part one
I feel like my head might explode–it really might explode. I am 35 years old and I do not know where I am. Or rather, I know exactly where I am but I don’t know how I got here. Or rather, I know exactly how I got here and I can’t quite believe it all happened the way that it did.
Let me back up.
It is the summer I turned 30. I turned 30 and my lover of four years left me six days prior. She was the one I was supposed to be with forever. We even got married. In a church. Like how people do when they are grown-ups. But the thing was, we weren’t grown-ups. Not even close.
We had a near-obsessive relationship with one another. Very close and symbiotic—this is the lesbian way. We had this kind of relationship until she went to medical school. Going to medical school was definitely the nail in the coffin of an unhealthy relationship—she didn’t have time for me. I sank into a depression and then lifted myself out of it through becoming obsessed with another woman. She dumped me promptly after her exams were over that year (on Pride Sunday, a practically a national holiday for the gays), because she was sick of watching me moon over someone else–probably a smart thing for her to do. And then she moved out the next day. I was blown away by this. I felt like a shallow hull of a person. I let things get really out of hand with the housekeeping and with finances. I just checked out.
But she left me six days before my 30th birthday and seven days before our rent was due—poor me. She just up and left. But this is not her story or the story of Maggie and I. All of that was just a prelude.
Fast-forward.
I am sitting in my warm blue kitchen and I am typing. It is not quite ten a.m. on a sunny winter Saturday. There is a light frosting of snow on the ground outside and I am listening to “sad bastard” music today—R.E.M., Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, Loretta Lynn, Lucinda Williams. I am committed to a “sad bastard” day.
In the last year and a half, I have destroyed a relationship, been denied custody of my children, and felt more self-pity and desolation than I never knew possible. I have been bent, burned and broken for a long time now. It’s starting to lift and writing it all down is about the only way I can see out of it. I have carved a corner out in the kitchen for my computer and I am going to sit here and type until it’s finished. I am serious this time. Nobody can stop me—not even myself.
So, I am sitting here and I am typing and there is a lot to tell. It’s kind of difficult to break it down or to tell how long this story might end up. It could be a novel or I could just get sick of the whole thing and make it an extended short story. Depends on how rapt I feel you are in reading. And how terribly self-indulgent I’m feeling for the next oh, however long this takes. Or how impatient I get in the telling.
Start slowly. Deep breath.
I am sitting in a blue kitchen in a flat in a working class neighborhood. My rent is terrifically cheap. I mean, it’s almost as cheap as my rent was living in a house in Urbana in the early 90’s. And the year is 2007. I mean, it’s as cheap as cheap seemed when I was 21. And as I mentioned, I am now 35.
It’s hard to wake up and realize that you are now older than you had ever pictured yourself being. And to be rewinding to the same kind of rent fourteen years ago and having roommates (THAT whole thing) and to be starting over in a significant way. Well, that’s why I’m telling this story. It’s the sort of classic “second chance” kind of story.
Back to the 30th birthday.
It all started slowly. Or rather, it was a great rush. One evening, I was lying on my roommate Tammy’s couch, listening to a song over and over. And the next, I was getting up every two hours on the hour to help feed baby twins.
You know, it’s funny, because as I typed Tammy’s name, the “autospeller” picked it up and wanted to enter her full name. It’s funny because she doesn’t even go by that name anymore, like so many other people I know. Tammy is a Buddhist now (though she is still a woman, unlike the many others) But it flashed her name and that goes with the nostalgic feeling I’m trying to invoke here, so it fits and I thought I’d mention it.
So, I was living with Tammy in a flat that was so very much like the one I live in now that it bears mentioning. Three bedrooms, same layout. Allowed to paint whatever colors I want and many of the colors are the same ones as back then. The light blue in the kitchen where I sit, for example, is the same color as mine and Maggie’s bedroom back there. And the yellow in Sarah’s bedroom is the same as the yellow in the study (which became Tammy’s room). The lavender in my room almost goes to the same tone as the irridescent tone in our old bathroom. The funny part (there are so many funny parts) is that most of these colors were not picked by me—They pre-existed me. My roommates chose these colors.
Just trying to establish the connection between the past and present.
Back to 2001. I’m lying on Tammy’s gold velour couch and trying to remember a perfect moment. I’m listening to this song about perfection and L comes in. She’s with her friend Bitchface (friend one who won’t speak to me anymore) and they are leaving my party. They’ve been there for a while and I watched L flirt with Ronit. It was cute, they had some kind of Sephartic connection. I would get to know this kind of Arab-Jewish geography game intimately in coming years and months.
So, L is leaving my party with Bitchface. They’ve ridden their bikes to my house from Andersonville and I am impressed. I’m impressed because it’s a far way to ride for someone you hardly know. And I don’t know at this point that L is interested in me. I probably would have been less impressed if I had known–I’m given to extreme displays when I’m romantically interested in someone. So it doesn’t seem that extreme, riding your bike a few miles if you want to get in someone’s pants. But for a friend, much more impressive.
But this is before all of that.
I am impressed and L is the most together, smart, funny woman I’ve ever met. She and I are going to be friends. She seems to have the potential to be a good friend. I have watched her with the actors where we both work and with our mutual friends at my party and she is a good person. She’s solid. She’s funny. And she seems very together.
We are going to be friends. I like her.
Uh-oh. I like her. This is not supposed to happen.
A few months later, I invite her over for dinner. As friends. I make her some amazing soup—Squash soup with sweet potatoes. And sage. I burn a spoon on the stove while she’s on her way over. I space out and daydream about her and I burn a wooden spoon. I still have it—a charred reminder of sweet love in its first flush. it’s an apt reminder–it speaks to the ruin that came much later. A burnt spoon; god, symbolism. You’d think that this was a junkie story. But it’s not. Or, well, almost not.
Is addiction really just the story of drugs? Is it just about something chemical? Maybe the desire to fall in love could be an addiction…there are chemicals involved…maybe looking for the right mate could be an addiction. Maybe I’m a junkie. Maybe I didn’t know any better. This story starts with a burnt spoon.
She came over and we had the most adult evening I’ve ever had in my life, up until that point. We made conversation and split a bottle of wine. We sat outside on my porch on the bench and smoked. Over dinner, we have discussed how she’s planning on getting pregnant. She has processed all of her feelings about single parenthood—she’s ready to go. I fantasized about having kids with her–it was a dangerous place to go. About dating a nice girl Midwestern woman who wants children. I engaged in the fantasy of creating the perfect lesbian family. Of us cooking together in our condo kitchen and feeding babies organic homemade babyfood and bathing them and putting them to bed and being perfectly in love with one another.
But this is not how the story really starts; or even how it went; or how it ended up. I mean, I would later pinpoint that as a first date—but that’s not how it was couched then. It was safely embedded in friendship. Which, in retrospect, is probably where it should have remained. But I am not that smart and I was not that self-aware back then. When I was 30.
It seems like so long ago. Maybe two lifetimes.
1:25 p.m. – 2007-02-04
30th birthdays, new friends | admin | 
April 7, 2007 9:39 am
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