Headed Home...

I have been in Chicago and Louisville for the past week. Chicago has three dear friends that love me very much, and though I don't really care for the city, being with them has been immensely healing. Last night, when I got back to Chicago from Louisville, the couple I'm staying with told me that to them, I'm family. The statement came about because when I was here early last week, a package arrived for them while I was gone. Amber asked why I didn't open it, sincerely. "You're family!"

This is the only house that isn't my actual family where there's a picture of me on the fridge, far as I know. I'm sitting on the bed in their guest room right now, the sheets stripped and drying just outside the door. I should have left nearly three hours ago. I'm just going to hit awful traffic now. But my gut is all in knots and I keep tearing up. I'm afraid to go home. I don't know what I'm doing with my life. I don't know what the next few months hold for me, and I'm afraid.

I've been away for a week and it is the happiest, most content I've been for months. Since before Chris and I broke up. I had a week of adult conversations, interactions, situations. I went out, to shows, to bars, to restaurants, and no one was obnoxious, no one acted a fool, no one said any stupid shit to me, and it was eye-opening. I've thought for a bit now that maybe I'm really done with the party life. Like most things I do actually mean eventually, I think I've been saying this for about three years now. I want reasonable, adult people in my life. We can still go to shows, go to bars, go out and drink, but getting shit faced doesn't feel like me anymore. Fucking dudes who have appropriately thick bodies and the right amount of chest hair but are assholes doesn't feel like what I should be doing anymore. You'd think that would have occurred to me some time ago, and it did, about half-way, nearly a year ago, but, fuck.

I think I'm done. I want to focus on me, on healing all the things I'm holding onto that make me difficult to be close to (with the understanding that I am always going to be an intense, difficult person. I know that's who I am, and I don't want to be someone else. I do want some smoother edges, though). My other friend here in Chicago told me I'm much calmer than last we met two years ago. That means a lot to me.

Every year for the past three years I've gone on a trip this time of year that's put huge things into perspective and moved me forward a great deal. Memphis in 2011 pushed me toward forming my band. New Orleans 2012 made me realize just how many toxic people I was keeping in my life. I hope looking back around this time next year, it'll feel like something just as big was created from my travels.

Heart Tests

Some might call this torture, but it's a simple way for me to remind myself that I can, and do, move on.

I'll listen to a mix cd/playlist an ex made me, usually the one prior to the one that's hurting now. Or that I made for them. Or I'll listen to an ex's band. In this case, Andy's music, and the (really fucking awesome) mix cds he made for me. (Seriously, the guy was amazing at making a mix cd. Best I've ever gotten by a long shot, and the sort of mixes that you throw them on in mixed company and everyone loves them. Plus, the "love" mix he made me once, entitled "I'm Still Your Fag" after the Broken Social Scene song of the same name included on the disc, is quite possibly the best love mix ever made in the history of love mixes. So good I've made copies of it for other people who then mine it for their own mix cd making uses.) (And, notably, I don't listen to anything Thor related for this exercise; he didn't have a band, and he never made me a mix, and the mix I made him is something I play at work almost daily. The guy upset me so deeply in the moment and now it's just all okay.)

And sometimes, it still hurts, even on top of the current heart hurt. But most of the time, I feel nothing but enjoyment of the music.

Feeling Impotent

A sure sign my brains are rotting:

Bad dream about bad touch uncle. Haven't had one in years. And it wasn't that bad, but he was there, at a family gathering, and the air was hot and damp with summer, the lighting was bad, everything was shadowy and uncertain, and I could see him, sitting there in a recliner. It may have been the 80s, I felt young. He was wearing a ringer shirt; red around the collar and sleeves.

I wondered why he was there, and why no one was doing anything about it.

So I slunk around, afraid to be seen by him, afraid to engage with anyone because I didn't want to upset anybody.

I don't remember if the dream would have been before or after I woke at 5 a.m., panicking a bit and fretting over the fact that I've not heard a word from Chris's sister, my friend of nearly nine years, despite a couple of emails and two texts, in the three weeks since I wrote the first email.

But it seems to work either way. In general, I'm feeling pretty impotent. She avoids conflict (though I'm not even sure what the conflict would be here, so that compounds my impotence), and I've done as much as I should without being pushy.

I'm a doer and a planner. I like to take an active role. There's nothing to be done, and nothing to plan for but two vacations that seem altogether too far off. A month away. I'm too sad to do things at home so I just sit on the couch. I've lost momentum, I am mostly coping with loss, doping myself with Friday Night Lights and Downton Abbey and numbing movies because there isn't the energy in my limbs to do anything else.

I should clean out my juicer. Take out the garbage. But today is not a day where those things will get done. It's taken about all I've got to convince myself to sit down for a bit and start a painting, which I'm all ready for, the tools are in front of me...

So, paint.

In Love

I fall in love easily, but I also stay in love for a long time, typically well after the relationship is over. If I make a decision like that about someone, it's because it's true and it stays true. It took me over six years to move on from my first love, Jared, who I'd only been with for a month and a half (with periodic make out sessions every couple of years after). The end of love came abruptly, a thought, out of nowhere, when I woke up one morning in Paris in 2001.

"His kisses are too soft."

And that was it. If I don't enjoy kissing you, it doesn't make much sense to be in love with you.

That realization won't ever come toward Chris. His kisses were exactly what twenty years of kissing has taught me is perfection. And we had a perfect rhythm from the first instant.

My high school "Psychology" teacher (in quotes because she was mostly there as volleyball coach) once said, "You can't be in love with more than one person at a time." For the longest time, I regurgitated that pabulum as if it were gospel. It's been years since I thought that were true, and yesterday, as I sat at the intersection of Hennepin and Franklin after my therapy session, thinking about love and my longing for a "true," lasting love, I considered, again, that statement.

Love, being a chemical reaction to a battery of things, pheromone, timing, proximity, and hundreds of other things that you just know you "like" or "love" about someone, it makes not one iota of flipping sense that you can only be "in love" with one person at a time.

I say this because there are people I know I will always be in love with, on some level. It's not sexual, though it is romantic, in a way, and comes from a place of bonding that just can't be broken. 

My therapist asked me why I love Chris, when he's done several things that are a bit fucked up and could be grounds for moving on. After thinking about it, I made this statement:

"When Chris is trying, when he's in it, he's everything I want, he's the one for me. But he isn't trying, he doesn't want to try, he's 'done,' so he's not the one for me."

It's just a matter of reconciling the disconnect between the two versions of Chris. He is ugly and immature in his darkness, anger and distance. But when he is focused and in it, he is, as I've always told him, a magickal fucking unicorn.

Time will tell how my feelings play out, and whether he and I will ever reconnect on any level, but at this moment, I just need to take everything day by day and not let my fears or hurt dictate my behavior. Right now, at least, it's not time to let go of being in love.

This Poem Kills Platitudes

My friend Juni's father wrote this poem. He has died, and she wasn't even aware that he'd written poetry.

The words here, the simplicity of how they're written, the rawness of it, the aching vulnerability, I've just got tears streaming down my face.

This is what love is. This is how you love. Belief or acceptance of anything else won't get you very far.

And fuck Chris for not wanting to try.

***

I have a need for you to be what I make you.
It's very difficult for me
to let you come to me
on your own,
as only what you are

and

I have a need to be what you want to make me.
It's very difficult for me
to come to you
on my own, 
as only what I am.

I am afraid

Maybe,
if I give you my fear
the way will open
for us to come together,
as only what we are.

I would like to try. ~Liam Grimm

The upcoming relocation situation

I'm leaving my beloved apartment May 1st when my lease is up. Publicly, and this is a solid portion of it, I've said it's because I won't have a car and biking from where I usually end up all summer (in and around Uptown) can be both tedious and dangerous late at night/when I've been drinking. There's a long stretch of road that's all near to Interstate exits and on ramps, and I never feel quite comfortable biking that 3/4 of a mile or so to my home in Near North.

It's also not near anything that I do frequently enjoy. The bars, restaurants and venues. I mean, it's "near" everything, nothing is more than fifteen minutes away, but little of it is within walking distance. If anything, it is exceptionally centrally located to all things, but not exactly close to anything. A conundrum of locale.

But, the bulk of why I want to leave is that this home has seen too much heartache. I have been looking around the last week and I am haunted by several scenes: crying myself to sleep in my bed after Andy, sitting around despondent after Thor (Thor, who I haven't spoken of, may not be necessary to speak of; it was a three month relationship. He lives in New Orleans. It didn't work, and didn't really work from the get-go. Honestly, though I fell hard and fast for him, I don't remember much that I really liked about him. I liked his style of dress. His calm demeanor. His swagger when he walked. That he was a carpenter, and a sculptor. I liked that he touched my elbow at intersections, a chivalrous gesture, to bade me not run like a ninny into traffic. But, I was not particularly attracted to him, and it just wasn't going to work out. So it didn't. We're friends now, everything is good.), and now, all of this with Chris.

I just want a fresh start. And simple comforts, like my favorite bar less than ten blocks away.

Hurts Donut

Some days are worse than others, and this has been the worst in two weeks. I hurt everywhere, my heart, my guts, even a dull ache that extends into my knees for some reason, that seems to be attached to emotion rather than a physical ailment.

Every few minutes I have to talk myself out of communicating with him in some way. Every few minutes I have to give myself a pep talk that I need to be patient. Some shift for the better is on the horizon, it can't get worse now, I just need to be calm, and patient, and think good thoughts and distract myself and...

not think about how much I love this person who doesn't want to be with me.