What is the sound of your rage?

We were asked this last night. In a crowded hall, we were told to stand. Requested, really. But you weren’t going to say no. After we stood, giggling and uncertain as to what was coming next, she asked us this. “What is the sound of your rage? I want to hear it.”

Since the election, the calls for understanding and love and forgiveness and coming together have flooded the pages and feeds and everything. Love in adversity! Complaining is bad! We must stand as one nation!

What is the sound of your rage?

My rage was tears on my cheeks and a fluttering heart. I was afraid if I made a sound, it would go from shriek to sob and continue in a low moan through the remainder of the podcast. The rest of the night. Probably until the protest. Possibly after that. A low keening wail. I’ve thought of cutting of my hair to show my anguish. Considered getting a tattoo. Something. A physical sign that JESUS CHRIST THIS IS…

life altering.

I stood next to a blonde woman as she bellowed her rage. I heard the high pitched screams and low yells of anger that felt somehow put upon echo through the hall. We had all been angry and sad and tired for months. We were being worn down. Some of us had already decided to put our heads down and wait out these four years. These eight years. This new reality of America. Others had decided to fight, but only if it didn’t inconvenience their lives. We have retirement to save for after all.

I thought about the decisions I was in process of avoiding, that I had been turning and churning in my weary apathetic activist brain for weeks. I thought about the Ted talk a friend had sent to me that was to help me make a difficult choice. Ultimately, the Ted talker said, it comes down to who do you want to be?

Who do I want to be?

I cried in that hall as the rage and anger whirled around me because I knew that who I wanted to be was clear. And oh my god, it is hard. There seems to be a clear fork in the road. You can go back to being who you were, in a time where who you were cannot really exist as you were. Or you can pile branches in front of that path, pile them high and thick because you aren’t going back that way anymore. That safety net is gone. That other path, that path leading to who you want to be… it isn’t well lit. It is unknown. There’s a lot of feeling the way forward. It may cross crevasses. It may just go through grassy fields. But the fear of it is, it is unknown.

The fear of the other path is, well, it is unknown yet so very familiar.

I want it to be easy. I want it to be safe. I want to be able to parachute out of my current existence if necessary. I want I want I want. I want democracy to be easy. I want to be comfortable. I am uncomfortable with my discomfort that I might be inconvenienced.

What does your rage sound like?

It sounds like the shattering of my ideals of myself.

It sounds like waking up and walking on.

Homeward Bound

My house that stunk of cigarettes and was yellowed with nicotine and tar is now white-walled, smelling of cleaning solution and curing paint, and filled with the detritus of my adventures overseas. A friend referred to it as a gallery you can sleep in. I feel my brain settling down and myself able to think of things other than homes and paint and what in the world have I gotten myself into???

What in the world have I gotten myself into?

Other future paths that I thought might be opening up have closed, maybe temporarily, maybe permanently. I forget how different the minds and hearts of a nomad are in comparison to those who have had a set routine for years. What are and are not possibilities are at times vastly different for those who have made a living adapting and adjusting to the varied routines, who have maintained relationships across miles and hours and days of differences. Is someone an airplane ride away too far away to continue to get to know? Sometimes, a lot of times, it would seem the answer is yes. Though I suppose that happens to the non-nomadic as well. It all comes down to, you aren’t enough right now.

And now the houseplants have been repotted and settled, their leaves fattening up with water again. The cats have been doped up with flea medicine and are discovering what it means to go outside, to sniff the grass and bat at the fat bees that hum and hover over my pink and white flowers in the backyard. The recycling and the garbage that has gathered over the past few weeks (only a few weeks?!?) is now being sorted and put on the side of the street for pickup tomorrow.

We will settle and learn how to be homeowners. How to have a piece of land and space and home that is ours and ours and ours. Bound to home. Whether that means I live here or not, this place is my responsibility. Bound.

How do you solve a problem like…

At my father’s funeral, my sister went through all of the sisters and explained our relationships with our dad.

Through her tears, pictures flashed behind her on the church wall as she described the events in the photos. Golfing, children, dancing at holidays. Mine was me, alone, in a bright orange fuzzy jacket. By the jacket I could tell it was a photo I had sent to my parents from Mongolia. No photos with me and my dad. Nothing more recent than a time when I lived in a country far away five years ago. The absent daughter, the prodigal daughter. Oh wait, the prodigal son returned. A prodigal daughter would have come back.

I saw that picture, me alone laughing while swathed in bright orange and unfortunate bangs, and wondered if I had made the right choices. My sister then called out my adventurous spirit, so like my dad’s. Mentioned the pride my dad had had in me, his youngest, his least settled, most fat, least stable, most … distant.

I had never thought of my dad as proud of me, as seeing value in my driving need to go far from home and see something other. What rang in my ears more than the idea of pride this man had had in me was that he had asked me, when I was 23, when I would find a man to take care of me. Me, who had moved to Reno when I was 19, had figured out how to go to university, had graduated from said university in another state at 25. When would I find a man to take care of me? To guide me, mold me, make sure I was okay as I flittered and floated around the world.

I told him I never would. That I didn’t want someone to take care of me, that I, if anything, just wanted someone to love me. That was enough. Or maybe too much. Taking care of something or someone doesn’t necessarily imply partnership or love or anything other than duty and commitment. I wanted both more and less. Someone to be my equal, my partner, to allow me to take care of him as I took care of myself and as he took care of me. I wanted to work and explore and go out into …. wherever out was.

We were too alike, my dad and I. Noses sharp and dominant, a propensity to talk to salespeople, to waitresses and waiters, to know people somehow someway in the towns we went to. We were stubborn and assured at all times of how very right we were. Right we are. Our eyes are the same color. Our windows to the world. We agreed on the style of cars but not the cost. Oh the cost of things. I was his own propensity to frivolity taken to its logical and financially challenging extreme. He worried that his littlest, his shortest, his youngest, his most freckled would be unable to contain herself as she aged, unable to maintain a moderate and modest income. Interested in too many things, beholden to none, the irresponsibility of the youngest imprinted on her.

Proud of me? How could he be proud of someone so not what he wanted from a child? Not obedient, not fiscally conservative, not socially conservative, not fit. not not not. And yet, I believe my sister’s words. I was and am the facet of my dad that is fiercely independent, talkative, interested in beauty and style, loving. I am the downfalls in his personality–taken to whims and quick changes of temper and the ever present belief that I AM RIGHT. I am right. I am the smartest person in the room, even when I’m not.

I miss my dad. It has been almost 6 years since he died and I don’t know how many years since he was taken from us. The taking was slow and measured until it wasn’t. My distance which was my savior is my unknown regret.

As a 40 year old, I can only wish things are different. What else do you wish in middle age? I wish my dad were still alive. I wish I were more wholly myself when he was alive. I wish we could have had a real beer, a true beer together. I wish we could have talked openly about … I don’t know. Something. About his wishes for himself. His wishes for his kids. What he gave up as he had 7 kids.  I wish I hadn’t left home so very young. I wish I had found patience earlier, patience with myself and with others. With my parents.

My dad died when I was in Afghanistan. I’m not sure when a good time would be for him to have died. I’m not sure when a good time would have been for me to be in Afghanistan. I am sure now that these were not two times that should have dovetailed. My dad became sick as I was coming into my own as a expat. I’m not sure it was the best that these all happened at the same time. Had I to do it over, I don’t know what I would have changed, but I would have changed something.

I would have had a relationship with my dad that allowed for a photo of the two of us together. Not a photo of me smiling while the two of us were a world apart.

Running to Save My Life

I think about running a lot.

I imagine my feet smacking onto the pavement, no graceful plunk of a delicate foot. A plodding angry advance on the pavement. I run circles around my neighborhood, or on advanced days I run to the weight room at the gym.

Perhaps running is too generous a term. I jog/walk/hobble/inhale/exhale/gasp to the gym. Very little running, if you think of running as fast and smooth, as a whippet lacing through air.

I forget to run, sometimes. I instead will read shitty blogs on the internet. Or watch old episodes of Sex and the City over and over and over, until I convince myself that maybe this one time Carrie won’t date that total doof. She always does, though. She never learns. Sometimes I just lie down on the bed, my cats cuddling in close breathing their fishy rotten tooth breath on my face as they snore/purr in contentment that the food lady is where she belongs, providing heat in their favorite nap spot.

I forget to run sometimes for long stretches of time. Months, at the worst. My head starts to war with itself after a while. Part of my brain just wants to lie and lie and lie, peaceful and dream of nothing. The other part knows that my body is becoming stagnant, mush, and that this is invading said peaceful brain. If I run I will be less sad, the world will brighten, I will think about weight lifting again (my one true love), I will eat salads instead of haribo, I will nourish instead of deplete. Sometimes I have to think about running a lot in order to actually do it.

Then something snaps and I wake up and no longer think. I do. I get up, bleary eyed, shoving the cats aside. I fumble for my ankle socks and can’t find them, so I pull on the socks that go half way up my calf and say, have a sunshiney fucking day. I grab my hat so the creeping beige melasma that I tell myself is smooshed freckles will stop creeping across my face and yank on my multi-colored shoes that were comfortable from the moment I stepped into their overpriced cushiony soles. Grabbing my keys and tucking them into the convenient pocket at my waist, I run down the stairs and out the door. Minimal stretching, I just start jogging. Down the street, across the street, steady pace. Days like this aren’t for pacing or time or speed. They are for doing. Just doing. Doing for as long as it feels good.

Sometimes it only feels good that first block. Then, those days, I know I have to do more. I jog back and forth, crisscrossing in front of the brunchers who are in line far too long for eggs. JUST EGGS, PEOPLE! Get it together! I huff and breathe heavily and hope they think I have gone for miles instead of blocks. Look how red she is! She is such a runner! Must have done ten today at least!

Run run run til I get back to my building. Then I go upstairs and shower and vow it will not be months til I go again. I sign up for too many races in too short a period of time because I fear my couch, my bed, my brain that tells me to rest when there is no need for rest.

I think about running and how, when I do it, it saves my life.

And I go the next day, running away from myself.

Thank you for serving

I was at a wedding this weekend. A colleague I had worked with in Afghanistan had found a woman he decided to marry. The wedding was simple and straightforward, the crowd small, the couple very in love in a solid way.

The service was in an old Catholic church, I think the oldest in the city. It had been updated with paint, but had the original flooring, stained glass, and statuary. A comfortable blend of Catholic tradition and modern tastes. The ceremony was simplified from what I remember when I was younger. Not so much kneeling, very few participants in the communion. Not too many practicing Catholics anymore.

The prayers of the faithful were on traditional lines–prayers for the couple, for the living and dead, the continual prayer for world peace. After the prayer for world peace, there was the prayer to bless those serving our country abroad, military and civilian.

I teared up. Lovely touch. Was that part of what this church always prays for? Do they remember the civilians?

I spoke with the groom at the reception. He had made sure to have that added. We pray for the civilians who are risking their lives.

What touched me even more, was that it wasn’t about ‘official’ civilians. Just civilians. The acknowledgement that you are working for peace, for prosperity, for the safety of your community back home and that you can do that as a civilian or as a member of the military. There are many ways to  serve.

Do we value the military more highly because they are more visible? Because the fighting and the warrior culture? Their jobs are different and difficult and the combat vets… I can’t imagine. But we don’t differentiate between combat vets and vets who don’t see combat. You serve, you serve. Military is military. You are helping the cause. So, if all military is military, then why isn’t all service service? Are civilian lives worth less?

There is no day to honor the diplomat, the security detail, the management services, the health officer, the consular officer. Everyone shouts Benghazi as a cry to support their political side, but did they really care about the security of our diplomats before? Do they care now? Are they actively finding out what it IS that diplomats from all of the federal agencies with foreign service officers DO so that they can understand how best to keep them safe while keeping them relevant at their jobs?

Thank you to the civilians and the military to strive to keep us safe and provide assistance to others overseas and abroad. The military are no less honored if we spread out the love and open the circle to the civilians as well.

Running in Place…

This is normally when I start looking around for better pastures, unknown opportunities, a way to parachute out.

Here I am, trying to buy a house.

A house.

Debt for the next 30 years if I’m lucky. Desperate attempts to keep 940 sq ft plus a tiny yard until I finally cave to the financial pressures and go into foreclosure if I’m not. Gambling on my ability to keep my job, find a new job, keep making enough money on my own, sell the house, rent the house, unload myself of this albatross I’m willing slinging around my neck.

A house.

To avoid thinking about the debt, the responsibility, the galvanized steel pipes taunting me in the dark spaces I definitely do not wish to crawl into, I think about colors for walls, patterns for floor tile, tiny impractical structures I can add into the yard. I dream of a bright pink tiny house, lined with turquoise. Path and patio of pavers winding down the yard to a sauna that has a hammock hanging outside. Maybe a fire pit. A respite from a world I increasingly don’t go into. The nomad is shrinking into herself.

It seems inevitable. This is what you do. You take the job that is stable and steady and has excellent benefits. You seek the parts of the job that make your eyes sparkle and tamp down the dissatisfaction. Everyone is dissatisfied. If it was fun, it wouldn’t be called work! You seek out a plot of land and a plastered building to make your own. You eventually date so much and so often and so many men who send you pictures of their dicks (unsolicited) while also wondering why you can’t take a joke, that when someone mild and relatively kind shows up for a drink, you count your lucky stars. You stay in the job, you buy the house, you date the placid man and you forget that you once dreamed of seeing. It seems impossible to leave America. Your feet are stuck. You begin to understand why so few people here have passports. What is out there?

I read the papers that the bank sends, the title company sends, read the blogs and the advice columns and wonder wonder wonder if I’m doing the right thing.

After not running for a while, I started running again. It is a way to go somewhere, I suppose. I went 8k the last time. Huffing through blueberry fields and beside cabbages, along gravel and dirt and paved road. 8k proving to me YET AGAIN, that I need to train. Bite off bits of runs during the week so I can handle the whole thing on the weekend. I am planning for runs through the fall, the winter, into next spring. As I was running on Monday, I thought, I’d like to do this next year.

Next year. Because I will be here. Because I’m buying a house. And staying here.

Frida

Frida was a month old when she came to live with me. A tiny little bit of paws and brush tail, giant wet eyes and ears that overwhelmed her face, she ran around my apartment her first day, screaming in a voice too big for her body and looking worriedly for the rest of her littermates. Instead of her brothers and sisters, she found my old orange tom cat, Diego, staring at her with disdain from his perch on the couch.

I didn’t follow the recommendations to keep them in separate rooms where they could sniff each other through the door, figure out if they would love each other or kill each other. Instead, I let this tiny little fluff wander around the apartment as Diego watched and sniffed. I figured she was tiny and female. He probably wouldn’t hurt her. They eventually began grooming each other furiously and sleep swirled together in a mass of orange, grey, and white fur punctuated by blinking black and green eyes. I have many photos of them spooning, with Diego’s front paw protectively wrapped around his kitten.

Diego is a big fluffy guy with a tiny, almost silent, mew. His nose is broad and his eyes a serene green in a face that is freckled. He doesn’t run unless food is involved. Instead, he strides about the apartment with elegance. As he ages, it is more difficult for him to jump up to the bathroom sink to drink the running water. He will meow loudly for me to come in to pick him up and turn on the faucet. When he is angry, he silently stares at me and pees on something I hold dear–a jacket, shoes, my bed. When he is happy, he purrs constantly and seeks my hand with the side of his face. His every move is considered, purposeful. My old man is not silly, unless Frida torments it out of him.

Frida is a loud garumph. She looks little but only weighs a pound less than Diego. Her footsteps are stomps. You can hear her running in other rooms in the apartment. When she lies down, she audibly flops over and gazes up at you, lashing her tail against the wood. Her meows aren’t meows, but long keening wails accompanied by doe eyes. Her safe space is the highest point in the room, but at night her preference is to burrow under the covers with me and hide in the crook of my knees. If the bed covers do not have a gap, she will paw at them until I lift the edge so that she can bellycrawl under. There she will curl up and not move, no matter how hot the evening or how much I toss and turn. She will ride the bed and my legs like a surfer riding a wave.

Frida is not shy about her affections, nor is she shy about letting you know what she does not like. She sits besides me when I write, watching my fingers tap across the keyboard, mrawing and waiting for me to smoosh her head with my hand. This little cat does not like a tentative stroke of her head, but prefers when scratches are firm and her head gets pushed down a little from the weight of my hand. If I don’t pay enough attention to her as she sits beside me, whe will flop herself in the space between my keyboard and the computer screen, lying luxuriously against the glass, hiding the words as I type them and purr. Daring me to try to move her. Moving her is always an ordeal because she hates being picked up. Hates it. I have tried to get her used to it since the first day in my house. I handled her, picked her up, held her against my chest and shoulder. She will have none of it, struggling like a toddler when you try to put it against its will in a car seat. She becomes ten sizes bigger, a hundred times as strong, and grows eight more legs. My noisy little cat becomes silent in her battle to remain wholly independent yet wholly attached to me.

I like this about cats. They don’t let you coax them into things, not really. They don’t let you convince them to do things they don’t want to do. They either do or do not, will or will not, and that is the end of it. I could take lessons from them.

Fear of a Written Record

My backpack is filled with the thoughts of roughly ten different people. They have read a piece I wrote about my time in Afghanistan, when we had a complex attack and I spent hours on the linoleum, waiting for the All Clear so that I could walk to my hooch and go to sleep.

I don’t know if I’m ready to write this story, even though I’ve already written enough to fill a book. A disjointed book, which is more question than answer, but a book nonetheless.

Their questions include such things as, what is a PX?

What is a PX? I’ve forgotten that people don’t know what a PX is. How do you not know? How does anyone not know?

What is KAF? WHAT IS KAF? How can any USian ask what KAF is? I think this as I struggle to remember that there were days when I didn’t know Afghanistan, when Bagram was a mystery to pronounce, much less know that it was. KAF was the largest base there. Now it is dust. The 5 mile space teeming with nationalities by the Kandahar International Airport is gone. Not even the poo pond is left. Damn, I can’t believe that stench is gone from the earth. I think it must still be there.

They want to know why I was there, what I did there. I was tired and simply said, this is a piece from a larger book. It is explained there. I was a bit snappy and it is an essay class. I should know better. Explain in the essay, don’t say there is a book.

My teacher wants the story, not the situation. How did I feel in my body? What did it smell like? Did you regret going? What were you thinking during the attack?

Another student noted that the language and the structure of the first paragraph, where I describe rolling into KAF, is different in feel from the rest of the essay. Probably because I wrote the rest of the essay before, and this new part was written with the help of some rose. Because I am afraid.

It tears little parts out of me to write about Afghanistan, and the companion stories of my dad’s life in Alzheimers. Our family’s life in Alzheimers. To write the story, to bring the reader along, I have to remember it. Dig deep into my bones and muscles and pull it back out. Feel the heat burning a hole in my neck, the rough fabric of my green cargo pants scratching my legs til I washed them enough to soften, the weight of the body armor on my chest and back, the helmet as it knocked against the entryway to the helo. Smell the dust and shit and coffee and tater tots and my own ever present cigarettes. Remember the sound of Naomi’s fucking yoga breathing every goddamn morning. Remember the sound of the rocket alarms. The droning of some of my colleagues during the morning meeting. Every damn morning. Trying to prove their activities were the most important, the most interesting, would bring the most change. God.

I have to look back with affection and curiosity and wonder, wonder at my own situation, the situation of the Afghans, other forces, other countries, other lives.

All these years later, it still makes me want to cry. Lie down on the floor. What the hell were we doing? Did we do?

I need to figure out what I’m writing, and why. Move through the fear of flinging myself back into dark places and willfully forgotten memories and bring it all out. All of it. Not worry about am I remembering correctly. Whose version of correct?

It is going back to the beginning, remembering the times when I didn’t know, when I was learning and discovering. Teach the reader the jargon, bring the reader to the place I lived that no longer exists. Show them the absurdity. Take them through the fear. Become fearless in writing my record.

Fuck.

Carousing to maintain sanity

Yesterday was a wonderful day of sun and friends and Sound of Music Sing-a-long and Thai food and boozing it up. Wine with the Sound of Music, beer and cocktails later. As I strive to be committed to activities that enhance my health–yoga, running, the eternal attempts to eat healthily (whatever that is on a given day…), I also refuse to quit drinking. Or to even contemplate not drinking. Not that it is an every day occurrence, but all the weight loss and serenity enhancing books and articles and blah blah blah get to that one–stop drinking. Or only drink red wine. Or something.

I enjoy drinking. I like all of the booze. I like seeing how inventive bartenders can get with mixing different tastes. I had a cocktail the other day where the bartender had steeped toasted coconut in bourbon for five minutes and turned that into a bourbon lime rickey. Delicious! I like discovering how the same grape grown in the same year but in different soil can produce such different aspects in the flavor of the wine. I really like it when Oregon brewers calm the hell down about hops and explore nuances of flavor. I could go the next hundred years and not have another IPA.

Beyond the taste, I like the bone relaxing effects of it. The ease that seeps into your joints and mind, slowly hopefully. Not getting drunk necessarily, or even tipsy (though sometimes a good tipsy giggle over nothing is spectacular), but the easy facilitation of letting go for a damn minute. It is a quick fix, a shot of ease. It may be better and healthier to find your ease through running and yoga and meditation and writing and all of the other things that you do to reduce stress and let go for a minute. But DAMN, sometimes you don’t want to work for it, you want the shortcut, you want that wine or beer.

It brings people together, much like food does. You share in the joy of the unwind, sample each other’s drinks and usually think the one you yourself got is better. It can lead to conversations among strangers about preferences and tastes and where to go next, what to do.

It reminds me of times when I definitely went too far down the ease path and whoa, should have pulled back. It reminds me of times where we were huddled together in a small room filled with bunk beds, lounging on the floor and discussing our places in the world and in the war. We could never get away from work talk. It reminds me of my best friend’s kind of shitty boyfriend telling me I was a bad influence on her. I didn’t try to control her drinking the way he did. It reminds me of sitting at the table with family and asking for some of the wine the grownups were drinking. My dad let me have some, to the chagrin of one of my sisters. He told her he didn’t to make it exotic or interesting by saying no. I thought the red wine was gross and went back to drinking my pop. It reminds me of getting into an embarrassing fight with a friend at a party where we were friends of friends of friends of the host. She was infuriated because I teased her and because I had encouraged her to try dating a man and it had not turned out as she would have liked. It reminds me of the times when I had just moved to a new country, scared and apprehensive yet again, and someone took me out to sit outside in the sun on a tiny blue stool to drink glass after glass of weak cold beer brewed that day.

Carousing with my friend (such carousing! on our way home by 1020pm–she to her husband and baby, me to sleep to see if I would get up in time for my race. I did not. 40 is not kind to people who drink several beers and cocktails and then want to run in the early morning) and talking about topics from house hunting to baby raising to BDSM felt like home. It would have likely felt like home without the boozin’, but for me it was the whole experience and the connection to all the other experiences I’ve had throughout my life and around the world. There are few common threads in my life, really. International travel, food, and booze. Bringing those together with friends helps me maintain my sanity as I continue my adjustment to home.

Possibilities

Dating is in the eye of the beholder. There seems to be no rhyme or reason what it means to be devoted to someone, to dating someone, to being serious with someone, but for the intention. You cannot say necessarily that having sex means you are serious with someone–you may just be having sex and have no emotional connection. It is harder somehow for us to accept that people may have a deep, romantic, emotional connection and not have sex. It somehow isn’t ‘real’ without sex. You can have a romantic connection and a sexual connection and still not have it be serious. There are no hard and fast rules to what it means to be in a relationship, or what a relationship means. It is presumed, it seems, that a relationship that is short is not necessarily powerful and does not affect you as much as one that is longer. So maybe it is length of time and presence of sex? Unless of course you are involved in a friends with benefits situation that has gone on for some time. And maybe one of you starts seeing someone toward whom your intentions are more intimate? longer term? uncasual? Then the other of you feels jealous, though feels foolish for feeling jealous because you were just friends. As though friendship is something not as serious, not as real as a romantic relationship. Even though many friendships last longer than romantic ones. But then we get back to the conundrum of the length of time mattering when, does it really?

I think things are confusing. For everyone. It is hard to determine what we need and to fulfill our own emotional needs while helping to support others in fulfilling theirs. It is hard and complex and I have come to the conclusion that there is no formula for these feelings, these romances, these connections, these sparks. I’ve felt less of a connection to men I have dated for months than someone I spent a single night with. One was more actual time on the clock, more words spoken, more touches shared. The other was more sense of ease, of being seen and of seeing. More commonalities in point of view. When the one of months left, I barely noticed. When I knew I would never see the one night again, I deeply wished I lived in a different place just so I could. I, who had so recently settled down for what I thought would be a long haul of resting in place thought, maybe travel again wouldn’t be so bad… But that’s absurd. You don’t change course for one night. Of course not. You change course or compromise for years. For the dedication of the continued day to day. Perhaps a day to day that is uninspiring, or that you stick with because well, you stick with it. Longer is better…

I’ve fallen in love with and still love one man over the course of years. I haven’t seen him in a while–our lives grew apart. That sense of ease that I had with him, when I was with him, was the first time I knew what being seen felt like. We didn’t think the other was perfect and told each other so. Sometimes rather often. We weren’t afraid to say when we thought the other was an ass. We weren’t afraid to tell each other unflattering things about ourselves. But we also weren’t afraid to tell each other how much we admired each other, how smart and funny and thoughtful and brave (in different ways). I met him when I was young enough to have that form the basis for what I wanted in a partner, in someone I would share deep love with regardless of what form that love would take. Or how long it would last.

I’ve dated many men and it is those that I have that foundational ease with, that sense of openness about faults and grossness but also admiring and appreciating that I take to heart. My friends make fun of me because I will tell my faults on a first date, I will share my gross stories, I will be a little mean. Most of my first dates do not go well. I am not preening, I am not laughing at jokes or stories I don’t find funny. I am not an audience. I will ask for their gross stories, eagerly wait to see if they push back if they can debate without getting wounded. Those are the men, and they are admittedly few (I’m prickly and while I smile easily, it is not always because I am amused) but they are the ones I appreciate and admire in their grossness, who appreciate me and let my faults pass. I don’t want to be universally liked, I want to be well liked, I want to be seen for who I am.

I fell a little in love the other night, during such a date. I didn’t find myself checking my watch or phone surreptitiously an hour or so into it. I, an introvert who gets anxious and tired out by new people, didn’t crave alone time. We talked and shared gross stories and smiled when sharing silly stories and then shared serious thoughts that would turn to humorous comments soon enough. We leaned closer and kept eye contact and slowly sipped our beers. It won’t be repeated, though it would be nice. But, even at just one evening, it is enough. The hope of possibilities.