IFLS

November 13, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Whenever one object exerts a force on another object, the second object exerts an equal and opposite on the first. -Newton’s Third Law of Physics

I knew I was attracted to Supergrover’s personality from the moment I met her. Again, cute, cuddly, and (works) blue. She was attracted to me because I was vulnerable with her in a way no one else could be- she read my thoughts here and thought she found a safe space. She did, it just took initiation into a really shitty club, the one in which I’m not social masking so there are maybe three people in it. Her husband spoils her in a way I would have wanted, because she put up with too much bullshit for discount yogurt coupon.

She talks me down off the ceiling, and the reason I’m over the moon is that she does it whether I need it or not. In those moments, I may not be able to look into her eyes, but I see the forehead kiss coming. The problem comes in when Supergrover doesn’t take the time to correct the story I’m telling myself and we get off track. But I don’t want to be off track. I am open and communicating, which comes across as rude and demanding. It’s how she came across after she didn’t want to solve anything anymore. Therefore, I used her tone thinking that’s how she’d respond to me. That when we came back together and regrouped after I’d had time and space to think about it, there would be a continuation of her giving me no bullshit answers and me doing the same.

What actually happened is that my no bullshit answers were taken as “you’re trying to hurt me.” Meanwhile, my heart’s all tied up and I’m lovesick because she thinks that. It leads to more anxiety on my part and avoidance on hers. It finally became untenable, because I was tired of having made a commitment to her like I did and not getting a say in anything…… while she said I dictated everything. Easy to be a dictator when I’m the only one who initiates and first response is anger. I wanted her to keep standing up to me by confiding in me. Being stronger by being vulnerable. Raging inside that she couldn’t and it was all my fault. After eight years of it, I finally decided something true. I matched her tone for tone and it wasn’t all me.

Turns out if I can’t date her, she can’t date her, either. That’s because we’re annoying as shit from different ends of the spectrum. I’m laid back. She’s persnickety. “Do not miss a detail or I will incinerate you if my ire is in full force” is on brand. Mine would be “your nachos look better than mine.” That’s because she’d never ask something of someone else that she wouldn’t do herself, and she wouldn’t miss a trick with nachos, either.

There are certain songs that remind me of her.

If you said “goodbye” to me tonight, there would still be music left to write. What else would I do? I’m so inspired by you. That hasn’t happened for the longest time.

She hides like a child but she’s always a woman to me.

Those are Billy Joel lines that have come through my head recently, but I’ve attributed others.

She’s like a one-way ticket and you can’t come back….. singin’ yeaaaahhhh, you want her, but she’s so mean.

I’ll never let her go, but only in terms of the character she presents here. There will still be music left to write because all creatives use their pain as art, no matter what kind it may be. For me, it’s having a love so deep and so ethereal that it has become a mind worm, but stopping our interaction has made it healthier. I do not ruminate on the questions when I know there aren’t going to be any answers…. as in, I’m not expecting them, waiting on them.

I never should have been waiting on them in the first place, but you’d have to understand details I can’t share as to why that didn’t happen. Why she got twisted further into me rather than further away.

We leapt before we looked, and were only now starting to see real promise- or were we? I don’t think so, because our relationship hung on thinking about perhaps one day maybe never doing something and what I could do for her. She is not selfish at all. I had time to be sweet to her and I wanted to do so. When she had time, she wanted to as well. We’ve sent each other all kinds of digital shit, particularly books and coffee because Amazon and Starbucks are the easiest to transfer back and forth.

We just don’t have the same time; people are right when they say everyone’s got the same 24 hours, but wrong at both ends of the spectrum. A poor person doesn’t get as much accomplished because they can’t travel very far, very fast. You have to have money for gas or public transportation. A powerful person doesn’t accomplish very much because they can’t focus on anything with everyone pulling them in all directions. The difference is small ball. Conversations and research add up. You might have had five minutes a day, but that’s 25 minutes at the end of a work week.

An ADHD or Autistic person does not do that consistently because their thought process is not going to pick up at the same place the next day. They have to come up with a new great idea, because they had it at 3:15, then Carol had an issue, then they got back to their desks and remembered the seed. But then there was only about an hour or an hour and a half left in the day, which isn’t time to fully flesh out the idea. By 5:30, it might as well be, “what idea?”

This is why conversations with Supergrover are so important to me. She’s big picture, and I’m details in terms of spitballing creative ideas or solving a problem. But that’s because she keeps track of everything and all my brainstorming will be off the cuff. My disability comes in where she shouldn’t be expected to keep track of everything, and I’m ADHD. We both have to learn to cope if we have a shot at friendship down the road, and it will be a long time before I’m ready to say we won’t. This is because traditionally when we try to separate, no we can’t.

There are just two reasons it feels final. The first is that I have a legitimate issue with her, I’m not just trying to be an annoying little shit. I’m sorry she’s busy, but I’ve been in the waiting room for eight years. The second is that she sabotaged one of my relationships and I let her because it was good for both of us. And yet also wouldn’t compromise with me on anything later when I felt I’d proven myself trustworthy.

I never railed at her for being straight, I never railed at her for telling me what she told me so that we couldn’t separate, I never tried to make her feel bad because she married a man. I never did a lot of things, she just assumed. She’d read a shit ton of my writing and decided what it meant and how to feel about it all on her own, which she should have. But she didn’t share with me any of her interpretations so that if her assumptions were wrong, I could correct them. She also wouldn’t correct any of my assumptions, then rail that I’d made them. It was not healthy, and her last words to me were “obviously, you’re the only person who can change…” as if I’d lorded my changes over her. I’m not better than her, I’m just different. I felt like I’d done a very good job of listening to her needs and responding, and I was being repaid in anger and guilt.

Reminded me of going to the hospital after Dana hit me and her saying, “must be nice to just be able to check out like that” after she’d hit me. Both Supergrover and Dana caused me to feel things that I’d never felt before in the extreme. I will never forget what it felt like to be hit by a partner. I will never forget what it’s like to be alone in a room with Supergrover, which is how I viewed our relationship- displaced in space and time, a room of our own. 😉 Different experiences, yet not. Different environments, yet not.

In the case of the failed relationship, I felt like I’d anticipated Supergrover’s needs jumping up and down for attention and it didn’t work out the way I thought it would. I don’t know what I was expecting given the previous few years, but it wasn’t what I got.

I got a big gift from her, but there was nothing on the card to indicate that it was transactional. Most of our gifts were “just because,” so if it meant “thank you,” I didn’t pick it up. Therefore, I recognize that she spoke to me in her love language and I am grateful. I just think it’s foolish for only one of us to study the language. It means only I’m in a foreign country.

Marcus? Marcus would get lost in his own museum.

And in fact, that’s exactly what I did. I wrote into the night, creating new memories with her and reveling in her old stories when she told them. I told her I wanted to be the Merlin to her Arthur, but I know in my heart of hearts that she did not believe I was telling the truth. This is not real? I ended up wishing that it could be more than each of us curled up reading each other from thousands of miles away, but grateful for even a 30 second interaction because her time is as precious as she is.

My beautiful girl is such a force of nature that I had to be mad at God for a while. First, railing at them because I’d been born queer because the relationship would be so much easier if I hadn’t. Then, railing because since she shut down communicating with me, it felt like she thought she was them.

She thought I was mean and vice vera.

Whatever objects of mine weren’t in motion before she appeared certainly started rolling afterward. The entry before last took place at Marylhurst, the year leading up to meeting Supergrover. Before I knew it was an emotional affair on my end, and I was always preventing her from being uncomfortable because I couldn’t keep my mouth shut and I knew she would be.

Not only was I blunt, I couldn’t get a read on what was okay and what wasn’t. Our reactions used to be so similar that when she put me in motion, we moved in the same direction.

Now, for every action there was an equal and opposite reaction in which her actions were always pure and she was perfect, and I was trying to take her for a ride. This was in no way true, but I see how she’d get that impression. I thought she would see with eight years of diligence that I wasn’t going anywhere and I was taking my end of the bargain seriously, but an avoidant attachment will run from an anxious one every time because they are not used to communicating with people clearly enough to avoid small anxieties that then spiral. Slights unfold in the memory.

I also don’t know when our relationship is affected by outside sources, and she held that against me, too. She asked why I wrote like she does everything because of me. If you don’t tell me there’s an outside force, I’m not going to look for it. I have enough problems not spiraling out without anticipating even more blowback because the moving goalpost would be “why do you attribute things to my friends and family?” I didn’t want her out of my life because I thought she was a bad person. I thought our relationship was difficult because I couldn’t love her any more than I already did unless she showed me how.

She has no idea how many e-mails I’ve written with tears streaming down my face because of it. Whatever you call it- a chord running between us, wearing her metaphysical ring, two toys in the same sandbox, etc.- I wasn’t prepared for how hard it was to undo a trauma bond, and I’ve been left with no other choice. I am not holding onto hope because I think it’s realistic. I am holding onto hope because neither one of us has been able to avoid each other no matter what our feelings have been for 10 years. It’s a tapestry.

I just decided to stop stitching until we went to Target together to buy fabric softener….. and she has to drive for many reasons. She doesn’t get to have an engine that good and not let me watch her play with it :::sly grin::: because she’d know how to raise the hair on the back of my neck safely. That’s why she’s the alpha in our relationship. One of only four or five people I’d trust to catch in one of those exercises where I just have to hope I don’t hit anything as I lean back.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. I am angry that she does not see me as someone who would catch her and it has become useless to keep saying it and hope she takes it in. Maybe she will in retrospect, but even so it’s unlikely to result in reconnection. That’s because I’ve told her over and over that if she comes back, it has to be big. She has to lay all her feelings on the table so that I feel secure.

I know her first thought when she read that (the first time) was “why didn’t she just ask me to poke myself with a fork instead?” That’s because she’s cute and cuddly, but doesn’t indulge that side of herself. Doesn’t realize that the things she sees as “darts” from me are actually the things I love most about her. I’m not criticizing her, I’m telling her I notice her “-isms.” She has personal and professional quirks that make her unique. She doesn’t see that I think she’s uniquely inspiring and stupid gorgeous because she isn’t looking for it. That doesn’t make it less true.

I say everything wrong, but no I don’t because no one is ever wrong a hundred percent of the time. All of this has become a drumbeat because if I do not concentrate on resolving the issue and keep looking back across the river, I won’t be able to rescue myself.

She has told me to find people that bring good things into my life, that don’t cause me issues. Two huge problems with that. The first is that if I move on, she still causes issues because the bond is unbreakable. We leapt before we looked, and now I’m paying for it dearly. I am sure I am not the only one, I just don’t know her side of the story because she’s so adamant about not telling it.

So now, my task is to find something that will turn my attention, and I’m finding all sorts of temporary interests, but not anything so magical that it would interrupt how I’m feeling currently. Part of it is being a monotropic thinker caught up in a rumination that won’t go away. Part of it is that the situation cannot be duplicated, so if I lose her, I lose a once in a lifetime experience. My broken heart was caused entirely by thinking that I was the only one who got the chance of a lifetime. I forgot that when I saw her trademark and thought it was cool, she had met Leslie Lanagan.™

I don’t think that because of anything but Newton. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Supergrover fell in love with my writing. I started believing in myself. Any belief in myself started with “you like Eminem? Explain exactly how I’m not going to fall in love with you. USE BIG WORDS.”

I was joking. We’d just met like, 30 minutes ago. It was a mistake, and a big one….. but not for the reason you might think. I didn’t pull a trigger in her that meant anything sexual, but I made her feel good and vice versa. We amped up each other’s dopamine so that we felt this heightened bubble around us that excluded the rest of the world for evil and for awesome. It was private and healthy until it was private and not. And I’m not even sure how private it is, sweating bullets over everything about everything.

What I know is that if I keep putting one foot in front of the other, my attention will eventually turn. I think that’s best because she’s given no indication that me asking her to step up would do any good at all, and in fact most things I say piss her off because she can only accept my truth when she sees herself the same way I do. If those stories are different, she will become defensive and accusatory. At that point, I’ll just explode because I am so tired of trying to make it work.

The reason I’m tired of seeming “demanding” is that I’m not asking for anything huge. If she actually asked what my terms were, filling them would be the bare minimum in a virtual friendship. It’s not that I blame her for always being busy. I blame her for doing everything she can not to talk about her feelings so that I constantly feel like the failure in our relationship because I’ve asked her to emote. Anything above clear communication in text, like having lunch, is above and beyond. Penciling in lunch is what I’m willing to do, not what I need.

What I need is her to stop moving the goalposts so that I actually get positive feedback. When she holds off reading because she feels angry/guilty, she opens the e-mail and responds to it with anger and guilt…… if the issue is between us. She has time to post-mortem with me if she is not a party. She will help me improve any relationship except for ours.

It felt like I was settling for a connection that would be insecure my whole life because I would walk on eggshells to keep her until I died…….. because bringing up anything about our relationship makes her avoid me. It has to stop for as much as she walks in beauty and I do because of it.

Two reasons for giving up. The first is that I genuinely don’t want to take up her time. The second is that I don’t want the occasions when we do have time to interact to be contentious. I can’t be one of those “Christmas and Easter” friends because we’ve been so close in the past that it physically hurts when we’re distant. Having that distance is the only thing that allows me to keep that thought process at bay. It’s exhausting for the feelings I have about her to rush in and out. Riding the waves is a good thing, but it’s dangerous when the water levels are so different at low and high tides.

I am astounded by the entry where she told me she had read as much as she was going to read, that it’d been okay up to now. There were tears running down my face; my face felt as if it had never really been washed before. The reason I was crying is that the entry was much later than I thought it would be, and she’d read everything that was truly important to me. She didn’t agree with all of it, and that’s okay. Just knowing she read it is enough. Knowing she was still reading while I was at full strength, not social masking. Letting my autism run wild over our experiences so that I could process them through my fingers.

Of course it hurt that she said she wouldn’t read anymore, but it hasn’t been true at any other time in our relationship, so I’m convinced if it’s not true now, it will be. I have no doubt she loves reading about you. For some reason, in her mind I am very perceptive about everyone on this blog as well as completely 100% wrong when she’s in it.

I am not surprised at this attitude, as it’s most people’s attitude about my writing. It’s irritating as shit because people will read me for days/months/years and really get a feel for my writing. They’ll fall in love with it and treat me like a hero. They’ll build me up til I think I’m James Dean on toast. Then, when they’ve convinced me they really want to be a part of my life, they see what I’ve written about them and it quickly begins a downward spiral if I say anything but “the sun shines out of their asses.” I have not changed a thing in terms of the way I operate, but they’ve changed their perspective on me.

I love that Supergrover read the entry about all the things she never knew, about telling the bees she was gone… and might have even heard me read it. If she did, I hope she likes it, because that’s the purest love letter I’ve ever written to anyone.

Falling in love with straight women is never advisable. It’s cliché for a reason, though. Happens all the time. When it comes to being attracted to someone, mistakes are made whether people are the same sexual orientation or not. Plus, even if we had both been queer, that’s no guarantee that we would have been attracted to each other. I’m not even sure I’d be attracted to her physically because I’ve never seen her in person. Yes, her photo is gorgeous; I can’t go on that because you can’t judge how you feel around them by it.

This is why I’m so sure that what she looks like doesn’t even matter. That whether we meet or not, our brains are connected and that’s what’s important to me. Our brains being connected is just not a good thing until we establish healthy patterns and tamp down all the rage.

She and I, like Dana and me would’ve if we’d gotten back together, restarted with a lot of hostility. Over time, we each came around and I kept growing. I felt like we were getting closer, but I think now that I felt the intimacy of opening up to her. That theory holds up because my feelings didn’t degrade if she stopped talking- still haven’t, won’t. What I went through with her was a dream, but a disjointed one…. the kind where you think you’re going to learn the meaning of life….. until you realize it’s all just a bunch of green glass and movie magic.

I am not sorry for wanting her to be my somewhere over the rainbow, but I am sorry that she knows it….. and I couldn’t get around it by hiding her to her because I’m just not that good a writer. Hiding her to people who don’t already know her is hard enough. The reason she knows I love her this much is not just because I told her. I thought it was easier to go the hard route and just be honest with everyone, including you.

Generally, after I talked to her, I talked about her…….. and she read it. The reason we didn’t leave it at a one-note conversation is because I wasn’t writing my feelings about her to her. I was writing my feelings about her to you and she was listening. Sometimes it made her angry. Sometimes I touched her heart. The worst days was when she perceived I was doing the former when I was trying to overdo it on the latter. All I’ve ever wanted is to change her mind and heart, because I wouldn’t be who I am if she hadn’t changed mine.

She knows how I feel about her, how I’ll always feel about her. I will stay in motion especially being acted on by an outside force. In so many ways because our relationship is virtual, losing her is losing me. There are moments when my social mask is her because none of my other friends know her and won’t pick up the imitation. We’re both good people. If something worked on me, it’ll work on someone else.

Supergrover is sort of neurotypical with ironclad boundaries and morals. Therefore, it was imperative to pick up her social masking. She is much more stable than I am in that arena (I’m autistic/ADHD and she’s not, but she has PTSD so I’d be surprised if social masking hasn’t been a part of her life since she picked a favorite Crayon.). We are both incredibly complicated constructs, what makes us attracted to each other on a magnetic level because our conversations just keep digging down.

At first, she was good about thanking me for calling her out and not immediately getting angry, but it didn’t last because I got on her last fuckin’ nerve. I’m not saying her reactions weren’t anything I didn’t deserve, just that I was thoughtless and it had bigger consequences than I could see on the current chessboard. You often don’t when you’re playing black.

I didn’t get anywhere in our relationship until I pushed over my king for the last time….. except it wasn’t, because Supergrover was used to having a fight and would provoke me when I said I needed time. I am responsible for not walking away at that point, but because autism, I’m not very good at that. So, we’d spend our days ripping each other apart when this is someone I wanted to love for all time.

It mystified me that we were fighting over how beautiful she was and I was losing. I’ve loved beautiful women since forever and I’d still never seen anything like her……… and I would say that if I’d never seen a pic.

Her letters were like uncut coke to an autistic brain. I lit up like a Christmas tree every time a notification came in. My senses were heightened because I’d been in burnout/depression when we met and the dopamine of new relationship energy pulled me out. I missed DC (I lived in Oregon then), and for as much as I thought of myself as a lovesick girlfriend obsessed with punctuation, I thought of her letters as “news from home,” too.

I had never had a relationship that was so deep emotionally without being physical, so it took a while to learn how straight women do that. Definitely something I needed to know because I’ve misinterpreted lots of signals the wrong way in both directions. One of the things that’s come from being so tired of walking in gray area is if I’m interested in someone, just tell them. Don’t stop to hem and haw over whether they’re straight or not. If they are, they’ll tell you.

I realized I was pigeonholing women by anticipating whether they were or weren’t based on a non-existent set of facts that are actually just stereotypes. I’m not saying that telling Supergrover I had feelings for her was wrong, I’m saying that I was an idiot for thinking it wouldn’t change things as much as it did, because she was already a monotropic thought process without bringing all that romance shit into it. I felt like a seventh grader. Ugh. Eyeroll.

The one thing I will not do is pretend it didn’t happen. Supergrover has to learn to deal with my feelings if she wants to be in my life because I do not want a relationship where only one of us is getting what we need. What I need is for her to stop the push/pull of adoring me when I adore her here- deeply, intimately… and saying “you’re the only one who ever ruins anything” after we have text.

If this was a movie, our indecision over whether to be good to each other or not would make the audience throw popcorn at the screen. So many times we have duelled, enough that now there’s never a winner because we decided to attack each other instead of the problem.

I want to be kind to her. I want to love her like no one else does, and I can be safe and secure in the fact that I do. It has been such a circuitous route that it is impossible to remember every turn. I do know that at some times, it has felt like Google Maps just told us to swim.

Right now what I am doing is making sure that when I’m older, I still have these memories. It’s not a lot to write down to move on. It’s a lot to write down to record. Hindsight is 20/20, and I cannot look forward before I look back. If I am only looking forward, I am not seeing the mistakes I’ve already made.

Autistic people take in information by reading a lot of the time because processing someone’s voice is more difficult than text. In effect, I’m writing down my memories because it makes social masking stick in my head.

Social masking doesn’t mean that I’m not being real with you when I do it. I am not trying to learn how to emote. I am learning how people receive it so that I can be more effective in my communication. It would be nice if people did the same for me, but neurotypical people don’t generally do that. It’s not how society works. If you are not having a meltdown and stimming by rocking, “you don’t look autistic.” If you hear people say that, they’re certainly not the type who’s prepared to be sensitive to it.

The world doesn’t owe me any favors in terms of excusing my behavior because I’m autistic. It is only a tool for me to learn how my reactions are different by having them classified into a group. I would like to make the whole world more accessible, but that’s not my call. My call is being able to act upon an outside force because it acts upon me, not cower away because I’m afraid to take up room.

For instance, I know that I rejected a lot of love in my equal and opposite reaction to Supergrover because it wasn’t the package I wanted. She thought I was being selfish, like a child who’s had their favorite toy taken away. Our problems weren’t child’s play, so I don’t know why she thought the solutions were easy. She took up an enormous amount of room in the relationship and, I feel, blamed me for wanting a solid 10-20% rather than a rolling approval rating with large spikes.

I’ve said it so many times, and mostly that’s just to convince me I did the right thing. It is torture in the moments I think I didn’t, because if so, I traded a lot for a little. There had to be multiple battles for me to concede the war, because I kept changing tacks and nothing got better. It was hell walking away, and an even bigger hell to stay and be caught in a gray area that felt like it had an electric fence. No matter how much I tried not to get buzzed, I hit a wire somewhere.

The two scenarios are so different because the honeymoon phase is so different from where we are now. It would have to have been that explosive to create this much pain.

Every action creates an equal and opposite reaction, but some elements are more stable than others.

I am not coming from a place of lack, begging her to come home. I am coming from a place of abundance that I ever got to love her at all.

For cesium, there was flourine. For me, there was you…. and the joy and light of being complete.

I’ll Have to Ask My “Wife”

September 5, 2023September 5, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What does your ideal home look like?

I may have accidentally gotten myself married off this weekend. Of course it’s all in jest, but I did make a genuine friend. It all started with an in-group chat re: a woman saying that she had just been on her first date with a woman, and was already sweating bullets over what to do next. Here’s my reply:

She’s a woman. She’s on pins and needles. Text her right now before she has a heart attack. And yes, I’m kidding. But trust me when I say that most women who date women are not direct and it’s confusing AF. You’re lucky you knew you were on a date and so did she.

And then I said, “and if you post in two weeks that you’re getting married, SO HELP ME GOD.”

It was then that the real conversation started, because I hit a nerve I knew I would. It’s just too easy, because what I’m talking about is fairly unique to women loving women and common in every country/culture. It has become a joke over the years, so much so that I’m surprised U-Haul hasn’t built an entire ad campaign around it.

So, anyway, a woman replied to me with a gif of a woman driving a U-Haul and I said “we need to focus on her right now. Stop flirting with me.” She thinks that’s funny and we keep talking. We have someone ask for a wedding invitation and someone offer to plan it for us- in “colors that are bold, yet somehow neutral.” I don’t think I’ve laughed harder in months.

We ended up friending each other because of a different part of the conversation. She says she’s an introvert. I said, “I was going to tell you I’m an introvert, but it’s so much worse than that. I’m a writer. And if you really need an excuse to poke your eyeball with a fork, I’m also a novelist.” Her reply? “Omg. So am I. Jesus. We’re already married.”

It was then that I knew she was a keeper. 😉

Well, in terms of a professional contact. I really don’t have many writer friends, so I asked her if I could friend her to talk shop. What started out as a joke turned into a genuine connection in the span of a few hours…. even if we don’t end up getting married in two weeks.

Here’s how my old life influenced my new one. For the last 10 years, I have had a boss ass bitch in my head giving me confidence. I am no longer one of those women who can’t be direct and just goes with the flow right up until they can’t. I wasn’t treating women like I had to be afraid of their opinions. It is not my job to be likable. It is my job to be myself and to let the right people gravitate toward me. It’s not being mean. It’s being in charge of my own vibration and making it loud enough that people either boost the signal or walk away. They have control over the amps, not my volume control.

So now, when I think of the perfect house, the only thing I require is a space that is totally and completely mine. Reflection is what I need to decide whether a problem does or does not go to 11.

As for decor, I haven’t even finished planning my “wedding” yet. Give me another two weeks. 😉

Many, Most of Them Mine

May 4, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Do you have a quote you live your life by or think of often?

This is going to sound like the most conceited thing ever, but the quotes I live by the most are my own. This is not because I count on them to tell me what I’m doing right, but what I’m doing wrong. I can hold myself accountable for my actions, publicly, and I am hugely capable of dealing with criticism given enough time and space. I can’t say that I never feel rejected, because it simply isn’t true. I react because I don’t take time for myself and really figure out what I want to say. My trauma reflexes work faster than my superego, where everyone should be able to operate. I go back to id over and over because I’m in survival mode. If I am writing down what I am feeling over time, then I can tell when I’m solidly all id and need to protect my energy, because giving more emotional energy to myself so that I can fly under my own power is the most important thing on earth. That’s because in order to get rid of my rejection echo chamber that turns everything from a simple mistake to life-ending crisis, I can never, ever count on external validation. I have shown that I am willing to run my life based on what other people think, and it doesn’t pay off for anyone on earth. I am not special.

I think one of the things that bothers me about the internet relationship is that because it was all written word, all the time, the punches felt so much harder. I’d hear whatever she said in my head constantly, and focus on the ways I wasn’t serving her by being her friend, because I didn’t get the reaction I wanted. I think that’s because she was unwilling to notice we had a problem and face it head on. When we’d get the most angry, we weren’t even seeing the other. We’d go into id jointly and severally. Or, I thought we were, anyway. I think this because she never thought she could do enough for me, either. We had that same worthlessness loop inside us because I felt horrible that we had problems at all and wanted to move past them, she thought I was being a drama queen and making it worse than it was.

It was even worse when she’d get offended at the smallest amount of teasing her ever. I don’t mean the big things that actually were offensive. It was even offensive to joke about our city mouse, country mouse existence. To not even notice that your reaction probably comes from something bigger than that always came across to me as “I don’t care how you feel.” When I told her how she was coming across, she’d change the subject. It didn’t matter if she changed how she treated me… to her, that is. I wanted to know it was going to get better in the future, and the only way to do that was to talk about it. You can’t build a relationship with someone who always sees conflict as the other person trying to hurt you, which we both said to each other on multiple occasions. We hit the same triggers in each other all the time. What wasn’t getting better was either one of us turning them off. Now that she didn’t fit into the mold of friend I needed her to be, of course I was out. It wasn’t because I couldn’t be that for her, it’s that I couldn’t be that for her anymore. She’d told me too much for me not to be absolutely wound into her the way I’m protective of Bryn, Cora, and Lindsay. When I say that just because she was chronologically older than me and it not meaning anything, I mean that I am older emotionally because I was allowed to grow that much more early on. In fact, she’s never had a big sister, and I have a feeling that went into our demise as well. Once we had one fight, she couldn’t see me as trying to protect her anymore. Being stern with her the way I would if any of my babies had problems- trying to say what I felt in a way that would help them without seeming judgmental. And stern is even the wrong word here, that’s just how I’d describe my writing because I can’t hug someone while I’m only writing to them.

I can’t tell them all the times that tears have been running down my face in empathy, and at the same time, knowing that if I don’t say what I mean and mean what I say, then I won’t get what I need out of our interactions, either. I can’t tell them how much they mean to me if they’re not looking for it. All I can hope for is that my words matter to them enough to go back and hear the message they missed in the middle of the mess. She thought I was ragging on her, I thought I loved her more than life itself…. but how can someone take in that message if they’re determined to believe that someone is hurting them, or wants hurt for them?

What I’m learning is that every time I go back to this topic, I hurt a little less because it’s a shallower well of injury. I care so much less about the outcome that I’m able to do the emotional work more objectively (I hope). I am trying to explain what happened so that I understand where I’m coming from. To acknowledge that I’m an angel and an asshole. That I am capable of every emotion in the spectrum. Sometimes I use my power of empathy for good, sometimes for bad, but generally when my propensity for bad decisions comes out, it’s from trying to get approval from someone else.

It bothered me that it pleased her to be thought of as the mom in my life, not because she became my mother, but because I’d describe her mother love as that feeling inside me when it was good. She’d cut and paste those lines into an e-mail and tell me she loved them…. while also not letting me talk about problems we had on that level, either. I took the good with the bad, loving her whole spectrum of emotions and respecting all of them. Hers were even bigger than mine if she looked at them that way. I chose to focus on her superego, she chose to focus on my id. I don’t blame her for that in the slightest, because I barked up the wrong tree. But my god is it easy to see how I got there.

I am not letting myself off the hook, nor her. Because for all the up and down, hers are the quotes I live by…. even the tiniest.

Sausage, bacon, light mushrooms.

Music and Silence

March 28, 2023March 29, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Here’s a SoundCloud link so you can listen rather than read.

One of my favorite pieces of music is “4’33” by John Cage. People think that it is four minutes and 33 seconds of silence, and that’s minimizing its power. It probably doesn’t make sense on a recording, but live, it’s incredible. The piece is not written so that the silence is the point. No. The music is the environment of the room in which it’s being performed. Every time it’s programmed, it looks a little different.

It also puts classical music on its head. Other pieces require you to be quiet. You still shouldn’t talk, but the music is in movement- dropped pens, unwrapping a cough drop, patting a toddler on the back. I’m generally cold, so my contribution is generally rubbing my hands like it’s the start of Toto’s “Africa.” Admittedly, it is “cheating,” because I am the rhythm section of something that’s supposed to be completely random. I feel like the ringer in the crowd. Again, silence is not the point. I have had people tell me to stop. The problem is that I am not a ringer on purpose. I really am that cold. More than once have I been called “Leslie No-Blood.”

Cold, though, is relative.

I will take being physically cold a lot better than someone being emotionally cold to me. For instance, caring about your reaction to my feelings more than you care that what you’re doing is hurting me. At that point, I don’t care what anyone thinks. It isn’t right for me to keep saying I’ll go along with thinking that your feelings are more important than mine. Then, it’s not a relationship. Healthy ones mean that sometimes my problem is more important than yours, and sometimes your problem is more important than mine… but no matter, we’ll attack either and it’s easier when both minds are on it.

However, if one person puts the other in the position of “your feelings don’t matter,” the relationship doesn’t deserve to survive. Until now, I have been the person who already thinks her feelings don’t matter. I will never again let it be reinforced by another. I have let people (particularly women) emotionally vampire me for years. They use me as their dumping ground because I’m willing to listen. I seemingly have a jackass magnet on my forehead, because nearly everyone I’ve ever met has wanted to tell me their life story whether I was interested or not.

One of my friends told me that I should be CIA because I was good at gleaning information. I’m really not. I’m just empathetic to the point of losing myself and people naturally let it spill because they feel safe. I don’t create an environment to be The Little Gray Man. I’m just capable of saying “there, there.” I have a feeling that if I *was* CIA, it would be under Napoleon’s instructions: “never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” Why go out of my way to get information out of people when they’ll just give it to me?

20-30% of the time, it’s great. The rest of the time, people are quite invasive of my space and have no problem stealing my emotional energy without thinking I might want it back. People allow me to refill when I can talk to them in the same way. It’s just that most of the people who have talked to me (generally on the bus or train when I’m in public, anyway) have no idea that it’s been 20 minutes and I haven’t said a word. Not only that, they haven’t even taken a breath long enough to give me an opening. It’s “hello,” big emotional dump, walk away. I allowed it because that’s what I’ve always been taught. Being good was not needing anything. Taking up so little space was a bad thing.

Now, I feel like there have been some instances of overcorrection, but I have learned something important. Extremely important. The only people that will test you on needing anything are the people who have benefitted from your silence. If they were getting something out of you being a friend, yet never speaking up, they’ll be so mad. Let them be mad. They’ll either get over it or they won’t, and that’s not up to you.

Brene Brown says that vulnerability is showing up to a conversation without being able to control the outcome. I haven’t allowed many of those people in my life because I didn’t think I deserved them. It was natural for my feelings not to matter, so why wouldn’t I let people steamroll over me as if I don’t exist?

I “all of the sudden” seem very selfish for needing anything at all. It’s not that. It’s that when you ignore me, I’ll get louder because your ears are clogged. If you don’t listen even then, it’s time to pack up. I can only do what I can do. The one thing I have never been able to do before now is stop the bleeding. I would just let other people use up every emotional resource I needed to use for myself because obviously, they were more deserving of it.

I am not saying that I am always blameless for everything. It’s impossible. At times, I’m excellent at being the world’s biggest asshole with a God complex. My only point here is that I come by it honestly. If I tell you in plain voice how I’m feeling and it’s ignored, if you don’t mean anything to me, I’ll walk away. If you do, I will repeat what I said until you acknowledge. At this point, no matter how much I care about you, I’m out. If I am putting myself out there as someone who is taking care of you, I will go to extraordinary lengths to make sure we have equal airtime. If your idea of equal airtime is that we both spend the majority of the time thinking about you, I will call it early.

Before, I would just stuff everything down. I would spend years being unhappy because that’s what I thought I deserved. With the set of relationships I’ve been talking about in the last few entries, they are all people to whom I have spilled my guts. It wasn’t that I didn’t have a place to go with my feelings. The entire problem with all of them is that when I expressed the fact that there was a problem in our relationship, they wanted to minimize, move past it, or institute a monster avoidance policy.

It’s just not worth it to go into the minutiae of who did what to whom, but I will say that all of them benefitted from me listening to their problems, but when I spilled mine, there couldn’t be a discussion. All the time they spent talking about their problems was good and wanting them to talk about our problems was bad.

All of the music would get sucked out of the room, leaving me in absolute quiet. I could think about our problems on my own. Laying them out was also problematic. Most people are intimidated by the depths to which I feel emotion. Most people don’t know how they feel as easily as I do, and are not capable of putting it into words off the cuff. I have compassion for that, because INFJ personalities are only 9-15% of the world’s population. Very few people deal in emotions the way I do…. Meaning I am not arrogant enough to think that I am more emotionally intelligent than others. I can bring the receipts, but you wouldn’t know it unless you’re asking for them. People do think I’m arrogant, though, just for being me. I know how I feel and express it well. I am also female, which lends itself to my arrogant reputation whether it is true or not.

….because men are visionaries whether they have the letters to prove it or not. I just have resting bitch face. Best not interrupt a man who can’t tell shit from Shinola. He needs all the brainpower he can get.

Speaking of my arrogant reputation, it is non-existent to everyone except the people I’ve let have power over me and now want to be an equal…. Especially those who don’t feel there’s a balance of power issue at all. Why would there be? If you already have it all, why would you give it up? Why would you complain when there’s not a problem for you. Both of us love you to pieces.

Women taking back their power always looks like arrogance, even to other women, because they’ve all been programmed to think we shouldn’t need anything. Someone breaking out of that mold is not to be trusted. I think it’s a large part of the problem in female leadership. Men aren’t used to women demanding things, especially when their performance is poor. They’re not bad at their jobs, you are a threat. It’s amazing how often HR thinks the same way.

I think the reason women in lesbian relationships are less willing to play is that they don’t have to deal with men’s shit at home. They are all at once the problem and woefully unprepared to deal with it on two levels. The first is that they don’t understand why things are the way they are. The second is that they are powerless to do anything about it.

Even if I was the CEO, some of my male employees would think I was worthless at it because I got it through some type of nepotism, whether from my husband or the collection of men I had to sleep with to get the job. I like the second option better, because I’ve had so many relationships with women that the idea of “sleeping my way to the top” is just too ridiculous not to laugh. They don’t put enough women loving women in power for that to be an achievable goal whether I was interested or not (I’m not).

Speaking of women loving women, someone called me out on my straight girl crush when I said, “don’t think I don’t know what I lost” by saying, “she’s straight. You were never in the game.” I’m glad they called me out, because that’s not what I meant. I didn’t mean that I lost a romantic relationship, because it was clear from the start that was never going to happen. I meant the complete idiocy it was to lay it out there in the first place, because then I was an untrusted entity and all the work we’d done previously was down the drain. You would have to know how important friendship is to me to know how seriously I mean that. My platonic relationships aren’t less important than my romantic ones. I feel deeply no matter what, which is why I only have two or three friends. I don’t have the emotional capacity to lay out that kind of energy for everyone, so I don’t.

What happens is, in effect, putting on a recording of 4’33 and grabbing onto the music in the room. It’s always there, humming, pulsating, rhythm on fire…. But fire is quiet when couched between music and silence. I have to find it, though. Else I’ll just rub my hands in the cold.

All the Things You Never Knew

March 16, 2023March 19, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

This is the most stereotypical thing you’ll ever read from the mind of women who love women. I mean, it is brutal. I will go into the lesbian falling in love with a straight woman HALL OF FAME. I just want to correct assumptions. I don’t need anything, I want it, and there’s a huge difference now that I don’t care if anyone likes me or not. I just don’t have enough time left to worry in terms of a second act. I will also not be recording this one because I can’t sit that long in this much pain, even though there’s glory, too. Maybe in a year.

You have trauma reflexes. So do I. I was taking everything you said as yelling at me and so were you. It devolved into madness and I was trying to stabilize. Future proof for both of us so that we could move the fuck on and love each other like we should’ve in the first place, when the connection was so explosive for both of us that it woke up everything within me. I paid attention closer, and I felt that was necessary because our story is a book series because I didn’t change all at once, like a magic wand. I changed because I did the homework and you sometimes would and sometimes wouldn’t, and that’s what hurt more than it helped…. and thank God I am not literally writing a book series on this. First of all, what a terrible idea.

You never seemed to realize that I was paying attention to you because I thought you could do no wrong, ever, as long as we were doing the homework as a group project, but we were just never in sync.

I’d say things like you and anyone you want to bring can be expats wherever Daniel and I are living, and you didn’t respond to it. I was always confused, and because I’d been in love with you, it caused me so much pain that I just couldn’t take it. I didn’t know if it was a good idea or not. I was scared to throw it out there, scared to say anyone you want, and I didn’t know how you felt about it.

I’ve always told you that I was just laying out my feelings, that I was writing like I was blogging. The way you reacted was frequently to feel like I was coming down on you instead of building our relationship, it had to be dead on brick by brick for a while. So that we could forgive each other and ourselves from some really deep shit and move on without those feelings constantly coming up to bite us, and I can’t think of a single problem we’ve ever had that didn’t escalate into thermonuclear war.

I loved you every day. All day. It will never go away, and I will love you until my last breath. Just because my trauma reflexes told me otherwise doesn’t mean that it was true. It was just true in that moment, that snapshot of my day. So many times I thought you lost your camera. Lost sight of the fact that it was for life because it had to be. There has never been an instance where I hashed out our problems in front of you and waited to see if I was correct. I wanted to know if I’d said something helpful or hurtful so that I could tell you what I meant if you had questions because you thought it was an attack and it wasn’t. That’s what I meant when I said that there were moments that shit had gone down at work and I was having a panic attack and neither one of us could handle the other’s emotions. We just turned on each other again… but never did we once go back to being ourselves, the ones that loved each other until we just couldn’t because we were the only people in each other’s lives where it was okay to go that deep because we’d been doing it so long we’d forgotten why small talk exists. It was intense and beautiful and fed me in all the right ways, but I never knew how you felt about it until I’d hit a trauma reflex and in the next few minutes whether it was verbal or in writing I’d feel like everything was gone. When I told you that, I was trying to goad you provoke you make you mad, whatever the story you were telling yourself and I told you that I’d done the homework. I fucking taught Microsoft Word to Brene Brown and I joked about it with you, but how in the hell could I have gotten this interested in resolving everything without her?

You didn’t seem to be curious when I was letting my feelings out about you when they were negative. You accused me of going into combat mode and stop hearing me and start fighting.

It was never me. It was someone else in the room, and I got that from a comment on my own marriage article. When we weren’t triggered, we each tried to bring light into the darkness and it always failed. I always had empathy for everything you were going through in terms of what you might feel about me laying out all my feelings, and you being so busy that you simply didn’t have time. I understood and waited in line. I’m still there. But if you choose me, know that love makes me as serious as a heart attack in a way I don’t want to be. I see how you’re struggling and I want to help you but I can’t if you don’t let me know what the problem is. Most of the tme, when you feel annoyed and angry, I’m just gardening. There are so many follow-up questions that you haven’t ever seemed to have time for… but again, I don’t sit in judgement of you. I lay out my feelings and you call me an asshole and before I can even take a breath I’m trying to find out why and when you’re doing it so that I can figure out which trigger I’ve hit and why. That way, I know not to do it anymore. When you don’t tell me what you were thinking and feeling about that, I get anxious because the only thing I want in the world is for us to enjoy each other and it seems like it is a thing that could happen and something it couldn’t and it’s confusing as fuck no matter whether I’d ever been in love with you or not when I have no idea what in the hell I’m doing to you when I write. Because then I could adjust, make it better, make it where you can lean on me again. But because you don’t see it, you see me casing and trashing the joint.

I couldn’t talk to you in a way where you felt loved and special because I couldn’t. My trauma reflexes would hunt me down and go for blood, and so would yours. But I didn’t want to be stuck in trauma reflex mode.

I wanted to return to the spectrum we’ve always had, which is that love wins. When I was teling you how I could love you and why, you ignored all of it and waited for your moment to gut me. There was too much pain and not enough teasing me.

I was trying to be funny when I talked about trading dick for a live-in chef and how you know you fucked up, but I was just flipping you shit. Your reaction was so hard core you are going to fuck up everything or that’s how I perceived it and spiraled out.

Do you really think that was about you? No, it was a trauma reflex kicking in. There was no apology phase except from me… the part where we hug each other and all is forgotten. I didn’t really think that was all you. I thought you were just having a bad day and I wasn’t the dog you needed to kick. They weren’t even there. It was the monster in your head and the ghost out to get you. I also know that I needed to be corrected, called out in love, but your way of doing it was to absolutely incinerate me when you know abandonment is my trigger.

I am choosing to resolve all of this shit if you are, but the longer you don’t speak the more it convinces me that you don’t want to do any emotional work with me when I told you there was no shortcut back to nice on this one and you showed up with such intensity that it made me lose my head for a little bit, dreaming about later in life when we’re all ancient, sitting on the back porch because you have nowhere to be and your kids are all grown and all that shit. It could be more if you were willing to move in my direction, but I don’t think it ever will be. I wasn’t focusing on you disappointing me, I was focusing on everything I needed to tell you before we were ancient, and I know that if you want to say it, you have to say it rightthefuck now because my mother went from having to wear a cast and being dead in the blink of an eye.

The reason I got so deep into our shit is because I love you, not because I hate you. It’s not a flirting, blushing love but day in, day out hard work. You live for the highs, not the lows. I gave you a letter that contained all the things about you that I love, and it was ignored. I don’t need you to take everything and throw it all away, because that’s what you did. I don’t think it was intentional, I think it was just my own trauma reflexes talking because I constantly think you don’t care when you only respond to me saying shit that makes you feel horrible. You don’t respond to me when I’m telling you I’ve been willing to be devoted in a way that couldn’t be duplicated, and again, I think it came across as goading and provoking, because my trauma reflexes aren’t smart enough to back down. So while I have things to say that are hard to digest, that doesn’t mean that I’m trying to load you up with guilt and shame. It means I love you enough to struggle until it’s right for both of us. It’s just not right for both of us, or at least right now. You seem to me to be happy this way, and I don’t even have to be angry about it because I know it’s just you responding to trauma and not burn the whole world down. I didn’t know you didn’t know that, so when you’d accuse me of throwing emotional bombs and trashing everything, I wasn’t asking for that. I was asking you to take it away and think about it while you need to be apart from me. Recognizing that your time is worth so much. Recognizing that In the Beginning I would have done anything for a walk and talk. And you know I’d do some shady shit if you needed me. If you needed me I wouldn’t stop for red lights.

Your story is important, more important than mine right now. Mine will come later, and I want you to fucking be there. I have been singing through the pain, and you should know me well enough to know what a big fucking deal that is. It’s my trigger, and I was leaning in. To have you not even respond was excruciating.

And if that feels like me goading you, it’s not. It’s recognizing that when you emote, I feel it deeply. You’re my friend and I have been in love with you in the past, so our issues on both sides are deeply seeded, seated for maximum root system. I have never, ever been saying that you are wrong and bad. I was saying “I think you are wrong about this.”

I have so much crap in my life that it was over the moment you said “you made me.” I don’t need people who think that way. But I can’t break the connection. It feels weird, but it’s correct on both sides. The thing is a direct quote from “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle.” “Just talk to her once and it won’t be weird anymore.” What I mean is about these topics. We only have to cover them one time and then we can move on… when our trauma reflexes aren’t constatly telling us that we’re disappointing each other. I am not you when I am with you and become you in some ways because some of your lines go through my head because you’re such an extroardinary writer that I can’t get over it.

But that doesn’t mean that I’m not allowed to have feelings about it. I would do anything for and with you if you’d just tell me how you feel. I am an INFJ. I don’t see the world as what it is, but what it could be. I wanted to build something with you, and when I told you there was a monkey wrench in that plan, you were silent.

Just like you, nothing intentional, whether it was bad or not. That’s what love does. It is a series of vulnerablilities, not all sunshine. That’s when we have to find it for ourselves, going back to a discussion when there’s not a chance we could change it, but doing something about the present. Feeling better and stronger in self esteem, being other aware and communicating, and I am not asking for you to be this way all the time. I’m asking for a tiny bit more than you can give, and that’s okay with me. I know why. We both need a step back. I also told you that you were welcome until I took my last breath, and then my trauma reflexes kicked in and it came across to me as “it’s always going to be this way. I’m always going to feel confused and lost when something big comes up, because you don’t spend your days in all that touchy feely crap.

Because if one comes out, they all do. That’s when it’s hard as fuck, but then it passes and you become more integrated. But again, only seeing through my own lens and not yours because I don’t know if I’m welcome in your life or not, because we both tell each other to fuck off at the exact moment we start getting somewhere.

But like I told you before, I’m sure you could get in touch with me if you wanted, but I have no idea whether you will or not. I’m not carrying a flame for you. I haven’t seen enough evidence that you’re willing to speak with me in my love language if I am willing to speak to you in yours. When I was telling you who I was, it was through my jokes and humor because that’s how I deal with enormous pain. Just enormous. I am totally cool with it now, But don’t think I don’t know what I lost.

Thus the jokes that make you cringe and let me blow off a little steam, just like you. We are so much alike in so many ways that it boggles my mind. Having you say that I’m painting my feelings as fact was rough, because my truth is my truth. I’ve been doing it the entire time. You only blink when our problem is about us. It is suspicious or angry. It feels like our emotions are struggling to get out.

You said “I trusted you” in many, many different contexts. Sometimes, it was because you felt like I’d screwed you over and I hadn’t. Sometimes it was because you really did trust me and it was fantastic or terrible depending on which issue we were talking about.

You thought I was trying to irk you in the most serious way possible and it didn’t calm you down that I told you I was laying out my feelings, that nothing I ever did would have anything to do with you, that my actions were my responsibility, not my obligation. That I was offering you love so profound you couldn’t even wrap your arms around it and your response was nothing.

That’s why I always knew what trigger I’d hit and when. But only after I’d done the homework and learned you enough to see you clearly. I could respond that way when I laid out my feelings, but if I hit a trigger in you, you immediately stopped seeing love and started seeing an incredible amount of negative energy. Why would I ever raise my voice? When I’m writing, it’s just stream of consciousness and I throw it out there to see what sticks, and the cycle continues because once our reflexes have calmed the fuck down, what I saw is that we loved each other with intensity, not that I was always ragging on you. That I couldn’t be counted on for anything but constantly saying we were done and not done. I know that’s not true, and I also know that you know it.

This is because I never knew if I was welcome or not. We couldn’t futureproof if our lives depended on it, and yet we need each other in a million different ways. You see it differently than I do, and it hurts so much that I’m just as miserable now as I was after my divorce and my mother died. I loved you that much that I feel that much pain. But what was coming across was that I was trying not to poke the bear, and you didn’t see that I was doing it because the lens through which you were reading was that everything was bad and this would never go away and why was I still on this?

Because we can’t move on until we fix this thing, this toxic cycle because that’s the hand we’ve been dealt and we have to manage the downward spirals, not assume that the other is trying to hurt them when it escalates. I have never tried to hurt you, ever, unless we were both in escalation mode. When that happened, our trauma reflexes made both of us scared of each other, when if we’d talked it out in person it would have taken a few minutes, but we didn’t. We chose to hash it out with seven percent of what goes into communication instead of just saying “I can’t with your writer personality. Get your ass over here.”

I don’t know where your anger is, but I feel it. Whatever we’re both fighting, it should NOT be each other. I told you that you could cry on my shoulder if you needed a place to go with your feelings, but I never knew if I was welcome to tell you that….. but we’ve been friends since Jesus was a boy.

Because you say nothing and I don’t want to live like that. I want to embrace my true authentic self, and I swear to Christ you’re always welcome in my life. If you show up BIG, and accept the love I’m offering and recognizing that we are just enough alike and just enough different and we both need to bend and sway instead of letting the tree disease.

You have no idea. None at just how much hearing your voice changed me. I got the idea that my voice was a mask long ago, and the idea to actually put it out there from you. The other thing I realized is twofold. The first is that hearing each other’s voices while we talked it out would have solved the problem nearly immediately. Secondly, not knowing you had a partner was brutal on many levels. Not knowing that you’d deleted everything led to the change you see now, but a huge fight in the moment because trauma on both sides. I tried to tell you that every day for too long and you never responded to it. I let you go because I was exhausted. I couldn’t go any longer without you being willing to engage in resolution and resurrection, and you focused on all the wrong things.

So did I, beautiful girl. I got the idea to call you that because that’s what I call Cora. It wasn’t trying to dive into history or anything like it, because I am stable enough to love you absolutely for who you are. You are a Doctor Who is a very bad patient (I can work Doctor Who into goddamn anything, just roll with it). The absolute only thing I ever asked you about that show even though it’s the biggest fandom in my life, you never told me how you felt about it, or if you even clicked the link. I thought you would do it because you love me, not the show. It was about Vincent van Gogh, and how someone didn’t save his life because he changed it, it’s that sometimes you can’t change your story.

Apt.

And you thought I was being a drama queen. It’s not that at all, it’s that your response was a trigger. When I told you that, you dismissed me. I never wanted to talk to you again in my whole life. But I made an exception with Daniel because he is important too. The reason the email telling you about Daniel was begging and pleading is because I told you that I never wanted to speak to you again and then found out that I hadn’t sent it. I didn’t want to trigger you.

I wanted you to show up, and you couldn’t or didn’t. Whether I know it or not is up for grabs, but that depends on you. Because whether I thought love was romantic or platonic, it’s been such an extraordinary experience, but you kept thinking it was terrible because our trauma reflexes constantly rubbed up against each other. When I told you that my letters were going to be received as me being an asshole whether I meant it or not, you had no idea what idea I was focusing on, and the idea has been she’s the most beautiful, most interesting, most puts my mind in hyperdrive person in my life so do anything to keep that relationship strong and healthy for the future. I am speaking with such love and trauma here:

“The longer you go without speaking, the longer I don’t think you want to do any emotional work with me.”

Your response was to show up big, and then when I emoted about you, you shot me to shit. It just feels like you can’t handle large emotions anymore, when to me that is actually the most valuable part of our relationship. That’s why I don’t wanna pay attention anymore. It’s that I feel like I am Putting everything out there , and you’re not. I am not your personal content creator. You are not my therapist. Both of those things are well established. However, you are the friend that agreed to listen. So am I. Nothing was ever a half ass threat to trigger you. I am sorry that you feel that way. How it comes across is you not taking my mental health issues seriously. When I told you that, you stepped all over my ass. I forgive you. I haven’t forgotten. This is because in that moment, you decided that your trigger was more important than mine. I even said that there are certain words that you say that send me into a blind panic, but you never asked what they were. Now you know.

I’m sure my response was sharp to you, and I was triggered.

To me, it was our love story and how it changed over the years to accomodate both of us. It was recognizing that I had my own demons where you were concerned, that I wasn’t ever being flippant or trying to hurt you, goad you, provoke you. This is what I am talking about in terms of a toxic cycle.

It was so much bigger than that to me, both including you as family and showing up big, but I would have shown up so much bigger than that. If you look at my letters through that lens, you can see it so clearly that even I’m frightened by it. I don’t know how to manage it.

And as I’ve always said, this is not about you. This is about me. I couldn’t stand that we were both in each other’s heads and hearts, and we couldn’t make it any better. Those things are both true.

I was crying when I told you that I had become the Lord John Grey you could love and not the one that you couldn’t. You couldn’t listen to “can’t you see that I am screaming for empathy and not with anger.

I’m also saying that I escalated. I hurt you. Screwed you to the wall. But we both needed to be selfish. Maybe this is a time of interim, maybe it’s not. But here’s what I can control. I can stop actively letting you into my life if you won’t tell me how I can be a better friend. You keep saying that you’re tired of letters that try to guilt you and it makes you delay writing back or putting me on the back burner.

Putting me on the back burner turned out to be a huge fucking stove. I’m frustrated that your responses are short and never about us. I know, beautiful girl, that you can’t. Both because of time and trauma.

We’re getting to the age where we need each other, but we’re not moving in the same direction.

If you want to show up big, it means taking “you made me” out of the equation, taking lecturing you out of the equation, all that. The spectrum is large. I have now had every feeling that can be described about you by now, and I’m still showing up even though it was really fucking hard. But as I told my friends, it was worth it.

It wasn’t my obligation. I could have gone on hurting about it forever and kicking myself, or I could ask you to compromise. Asking you to compromise was not the tack I should have taken, for many, many reasons.

Because my trauma literally lines up with yours. We irritate the hell out of each other, but it doesn’t mean there’s not something here. It means it’s gone until we can both fucking chill.

But to my mind, you’ll always be the one who stole my heart, and returned it stronger than it had ever been. I couldn’t have become who I am if you hadn’t been you. That’s the real story, and I felt like you lost the plot because I never knew yours. I asked you what you were doing, and it was just another emotional bomb where I wasn’t upset at all. I was genuinely asking “where are you, and where do you want to go.” I probably could have worded it better, but that’s what I meant.

In most cases, I could have worded things better because there was no context. You weren’t sitting with me, watching me write, asking questions when you didn’t know something, and me getting to tell you what I was feeling in my own tone of voice, so you know I’m not throwing emotional bombs. It’s a prayer of relief in the legal sense in that I am telling you where I am and where I’m going, and asking for resolution on the few things that still need closure. None of this is predicated on my gender or sexual orientation. It’s what having a relationship where both people are open and vulnerable means.

But again, you don’t have time for that and it is really, really okay as long as you carve out a tiny, tiny bit of tme to help me be less confused. You have the funniest bullet points in the known universe and I’m here for it.

This is the relationship where I’m willing to drop the funny with you. You have no idea what that means to me. I wore a mask through my entire childhood, trying to be funnier than I am, more polite than I want to be because sometimes I just didn’t want to engage. I never had the strength to dictate terms, and I’m not going to be that anymore.

Wanting to be liked has cost me so much, and so has not. But what’s different about not is that I chose it. It is mine.

I chose you. If you choose me, it’s on like Donkey Kong. If not, “may the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house.” I really do love you with that day in, day out kind off love. It gives me more strength than you can grasp, and I’m not sure that you ever have.

You are fuel for me, because once the fire was lit, I put it out. It may not have been the way you wanted or enough for you, but please know that I have always loved you as a complete person, not for your body. That’s shallow and inconsequential. I lit a glowing campfire. It keeps us all warm.

This has been all about consequences on both sides of the equation, where I could hear you say things like “I am furious with you right now.” Because I know you won’t be furious forever, and I will wait as long as it takes if you’re thinking that this is accurate and you want to reach out, but if you’re going to take it as more negativity than love, you might want to clean your glasses.

It’s your brain that turned me on. I think that should mean something, because I may be extraordinarily intelligent and paint my feelings as fact, but that’s because I got to it through you. That I could dictate terms, that I could stand up for myself, that I could say when there was a problem and do what needed to be done to fix it.

It’s a bigger ladder to get to me now that I’ve loved you, because I’ve learned to compartmentalize and focus on what’s happening right now. And what I’m doing right now is thinking about direction, and I always have been.

Sometimes I want you to return with something beautifully written, because I know that when I receive it, I’ve gotten a letter from the one I love the most, and no matter what it says, it’s valuable. Even the ones that drive me up the wall, because it’s a tapestry.

It has torn, but I have thread. I have stitched it up before, and I hope I will stitch it up again. I take nothing away from what I have and haven’t done. My reflexes are deeply intrinsic and have nothing to do with you.

I felt like I owed you the homework, not because it felt obligatory, but because there’s nothing more in the world that I want you to feel except Leslie loves me and we’re all good, it’s just that when issues come up, she will irritate and anger the living shit out of you because you don’t garden as a writer, and it’s a problem that I am… except that I have always been this way, a thinker in longhand. Neither one of us are the people we met, and we’ve never had a do-over.

If there is a God of the universe, I got them by writing to you. Every letter was a prayer in longhand. Every letter was how I process emotion from beginning to end. You do that with your mind, I do that with my heart. Maybe we can learn how to think and feel together. We are so different in some ways. Being empathic is a rough gig. I don’t mean that you are not empathetic, I mean feeling the whole world at once. It’s not that great. I am constantly emotionally laden. Writing is to deal with all that Because it is a comprehensive response to life.

There was never a chance that you were going to believe that I could call you out and love you for exactly who you are simultaneously, as if my feelings aren’t as crazy, wild as yours.

I never, ever want you to forget that, because even if it’s over I would do anything to prove that your sacrifices are not in vain. Just because I have to do a thing doesn’t mean I don’t get to feel about it.

We both do the things, just in different contexts. And you can see that so clearly when I lay out my relationships with other people. I seem to write beautifully about everyone but you.

When you’re the one I choose whether you ever choose me or not.

You’ll notice that I didn’t say you were ever in love with me, or that we weren’t taking in different realities. Our frames of reference were different because I had to get rid of the trigger that said I had to be with you to open up like this. I don’t. I just need to love you the way you were made. We both have different ways of being in this relationship, and that’s okay as long as we make the effort to speak in the other’s love language and not our own so that things are exactly are the way we are now, both of us butt hurt over what would be nothing if our trauma reflexes hadn’t kicked our asses. I asked you how we could move on, no response. But I swear on a six pack of Bibles it surprised the hell out of me that I got a response leaving me with a brand new asshole like two weeks later.

Do you see what I mean? Instead of asking about context, you went off. If it was a different day, it wouldn’t have been you. I have ripped you new assholes with as much dexterity as you. We are both so brilliant. I remember when I told you that you were the Hemingway of e-mail or some shit, that you write clearly and beautifully even when you’re angry and my response is “I’m not pleasing her,” but that’s not me. That’s my trauma reflex.

And if we’re really, really being dead honest, if we take sexual orientation out of the equation you could have written this about me.

And it would be better than mine.

Lopez, Island.

January 17, 2023January 17, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Trigger Warning: Teen Sex Abuse

I told you earlier that a friend was doing guided meditation on me, went down to the point I could, then pulled in a humorous story about Sam because I couldn’t take it. I couldn’t tell you another story in which I felt emotionally abused, because I was a ninth and tenth grader. At the time, I thought I was making friends.

I wasn’t. I was an accessory. The person chosen to sit in the classroom so that one of my friends and our teacher could get away with an affair. I unwittingly protected a sexual predator who was actually fucking one of my friends and I didn’t say shit. I don’t feel guilty for two reasons. The first is that I was never older than 15 in their presence. I don’t know what would have happened if I’d stayed at HSPVA, and I don’t mind saying where it happened because I found out later that everyone knew. The second is that I was in an emotionally abusive relationship with someone 11 years older. In my head, we’d each found love. Neither my friend nor I knew it was toxic until years later…. and I don’t think my then-love thought of it as abuse, either. I think she thought she was treating me like I treat my own daughter, the one I adopted through the rainbow flag. We are our own country. No woman is an island, to paraphrase John Donne.

Or at least, that’s what I thought about my friend and me. I thought Lopez definitely was…. she could get away with anything and my friend was so lucky. She got everything I wanted and a bag of chips. What stopped it from happening in my case is beyond me, because all the grooming was there. I just got lucky. Whatever it was that stopped her, I think it was positive now. She had me dead to rights back then.

I was just as genderfluid/genderqueer as I am now. I always felt a bit of white knight valor, as if saving her was up to me. It’s a pattern I struggle with to this day. I want to save everyone. Every little girl. Every woman…. and even though they’re a minority in terms of sexual violence, boys and men. I can’t think about children being put through any of this. Even if it’s just grooming that sets up a trigger and not actual intercourse. It’s especially egregious in little boys, because it’s before the weight of the world is on them to be a man. So they’re raped or molested while they’re still young enough to be sweet and affectionate and every bit as kissyface as little girls are…. and then that shit gets buried, because no one wants to hear their pain. Sexual trauma is difficult. It’s even more difficult to exorcise when “being a man” means “cut off all your emotions and never speak of anything but how angry you are.”

I feel it’s another reason I can love Daniel for all he’s worth, which is a hell of a lot. I knew him befoe life broke him. I knew him before anyone ever said “buck up, buttercup.” I had forgotten, but he remembered that our “first date” was to the Caldwell Zoo in Tyler, Texas. My mom was with us that day. I know she was, she was one of our substitute teachers that year… actually, I’m not sure that I had a year where my mom wasn’t my substitute in elementary except K-2. So many great memories, and Daniel was there for all of them.

For instance, my mom and John Brennan have both taken me to Egypt. It’s just that my mom was first.

The connection to Brennan is a scene from “Undaunted,” his autobiography. When he was young, he went to University of Cairo. Picturing John at like, 19 or 20 riding around the city high as hell on hashish and getting his ear pierced is just as much of a happy place as Beirut. I have John’s number. Invite him to Cairo, and leave an earring and some hash on the table. What I wouldn’t give to hear his stories, even ones I’ve already heard before, in his own patois.

My mom and dad went to Israel, Egypt, and Jordan when I was small. I have always wanted to walk the Bible like them, and was even more obsessed with the idea when Bruce Feiler published a book called “Walking the Bible,” an atheist’s journey. The ending is too rich to spoil, but he ends up Jewish (Beth dies, he was dead the whole movie, K has a daughter). They brought all kinds of cool stuff home, and then Mrs. Watson had to have her thyroid out.

Enter Carolyn Lanagan with all her cool Egyptian accessories.

Keep in mind this is a *substitute,* okkkkkkk. I have never seen anyone more dedicated to their job. Mrs. Watson was out for practically the whole year, and we didn’t watch a movie once. She ruined me for every sub ever. I never paid attention to any of them. I was a blogger even then, I just couldn’t type.

Though I can’t speak for them, I am sure most of my classmates will remember walking into the fifth grade hallway and seeing the lights dimmed, all the chairs arranged like the rows on an airplane, and the three fifth grade teachers handing out handmade American passports and *personalized* plane tickets. I probably also remember a little bit better than they do because of the time it took to create such a thing.

I am not sure, but I think my mother had a PC at home. I know I had an old one in my room, but I don’t remember whether she just used mine when she needed it. I know that Mrs. Watson had an Apple IIe, but I don’t think my mom used that one, either, because it wasn’t in her classrom. In any case, I was the computer person, so I made *some* of the stuff for her. It’s not like it was hard. It was Print Shop and a dot matrix. I can’t remember what banner it was, but it was something with a plane and a piece of paper that looked like a menu.

It was. The teachers took drink orders.

The cart came by as the lights dimmed and we “took off.” In front of us was a screen full of pictures from my mom and dad’s trip. I saw my mom picking out my souvenirs, and I knew they were mine because I already had them. That day I think I was even wearing my Coca-Cola spoof shirt, the one that said “Enjoy Torah.” We all felt good, literally on air. My mom was really good at that for kids.

It wasn’t until she put me in a terrible position that I started to hate her as much as everyone else who was hurting me, because she became one of them. She saw what was happening with my abuser, and that I was going to be coming out of the closet whether she wanted me to or not. When I was 13, she just gave up. She didn’t know what the fuck to do with a lesbian daughter, so me running to a narcissist was seemingly fine. She noticed, but it was too late. They had me.

Then, when I was 15, she heard me talking on the phone to a girl I was interested in at school. She told me that I would *not* talk on the phone like that, I would not cause my father to lose his job like that. I was terrified. I could cause my father to lose his job? What in the actual fuck are you talking about?

Hell wasn’t that she said it. Hell was knowing she was right.

Or, at least, her fears weren’t unfounded. In the United Methodist Discipline, it says that “homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching.” I personally think that being a judgmental bastard of an organization is way more incompatible, but no one asked me. “Open hearts, open minds, open doors.” What a crock of shit. They can’t even hear themselves out loud. They are also perfectly happy for you to attend church as long as you don’t want to get married or ordained or in my ittle 15-year-old mind, both. They’ll also thank you for putting money in the plate while denying you all of these things.

In my case, it’s an eyeroll and “you know we can see you, right?”

If I was still a Methodist and actually cared about the organization, I would have fought tooth and nail for equality. It is criminal how the Church has managed to mangle Jesus’ from “widen the net” into “the gate should have closed after I got in.” No one likes gatekeepers, particularly because no one is good enough to do the job…. which is to destroy the gate altogether.

It was in this righteous indignation that I stopped caring what anyone thought of me. I am one of the most empathic people I’ve ever met, along with every close friend or partner I’ve ever had say that I’m too intense for them at some point or another. It’s not that I don’t feel. I have to cut off my emotions to stay alive. Everything that is a weight on the world feels like it’s on me as well. I’m not egocentric, I was made for this….. sort of. It’s an INFJ’s lot in life.

For me, it’s A LOT in life. I don’t go a second of any day without feeling somone else’s pain. One person’s in particular is wound around me. Another person’s pain is so far inside me no one will ever find it. And then there’s the two women that ratcheted up my libido before it was supposed to be ready.

I was one person’s first choice. I was on deck for the other. One of them was at church. One of them was at school. Women to absolutely rearrange my insides whenever they felt like it. Sometimes it was being particular to me over my friend to ensure that it looked from the outside that she was objective while she was fucking my fourteen year old friend. Sometimes it was flirting that seemed innocent until after my reality cracked.

Neither woman was an island…. or at least, the one I loved wasn’t. She was watched meticulously. She met with my mother and agreed to stay away from me. It injured us both and lasted three days. Because, see, we needed each other… just in completely different ways.

Lopez is an island.

The one true sexual predator out of all of the abusers I’ve known. It wasn’t me, but it felt like it…. especially when said friend wanted to hide the fact that she was in this relationship and probably also thought that she needed to take care of The Leslie Problem in case I got designs on “her woman.”

She was a visual artist. She made up a postcard calling me a predator and saying that I was out to harass/rape/whateverthefuck all the straight girls and made copies. Put them in people’s lockers. Had a shitty picture of e on them and everything. I mean, if you’re going to go to the hassle of making a poster that shits all over me, at least include a picture that actually looks decent.

That is how I eventually turned into an island. I shut down. It just took about 25 years. I didn’t know how fucked up my humor reflexes were until I got called out by three straight women that I love to the ends of this earth, and I blew it. The worst part was only realizing it in retrospect, because I lost all three friendships at the same time.

I am only now being networked again at my own hand. I haven’t had enough strength. I disappeared into myself for every reason imaginable. It’s nice to have a close mom friend, because I don’t have a mom. She’s not my replacement for her, just the one I go to when I have those sorts of issues. It was actually pretty funny, when I asked her if she could answer those mom questions, she said sure…. as long as I didn’t expect her to answer the same way that my own mother would have.

I choked a bit and said, “I think of you and my mother being alike in the same way that Tom Brady and I are both 43.” I have grown since then, I am 45. So has she. Before, she identified as a mom. Now she identifies as a dragon. Or a wolverine. She alternates, but whatever it is, it will eat your face off either way. The fire, teeth, and claws aren’t for me. They’re for anyone who dares try to hurt me. There are several people who I know would be under her pool if need be, but even though she’s a beast, she’s on a leash.

It’s the kind of love that makes me fight for my baby girl just as hard. We’re not blood, we’re queer. This is how we avoid the institutional pain of isolation. I adopted Cora so that I wouldn’t be an island, and neither would she.

How Edu Saved My Ass -or- Yogurt

December 22, 2022December 23, 2022 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Last night, Edu made curry. I made a point of talking to her while she cooked, because I knew she would feed me if I stood there long enough. It’s not that I’m lazy and can’t cook for myself. It’s twofold. The first is that I would rather eat a Pop-Tart or whatever (crackers and cheese, etc.) and call it a day. Edu makes me excited about food.

She knows that when I show up, it’s because it smells good. This was shrimp, dal, rice, onions, chilis, and masala. Masala is any spice blend in India- garam masala is hot spices, but Edu had already added fresh peppers- gods the fruit was beautiful. Heat tastes so much better, fresher off the vine. The difference is stunning.

That being said, I am the type person that does like the thrill ride, but I need enough fat and sugar lining my stomach before I take it on. It also helps if the dish is very, very hot to cool it down a little. In India, that means plain yogurt or raita. I like both, but I could eat plain straight out of the container.

By this point, I don’t even know who I am. Like, what the hell even are these? Carolina Reapers. F ME RUNNING WHAT ARE YOU DOING?

I don’t think I’ve ever been so high in my life, and I’ve taken caffeine and Ambien TOGETHER. My bathrobe and my SpongeBob doll talked to me all night when I was 19. The story behind it is really innocent. I didn’t know that Ambien wasn’t really sleeping medication. It doesn’t knock you out in that way. It’s an amnesiac, and you basically go into a fugue state if you’re amped up on something like caffeine. There is one Canadian in particular that will know what I’m talking about quite intimately, because we once had a hilarious conversation in the middle of the night where he stood on his head because of the same combo….. and didn’t even remember picking up the phone in the morning.

I thought of myself as still dating Meagan platonically. I would say that she didn’t know that, but she did. She knew it was a big deal when she came to visit her parents, and she pulled out all the stops. I don’t think I’ve ever thanked her for this…. She even came home from college either in the second semester or the fall of her sophomore year. She took me to Starbucks and we had our classic high school date. It was so romantic, but only in an Anne Shirley and Diana Barry sort of way. I was extraordinarily observant of the fact that Meagan was never coming back to the United States under any circumstances. High school was it.

If there’s anything about my relationship with Meagan that still burns me up after all these years, it’s that my parents are still in Houston and hers aren’t. No more dates, even platonically. All hope is not lost, though. Here’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever done for Meagan in my life.

Meagan used to be married to a woman named Deah. Deah and I had our differences, but she was fully aware of how much I loved Meagan because I told her that all the time. I am sure she still looks back and laughs over how pathetically in love I was with my memories. Because you see, when I looked at Meagan, I didn’t see the capable & successful massage therapist, wife, and mother. I saw my little girl on a high school soccer field, the whistle blown and the game stopped……. and the forward who didn’t hear the whistle and kicked Meag so hard she went down. If you want to find my smallest place, the one where I feel the most emotion, just talk about that game. I dare you. It won’t be pretty. I ran down to the field and would have been able to get to her if I hadn’t been stopped. I looked around at the crowd. Oh, shit. Now I’ve confirmed her mother’s worst fears…………………

Deah, knowing absolutely everything there is to know about this, decided to surprise Meagan for her birthday one year (I forget which). Meagan was equally enamored with me in a first love kind of way. We’ll never go back, but we can still cry about how obsessed we were in 1996. So, back to Deah.

I was very, very surprised to hear from her. She said that I should come up and spend the weekend, because she wanted to do something big for Meag. Oh, hell yes I was in. That’s my girl right there.

Because here’s what those dates our first year of college did for us. The first one was AWFUL. I was still so upset about our breakup that I couldn’t really enjoy myself. I was jealous of the women she was actually romantically interested in because I had basically picked them for her by telling her about a college group that was queer on her campus, because I was thinking about transferring up to University of New Brunswick after I was done with junior college.

But that was just the first one. After I accepted that I was TX and she was NB, we were able to build on a friendship instead of thermonuclear war. As a result, she was my first girlfriend, and she’ll be with me until I take my last breath, because my memories are pure and beautiful where she is concerned.

Off I go to give my girl and I an emotional roller coaster for the weekend where Deah just got to sit and gloat at her awesomeness, which was entirely deserved. I really only remember two lines from that trip, one funny and one that hacked me in half.

I don’t know if this has ever happened to you, but sometimes when people are awful to you, you get an apology you never asked for and yet mightily deserve. She apologized for breaking up with me. That wasn’t new. It was the context. She didn’t apologize for being a bad kid. She apologized for not sticking around long enough to see what would have happened had we become partners as adults, because, and here’s the kicker. It made me cry……….. she thought it was something that we would have been very good at and she was sorry she never got the chance.

In what universe would that not take your heart and beat it within an inch of your life? Everything I had ever felt about Meag (and it was Niagra Falls) just rushed to the surface of my skin. Outwardly, I didn’t say anything. Inside, I was 18 years old, crying for myself and for all the missed dinners with our own kids.

I also had to get angry to get over it. My inner monologue ran thusly.

“HOW DARE YOU TAKE AWAY MY CHOICE! HOW DARE YOU NOT ALLOW ME TO FORGIVE YOU! HOW DARE YOU NOT TELL ME ABOUT SOMETHING LIKE THIS UNTIL IT WAS SO ENTIRELY POINTLESS?”

But that’s why she told me. It was pointless to her, so she didn’t attach any emotion to it. I am all emotion all the time, so it wasn’t tantamount to admitting to myself that I was still in love with her and I should drop everything and become Canadian right this very minute forever and ever amen, though the idea still doesn’t suck.

It was acknowledgement of death, grief, and loss. Our relationship has died. Our relationship has risen. (We haven’t talked in years.) Our relationship will come again. (See what I did there, Dana and Counselor?) Our relationship was just too hot to handle for a spectrum of reasons.

But I will never in my lifetime forget when Meagan and I were two peppers, and instead of being a third, Deah was the plain yogurt that cooled everything to the right temperature.

So, for a few paragraphs, I want to write directly to Meagan. Please be quiet and respectful. Take off your shoes in the house, my girl is Canadian.

Dear Meagan,

I wouldn’t be myself if I didn’t introduce and close by saying “I love you.” The difference between you and all the other people I tell I love is time. It’s been 27 years since we’ve even kissed and held hands, but I love you more now because of those 27 years than I ever did as a mere child.

27 years of loving each other so much we couldn’t breathe. First because of attraction, then because of confidentiality, honesty, compassion. All the things that we really need in our friends, you presented them to me on a silver platter. 27 years where I would have literally died rather than watch you go through pain.

I am always yours, whether you need me or not. I will always love you, whether you need me or not. it’s been 28 years. There is nothing on earth I wouldn’t do for you. No boundary that would ever stand in my way. If something was going on with you, I wouldn’t even wait until we hung up to make my way to the airport.

Tony and I will be waiting in front of YOW with snacks and Starbucks. Get in, loser. We’re going home to Texas for some R&R with the boys. You can picture it, can’t you? You and me, John and Tony, O, J, T, L? It doesn’t matter that we’re not together. We’re good enough friends that we’ll fake it and make everyone crack up with laughter, because we aren’t a married couple, but we can sure as hell act like it. Surely I have enough practice at annoying the fuck out of you by now.

I love you,

Leslie

p.s. When I am chilis, you are plain yogurt. When it’s your turn, you be the Vindaloo. I’m yogurt. I’m cool.

I am editing this entry to tell you the funny story that happened on my trip to Ottawa. Meagan and I were setting up her living room like a coffee house so we could get that intimate vibe of talking with friends, and I made the tea. I was particular about the tea, because I’m particular about all beverages.

That reminds me of something I need to tell Sam…. hold please.

The way I make my coffee so good is to use the scoop that comes with the machine and take the time to level off every tablespoon. Use 1 LEVEL T of dry coffee for every cup of water. It will mellow out and be absolutely delicious if you use the same ratio with cold brew. Just set it up in the fridge at night and it’ll be better than anything Starbucks could ever dream of making. Give me Cafe Bustelo or give me death.

It’s not like Sam makes coffee wrong, y’all. It’s that I was in charge of it one morning and she asked me specifically what I did different than she did and I didn’t answer her. I mean, what are the odds that I walk into a relative stranger’s house and her coffee is the one I’ve obsessed over since I worked at Tapalaya, in Cajun fine dining.

We had our own delicious coffee, Cafe Du Monde, of course. I drank A LOT of it because it was coffee and and yet it was only half-caf because of the chicory. But there was a Cuban restaurant within walking distance of Tapalaya, so I don’t remember if Chef and I ever went together, but we definitely took turns getting Cafe Bustelo cups of coffee and lattes.

Speaking of half-caf and chicory, Cuban coffee doesn’t play. Two Bustelo lattes and you can smell numbers.

Back to Meagan and Deah and the living room and the tea.

Meagan asked me how I made my tea so goddamn good. I said, “I steep it for 11 minutes.”

Meag said something like, “what’s so special about eleven minutes? That seems oddly specific.”

Without even a hint of irony and not trying to be funny, I brought both Meag and Deah to tears.

I said, “I steeped it for 10 minutes and it wasn’t long enough.”

And scene.