what it means for their relationship.

The thing about Daniel that hurts me the most is that he wanted to get married right out of rehab, not so we could be together any faster, but to make travel easier, as well as getting me a PTSD Doc with trauma experience and better meds. Saying goodbye to that is a major loss, because I’d never had someone offer me such a big world of “fix-it” than him, and not because I asked. He’s a Doc. He saw I needed it.

Then, later he got angry that I saw him as “having this perfect life.” No, I don’t. I think he’s in the shit. I wanted him to have more to dream of than a dead end job somewhere just to make ends meet. His possibilities are endless, but they are only suggestions. If Daniel wants to move to the beach in a country where we can both live off his retirement, or I could get a job over the Intenet making American money to supplement his retirement, our digital nomad plan has legs.

My basic philosophy on Daniel is that anything he creates now is his choice… from relationships to writing to whatever he wants to do. It’s just that he’s already done his job. He was embedded with Marines in Kandahar during Operation Enduring Freedom. He deserves to do nothing if that’s what he wants. I just think he’s too curious about music, literature, and history to stay bored if he gets that way.

I just want him to know that I do have his best interests at heart. I’m trying to integrate him into a completely queer family, and if you’ve grown up in NE Texas all your life, that is a tall task. He thinks I want to “reprogram him.” No, I want you to take interest in not treating people as if you’re the center of the universe. He can’t help it. He’s an alcoholic. He’s not capable. But it doesn’t make me sorry that I called him out. It makes me human that I’m willing to take all his shit just to hopefully get the reward of a husband and daughter that might never come.

Well, the kid stays in the picture, but you know what I mean.

I can’t picture a life without Cora anymore because I know where she lives. I feel that she is in great danger. I have just as much trauma regarding Cora walking out her front door every day as I do thinking about how crushed I would have been had Daniel not made it home.

Again, it’s NE Texas and there she is sin. So am I. I could also be shot for being trans because I’m genderqueer. I don’t look like a stereotypical woman, so if someone wasn’t paying attention, they’re not going to care if they shoot us both and I would not know how to cope if she died and I lived.

I want her to move to Baltimore with me, because we’ll get a better deal and it’s not too far from Johns Hopkins or the VA. Because of Texas’ inane laws, Cora cannot get the medication or the surgery she needs and she’s 24 years old. If she wants those things, I think it would be completely doable at Johns Hopkins and if the VA does trans medicine, we could also go to Walter Reed, because that would be free to her.

If there are any veterans out there who know if Walter Reed does trans medicine, that would be helpful. Otherwise, it would be cheaper to fly to Thailand first class and get her care there.

I have never met Cora’s mother, but I would like to be friends with her, too, especially if Daniel is uncomfortable visiting her if she’s living with me. I hope he doesn’t. I’m just as much of his friend as I ever was. I am sure that he’s behind his daughter a hundred percent, and I don’t care how he feels about me in terms of getting back together, because obviously Cora’s treatment is not about him.

I think some part of him thinks he’s responsible for all this, because he doesn’t want her to put away her old pictures because he likes reminiscing. He doesn’t want to burn the old birth certificate as a ceremony. He also thinks he’s alone in all this, that millions of parents haven’t gone through the same thing, having a funeral for the child they lost so they can better accept the child they have.

No one raised Cora to be trans, she just is. She’s been wearing a mask since she was born. For her to break out of it, she needs the support of her entire family in lockstep.

I need them to buy the books. I need them to research on the web. I need her parents to see how they’re contributing to her feelings of unworthiness.

I see this more clearly than Daniel because no one raised me to be queer, either. Learning to be a husband and a wife was a time of trial. I don’t know shit from shinola when it comes to finance, important documents, etc. None of my partners have ever been good at this stuff, either, because they were raised the same as me.

That being said, when I’m with men, I tend to treat them like I’m their husbands because no one has ever done it for them before. Treating their minds and their bodies like they are as beautiful as women, letting them open up with anything and everything they want to talk about, letting them be the little boys they were before life hit them in the face.

Men are more tender when you strip away the bullshit of masculinity as an identity. Even the idea of femininity is bullshit, because when I say that I am all female, it doesn’t register that I, too, am an archetype of a woman and I don’t have to wear makeup or clothes to impress to address that fact. I just don’t care that much and want to be comfortable.

I have genderfluid relationships no matter which gender I’m in a relationship with, because I’ve been with women for so damn long that I don’t approach anything with the manners of a stereotypical wife. Therefore, I have no idea how to treat men, so I treat them like women. It works. I still have some of my butch identity that way, and men are forced into a feminine identity that’s always been there, but dormant since they were children. It makes perfect sense. The dance of intimacy is right because we’re both just people, he no more important than me.

It’s something that I want with Daniel, because I think that kind of love will help him heal from his war wounds. I can be his husband if he’ll let me. He’ll get a kind of love that equalizes us so that the power dynamic is gone. He can be submissive with his emotions and his body if he needs to, and it’s ok. It’s why I’m ok with him being in recovery and why I’m ok with waiting a year to see if the breakup was the right move or not. Part of me will never get over it if it’s real.

But one day, I hope he’ll start moving back to me, Eleven Dollars at a time.

The War Daniel in His Own Words

~ theantileslie ~ Leave a comment

It happens every time.

Well, not every time.  But almost every time.  You’re at a gathering of friends and theres always at least one person that finds out you’re ex-military and you can just see the question forming on their lips but a struggle of “do I ask???”  And usually they can’t help themselves and ask.

 “Did you have to kill anybody.”  I sigh, because I fucking hate that question.  It was one of the harsh realities I had to struggle with spiritually before I joined, knowing that scenario was going to present itself.  You ask yourself day in and out what you think you will do in “that” scenario.

Before you are assigned to a Marine Corps unit as a Corpsman, you go through a 9 week course called Field Medical Training Battalion.  It’s essentially a crash course in being a grunt.  You familiarize yourself with the M4 and 9mm and 50 cal.  You go through what’s called Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain.  And it’s not a video game situation.  Were armed up with paintball guns, and the instructors play the part of the locals/Taliban.

That’s one of the mindfucks about MOUT.  Who is a civilian just trying to make schwarmas, and who wants to kill me?  And heres another mind fuck—these mother fuckers don’t play fair.  They will use “civilians” as explosive devices.

Especially children. 

The kids will come up to the Marines on patrol asking for candy or whatnot but they’re really a lure to get you to drop your guard long enough for them to shoot you from a second story window.  Look up then down then up again was the training mantra…. but MOUT was a humbling experience in just how quickly it could all be over.  I remember one of my guys getting shot in the leg.  I went to pull him behind a wall to kwik clot the wound and I didn’t get down low enough and took a paintball pellet to the neck.  If it was real, I just died.  I didn’t sleep that night.

So to truly answer your question you have to start back behind the wire.  

You could be playing football and grilling hamburgers when your fire team is called to gear up.  A fire team is a group of 5-7 that patrol together.  It consists of either a Sgt or Corporal that’s the Fire Team leader. 

You’ve got a doc, an EOD guy and the rest are gunners.  So you’re playing football and talking shit about how Tony Romo would always break your heart and then the next moment you have to go put all your gear on and get ready to go complete a mission.  As Doc that sucks even worse because you wear everything the Marines wear plus your med bag.  

You’re responsible for making sure your whole fire team has certain things in certain places.  Their tourniquet on the top right; kwik Clot in the right cargo pocket.  Things like that.

Not knowing when your team is going to be called sucks, but knowing 12 hours ahead of time is worse.  All that time waiting around to be under the stress of “is this the last thing Ill ever do?”

Some of my grunts thrived on the anticipation of getting to kill bad guys.  That was part of the mission.  And they had no moral qualms about it at all.  They saw it as a very clearly black/white/them or me, no fuck that these people want to take me from my wife and kids and they can go fuck themselves.  So in that aspect, the boys’ conscience is totally clear and the more people they shoot the better.  I don’t think that makes us sociopaths.  I think it makes us like Dexter [Dexter was a sociopath.].  Vigilante killers of people that need to die, minus the vigilante part.

I am a corpsman, so I am not wired that way.  Every time we went out my prayer was 1 that I come back alive, and 2 that I bring everyone back with me, and 3 not to have to use either of my firearms.

On the shittiest day of my life we went out just like any other one.  The mission was to go into town and give hep A and b, hep c , smallpox and anthrax vaccinations.  My spot in line was last, giving hep a/b. 

I don’t even know why there was a lull in the line.  I think we had run out of smallpox spears or something, so I was looking around.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw it happening. 

Dipshit wasn’t even trying to be subtle.  So without thinking, safety goes off; I used my marine’s shoulder to balance my weapon on and I shot the fuck stick through his eye.  Then I yelled “FIRE FIRE FIRE” which was the alarm for a bomb.  EOD snatched the kid and worked their magic.  My first trained response was to look for others because they are human hyenas and not averse to sacrificing one for the sake of the many.

At that point the field ex was terminated and it became about securing the town.  No one was hurt, and that’s all I remember of the post action.  We all came back across the wire and that was that [also terrifying that you have to feel like you’re in that much danger to feel comfortable in that much danger].

I can’t tangibly measure what my cortisol levels were.  I know when I came back I was like “holyfuck holyfuck HOLYFUCK.” And I couldn’t get still.  I couldn’t stop shaking.

I cried because now I knew I was capable of taking a life.  Commander Baker, our on site Psychiatrist, talked to me for about two hours about innocuous stuff; the first Van Halen album; why the cowboys can’t win in December; why The White album should have only been one album of 14 songs.  He gave me some Xanax, ambien and dilauded and sent me to a drug induced sleep. The next day they handed me my down chit, which meant I couldn’t go past the line for 6 days.  So all I really had time to do was think.  

And one of the things I thought about the most is that regardless of what we think over here, over there, we’re the heels and they’re the babyfaces.  They are the heroes of their country trying to rid it of these arrogant westerners that think their culture is so superior to their own.  They have families and dogs.  And that family and dog hated me.  I took someone’s dad, husband, favorite uncle, drinking buddy.  

A day doesn’t pass where I don’t think about it at least once.  And that’s part of why I drink like I do.  Because when I’m sober it comes back to haunt me, and when I’m drunk I can let it go and forgive myself for doing what had to be done……………………………………

Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been here to see The Cubs win their first world series in a century; hear the first new Guns n’ Roses music in 17 years; to get to the point where I played 50 shows a year.  And most importantly to be able to see my kid graduate high school, to make the very brave decision to come out as trans; to develop into this fabulous artist, to see my sister realize her dream of having a goat farm; to be able to help my mom through her post cancer recovery.

And to get to marry you.  

And now im going to go cry.

Editor’s Note: I have been sitting on this for a while, because I thought I had something to say here. I don’t. It’s perfect on its own. I’m still crying.

          

Nothing You Could Say Could Tear Me Away

~ theantileslie ~ 1 Comment

I’ve been waiting for seven years to say that I’ve met someone and not have it be an April Fool’s joke or clickbait.

Today is that day.

I can’t tell you much about her because she’s a mom. Her kids know she’s dating someone, but not who it is. It’s too early for them to meet me, but acceptable for them to know that if their favorite sci-fi novels are missing, they haven’t been stolen. I hope they know what their mother has done having told me I could read anything I want. 😛

Editor’s Note: This week I borrowed “out of my mind,” by Sharon M. Draper. It’s about an 11 year old girl who has a photographic memory and is trapped inside her body. She can see everything, but she can’t tell anyone about it because she can’t write. She finally gets a voice, and not everyone is eager to listen.

I can give you details that have nothing to do with my girl’s current life, though.

She has a Bachelor’s and Master’s in Vocal Performance. When she’d gotten those done, she auditioned for one of the specialized choirs in the Army, and got a secured chair as an alto before she shipped off for basic training. After she retired from the Army, she directed church choirs for a while, then reinvented herself yet again. I absolutely wouldn’t tell you what that was, anyway, because it tends to make people ask her for things as if her time doesn’t cost money.

One of the things I truly love about my girl is that she reminds me of so many people I’ve loved over the years…. The professional musicians that raised me, including my biological parents, teachers at Clifton, HSPVA, Clements, private instructors in trumpet and voice, beloved choir directors, et al. are the lights that shine behind her, strengthening our connection with shared language. She’s also from New Jersey, not Texas, so she doesn’t remind me of any one musician from my past, or any of them if we’re strictly talking personality. The Texan church musician is an archetype all its own, can I get an “amen?”

And now you’re going to ask if her voice makes me cry, and I’m going to have to decide between snarky comeback and my vulnerable truth. I’m going to go with it.

The truth is that even when she’s just driving and singing absentmindedly, my heart flips. If I was sitting in the audience of one of her performances, forget about it… I’d be gone. She’s got the kind of heart that I know she’d be singing to me no matter how many people paid to be on the front row. What really makes my heart clench is singing together…… You can coax me into crying with that mental picture almost a hundred percent of the time.

But that doesn’t stop her from giving me shit about being a soprano and a trumpet player, and I love every second of it. Because she’s a choir director, she already knows all the inside jokes that are going to make me laugh, especially because her field choir traveled with a band and that rivalry never goes away. For instance, a lot of her friends have gone from the Army Field Band to professional work all over Washington and Baltimore. I am only one degree from Marin Alsop now, and I will not tell you anything about those conversations. I will only say that no matter what I’ve heard, it’s trivial. I’ve heard it all in my own musical life. I still want to see Alsop conduct. Whether she’s Jesus incarnate or Lucifer, every time she gets excited and does that little Bernstein hop, I’m drooling like a computer programmer at a Star Trek convention.

Here’s the best inside joke according to me:

My Girl: Voice is the superior instrument with choral music being perfection.

Me: Back the fuck up, Wilhousky.

Here’s why it’s an inside joke. Peter Wilhousky wrote one of the most famous, glorious arrangements of the Battle Hymn of the Republic I’ve ever heard in my life. My choir director at church from seventh grade to ninth loved it, so I’ve known every note to the soprano, first trumpet, alto, and second trumpet part since before I could type. I have also dabbled in first tenor because I will never drop out of the the a capella section in rehearsal. It’s just too chewy.

One of the first things I asked her was, “since you were in the military, just how many times have you done the Wilhousky arrangement?” She said, “a million, and I’m not even exaggerating.” One of the reasons I like it so much is that whether I was singing or playing, it was so damn fun.

My girl and I have other things besides music and the full on church experience regarding how the sausage is made, but I feel they might be too identifying, and thus, too private for now. But if we stay together long term, I’m sure more details will be allowed to creep out. I know we’ll be having discussions about how much I can say and when, and later on if things go really well, asking the kids themselves how much they want said about them because they’re teenagers. They can make up their own minds. I would also rather sign up for shock therapy treatment than become, for lack of a better term, a “mommy blogger.”

I’ll tell you right now, though, one of the kids and I are obsessed with the same thing. I’m not aiming to be a parent. The kids already have two parents. However, if neither of them are as into this shared thing as me and the shorty, it’s on like Donkey Kong. I tease my girl about it all the time…. I get fake disgusted with her assessment of something in said activity and say things like, “if I ever meet your kid, I’m going to assure them you’re only there to hold my bag and my water.” Teasing that hopefully never even gets close to the line of actually hurting is our thing.

This is the first potentially serious relationship I’ve ever been in where we’re not thinking about having kids. She has kids already. So, time is deliciously limited and every moment counts. It’s a little bit tricky because even though we don’t live that far from each other, it’s not really close enough to meet up on a whim. This is because I live in Maryland, a few miles further northwest than the line between Maryland and The District, still inside the beltway of the city. She lives in a suburb of Baltimore that’s closer to BWI, only 30 minutes from my house by car but two completely separate transit systems. The closest I can get is taking the bus to the Metro station and getting on the MARC train, with either my girl picking me up at the airport station (which thankfully, is very close to her house), or a quick Uber ride to get myself there if she’s tied up at work or something.

I downloaded the public transit app for Baltimore and added one ticket to BWI and a funds card with a few dollars on it. It’s for both of us. I can escape if something goes wrong and I just don’t feel like talking about it right that moment, and if nothing ever goes wrong, it’s just handy to be self-reliant. I’ve also watched too many couples break up because one person always has to do the driving… or if that wasn’t the main problem, it certainly didn’t help anything.

It’s something of which I’m aware, but I’m not as panicked as I would be if I lived in Houston. Now, I don’t have to be reliant on my girl to get me anywhere in either city/suburb. Any time she wants to pick me up to save me time or to spend more time together, it’s welcome and I am always grateful. I just don’t want to feel like a big issue later on…. Driving is one of those things that’s irritating enough if you’re rarely the driver… more so if you’re the only one who does it. When the honeymoon period wears off it’s generally the first knock-down drag-out fight.

Only one piece of the puzzle is left, and that won’t get solved until we decide to get really serious. If I move to the same city or the same house, we’ll gain the ability to do one more thing that we don’t have now…. being able to call each other up and say “I’m going to the pub with the crew. Meet us in 20.” It’s still possible if plans are made early enough in the day, but right now I’m at door to door in somewhere between 90 minutes and two hours. Her town is small enough that I could walk to a pub in 20 minutes if I was local. As long as I stay put, though, 90 minutes to two hours door to door is much faster than I could do it by car, because between traffic and construction there’s no time of day where it takes dramatically less time than others.

It’s so easy that next time my girl might not want to drive here, either. Our friends in Silver Spring would haul us around or we could Uber. So much better than sitting in traffic and driving. It’s sitting in traffic, reading and cuddling. The reason it’s not sustainable as a solution is that if we’re a committed couple, I would lose my mind getting to her or the kids if there was an emergency. Anything less than immediately is unacceptable. “Less than two hours” might fly in a long distance dating situation, but in a partnership is cruel to everyone. Being reliable is important to me.

For now, it’s a delicious thing to will time to stand still; things can progress slowly… I can take things out, try them on, think about them until they’re not foreign anymore. My girl and I can create a private bubble of writing to each other and dates where we really get to know each other with more senses than just reading words on an electronic page. If we’re playing for keeps, we need to be a team, starting with learning how the other one communicates.

I find that I communicate best in writing, especially when I have to say something hard. I can take as long as I need to flip out about it, and then calmly craft a response. My emotions are enormous. Most people don’t deserve my kneejerk reaction. They deserve my response after I’ve walked off and written about it. Just one of the things that lets me be an INFJ on my own without scaring the bejesus out of anyone… and then when I get to the part where I need to say something out loud, I’m confident because I’ve worked it out on my own. I simply need input. If my girl feels strongly about something, my own conclusions need to change. If we’re chatting about it online, I have two things. The first is the ability to copy and paste my thoughts into a letter. The second is that a moment expands when I read about it later…. and in a much more beautiful way than if I just tried to think about the conversation and remember it that way. That’s like trying to read a series of novels and then being tested on which events happened in which book.

I love going back over our conversations and rereading, because different things jump out at me than they did the first time, because I’ve walked away and am looking at it from a different perspective than I was even ten minutes ago.

There’s another advantage to rereading our conversations, and it’s invaluable. Because I’m rereading our conversations and replying to things as they come up, it’s like conflict repellant, and every bit as effective as bug spray. One of my triggers is having someone tell me that my perceptions aren’t accurate. I spent so many years doubting my own perceptions and instincts when I am actually extremely astute. Not much gets by me, and doubting my abilities as a visionary and truth teller when I can bring the receipts is a flat out rejection…. yet another reason why it’s taken me so long to open myself up to a romantic situation.

Only once has this happened, but I went on a date several years ago with a woman who’d gotten the URL for this web site from my OK Cupid profile. Then, she asked me out for coffee. When I accepted, she turned out to be a drooling fangirl who wanted me to be the voice I am here. It’s something that doesn’t seem like it would be problematic. This web site is me. I am this web site. Here’s the rub. At no time during that conversation was I ever allowed to deviate from anything I’ve already written, as if writers are never allowed to change their minds. Particularly with bloggers, entries are just verbal pictures, not even videos. It’s 2D with a timestamp. She’d quote me to me and then accuse me of lying, even if it was 2016 (or whatever, I don’t even remember that much- just that it was before my mother died) and the entry was from 2014. It made me express something verbally that I’ve always known with my other senses. I love respect. I hate fame.

Blogging is a stream of consciousness first draft in which I’ve given myself permission to write absolute shit. This is nothing compared to the heights I can reach with research and dedication. In some ways, I should never have become a blogger in the first place. I laid out every problem I had, including my struggles with mental illness, in hopes of “leading from the back.” Wounded Healer, Henri Nouwen, et cetera.

The pro was that people I didn’t know flocked here because I was saying things that connected. Those closest to me started trying to judge the stability of my mental health by my silly observations. I have the same relationship with my blog that I do with preaching in public. I can lead one person or a million, but not two…. as in, it’s very easy to talk to people I don’t know. People I do know tend to think that they are excellent detectives. Not once have they ever been right. They are right that occasionally I do spiral out, and as bad as they think. But not when.

The difference in my writing voice is not mania vs. depression. It’s “in the creative zone” vs. “I haven’t written in X number of days and I am itching to get everything out.” The other differences that are seen as lies are actually easily explained without being excused. I can only write one line at a time. My mind is a multi-core processor. Every time I tell a story, it includes thoughts from all the cores and not just the one I was using at the time the story was originally written. My details don’t get larger or smaller. They just get more dense…. or in layman’s terms, “I can bring the receipts. I don’t just make shit up.” Well, unless I’m preaching. One of the funniest things my little sister has ever said was “DAaad? Wassat true, or were you just preachin?'”

Returning to this moment, it’s foreign to me that someone wants to date me… will hold my hand walking down the street, will give me quick kisses and put her arm around me as if we’ve known each other our whole lives. It’s been 10 or 11 days. Nothing is being rushed about our relationship. It cannot be for all our sakes. We’re not thinking for two, exactly. Well, we are, but it’s not the two of us. I have an activity to do and she has a bag and a water to hold.

I’ve thought about kids two other times in my life, and shut the door permanently. I can’t remember what year it was that Dana and I went to the OB/GYN to check and see if we were good to go, but I was much younger then……. even still, it would have been a geriatric pregnancy. I am almost positive that if I had to make a choice between getting an abortion and having a child would be torture, because some kind of trauma was probably involved. I’ve also wanted a child since before my mother died, but I know my biological child would look like her even if the biological father didn’t. The flip side of the coin is that I would be much crazier than advertised if I decided to carry the pregnancy to term. I already have to choose between physically and mentally sick (physical drug side effects). A pregnancy would make that distinction as clear as it could possibly be. Both my medications (I think) are pregnancy approved…… but what if they don’t work for me while pregnant? Yes, I have thought a lot about this. Maryland has everything I need if something were to happen here, but I go to Texas more often than I travel anywhere else. Southern men are typically sweet and genteel. If they are liberal enough that they don’t have a problem with homosexuality, sometimes the flirting gets intense because we both know it’s not going anywhere.

If they’re a conservative crazy, and the percentage on that in Texas is not zero, it’s not impossible that they’d say they love Jesus while shooting me in the chest, or letting me live but raping me because “you’re only a lesbian because you haven’t had a real man yet.” Let me really drive it home for you. After the shooting in Colorado Springs, I had a panic attack. I was filled with survivor’s guilt. My only accomplishment that day was living in Maryland. I met my girl not long after, and it was like coming up for air after free diving. When she kissed me, I remembered what I was fighting for. I fall asleep thinking about her, and all I would do to keep myself strong so that she can lean on me. It’s all any couple wants. That the idea of support in government via marriage tax breaks and support in community through erasing prejudice is just crazy and we have to tear down all the progress we’ve already made is Looney Toons. Of the two, though, I’d rather have the love and support of the community. I’m kind of over entangling marriage and the government. Laws can move legal protections. They can’t change hearts and minds because that’s not what they’re designed to do.

As for me and my girl, we’re being careful not to become examples of the lesbian U-Haul stereotype. It’s good for the kids, but we see why it’s not that big a deal for other people (especially if it’s just the two of them in a very large house). Because of our shared language and library of images, I believe we could move in together tomorrow and with some counseling, make it work. There are multitudes of things that make us unique, but we are also extraordinarily similar. Both musicians, birthdays five days apart (although she’s four years older), both fluent in church lingo for an amazing understanding of my life before she arrived. It’s a whole bunch of things that would make us able to start off with good communication and get better at it, not constantly trying to make it work and needing counseling to keep from throttling each other. Getting by is just not the goal, though. It’s both of us thriving and growing together and not at each other’s expense.

Actually, there are ways in which it would be eerily difficult to tell us apart. There are others that are wildly different, but not in any way that would cause conflict. The kind where her life experience differs greatly from mine and brings a whole new skill set to the table. At her core, she’s the kind of peacenik musician you’d find at Interlochen and Julliard, but of course she also had to go through a program physically designed to make her fail to get into this professional-level program. It’s akin to winning a chair in a major symphony (or medalling in the Olympics). By contrast, I synthesize ideas very fast and often throw out thoughts before saying “do you have the bandwidth to listen to……” I am also highly adept at taking on the emotion of every person in the room, and thus have inside information as to their motivations. I’ve always had instincts in that direction, but I’m deadly accurate now that my bullshit detector has dropped.

Speaking of taking in the reaction of everyone in the room, my favorite thing is still being the only one not drinking. Sometimes I do, but I think it’s more exciting to relax with a non-alcoholic beer (especially in a glass) so that people forget two things. The first is that you’re not really drinking. The second is that you’re a diarist. You’re not talking to a reporter, but definitely reporter-adjacent. At parties, if I don’t know you and you have a dumbass attack in front of me, you’re probably going to become a funny story on this web site. If I do know you, I’ll at least ask you if I can write about it because you can laugh about it and I’m not hitting a real nerve. Live and learn.

I feel so good around my girl that it’s a great surprise she’s told me I do things for her that help. I don’t feel as if the relationship is one-sided. I feel wanted in a way that I haven’t in years, that I am a priority and she drops everything for me the same way she checks out of our relationship when we’re apart so that other people also get her full attention. It’s priceless, and feels healthier than trying to manage five conversations at once.

I honestly forgot how much all people need these feelings. I was so focused on independence that I forgot about interdependence, and how nice it can be as well. I’d let the pendulum swing too far into loneliness… particularly because I didn’t notice I was lonely. I used to be the real life Linus Baker, just American and not British…. also not from the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, but that’s neither here nor there.

Now, my life feels whole. I have amazing friends, and a chance at a real thing with someone I’m crazy about. It didn’t feel real until she told the kids, though. Doesn’t matter that she only told the kids she was dating someone. Fine for them not to know it was me specifically. It just made me feel important that she thought our dating life was important enough to mention. Maybe now she’ll let me have diet soda at her house (I can hear it now… “friggin’ sopranos…..”). Even if she doesn’t, there are times when I think my heart can’t get bigger; it always does.

Like when she took me to Ingrid Michaelson and held me while Ingrid sang… some dates are close to magic… when you can feel the night stretching to accommodate your wishes. We went for half smokes and fries at Ben’s Chili Bowl, then walked to Jeni’s ice cream for a “nightcap.”

The next day we took in a matinee of “Into the Woods,” and then it was time for her to go back to her real life. It was so hard to let her go, knowing that I was stepping out on faith that we’d find a way to keep seeing each other if our paths aligned.

My faith is in this being the start of something big. She feels the same way, but I don’t want to speak for her on anything more than that. Wanting to be together for keeps if we continue being successful at communication is the one thing I don’t have to fact check. How we feel is deep and intense, passionate in every color across the Scandinavian sky. At the same time, I’m 45. She’s older than me. Combining lives is not an easy process, and when kids are involved, sometimes love isn’t enough. Unclear communication regarding division of labor kills a relationship faster than lack of love ever will.

I have issues with having brilliant ideas and an interesting relationship with follow-through. Luckily, my girl has plenty of experience in dealing with people close to her that have mental health issues. My girl can recognize a coping mechanism and roll with it, or help me create one. I will never get over the idiosyncracies that my mental health presents, but I can always use more cognitive behavioral therapy to make it manageable. It’s the same with medication. I take meds to make it better, but it’s a pill…. not a magic wand.

There’s one last connection that we have that I can tell you about, because it’s probably the thing I feared the most in putting myself out there in terms of dating. My grief is deep, It is ever-present. There is no moment of any day that I’m not away from it. It’s a constant dream, waking and sleeping. Her mother is dead, too. So much I don’t have to explain when we share that particular frame of reference. You just join the shittiest club on record. It’s something you literally can’t explain to anyone else who hasn’t lost a parent, because the feelings are too deep to put into words. Losing anyone is painful. Losing a parent rewires you from the inside out. Putting things into words gets easier over time, especially for writers because they’re constantly exorcising their demons whether it’s fiction or not. My girl and I are also in roughly the same place in our process. It’s not overwhelming anymore. It’s a dull buzz that’s occasionally triggered into an alarm. It makes our music connection that much more intense and primal. If you know me in real life, you got here several paragraphs ago.

I need to write this down for posterity, because it is a moment I’ll never stop treasuring. I remember her sitting on my couch. I was kneeling on the floor so I could look into her eyes. It was too much. Too powerful. Tears started rolling down my cheeks. I said, “thank you for bringing the music back.”

Nothing you could say could tear me away from my girl.

It hit me all at once that I was dating someone my mother would have loved and wanted to adopt. James Lipton was famous for asking this question from the Bernard Pivot questionnaire…. “If heaven exists, when you arrive at the pearly gates, what would you like to hear God say?”

My favorite answer is Harrison Ford’s…. “You look just like me.” My own is a delicious smirk and “see what I did there?”