Reconciling in the snowdrift

I miss you. I do want to make up. I want to just walk into that wordless hug, or that childish awkward, "Wanna be friends again?" To drop the dispute. Knowing it will happen again, knowing nothing is solved. Realizing that the part of you that screams at me on the street is the same part of you that leaps onto the stage to belt out Modest Mouse songs, in a hat. Realizing that to love someone means loving them not in spite of their shortcomings, nor because of them, but that all these pieces are inseparable, the stained-glass artwork that is our beautiful beautiful loved ones. That if I didn't love you, I couldn't see this, that I wouldn't have this longing for you, that all I would remember is the shudder that once I knew a person who was insane and wild, that I didn't trust, that made me nervous. But when you love that person, you don't remember them with shudders, even the slamming doors and the fear and the scenes in public. You chuckle and you roll your eyes and tell the story with a lightness you didn't feel when it was happening, and you are glad that at this moment that story is in the past, and that in this moment you aren't wishing you could crawl under the table, or wondering at what point this situation becomes more than you can handle. You love them. It isn't scripted, it isn't something you'd recommend. It just is.

Your family. Your lovers. Your friends. If you don't love them, their nutty moments stack up on the list, chalk marks you weigh trying to decide when to cut them out, how intimate is safe. And sometimes even when you do love them. But when they are gone, it's easier to see. The ones you don't love, slip so easily away, a fish back to the sea, and you can barely recall their face or why you were holding them to begin with. The ones you love aren't fish, though. They are your friends, your relatives, your lovers. Primus, Secondus, Tertius. Pieces of you. Pieces you miss.

I want you in my life. Secundia. Not as a perfect story. As you. As this wild and unpredictable force with a laugh that, when you are really inside of it, can turn every head in the room. With all of your insecurities that make you avoid everything and suddenly, inexplicably, leap into a gigantic overwhelming project that you pour all of your talent and cursing and fervor into, creating something so beautiful that there is no possible gratitude that can make up for the outpouring of your soul, into this, this project unworthy of your art. I want you happy, content, but yourself - and I know you live a life that is so beautiful precisely because you spend so little of it truly happy and content. I know you miss me. I miss you, too. I don't know how to make up - to let you be yourself, when I know how unhappy you are, to remain true to myself, instead of giving in to what you want me to be. I don't know how to love you and also let us both be ourselves.

I want you, Tertius. I want you in my life everyday, to wake up next to you, and feel your energy as I drift in and out of consciousness, safe and familiar and yet not me, not blood and not predictable. Unknown and yet steady, deep and true like ocean currents, so soft under the surface of the water. I want you to be yourself, to stand apart from me. I want you to be here, though, to be a part of my life, too. To be in arm's reach. I want to know you are safe, even though you don't wish it. You struggle against me wrapping you in bubble wrap, and thrash out against me spinning webs of protection and worry and pulling all my charms and resources to make your life more predictable. I know you don't want it. I know it isn't you. But I know I will keep doing it. And resent you for not recognizing it as love.

Running away into the snowdrift like the characters from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Recognizing the dissonance between my need for perfect control, and my recognition of my heart as the one who will, when truly in love, toss it all aside, toss all wisdom and responsibility and rules, and run into the snowdrift. Recognizing that the snowdrift is always inexplicably safer, warmer, more ideal than this world I am so carefully building out of toothpicks. The toothpick world never comes close to the joy or happiness of the snowdrift, and yet I will build it, I will always build it. Refusing to make eye contact with you, Primus, insisting that this time will be different, this time you will not get to sweep it away that easily, this time you will acknowledge what you did. Feeling strong, in a female talk show way, but not good, not whole.

We are supposed to be able to build that toothpick world, with enough therapy, and good choices, and sobriety, and selflessness. We aren't supposed to need the snowdrift, just as I shouldn't want to walk back into his embrace after that horrible night where he made me cry, hyperventilating in front of the bartender, this man who isn't even my lover, or family, who has no right, no right to hold this territory in my heart after these scenes. The family members who make you feel, over and over and over for decades, that you are worthless, that you have no value. And the people who tell you family doesn't matter, that you should do this and do that and tougher boundaries and less contact and family isn't blood but the people you choose that build you up and YES. Yes to all of it. And no to all of it.

Because when you love someone it isn't the same. It isn't just about the mechanics of setting up a family-substitute. You aren't just being old fashioned. You know the costs. But one of the costs is that it isn't a fish swimming away, but a piece that is still connected to you. That the easiest thing to do is to distract and pretend and find excuses not to connect or think or remember, because the horrible awkwardness of standing in the room with this entity that both is and is not your loved one, because you are both so distant and uncomfortable and desperate to reconnect without having to build it back up, toothpick by toothpick, for the thousands and millions of toothpicks it takes to rebuild that world between you, where you trust each other and forgive each other and promise to do better next time, even though you know it probably will be just the same. Every month, a waning crescent.

The snowdrift says it doesn't matter. It doesn't fucking matter. Set it down, and let it go. And walk back into that embrace, and yes he will make you cry again. And yes your family will make you want to die again. And yes your lover will say the cruelest thing imaginable and will stare at you vacantly when your heart is bleeding in your hands and you will cling onto your pillow one week out of each month, reeling from hormones bleak and bitter that paint so sharp and hateful a picture of the life you watch snap back into 'reality' a few days later. The snowdrift laughs at all the seriousness, so absurd all this pain when all you need to do is put it down and play with your friends, kiss your lover, call your mother, call your crazy friend and beg for a ride in the sportscar. And apologize even if it isn't your turn and even if he doesn't respect you and even though his behavior was unforgivable and even though the things he said/she said will come back, echoes whispered by your monthly ghosts to stab you over and over when you don't expect it and think its over.

Because they aren't the only things that come back. Primus picking you up and feeding you lobster when you were sad, dropping it at the door and running his germophobic self away, listening to you freak out, and understanding what it meant to swing that pendulum of neurotransmitters. Secundia had your back, fierce and proud of you. Tertius rolling over and curling around you, seeking you out even in his sleep. And the knowledge that it isn't all up to you, in any case -- they aren't waiting in the wings, and apology or no, each break is there, and their choices matter as much as yours. Perhaps the moment will come to run together into that snowdrift, or to painstakingly rebuild those toothpicks, and perhaps they won't run, or won't build. In this moment, as "Float on" pipes through the women's washroom, as you watch the water spooling down the drain, and breathe gratitude for every intimate connection with every friend, every relationship of value and beauty in your life, each and every one with its own blend of joy and pain, moments on the stage and moments on the street, it is enough to admit that your love and your estrangement can exist in the same space. Because if you didn't love these people, you would let them slip back into the sea. The ones you keep are the ones who cause you pain. They're the only ones who can.

The waiting

Waiting to dance is the crushing destroyer of the most determined spirits. Dancing happens so late. So incredibly late. I've been awake for weeks at this point, teaching & cataloging & driving & doing female social duty & navigating to strange places & sending kids off to new adventures & disciplining & Christ, there are still hours and hours to go. Dancing should happen earlier. I should be able to stop into a club at 7 am on the way to my car & rev up for work, process some of the physical tension. No wonder I'm in knots - I can't wait the interminable wait for the dancing. 

Fire-rimmed eyes

"11 If a son asks for bread from any father among you, will he give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will he give him a serpent instead of a fish? ¹² Or if he asks for an egg, will he offer him a scorpion? ¹³ If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him?” 
Luke 11:11-13

I give good gifts to myself. I should - I know myself and my desires quite well. Unfortunately, I don't always trust myself. I begin to suspect that there is a serpent in the box and I run away, leaving the perfectly selected gift behind.

How do you recognize truth? Can you feel it snap into place like a crisply-formed puzzle piece? Does truth look truer, or less true, in hindsight? Can you trust yourself, and how much?

I write truth down. I highlight it in books, and record the words on scraps I tape to my walls and memorize and recite. Books I have been scribbling in for decades, holders of truth. Theories I'm working out, because it always seems like truth is evolving. Little bits added to a rubber band ball that never decreases in size, no matter how old and inelastic the rubber becomes. Newer, springier, fresher bits added to the outside, ready to withstand drops and scrapes, pressing the older pieces inward to a formidable core.

Sometimes those inside pieces show up in my dreams, or in the speech of others, or in the contrapositions of new rubber bands.

Sometimes I can recognize truth like I recognize a dog breed: I have no idea how I know that is a Maltese. It just floated up to me.

But most of the time I think truth recognition is more work, more conscious. It happens like understanding factoring: slowly, building up the necessary bits in class after class, lots of frustration that it isn't coming easily, lots of guessing and getting right answers even though I can't explain how the process works, until one day in college it clicks in.

Also, I feel truth. In my stomach. Lies feel like warm mayonnaise and albumen sandwiches after a heavy night of drinking Mai Tais and red wine. Truth feels like cool woodland breezes on your face when your toes are warm, like a singer hitting a note with perfect pitch, like the smell you forgot you liked so much until you open a door and meet it again.

Truth like my sister telling me most men are good. Most men want to protect women, to help them and take care of them. That the chances are, a random woman falls in a gutter and a random man will pick her up. Not to rob or rape. Just to help.

Every fiber inside of me resisting this logic, no no no. No. Men are mercenary. This is their nature. There is no altruism, there is only machinations and destruction you haven't yet decoded. Battening the hatches in my mind, even while some part of the rubber band ball recognizes itself, and is glad to wrap this truth around. 

How would you live if you weren't always on guard against hit men? What would trust free you to experience?

I dreamed last night of my lover. He was walking toward me down a long road, at night. A voice from my team of warriors told me he was joining us in our upcoming battle. I watched his slow approach. His eyes were outlined in glowing fire, thin bright tracings like kohl made from white-blue lasers. I did not believe the voice. I watched him, expecting him to reveal himself as an enemy. He didn't, but he also didn't speak or hurry, just continued to slowly walk toward me with his glowing eyes. I weighed the possibilities of his loyalty, trying to decide how close I could allow him to come before I decided whose side he was on. I woke before he reached me.

I want to weep and rail when things don't go my way. Swearing temper tantrums. I want to orbit & shoot sparks out of my fingers when things go the way I wish them to, embracing the world with endless arms. Hearing people, friends, pity me for my relationship is at once a source of consternation and amusement. Have you heard me? What do you hear? What do you make up in your head when you hear the story fragments I tell you?

The judgement of others, their emotional reactions to my life, used to be a scary movie, this forbidding thing I avoided but couldn't stop looking for, hating and hiding from and on some level craving. Tell me you think I'm wrong, you think I'm being wronged, let me prove you wrong, let me convince myself I am Amazon strong by the sound of my own defense.

I'm trying to practice just smiling.

The Zen monk story, "I put that woman down hours ago, why are you still carrying her?"

Let them be concerned, let them believe you wrong or weak. Let them. There is no screeching in minor key. Smile. How do you feel at this exact moment? Is it worth trying to explain? Let it go.

So many many grains of the texture that make up a relationship, a life, that will be largely invisible to anyone outside of your skin. And, it's ok. The lack of perfect understanding is not a threat. My companion's feelings, or misunderstandings, are not my responsibility. As long as I can say I am true, and reflective. As long as I am listening to my tuning fork, the off-key note of another is not a problem. They aren't screwing up my song, they are playing one of their own.

His blue inside flame, like the oven that bakes my bread, heats my living room when the radiator is cold, its pretty periwinkle flickers that comfort & nurture. My hesitations are okay. It means I am learning. I'm not used to seeing inside, despite how many times I've said I wanted it desperately. What do you do once you get what you want, that treasure you couldn't admit to yourself you wanted, because it wasn't what you felt you should want? What if you wake up one day and realize there is no struggle, because the battle you were fighting was to give yourself permission to enjoy what you already have? When you have defined yourself as a creature of desire, what happens when you realize you've been unhappy at not having things which would make you unhappy to posess? What is left to long for? Can hope abide without decay, without ageing to fear of loss, possessive hoarding, dragon-guarding a clutch of jewels you dare not use?

Make a different choice. Want not what you think you should want, but what you actually want, and choose to enjoy the gifts you have given yourself. 

Glissance

Be careful what you wish for...

"October 11, 2009

Wanderlust. Escapism. Noticing the bars on the cage. Hard to see the benefits of stability, every reminder of it becoming an unreasonable irritant. "I love yous" don't sound the same anymore that they have the ring of metal clanging shut. Irrational, foolish, spendthrift & wasteful. Baseless discontent...I don't want your care or concern, while you give your adventure away. I want space to breathe, and rage, and weep. I want my own adventures that have nothing to do with you."

"November 10, 2009

...once again disappointed at being acquiesced to, disappointed that my words are automatically assumed to be correct, when I am forming my ideas after the words have taken shape in my mouth. How can I be the smartest person in this situation, when I know so little?
I don't know what he knows, or feels, or falsifies; I am not permitted access. My effusiveness traps me, the only words and ideas I get are my own. Where is the other voice to challenge me, to help me define my thoughts? It gave up on me, it takes my words as ultimate truth - me, who was always the first to point out how ephemeral, how mercurial, how chameleon my words are. I don't know what I think if all I hear is me. I need counterpoint. I crave comparisons, connections, dispute. I do not want to be right, if it means I hear nothing new."

"December 21, 2009

...the siren call of my own solitude, the adventure I cannot quite peer from my place on your breast. What else am I missing, besides my time at sea? What does not wait for me out there, what wisdom, what truth, what new perspective, what experience I cannot fathom? I can only hear rustlings; your breath is too loud. Even a few steps away, I catch merely a faint hum, full of delicious promise."

"April 11, 2010

Recognizing my own need for solitude, to write, to think, to use words, reflecting and composing and synthesizing. And finding another who will interact with me in emotional language, hear me, and offer me new thoughts to consider."

When I am agreed with and believed, I want to be challenged. When I have a committed companion, I want to be free. Stability stifles me.

So, I think, I need more freedom. I will reconstruct my world to allow for discovery. And yet, when I have an adventure, I want to found a city on that adventure and put in plumbing. I love my vacation so much, I want to move there - not realizing the very quality of a vacation is that all of your pots and pans are someplace else.

"September 7, 2009

And I wonder, am I really strong enough to be vulnerable for both of us...?  Am I really so good at this and so powerful that I can throw myself under his feet again and again and be ignored, that which I hate more than anything?  It is intoxicating to think so, to think that I can make a difference.  And it is also true that I love without reason, because I can, because it is who I am, because once he was vulnerable and perhaps will be so again. He will come, or not come.  He will be leaving the whole time, if he comes.  And the child soul inside of me will cringe and cry to see him packing and leaving, and will think that there is a thing I can do to stop it, or delay him.  But he will pack and leave over and over everytime, using his power to hold off the world...[H]is power is to say no, and if his power is to say no, how will he ever say yes?"

"November 25, 2009

There is gratitude also for the outside force, the other entity, pausing me, providing me with the chance to gather my wits and consider my actions. As much as I want to control, and as little as I enjoy being denied, I can appreciate that without [his] flight I was ready to do mad things..."

"November 28, 2009

Do you think of them, those moments? When I have thought I knew your mind, I have always been wrong, reading emotion & analysis into you, because I want it to be there.
I think you do not consider those moments, of me. I have been packed away like a copper pan you never use, impractical, easy to jettison, a charming illustration when the bar chatter calls
for something shiny, if you recall it at all.
But perhaps the copper pan is more useful, perhaps it gets more time in your synapses. After all, the pan was a thing you selected, and have packed and unpacked, carried and stored. I am just a person, so much more disposable to you, and not someone you chose at all.
I wonder about objects I put into your world: the scotch, the case, the letter...But I don't want to hear the answer, that the scotch has been drunk by strangers & enemies, the letter discarded the moment it was opened, the case storing ten thousand other things that occupy your brain that never thinks of me, not even once for all the times I have longed for news of you."

I want growth, which always means wanting something I don't have. Is it better, then, to want something that is out of your control, than to want something you can have at the price of another's pain? Is it better to want in, than to want out? 

"Our doom, then: the inelegant dance of intimacy, closer, farther, turning around. Tightening our grasp till we meet resistance, flinging apart to recover."

Are there any other choices besides wanting in or wanting out? Choices that don't require violence to my own soul, remaking it into a grotesque caricature? I can accept that there is not growth without pain, no living apart from change. But what I do not know is how to enjoy the wanting in, or the wanting out. And if the only enjoyment comes from the slivers of time in between them, or from refusing for a time to think about the stage I am in...Horrible. I refuse to accept it. There must be a better way. 

I have always been a terrible Buddhist. I do not know how to want less. The wanting itself is beautiful to me - more of an Aphrodite-ist, I suppose. And maybe that is it, maybe I have to shift my gaze, just a bit, from what I want, to the desire itself. Maybe my most lasting joy and satisfaction is not from getting what I want -- a moving, impossible target -- but from the dance of wanting, itself. Feeling alive. Throwing my heart into the ring and seeing what happens. Isn't it wonderful to want, and to strive, and to enjoy the results of that desire? Sometimes it is caught, and it is joyful. Sometimes it falls, and it is awful. But it isn't awful in an ugly way, at least. Like Helga said, if you are going to be miserable, at least do it with style.

Maybe if I can take a step back, re-read my painful wanting-journal entries from the past and see how beautiful they are, maybe that is how I can find beauty in the moment of not getting what I want. 

Jason said something last year about the dance men do, to pursue women. He told me that my honest remarks to men I've just met about how I am never going to sleep with them are soul-crushing, like sweeping all the pieces off the chess board. The outcome of the game is not the point. The point is to play. 

"Let us pursue," he said. "Even if you know, we know, everyone in the room knows we aren't going to take you home. There is still a chance -- maybe the same chance we have of winning the lottery -- but we will still enjoy dancing and buying drinks and chatting and playing the game. We still watch recorded football games. Don't give us honesty, even if we asked for it; not that kind of honesty. Honor the spirit, not the letter. Let us be men."

Let us be men. Let Bartlet be Bartlet. Let growth happen. I don't read my journal enough. I always say this, and then I never read it when I need to. When I am happy, I want to stay that way, and don't want anything to snag at my silky happiness out of the murky depths of past insecurity. When I am sad, I think I might want to stay that way too - out of a fear of being inauthentic, or stuffing it down too soon, or being brushed off by my own past self who felt the same and yet did not waste away. 

But my journal is full of my own wisdom, and strength. It is my record of growth, the height marks on the wall. It is, more than anything, a tool to get out of my own head - and the most effective one, because it is still inside my own head. Nothing else available to me can give me the distance and perspective that my own journal can. 

The goal of a relationship is not to be stapled to someone. The goal of being happy is not to be frozen there. The goal of being sad is not to alchemize your pain into a time machine. The goal of everything, everything, is to grow. 

Happiness without growth becomes a bore. Sadness without growth becomes a tapeworm on your soul. When I am sad, I don't want to grow - I just want to go back to the way I was before I was sad. But my journal can prove to me, actually prove in a way even I can't argue - that I can make it through. That even when I don't get what I want, maybe because I'm not getting what I want, because I have to just step back from the want and look at it, take pleasure in the fact of being alive and having wants...I am rich. Desire is beautiful in itself, the way a summer storm is beautiful. All you need is a tiny bit of distance to shelter you, and you can enjoy its power.

"Sunday, March 7, 2010

You are my wealth. You, men whose bodies I watch, whose smells I encode in my brain, whose stories I record, who I will my body to charm, changing my DNA pattern if need be. You are my wealth, because you give stories, touch, sensory data, charm, patterns. You give texture. You make the day brighter for me than it is for others. My step sways for you.  

You are my wealth, my treasure, my secret. How do I smile so bright, how do I feel so much joy, how do I bounce? I bounce, for reasons that relate to you, and relate beyond you. I bounce, because I draw from this land, like an octopus, like a tree with tentacles into the ground, drawing from the water, drawing from the swamp land underneath our civilization sheen, the bog eternal, the unending richness of decaying vegetation, I draw from this depth, I find richness in the land, connected to this air, this temperature, these trees, this water, this location in the universe. I also draw from you, you men with stories of pleasure and adventure, high seas and victory, I draw from you. I can reflect this all back to you, with prisms and mirrors, I can amplify. I can give you Spring, I can give you your own joy tenfold. But you are my wealth, richer than children, richer than hearth, richer than family crests and lineage.  

Your wealth is glissance, glimmers of the unreachable. Charm is the word we use for the connection between people that touches on something vast and amazing. We are charmed not by the person, but by the connection, the possibility of something larger and unknowable becoming known. You men, whom I love, for yourselves and for that which is beyond yourself, to which you are only the gateway.  You are my wealth, for whom I will do anything, for you are precious and beautiful. Give me a story, give me a glimmer, I will give you the earth."

If I had Prince on speed dial

I hate being predictable. I don't like blending. I can't chase stars ("he's in town tonight!"), or even go to casting calls for extras that I might, on some level, enjoy. Too many other people with wistful faces, too much straining in one direction - it creates an irrepressible urge in me to do the opposite thing. Being swept along with the crowd pisses me off too much - I can't even tie my raft to the flotilla on Eric's river floats. Whatever act of spirit that has to happen to allow that merging makes me angry. I will deliberately stop clapping as soon as the performer asks the crowd to clap. Maybe I was a sheep that stampeded off a cliff with the herd in another life. Maybe I spent too much time in spiritual warfare sessions where everyone was yelling at Satan. I don't want to be one of D.H. Lawrence's nightmare strong-willed women, the ones his heroes feel justified shooting, but I have this feeling that I might be.

So if I did have Prince on speed dial, it would have to have been one of those totally normal things that happens when you are excruciatingly bored or trapped and have limited options. Otherwise while all the hundreds were swimming toward him I would have been swimming away. Say we both went to a terrible conference (I bet he goes to them all the time, for his 9 to 5) and ditched a bunch of sessions, and hid out in the bar with fruit smoothies and discovered we had some complimentary wavelengths in our mutual disenchantment toward lackluster presenters. And he was alone...because his entourage were all super interested in the conference. At least the ones that weren't trapped in the elevator. Totally normal. I bet he met half of his closest friends in similar experiences. Don't we all?

I've carried on lots of long distance, crazy close friendships with men, though I guess most of them were in high school, guys I met in summer camps or summer jobs, and we were all full of words, words, words in that way that teenagers are. I'm not sure if that happens in adult life. Or outside of fundamental religions. I miss it, and I like to imagine that if any adult man were capable of that kind of friendship with a woman, it'd be Prince. But you don't develop those kinds of relationships in the surface pile and smalltalk crush of crowded rooms - they are built lounging on opposite sides of the sofa, his feet by your shoulders and yours by his, past curfew at the fundie Jesus camp, with the boy who is struggling to balance his sexual orientation with his faith and sees a kindred misfit in the sexually precocious lipstick girl.

If I had Prince on speed dial, I would have called him today. Let's face it, I would have called him a lot in the last four years. If I hadn't allowed all of my crazy close men-dships from high school to die, out of a misguided sense of loyalty when I got married (or because they insisted my marriage was a terrible error I'd live to regret...true, as it turns out, but what IS that about men friends that they always want to torpedo your relationships?), I'd have been calling them over the past four years, too, all those guys to whom I wrote nonstop letters for years. There's something incomparably soothing in a man listening to your drama. Maybe because they never really get sucked in - either they are playing it cool, or playing a video game on the other end of the line, or whatever, but the calm, not-exactly involved tone of voice is very reassuring - lets you think out loud without having to worry about the reception. Maybe they just have the privilege of not living up to the girl-expectation of Showing Empathy, so they can just listen, and you can know that you have a friend because they took the call, wrote back, whatever, and not have to perform the little empathy seen-empathy accepted-empathy returned dance. Usually men can make you laugh, too, and say something mildly inappropriate, and suddenly the really horrible monster in the closet just looks like an annoying mess you can probably knock out with a day or so of work.

Prince would be good at making a girl laugh, of course, but he'd also be tender, and there's nothing you are craving more when your heart is breaking than a little tenderness. Wisdom, yes, and the scrubbed-sand clean peacefulness of emptying out your tears, but neither of them are much good without the tenderness.

It seems bizarre now to have those kind of friendships with men you aren't dating, though it seemed perfectly sensible in high school to talk for three hours or twelve pages with a single boy you weren't dating and had no intention of dating. I used to get home from school and immediately page the boy seven years older than me who worked in construction and put in my ceiling fan. I'd page him little messages for an hour or so, every day. I cannot imagine doing such a thing now, but maybe that is partly because I never forgave construction boy for marrying another woman. Not that I wanted to marry him, necessarily. But I certainly didn't want him to have anything better to do than to talk to me after I got home from school.

Those relationships don't fit into the whole married with kids scheme. I know that I didn't like being on the outside end of them, when it was my boyfriend taking the call. So then, it has to be an untouchable man. Someone so far outside of bourgeois expectations of morality, so far above me in station, that I could not possibly be a threat to his likewise rarefied wife/girlfriend, and the danger of annoying her is taken off the table. Prince seems like a good match.

If I had Prince on speed dial, I'd probably interrupt sometimes when he was working. Maybe he'd turn on the speakerphone so he could keep working a little at the piano while I blithered. There was a boy who did that once, let me sit next to him on the bench while he fussed over the song. I don't think I talked so much as held my breath - he was English, with the nice accent and the floppy hair. He sent me a demo tape with my song after he finished it, and he told me that I was unlike any girl he knew, which was also nice. Piano is good when you are sad, takes the sad and makes it seem noble. Sad with a purpose.

Sad with a purpose as in, I'll never see you again but I want to play piano for you. Like the man who picked me up in a bar once and took me to the Michigan Union to play for me. It was really just like how I became friends with Prince - this guy was bored, too, though not with a bad conference. I think boredom is how all friendships start - if you weren't bored you would be too in tune with your moment to notice anything else. Thomas? Theodore? was in from out of town visiting some local notables, Ann Arbor business nobility, I forget which family dynasty. He was from Berkley, of course, properly bearded and compact of body. I was reading Anais Nin's diary. He sent a drink to my table, we started talking. He wanted to play for me, and even though it was broad daylight the idea of leaving with a man I'd met ten minutes ago for a piano excursion frightened me. The female chorus shouted, "ARE YOU INSANE??" So I declined politely, and he nodded and walked over to the bar, and let me know he'd still be interested if I changed my mind.

About ten minutes more of Anais. Fuck the chorus. I want adventure. What happened to the teenager on the piano bench? And I liked that he had given me space to think. I walked over and told him I had changed my mind. He smiled. Took me to one of the large ballrooms, and played for the whole room. When I asked him later if we could talk, if I could have contact info, he smiled and said he wouldn't give it to me unless I promised to write, because no one really follows up. I promised. He gave me a tattered card. I never wrote to him but occasionally stab myself by looking at the card. What would I say? Maybe it's not the boys who have changed since high school, or the expectations of phantom girlfriend/wives. Maybe it's me - maybe I'm just not the same storyteller, the same original girl who'd break the rules for a good conversation, who'd assume friendship unless explicitly propositioned, and even then, would just say no thanks and keep on chatting. I was less considerate twenty years ago, I suppose, but also a lot less self-conscious, and less tortured.

Prince's card wouldn't be moldering in a basket, though, because he would have just entered his number in my phone and put it on speed dial at the juice bar. I think there was another boy who did that a long time ago, which doesn't make sense, unless it was the programmable corded phone in my mom's kitchen. Maybe I'm thinking of someone from grad school. Hazy, hazy grad school. A boy actually chased me down the hall one of those hazy days to pet my hair when it was newly pink, and when I tracked him down later and asked him out he was scandalized. I never learn, I guess - I'm still emasculating boys a decade later, not taking them at face value, still assuming that something like spontaneous pink hair-petting means something else. High school me would not have assumed anything - hair-petting is just that. He doesn't likeyou-likeyou unless he asks you to Homecoming.

The face of someone entering a number and putting it on speed dial is blank, but I remember the emotion - amused faux-outrage at his cheek. No obsessing for hours about what it meant that he put himself on speed dial, I would just have laughed and decided it was pleasurable and left it at that.  Until he announced he was getting married, anyway. I am really unhappy about construction boy getting married, it seems. I'm remembering how he helped me move into college my freshman year, and consoled me when my mother screamed at me that day. He was a good guy who really should have remained not married so I could be calling him right now.

It'd be terrible in some ways having Prince on speed dial, though, since it'd be torture not to call him constantly like that, torture to pluck up the courage to call now that I'm adult and know that men won't tell you they don't want you calling everyday after school, they will just marry someone else. Can't risk pissing him off, or he'd change his number, or his name, and you'd never find him. I'd have to have some kind of schedule or alarm clock or something, that would let me know when it was ok to call him again, when the window of "back off" time had passed. What would I say? You can't call someone up to reminisce about bad conference experiences. "So...whatcha doin?" Horrible. Prince's number would be moldering, on speed dial instead of the basket, because I wouldn't have anything to say, because I'm too adult to send upside-down pager messages about being sans boobs.

It's hopeless. I'm hopeless. Even having Prince on speed dial isn't enough to make me happy.

How would you build up enough intimacy so that you could call Prince when you really needed him? So that over enough years of friendship he'd draw me a bath? And brush my hair? It's very important to figure out how to build the intimacy enough to get to this stage, because it's nice to be soothed, especially by a man's hands. Adult conversations in juice bars are just not the same as the after-curfew church camp talks, they just don't automatically lend themselves to spontaneous offbeat physicality. You can get really creative when most everything is off-limits.

He'd have to employ me. He must need a librarian. (Everyone does). Or maybe he'd provide me with a breadcrumb path...like the offer to "come over anytime you want to use my new washer and dryer" on which I followed up recently. I'm a sucker for front-loaders, and a numbingly-normal chore makes the initial, awkward bit of the intimacy quest a little less screamingly awful.

Maybe no special transition is needed between the meeting and the spontaneous "I need a friend, my sails are in shreds" call. Perfectly wretched at basketball and table tennis, I am quite adept at negotiating how to sail my storm-tossed ship into safe harbor when needed. Probably anyone who's known me for more than a year has gotten one of those calls, whether or not the receiver realized that I was calling from my ship. You can't use the shredded-sails call too often on any one person - got to spread that shit out. It's exhausting, picking up that call. Not terrible, though - it's strengthening, in some ways, to know that someone trusts you like that, and to be able to see yourself as a nurturer, as a calm port, a sanctuary and shepherd and sage. But I know I've avoided the shredded-sails calls sometimes, so I know I've got to have a broad base of calm ports from which to choose, enough so that I'm not wearing out my emergency welcomes. Prince is almost old enough to be my father, but not exactly, so he knows a lot more about heartbreak. He'd understand.

If it was the shredded-sails call that poured concrete onto our bad-conference foundation, I'd still have to come up with other things to call Prince about, so he didn't always see my number flash up and roll his eyes knowing I was in a pity puddle again. I'm not sure we really have that much in common, though, so that might be tough. I'd have to keep notes on what he was up to, what projects he was tinkering with, so I could ask pertinent questions after his work and his pursuits. Again, I really don't think I did this twenty years ago. I said whatever I was thinking, and expected it to turn out great. Improvement? Deterioration? Surely being considerate is better, or why would I have changed?

Maybe we could swap stories about fundie religion and door-to-door witnessing experiences. I am kinda missing out on someone to debate Bible trivia with. I actually had to look up Absalom's story yesterday because I had forgotten who his mother was and why his Dad was so pissed off with him. That hilarious day when I thought I'd found a Bible debater, the Calvinist technology professor all the fashionable pessimists loved to love, despite their disaffection for religion and earnestness. I showed up after a day reviewing my aged Greek sentence arcs and diagrams, ready to take him to the mat...and saw him blanch. Another man I emasculated. He just wanted to have a beer with his adorers. Not deal with the ball of intensity carrying the briefcase.

If I had Prince on speed dial, I might even find I spend less time struggling with shredded sails, because I would be way more in touch with my intuition. Or more able to direct the misery in some channel that did not lead to sailing into friends' ports on the Yacht of Pain. He seems to be pretty decent at pouring his pain into securely buried vaults, or transmogrifying it. I need a bit more of that. In fact, that's how I got to this particular voyage, chasing after another master pain-wizard, who had this uncanny talent of seeming to always have shit together, no matter what, deflecting the storms that I'd absorb and suffer through. I thought he could teach me. Maybe he tried. Maybe I needed more distance from my teacher to be able to process his lessons. Maybe just more repetition and practice.

Pretty sure that having Prince on speed dial would be good for my psyche. I might be able to re-invest the money I currently funnel to mental health and chiropractic. And maybe I wouldn't even miss the booze. Able to transition off the doom track with my Prince-tutored spiritual acuity, I'd be better at letting go and embracing forgiveness and hope. No one cries at Paisley Park.

Maybe. Or maybe I'd just have a really cool deep-voiced friend, who'd make things seem better simply by not being a part of them.

The dance

Chances of staring at the walls are great. But the fear of being a wallflower is enough to stiffen my spine. I'll go out. I'm not backing down, sensibly cowering in my apartment though I'm longing to dance. Fuck them. I've done it before. The worst that can happen is I feel stupid, with a drink. Courage needs to be practiced - the fact that I'm afraid makes me more likely to do it. 

"I like your energy," they say in the beginning. Ah, yes. My energy. My fearlessness. The part they will mistake later for anger, for snobbery, for disdain -- a judgement of them and an affront to their dominance -- but which in the newness of time reels them in, seems exciting & fun. At once the creator and the destroyer of my happiness...my energy, which propels me forth into situations I fear, feminine charms blazing, lashes lowered, shoulders thrown back, hips swinging. Why I will always laugh at the things they say in the beginning, because I know, I know this very thing that captures your imagination and pulls you across the room is that which you will learn to hate in me.
My energy. A smokescreen to fool them into thinking I'm not afraid. Not beating, counting the minutes until I can run, under the forced prescriptions of a ruler of my ego which demands I not shrink, not hide, not cower. I will let the screams of the drunken man on the street wash over, a wind blowing reeds, safe in my music cocoon. No angry rejoinder from me. I am water. Hard as you hit, I simply absorb, disperse. My energy is the oil in my amphora, carefully carried into the loud and crowded bar, where I know no one, where everyone is younger than me, where my heart will not reach out to me, but another impossible charm boy will dance with me. Dance with me. Dance and tell me the parts of my face in Spanish. Dance and charm. Tell me you like my energy. My energy, the smokescreen.

Masculinity, the emotional man, the man who needs me. My ability to take care of myself.

I have a visceral reaction to men needing care. Men needing me, or being soft. I hate it being there, but it is there. It is there, so I always will choose the calmest, most emotionally detached man in the room, and find him wildly attractive. 

wanting to be able to be a woman. to be with a man who is strong. but even then, i can barely relax, always looking for signs of weakness. and then, i want him to romance me, soften toward me, respond in softness. can only accept softness from a man i know will not fall apart on me. but those men are not soft, they will not fall apart because they do not experience the emotion that leads to both softness and sometimes falling apart. wanting both. wanting stability, wanting romance and emotional chaos. 

i am afraid of the emotional man. because i need to be strong. because she is standing in that room watching. because i can't be left by her, she holds my world together. loyalty. 

i am afraid of the emotional man, because i want him, but i feel like i have to choose between him and survival, and i know i don't need him. 

i am afraid of the emotional man because he is a luxury. he is in a tuxedo. he is a liability. he will drag me down, and then i will not be cared for, either. we will both be alone. Afraid if i start nurturing a man, it will not stop. it will bleed me dry, like a child.

I recoil from the emotional man because I do not trust him. Because it seems fake. But that is not my view - I am emotional, and I want emotion, want to trust it like I trust my own. I am smarter about emotions than about anything else, and it cripples me that I cannot talk emotions with men I am involved with, this thing that I am so good at.

Hating men needing me, hating them wanting care, like I hated my father for wanting me, mother - women who didn't want him. i wanted him to be strong, like mom - wanted him to move on, to show some spine. wanted him to play a masculine role, like she was. 

I need to be able to make choices with men that will actually get me closer to what I want, to what is good for me. That means I have to stop being afraid of emotional men, stop hating them, being ashamed of them, being angry and full of rage toward them. Because what I am feeling toward them is not about them. It is about being 13 and watching him act shamefully and then demand love for his actions, manipulating me by seeming pitiful.