It is time

It is time. To put away email, to text your entire phone list. It's time to announce your presence, to lean in, to let go. It is time to wonder, risk, explore. Time to try. Time to say yes. Time to breathe deeper, laugh with your eyes closed, and let tomorrow worry about itself. When it is time, all barriers will melt before you...except for those which stand, which will seem righteous rather than sinister, and petty rather than overwhelming. All puzzle pieces will fit, all tones are in tune, all emotions are true. When it is time, it is both easier than ever to attract a mate, and harder than ever to find simpatico with one. For when it is time, you are whole, as a child is whole onto herself, observing her world. And without the conditioning which tells us to pair bond, what girl-child would submit to the shame we serve up for our woman-selves each day? 

I'm better at having a broken heart than you are

The thing is, I'm just better at having a broken heart. I've been tossing it at boys since I was 8 years old. I know this letdown. I know the path. I don't like it, and the hill is a bitch. But I know it. Its grooves are familiar, and as much as I hate finding myself here, I know the way home.

But I bet you don't. And here's where my strategy of open-heartedness will pay off, while your choice to wall away in your castle denying you feel will fail. I love and scream and swear with a full throat and an outstretched hand and a constant willingness to see my faults. Your exacting nature does not permit such searching; you will never waver from your course, will never back down, will never reconsider. You are too careful to be broken, and you will quietly gather any disobedient hurt bits and hide them away. No one will know. And you will be even more precise in the future. Even more rigid. Impervious.

Messiness doesn't mind mistakes quite as much. A guileless love is unashamed of heartbreak; a childlike and effusive love knows and accepts the cost of emotional sincerity - or simply forgets it. I throw my heart away joyfully, with glee, with abandon, just to watch how beautifully it tumbles down the hill.

And thus I know heartbreak. I know it well. 

And you do not.

All my exaggerated pantomimes and microscopic linguistic analysis of my own emotions don't seem to be encouraging you to express yours. And I cannot feel them for you, although I sense that part of what drew you to me was the hope that you could delegate this task. But if you cannot feel and express and make sense of the boundaries between your emotions and your responsibilities, if you cannot see how this is not "extra work" but is the foundation of being intimate with another person, you cannot have any patience or understanding for someone who lives each day on the floor of the sorting house, slowly sifting and classifying and making piles to organize the chaos, trying her best to build meaningful intimacy with the people in her life.

I saw you tonight, ranger on the move, passionately arranging some deal on the phone you told me was broken. Good luck to you. But I think you have more feelings than you care to admit. And I don't envy you that realization.

I am better than you at falling apart, and that means I have more experience picking myself up.

Shattered

I love seeing my friends. People I love, with whom I have history. I look forward to trips, excursions, parties, bar nights and brunches, operas and sledding and movies and dance clubs. I love getting spontaneous invites and surprise visits and hearing people I'm out with suggest "one more place?" - extending what might have been a perfectly lovely breakfast or walk or happy hour into a day or an evening of catching up, telling stories, and connecting. It doesn't sound like "one more place" as much as "I don't want to part."

But the ends of things, the return trips, the goodbyes and partings and breaks in these connections get harder and harder to step through - the more excited I was to begin, the more planning and preparation I exerted to make the meeting happen, the more time that has passed since I last saw the person I meet.

The goodbye ought to be just as happy, if not more. I am loved! I love! The connection was evidence, affirmation, and a new treasure chest of stories and memories and beautiful things I can look at and hold onto when real life, and separation, come back. The beginning ought to be more fearful and sad than the ending - it might not go well, it might not happen at all. Yet beginnings don't crush me with worry and dread - I'm too energized by change and unknown and figuring things out. All my fear, all my sad, all my love twists inward at goodbyes. Returning home pulls my heart down into my stomach. It shouldn't - my bed is the most comfortable bed on earth. My apartment fills me with joy when I walk in. But to get there, I have to separate from these people I love.

These people I love so damn much. I knew I loved them, came to see them, looked forward to their company, but I had forgotten what exactly it felt like to be next to them, to touch them, to hear their voices. The shape of their faces when they smile and the texture of their skin on my fingertips and the exact span I need to stretch up to wrap my arms around their shoulders. I had forgotten what it was like to love them with flesh and voice and eyes. They were just an idea I loved, but I remembered when they hugged me all these other things that I had forgotten. How tender they are. How full of kindness. How open-hearted and sensitive and joyous. How brilliant. How beautiful, one right next to the other, a sofa full of heroic divinities. And now I know I will forget them again, and they will go back to being an idea, instead of this one specific unrepeatable utterly human being.

I want all of my loved ones within arms' reach, every single one of them, all the time. And I also want this feeling of falling in love with them anew, because it has been two decades and they have become entirely different gorgeous versions of the exact same person I loved the first time, fully bloomed and shimmering-winged, and I get to fall in love with an exciting stranger that is my best friend, has always been my best friend. This love, familiar as myself. I know you like I know my own dream world, but you have all these stories I don't know from these lives you've lived without me, and all I want is to sit next to you and listen to you and watch you be familiar and brand new in buttery baklava layers of sweetness. It is so good to be near you. And I am so very happy, and sad also, because I already miss you. I cannot hold this liquid moment still. I don't want to forget again what it feels like to be your friend.

Each summer my father would appear at the airport as a stranger that had gifts for me. And I wanted nothing to do with him and his foreignness. But ten weeks later after I remembered who he was I had to leave him at that airport and forget all the pieces of him again. And I'm tired of forgetting. I want my loves. Someday they won't be at that airport and I will have forgotten them and there won't be any way to remember again, how they smelled and how they cleared their throat and how they told a punchline.

And the lies Helga tells her son Freddie when he quite rightly sobs at every goodbye, telling him that he will see these people again, that there will always be another time, these lies we tell ourselves so that we don't fall apart like toddlers at every airport and train depot and bus station and repacked suitcase, these lies aren't doing the trick for me anymore. I miss you now. I miss you for every one of the hugs and laughs I will want to give you, that I wanted to give you for twenty years, that I will have in my heart for you, even though my head will turn you back into the idea of you, without your you-ness to surprise me, and hug me back.

I know that missing you is good, and beautiful. I know that I am lucky to have so much love in my life, so very lucky to have these pains of missing you because I have loved you well and hurt myself to sever from your sphere. I know. But I am in public, and I don't have the space or privacy to cry these heavy tears, to process this sadness, this love that wants to stay next to you and wants you to exist only for me until I feel like I can love you all the way through, a full saturation of color, until you can fully know and I can fully know you understand. Only then, only when you really really understand how I love you, until I know without a moment of doubt that you see what my heart holds for you, can I feel peace at you existing outside of my space, can I drive away from you with a bittersweet smile instead of feeling ripped, the quiet letdown of a finished ice cream cone rather than the wailing misery of a fallen scoop melting on the sidewalk.

It is beautiful to love and to be sad at separations and goodbyes. But it is not beautiful quite yet, not until I can properly rage at the hideous injustice of loving people out of arms' reach, people who may not understand how important they are to me.

"You haven't asked her"

"But you haven't asked Jolie what she does." 

His statement froze the three strangers mid-stride. They had been about to melt back into the party; the olive-skinned woman who talked and danced and pealed laughter at her own jokes, her quiet partner whose face didn't seem to move even when it did, and the rotund man lecturing them all on holding cell phones next to their heads. They had chatted, or rather the dark woman had told stories, and Michael had drawn her out further, polishing her loquaciousness until she relaxed and remembered her personality, while the pontificating man had attempted to dominate with Mr. Wilcox-style wisdom. But the conversation had run its course; the kohl eyed woman and the tousled hair man were energized and glancing about the room, ready for further stimulation now that this intercourse - begun in hesitant fumbles - had given them courage, and the quiet still one was going to be the same wherever she was dropped next. 

"You haven't asked her what she does." Michael repeated.

I wasn't ready to talk to any of them. I had tried, though not very hard, truthfully, but I had smiled and responded and nodded and opened my mouth and inhaled, ready to offer words. Other people had been quicker. Or perhaps cleverer, or surely smoother. I hadn't had anything truly wonderful to say. It is easier to let them have what they want. They want to hear themselves. But Michael's words had shamed them, and the Italian woman focused her sharp, striking eyes on me. "Well? What about you?"

I stuttered. She was standing too close to me, and her eyes paralyzed me. She was waiting for me to be amazing and I was warm, and flustered. I don't need the attention. I already am getting more than my fair share of attention, just standing here in my new dress with the tulle-stiffened flounces, shifting my weight in shoes that are just barely uncomfortable. I just want to observe, and be in my head, and let Michael charm everyone else for me so no one notices I haven't said anything. I can't think of what to say. They are talking so fast and I don't know them and don't know what they want from me yet, other than for me to be unthreatening. It is easy to succeed at demure if you don't open your mouth, but now I have to speak and am going to give myself away.

She smiled slowly, watching me struggle, and remarked, "How pretty you are." I was surely supposed to have said something more clever here, but I did not. Michael told them how smart I was, and I watched the conversation form iron bars around me. He was looking at me with such tenderness, knowing I was twisting in discomfort but not realizing putting me on stage was making it worse. He is proud of me, he wants me to be shiny, but I can't be shiny right now, I have too many arms to be shiny, and I love him for being his business self and taking over the room but I just can't do anything more complicated than polite right now. I am slowly leaking life force onto the stripped wooden floor when she strikes, "When are you two going to get married?"

I want to burst out laughing. If anyone who knew me, knew us could have been here in this moment. If he would leap in to save me right here. If she would stop toying with her prey and would have pity on me. "I've already been married," I reply lamely, goawayjustgoaway lady drumming in my brain. I succeed in dumbfounding her, just for a second. "I didn't like it."

"But...but look at him!" she refuses to accept defeat. "Look at him! Of course you want to marry him, you haven't been married to him!"

"Yes, he is very handsome." He is, and God only knows what he is making of this exchange in that tight labyrinth brain of his. He is very handsome, so handsome I can barely look at him when I'm angry, or flustered, or supposed to concentrate on other people. He is very charming, walking into this party and cultivating every person here so that they eat out of his hand and thank him for the opportunity. He is very skilled, very clever, and very aware of how awkward I am. And perhaps I should be pleased that this is the only thing he doesn't do quite perfectly, setting me at ease, manipulating me. Because I think he misjudges the cause of my unease, never suspecting I could be insecure about him, about whether I've pleased him, about whether he thinks he got the bad part of the bargain with me on his arm tonight, and my head stuffed with sawdust.

I want to tell him I don't need the compliments, that the attention is crushing me, that I just need his arm around my waist and the freedom to be vacant and rest on his social skill. But I don't have enough articulateness to even make the attempt. I touch his hand over our shared plate of food. I try to mind meld with him, staring soulfully into his eyes. "What?" he asks, startled. 

I didn't have a very successful evening. But for all of my personal stiffness and dullness, I did nevertheless walk away with this moment. You haven't asked her. All his smoothness and charm, like an athletic ability, and he so fit he is able to double back and pick up stragglers on the steep hill, without worrying he himself will tire. You haven't asked her. You haven't paid attention to my mate. You will stop what you are doing and show her homage. I will use my power to compel you to do so. And this millennia-old male power maneuver that would have enraged me if I were at full capacity, would never have happened if I were at full capacity, and breaks my heart with love at this moment. I am the one he cannot read. I am the lonely child and he is trying to bully his friends into playing with me. He doesn't realize the only reason I try to engage strangers in this mood is to be beautiful for him.

Nighttime thunderstorm

I will put my book down. I was disinterested in movies. Found myself no longer craving the noisy cheer of the bar. I hear the wind pick up, insistent and loud as it pushes the sultry air through the trees and the cracks between my air conditioning unit and the window sash. A storm is coming.

I will turn off the lights and open the drapes. The storm is supposed to last for hours.

The ceiling fan pulls the refrigerated storm air inside, where it tumbles to the wooden floor, past the dusty radiator which is warm from the slow sunset in my west facing living room windows. Their screens glitter with rain, drops I can feel bursting, brushing my hands as they settle on the peeling paint of the sills. It is my fault the paint is peeling from these sills, for I cannot bear to shut out the rain, at least not unless it is sheeting, violently, gushing in.

But this storm has perfect manners. Pleasant rumbles of thunder, popcorn soft, allow for plashing and trickling and leaf rustles and the quiet drone of the fan. It doesn't seek to destroy the paint left on the sills, any more than necessary. Lightning not meant to startle, but to decorate, revealing lilac skies with diamond highlights. 

How can something so troublesome and disappointing during the day be such a blessing and a beauty at night?

I need to move my car before I sleep, out of the university lot which will start ticketing at six am and into my paid parking spot, in the structure a mile away. It won't be an unpleasant task, not in this storm. But I hate to move away from the window. Placidity is a comfortable seat by double windows, looking out onto the dark, polite thunderstorm.

Trust the ants

Love and Lies: An Essay on Truthfulness, Deceit, and the Growth and Care of Erotic Love  -- By Clancy Martin  "Our feelings change from day to day, and yet if we don't expect too much from our feelings, if we don't react to those feelings too vigorously, if we are patient with our feelings, even a bit ironical about our feelings, we will remember that Friday will come around again, and we'll find ourselves once more in love."

I'm working on learning to trust the ants, in my own Psyche myth. I tend to want to leap up and do something, and feel guilty for sitting around thinking. I still sit around and think, a lot, but I don't give myself credit for that work - real work is something you can cross off a list. But what this tends to lead to, in my personal life, is a giant flaming disaster. My Eros is not a fan of being an item on the list, ever. He enjoys the mystery of his invisibility, and an organic unfolding of events and relationships.

I am much more likely to be wringing my hands over the phantoms the female chorus whispers in my ear, about the doom around the corner and about how I need to take a lamp and a knife in the dark and set about creating my own "real" solution.

But I am learning. Trying. Practicing trusting the ants. 

Part of it involves letting the phantoms wash over. A few days can make a world of difference in how big and scary those phantoms look. Coming home from a feminist rally, ideas and horror stories churning in my brain, is NOT the time to sit down to have a serious conversation with my lover. A night out with the girls, listening to their worries for my ultimate lifelong happiness...A week of tidal hormones, cold icy waves under a dark sky...I want his comfort, immediately, I want to bring all of the insecurities to him and have him banish them away with steady solid masculine practicality. And yet, my Eros, I have learned, is not so good at that. His typical response when I reach out in tremulous, amorphous fear of an imagined future is a brusque rebuff, "What? [sigh] I'm really busy."

So I'm practicing letting the phantom hang out for a bit. Trusting the ants. What if he's a Titan, a monster who will eat you and that's why he won't show his face? Well, that is true, that would be really terrible. I'm going to put that on the shelf for a little bit, though, and trust the ants. You need to pull out a knife and a lamp and slay him first, before he suspects that you know his true identity! Well, there isn't really any undoing that path. But I can find a room I can lock, and go in there for a while. Peek out in a little bit when he can't see me, and make a decision then if he looks Cyclopean or mostly just regular.

Because the part that Psyche can never really explain or share is the way it feels the morning after he visits her. The languid happiness of connection. I am allowed to trust my own intuition, too. My third eye is valid and dependable, too - and is acting from more data points than yours. This feeling, of wanting to gambol around in the forest and string flower necklaces for him, is not something I have to set aside in order to find truth - it is part of the truth. 

It isn't the only part. The fear is part, too. And pretending that the fear isn't real is not sustainable, I've been learning. I can't will it away when it comes. I can't logic it away or wallow it away or get it to go away, period. But I can find alternative responses to the fear, that are less drastic, more private, and that permit me a way to practice trusting the ants. Ways that permit me to feel, but still watch for them. To lock myself in a safe room if need be, but without shooting off missiles at people before I do. "What can I do at this moment, to honor and acknowledge this anger and hurt, and to get it outside of myself, without actually turning it loose like zombies or weaponizing it at a person?"

And if I can watch other women's relationships with new eyes, not the eyes of a child who needs to make people get along, or the eyes of a girl afraid for her fellow girl, but the eyes of a heroine, watching her fellow heroine, I can see new things. The disappointment that she feels, but does not allow to overpower her. The weighing she does between her feelings of anger and resentment and rejection, and the decision she makes to love, to listen, to understand, to choose patience and forgiveness and to respond with gifts of tenderness. Not perfectly - not as some strange saint. But as herself, with all her usual edges - and yet, a clear and conscious decision to act with grace. To trust, not just him, but her intuition of him, her choice to open herself, her ability to be ok despite his shortfall. To trust her ants.

And the magic, as an observer, to see this unfold, and to see a graceful response from the hero. Not gallant, not storybook - but a response of a human recognizing grace and returning it.

I can do this, too. I can be my graceful self, instead of my Medusa self. Grace is not a weakness. The grace is a choice, carefully considered and selected from all of your options. It is a gift from strength, because you have it to give, because you aren't in need, because you will need to rely on someone else's grace another time when you do not have reserves of strength.

And maybe the question to ask is not, "Am I ok with this?" and certainly not "What is the worst that can happen if I let this go?" but rather "Where am I, right this moment? How am I, right this moment? I think I am probably ok, despite this. Is this true? Can I leave this for the ants? Can I trust them?"

Because if I can trust the ants, I am free to act with grace instead of panic. I can enjoy the breath in my lungs as I watch them sort the grains, and make order out of my emotional disaster. And perhaps when it comes time to speak, I can speak both with sincerity and strength and with tenderness and compassion, and I will not have to make the compromise that breaks my soul.

Travel wish list

I like to travel. I like spontaneity. When someone says, "Want to go [insert location]?", I always want to say, "Yes!"
Sometimes this works out great.
Often, though, I end up spending a lovely time with friends and wishing I hadn't blown my travel budget on a location I really didn't care to see the first time.
I'm trying to get better about saying, "No, thanks," and being ok with the fact that I will probably be doing most of my travel alone, as a result.
But if you are interested in going to any of the places on my current list, let me know :)

Riad in Fez

Singapore

Brocken, Germany

Greek island...Crete? Santorini? Corfu?

Paris

Tahiti

St. Petersburg

Tanzania

Viet Nam

Istanbul

Great Zimbabwe 

New Orleans

Milan

Quebec City

Algeria

http://whc.unesco.org/en/statesparties/dz 

Miami

Columbia

Gifts I give myself

Clean sheets

A day off

Quiet

Bare countertops

Vacuuming under the furniture

Going to bed an hour early

Looking at the sky

Mending my clothes

Polishing my shoes

Oiling my skin

Cooking for myself

A conversation with a friend

A pot of tea

Solo vacations

Dining out alone

Long walks

Singing
Tulips
Ironing everything in the closet
Window-shopping when I don't want to spend, and listing the items I'm most interested in for when I have money and inclination but no creativity or wisdom: personal collection development so the purchase order process can be cranked out later
Doing something scary
Learning something new
Practicing a skill 

Deciding not to be angry

Deciding not to be afraid

Giving not what is expected, but what gives me joy to give

Belief in myself. Not in what I will do at some future date, or my character, but in the choices I have already made, and in my wisdom to give myself good and perfect gifts, that are not merely shiny in the package but solidly pleasant. The most important gift I can give myself is the faith that the choices I have made have been good for me, the correct choices, that where I am at this moment is true, and where I am supposed to be. Whether someone else is jealous and wants my life is not what makes my life valuable - it's what makes another person unhappy. Belief in myself is the detachment from others' jealousy, both as a misguided sign that I matter and as a sin I must somehow repay. And the past pieces I look at with embarrassment and chagrin, were steps to get here, to this moment of being in the right place. I know myself. I believe in my own path.

http://www.rulit.me/books/out-of-africa-read-69333-51.html 

"The tight place, the dark pit in which I am now lying, of what bird is it the talon?" 

Crumpets

Crumpets are awesome.

I know a lot of people like scones, because they are everywhere. Any bakery you walk into will have scones. Even the bakery at Kroger. But I think of scones like I think of cake. Maybe it's good, maybe it's not so good, but the real question is, "why aren't you eating pie?"

So, why aren't you eating crumpets? If you eat more of them, it will be easier for me to get them.

Soft crumpets are gentle.

Toasted crumpets are crunchy.

The butter seeps into the holes to create fabulous pockets of sunshine calories that burst on your tongue.

Unlike english muffins, crumpets do not try to fight back by stabbing your mouthparts. And they don't have that weird taste - cornmeal? nutmeg? grody shortening? what is that english muffin aftertaste? ew.

Crumpets are just mild, yeasty, soft vehicles for lovely things. That sentence makes them sound like breasts, which I won't argue against.

Crumpets go great with:
butter
strawberry butter
lemon curd
bacon
cream
pots of tea
soft ripened cheeses
blackberries so you can pretend to be Peter Rabbit
Turkish honey but avoid the mad honey
me
Nutella
Jalapeño jelly
ricotta
peaches
saag paneer when you run out of naan or don't want to pay extra for it and can't get the carryout place to substitute it for rice which you can clearly make yourself while you wait for the curry
lox
hot smoked salmon which is better than lox
soft boiled eggs that Jamie makes for you and sets in egg-pants

avocados

things crumpets do not go great with:

people who are going to talk about scones while eating a crumpet

silk blouses

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.