It’s Always Good Until It’s Not May 26, 2009

I wonder just how long I’ll have to live before I can write a memoir about love, and about what makes a relationship work.  Is it the genuine love for and support of one another?  Is it intellectual compatibility and stimulation?  Is it someone who makes you laugh?  Or is it nothing more than our own attitude, with almost no relation to the other person involved?  What can be compromised, sacrificed, before we say uncle and find greener pastures (or mirages)? For the first time I can remember, the NYT had a female same-sex “Vows” column, and it set off nearly all my little land mines: one proposed to the other on their second date.  How very “U-Haul” lesbian.  One was vegetarian when they met, the other decided to cook them up some yummy beans…with bacon.  Nice.  But they both love words, have sharp senses of banter and intellectually-toothsome careers.  I know exactly what I’m doing – I’m comparing my insides to their outsides.  Yeah, yeah.  And I was so happy most of this day, most of this weekend, until suddenly and immediately I wasn’t.  I must be such a joy to be in a relationship with.  Moody, distant at a second’s notice – only a few days ago I was sure I was going to fuck up this greatest relationship of my life, and here I am in a matter of milliseconds questioning whether she and I are going to make it.  Oh, ye of no faith whatsoever.

There is good news, folks – I didn’t act out on it, I knew what I was doing, and even though C is the most emotionally sensing person I’ve ever known and has definitely picked up on my struggle, it hasn’t ruined anything.  But the bigger questions are these: if love is a decision, how do we decide to keep making it?  Is it the level of compatibility that allows some people to not constantly question and doubt, or a personality trait?  In one of the “State of the Union” columns, one spouse credited the success of her relationship to the fact that she said she simply never allowed doubt to creep into her mind, even during the hard times.  Part of me wants so much to do that, to just buckle down and say this is the person with whom I’m spending the next 40-odd years, so let’s start getting used to it and nail up all those back doors.  Something about that is so appealing to me.  And I do have so much here – so much support, love, humor, ease, pretty great and getting better sex, food likes, affection, expressiveness, generosity, a great dog caretaker – so much.  I don’t truly think I could get more in one package.  But the wit isn’t there.  The intellect isn’t there.  And I doubt it will ever be.  And sometimes that is so incredibly okay.  Until it isn’t.  And I need to get better at soothing myself during the “isn’t” moments so I don’t blow them all up and have nothing but charred bits in my wake.  I know how good this is.  What I can’t and don’t know is if it’s forever.  And learning to accept that is really the greatest challenge – that we make plans and God laughs, that I can try to force my will upon my life like shaping pipecleaners, but it’s really not mine to mold.  I can just pray for enough light to take the next right step, and know that every time I see a future – be it shining or desolate – it’s nothing more than a figment of my imagination anyway.  Maybe if I could put a little less stock in the happy-ever-after convictions I have sometimes, I could learn to put a little less in the sturm-und-drang ones, too.

The Quell of Loneliness (get it?) February 29, 2008

Someone whose blog I liked very much has deleted it.  My head spins – why?  Where did she go?  Away from potentially critical, questioning readers?  She’d been miserable in her marriage and in relationships in general, started on a journey of self-discovery, and then met a man via this medium whom she decided was the answer to all her questions.  Many people congratulated her and wished her luck, but one or two cautioned her that she seemed to be repeating history.  I guess my fantasy is that she didn’t particularly want to hear the naysayers, wanted to remain blissfully ignorant and throw herself into the (unquestionable) joy of the beginning of a relationship without the buzzkill of cautionary tales.  And maybe she will, in fact, be blissfully happy.  Maybe for some, it’s possible to change a tune without learning a different instrument.  I’m probably jealous, more than anything.  Yes, I want what my higher power wants for me, blah, blah, blah, but I’d also like someone besides my sponsor (though she’s been right so far about everything else) to tell me that life will keep getting better and that I absolutely, positively will meet someone and be capable of a loving relationship.  Because most of the time, I honestly don’t believe it.

Being with my mother and the goddamn Blackberry that’s surgically attached to her thumbs for twelve days didn’t help matters any, to be sure.  I’ve never been so lonely in someone else’s company, yet here I am, sitting next to her, seeing the world and dying to talk to someone about all of it.  We might as well have been driving through Elizabeth, NJ for all she paid attention, yet we were driving through the streets of Mumbai and Manila, past local culture and sights unseen.  For sure, my recent ease in my own company helped me tremendously, but it was still incredibly lonely.  It made me miss B: suddenly I’m back to looking for her on Facebook, Googling her…someone with her name, living in her area, won honorable mention in a squash cooking contest.  A f–king squash cooking contest?  All she could cook when we were together was macaroni and cheese from a box and fried eggs.  So I start wandering down the road of “has she grown up?,” “should I contact her?”  Yuck, yuck, and yuck.  At least I know better than to listen to myself at this moment.  It’s just little drops of the drug, still stored in my veins somewhere, come out to haunt me.

One thing I WON’T do to quell this loneliness is sleep with boy C again.  All it did was make me miss women even more than I already did.  How do straight women deal with 5-o’clock-shadow-burn?  Or with all that hair?  If only I felt as much of an ease flirting with women as I do with men, I’d at least find someone to sleep with.  But that probably isn’t the answer, either.  I need to get back into my groove, to fill the emptiness myself.  I need to do what I think – correctly or not – my blogger-in-absentia was unable to do, to become truly at ease in my own company so that being with someone else never again has to mean abandoning a part of myself.  It’s a wonder I’m not emotional cheesecloth after being with my mother for twelve days: let me give myself the time to return to my former level of contentment before I start making any big decisions.

Journeys February 14, 2008

It’s been a whirlwind couple of days, and while I want very much to recount some of what went on, I’m also in a first-class lounge in London, on the first leg of my trip with my mom, and part of me just wants to be in the moment.

But some stuff happened that I think is important to document here.  C spent the night on Tues. night, as much due to the weather as any sort of lukewarm desire on my part.  The first time we had sex, I think my body was so hungry for touch that it could have been nearly anyone stroking my skin and I would have responded.  But the second time (Tues night), my head just wouldn’t shut up: I didn’t want to explore his body, didn’t particularly like the way he was touching me (it wasn’t bad, but it would have required a fair amount of coaching to be orgasmically effective), didn’t get very wet, and had a tough time staying present.  The wonderful thing, though, was how it made me realize that whether I’m lesbian or not (I’m not questioning that, per se, it’s just not the point here) I so-o-o-o-o do not want to be in a relationship right now, with anyone except me.  This new comfort in my own skin has been so hard-won, and now there are guards at the gate, making sure no one gets through.  He could have been my dream partner (he isn’t, but he’s lovely and kind), and I still wouldn’t be ready.  We talked about all of this, and he was extremely understanding, and we left on very good terms – I will look forward to seeing him again.  I’m just relieved to have given myself the space to figure out how I feel, and to have discovered this.

So, I’m on this trip with my mom, which in itself is an incredible statement, as I swore many years ago I’d never travel with her again.  One of the most helpful teachings for me in Al-Anon is how to recognize that people are not extensions of or reflections on me – I can like or not like her behavior, but unless it is directed at or involves me in some way, I can detach with love and just see her for who she is.  She’s being very solicitous so far, and we’ve mostly been reading or sleeping, and my excitement about traveling trumps any trepidations I might be having.  It’s exciting to be in the London airport, where B and I were just a few months back, and to be in such an incredibly different, far stronger place.  I’m happy, grounded, in touch with myself, and I look forward to remaining that way as much as I’m able, while eating great food and taking as many pictures as I can.

Boys and Girls February 3, 2008

It’s so lovely to get comments from readers that affirm my writing. Since being real is my overarching life goal, trying to remain authentic on this blog is its raison d’etre, and it’s encouraging when people corroborate that quality about it. Plus it makes me want to write more.

I woke up this morning from a seemingly very long dream about, in part, a wholly unsatisfying sexual relationship with this older (late 40s, early 50s) man. It took place in this bizarrely Victorian (yet for some reason I think he was Italian) setting, and I think my clothes were of a similar time: what I remember most is him touching me between my legs just to see that I was wet, but not doing anything more, and my feeling very frustrated. I want so much to have a healthy relationship with sex and my body, and I think that ultimately anything is possible, but for the time being it would throw me too off-course to have sex, I’m pretty sure. My most relaxed sex was with a male B, someone I met online after I broke up with C (damn, there are a lot of Bs and Cs in my romantic/sexual life) and before I met (female) B: maybe it was because he was a guy and I didn’t really have a lot of investment in it, but he also knew how to go down on me and made me come the first time he did it, much to my utter and total astonishment. Uh oh, am I repeating myself again? Blog amnesia: it’s a terrible thing. I was incredulous, really – it was partly that the way he did it worked for me (putting his mouth upside-down on me so his lips and tongue were on the shaft of my clit rather than underneath it), but was that all? I think about contacting him sometimes, but he wanted to pursue a relationship with me and I knew that wasn’t going to be in the cards. I just don’t think I can be in a relationship with someone whose body I don’t/can’t love. Why am I even questioning this? Because it’s available. If women knew I was gay, if people’s gaydar went off for me and women paid attention to me in anywhere near the volume that men do, I don’t think I’d be considering men at all. I really like my looks (yay! I can finally say that!), and I’m not about to cut my hair into a mullet and turn in all my cashmere for oversized flannel just so I can be recognized as a lesbian. There’s nothing political about my attractions, either – I’d have no problem being in a relationship with a man if I wanted that.

Another thing that really got to me about “Juno” was how simple she made it seem to figure out who we’re in love with. I do think there’s no question that if I’d had better relationship models, better examples of love in my childhood I’d have gone after healthier relationships. It makes so much sense that the person I fall in love with and want to spend the rest of my life with is also someone who a) thinks the sun comes out of my ass, as I think it was stated in the movie, and b) whom I think is just the coolest person ever. And by cool, I actually mean warm. And interesting, and loving, and loyal, and funny, and expressive, and communicative, and articulate, and smart, and grounded, and optimistic, and self-reflective…oh my. I know I’ll find that person and that what is important to me has really shifted over the past couple of years; that if I’m ever to find a life partner I’m on the right track now, but it’s difficult for me to imagine. I suppose it’s not a bad thing to have experiences that remind me I do sometimes want to be in a relationship, even though I much prefer being content with where I am to feeling any longings for something I not only don’t have but am not in any way ready for. If I’m truly buying this Higher Power notion, I need to believe that it will happen exactly when it’s supposed to.

February 3, 2008

I just got back from seeing “Juno,” and it left me so melancholy. I don’t know whether it was the movie itself that did it – the girl is loved unconditionally by her family and her boyfriend, and as a result she’s allowed to be this quirky, unique kid that I never, ever got to be. Who the hell would I have been if I’d had parents who could separate their shit from their children’s and not blame me for all their shortcomings and failings? I was told by an astrologer (I may be repeating myself) that I “chose” my family in this incarnation because I needed to be held back – my insecurities prevented me from using my power (whatever that may be) sooner than I was ready to. I am seeing myself blossom, that my ability to heal is my gift, and living by example is how I will continue to help others heal. I know I am on an incredible path, that I’m right where I should be, that it couldn’t be happening a decade sooner or an hour later.

I dropped the “gay bomb” on C today – we didn’t end up talking about relationships at all last night, and the evening was nice but a little stilted for me, hard to not jump into my old question-asking, polite-to-the-hilt self. I didn’t know how I felt, and maybe that was okay, but he came over today after the meeting and it was very relaxed: we were just talking and something came up where I would naturally have mentioned one of my exes, so I just said “This is awkward and I have no idea if you knew this, but I’m gay.” And he responded, smiling blithely, “no, I didn’t.” He was very calm about it, but I knew in that moment that I’d disappointed him, and even though it felt good, felt right to have told him, part of me wanted to say “but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to kiss you sometimes or that I wouldn’t like to be crazily fucked by you (he doesn’t really seem the type, but looks can always be deceiving).” I know sex wouldn’t be the right thing, that at this point in my journey it would be too confusing and destabilizing – that’s the other potential reason why I’m (I was) not feeling so great – I haven’t felt lonely in some time, and it’s not a good feeling. We can grow adjusted to almost anything, I think, and I don’t have any desire to disrupt this adjustment. I wish I could just have sex and then “reset” myself.

True Colors February 2, 2008

Okay, so I’m getting ready for this evening, not putting too much thought into it, but enjoying the “fussing” that I’m doing, and I put on this tight-fitting waffle/thermal long-sleeved t-shirt, and as I’m looking at myself in the mirror, my first thought is “God, B’s breasts were so hot.”  They were.  I’m normally a smile/eyes/hands/ass girl, but she had the softest breasts, and they looked so fucking hot under fitted shirts in bras we bought together (Victoria’s Secret Body by Victoria all the way, man) – toward the end of our relationship she started to get more lean and sinewy, but her breasts stayed on the bigger side, and oh my, that contrast between visible arm muscles and round, soft breasts…do I need to excuse myself for the moment and take matters into my own hands?
It just cracked me up that that’s where my head went.  I never, ever swoon over guys bodies.  I’m sorry, it just doesn’t happen for me.  Actually, I’m not sorry, I’m kind of amused.

Will Wonders Never Cease February 1, 2008

God, there’s so much I could write about. It’s raining ice up here, 70 miles from NYC, so I’m still in a bathrobe and hoping just to get some things done that I’ve been meaning to over the past few days. Among them is writing in this: it clears my head and makes me think, and while I haven’t gone back to read my posts in a while, I think it will ultimately be a wonderful record of this incredible journey I seem to be on.So I’ve been invited over to someone’s home for dinner tonight: a cute, funny, male someone, and I’m trying to let myself have all my feelings and questions without needing the answers until I’m ready for them. He doesn’t know I’m gay, I don’t think, and I know I ultimately prefer women and women’s bodies and that I have no desire whatsoever right now for an intimate relationship with anyone of any gender, but I do miss penetration and sex and kissing and all the good, lithe, fun, sweaty stuff that comes with the package. Would I sleep with him if the unfettered opportunity arose? I don’t know. I suppose I won’t know until I’m there and I see how I feel. He’s in AA, so there won’t be any drunken debauchery, nor will I be able to either blame tipsiness for bad decisions or allow it to push me past my own shyness. I think I need to just walk into it with an open mind and hope that it’s fun, regardless of what that fun entails. And I’d better shower soon in case the power goes out .

Back to Life, Back to Reality January 7, 2008

Isn’t it kind of funny that the next lyrics are, “however do you want me, however do you need me?” I’m reading the blogs of all these incredibly neat women in their 30s who are “waking up,” in a sense, realizing they are living lives that feel inauthentic in a variety of ways. I wrote to one of them, “do you think this is what happens to women between 35 and 40, but no one ever told us?” I feel very lucky I don’t have children or a spouse I need to step back from in order to find the contours of my own skin – I do think it can be done, but I’d imagine it’s harder to stick to your guns when someone else is persistently there asking if you wouldn’t prefer theirs. Or simply assuming yours and theirs are one and the same.

Every day, I get to ask myself what I want to do, and by and large I get to do it. I’ve started getting back into bed in the mornings after feeding my dog and cat, and reading/napping for a couple of hours. I still get up at 9:30 so (who am I defending myself to?), but I am finding I’m not nearly so overwhelmed by the mornings when I know I can get back into bed for awhile. I’m now reading “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” by Barbara Kingsolver, and when I got up this morning, I came to the computer and bought cheese-making cultures online (www.cheesemaking.com). It’ll be my cause of the moment, I’m sure, but the notion of living more softly on the earth by growing my own produce and making my own cheese (and maybe bread one of these days) is kind of exciting to me. Don’t get me wrong – I’ll likely have buffalo wings for dinner tonight, or something equally inorganic, but I adore food and the process of making it, so the notion that I could literally feed myself from my own larder is exciting to me. And what better use of my time and space now that I’ve moved outside the city in pursuit of a healthier existence?

One thing that has begun to change for me is that I’m enjoying my own company much more. Truth be told, I’ve always liked my own company once I got past the terror of it, but now I think I’m easing more and more into comfort with longer spates of time on my own. When I think about gardening and cooking organically, though, I definitely think about a group of friends sipping wine and cooking together – by myself it feels too lonely. Not to mention the cleanup’s a bitch when I’m alone. I don’t yet have a community of friends my age here…yet. I’ve generally preferred the company of older folk, partly because that’s who I’ve met through my program, and partly because they’re far less of a threat to me – I can be myself with them (and okay, also feel like a bit of a star) without a sense of competition. Yuck. I don’t feel competitive with people my age who are invested in authenticity, but I haven’t found many in my lifetime, of any age, and most have not lived close by. How would I find more such people, I wonder?

The best time of my life was at a summer college program for juniors in high school. It was the first time in my life that everyone wanted to really talk and be close and be real – we would have daily pile-ups, where we would all lie on each other’s bellies and talk for hours. We saw “Harold and Maude” and cried, made Cat Stevens’ music the unofficial soundtrack to our days, tie-dyed every white piece of fabric we could find, and just loved each other with a completely innocent yet utterly intimate and authentic love I think I’ve fruitlessly searched for ever since. One difficult thing about being lesbian (for me) is that it automatically categorizes contact between women as sexual, making non-sexual affection hard to ask for or realize. It’s really only been in this last year that I’ve been able to give and receive hugs or back rubs without any self-consciousness or worry of someone “taking it the wrong way” – I’ve had to become self-confident enough to know my own designs and not care what someone else assumes. It was an utterly paralyzing thing, especially for someone like me who craves affection, who would have hugged my friends with abandon if that fear hadn’t always gotten in my way.

To find out who we truly are, to fill ourselves all the way out our edges rather than being shaped by the inverse image of others’ molds, that is a worthy journey. What makes me laugh? What turns me on? When do I feel like the “real” me, even if different situations elicit different facets of that identity? Can this blog continue to be a place where I’m able to explore and express that real self? How do I find others in the company of whom I can still nourish that evolving identity?

Happy New Year? January 1, 2008

It’s early, way early for having finally fallen asleep around 2am. I didn’t even think I’d make it to midnight, but there’s some fight in the old girl yet.  I’m debating whether or not to get back into bed – on one hand it feels very decadent, on the other it depresses the hell out of me. Do you ever not know which “voice” to trust? The one that beckons soothingly, almost seductively that I’m tired, wouldn’t getting back into bed feel so good? Reading a book and falling back to sleep? Versus the voice that says you know what path that leads down, and it’s often not pretty, so why don’t you get up and be productive and shake whatever last cobwebs of sadness or melancholy are curtaining your mind. But then, it’s my mom who always needed to be productive, who told me my ass wasn’t going to get any smaller by keeping my nose in a book, and I can pretty much do whatever I damn please because I’m a full-fledged grown-up now. So it’s back, then, to Elizabeth Gilbert’s question as the mantra for my days: what do I really, really, really want?

I wanted an e-mail from B to be waiting for me this morning. Yuck, but it’s true. I don’t know what I’d have done with it, but I wanted it there, forcing my hand. I almost wrote her yesterday. My sponsor and I were doing part of the 4th step and talking about love, and she said that she thought I’d very much been in love with B, and she with me, but that in choosing her, I’d gone as far as I could go without making some major transformations in myself. I hit a bottom in our breakup the likes of which I’ve never seen and hope never to have to see again. I may actually have to go get “Eat, Pray, Love” and quote directly from it, because much to my then-splintered heart’s relief, I think she captured what happened to me.

“a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that’s holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you’ll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave. And thank God for it” (p.149).

That’s what she did to me, for me. And I almost wrote her to say thank you, that I’m okay, even better than okay, and that I was grateful she had been the best I could do for myself with the tools that I had at the time. She “broke my heart open so new light could get in, made me so desperate and out of control that I had to transform my life” (ibid). She made me feel what it felt like to be truly seen and truly loved.

But I didn’t write her, and she didn’t write me, and that may just be how it is for awhile. I’m 99% sure we’re not going to be together again – have you ever been with someone where the feel of their name in your mouth just wasn’t natural, and it made you think “how could I be with this person in the long term if saying their name doesn’t feel right to me?” Am I nuts? But her name never felt right in my mouth.

And now, I am learning what it means to love and be loved, to love myself without exception, to see that the moments when I feel nerdy or loser-y or alone are not really me, just some old records with really deep grooves. I am learning to be alone and not lonely…in her blog “And the Damage Done,” the writer speaks of how being alone may be the way to discover who we truly are, but fears we may not know that before we’re in our 60s or 70s, and then what? I don’t believe that’s true. I think life is a journey and that each person who enters it in some significant way is here to teach us more about ourselves that we could not learn in the absence of that outside influence, but that there is a point when the work pays off enough to start bringing more positive people into our lives. I’m learning so incredibly much about myself, about how loving through joking sarcasm still slices and puts me on guard, about how full of light I feel when I am able to express my true feelings and be myself without thinking.

I saw Chris Noth in a Starbuck’s on 8th Street the week before last. The reason I’m bringing it up here is that his dark eyes made me swoon, regardless of the body that came along with them – B had very blue eyes, and while I grew to love them (and I am a major sucker for crow’s feet, which she had as much from smiling all the time as from 20 years of smoking), I fall into warm, brown eyes much, much more deeply. My girlfriend before B, C (I’m not kidding) had brown eyes, but they were cold somehow – not lifeless, but not expressive most of the time, either. Like her. So brown is good but warmth is better. Anyway, Chris was much better looking in person than I’d have anticipated: quite tall, casually but nattily dressed, and really, such huge, dark eyes. Yum.

So yes, I think, Happy New Year to all. If nothing else, it marks the start of a new year in which anything at all can happen. At this time last year, I’d never have predicted I’d be here now, so who in God’s name knows where the next 364 days will take me. But life is good. Still hard, but good. No regrets.

My dog yips softly in sleep December 17, 2007

Lesbians are mostly thought to have cats. And believe me, I do. Cat, that is – only one, because actually I’m allergic and I have a small lap that wouldn’t accommodate more. But I have a dog, too, a 50-lb poodle-lab mix puppy (please, I beg, don’t use the term labradoodle. He’s a mutt that doesn’t shed much, that’s all) which makes me more into one of those outdoorsy-type women, hiking the Appalachian Trail with her dog. I’m so-o-o-o not that. The truth is I’m much lazier than I’d like to be, and if I could take a pill that would make my body feel tired and exercised, I’d do it most days. B and I had a lot of sex, even toward the end, and I was in the best shape of my life then. I like sex very much, though I can tend to be a bit too much of a performer and not really as present for it as I’d like to be. I know I’m very good at it, though I’m not sure there’s an objective metric on this: I’m extremely sensual and touch-aware, and I think I’m also on the high end of creative and uninhibited, so that has to count for something. Orgasms are hard for me, and they were even when I wasn’t on an antidepressant (or when that antidepressant was Wellbutrin, which is supposed to actually help sex drive)…actually, let me be more specific: the first orgasm is hard for me to reach, but then I can have one after another with very little stimulation, until I’m silly putty on the bed. Or couch. Tables and floors interest me less – I’m a bit of a comfort hound, and sexy as the idea’s been, I get distracted by the unyielding wood against my hipbones or shoulder blades.

Sometimes I question whether I’ve truly had mind-blowing sex, whether I even could, and if so and I haven’t, what’s missing. Attractions to people tend to grow for me over time: the more at ease I am, generally the more genuinely responsive my body can be, so the notion of a long sex life with a life partner is actually very inviting to me. I don’t honestly think I’ve sought out partners who were that attentive, who not only got to know my body but then did the things they knew I liked. For instance, I’m crazy insane for having my feet, neck and ears touched. But B paid very little attention to those parts of my body. She was actually enormously pussy/clit focused and yet, until maybe the second to last time we had sex, was never able to figure out (even with my guidance) how to make me come with her mouth. I love sex, I miss sex, but I am fully aware of how complicating it can be, especially between women. When I got out of my last relationship before B, I slept with a man for a while, and while I came every time, several times, and liked him well enough as a person, touching and tasting and looking at a man compared to a woman is like Turkey Hill lite vanilla ice milk (actually I think cum smells like bleach, which is a smidge less savory than vanilla) versus Haagen Dazs’ Mayan Chocolate. There is simply no comparison – in feel, in texture, in smell, in appearance. Don’t get me wrong – some women don’t smell or taste all that great. But to me, the smell of sex on myself and my female partner has got to be the sexiest, most distracting scent on the planet.

How in God’s name did I get here? And how can I leave? It’s not painful at all, actually – if anything it helps me pine less when I don’t idealize how we were together. Nor do I want to demonize the relationship, but it is my goal to see it fairly so that eventually I can know what parts of it I’d like to emulate, and what really wasn’t a good fit. We weren’t a good fit in a lot of ways, yet the ways we were were intoxicating – like a best friend in sleepover camp who you’re allowed to be incredibly affectionate with (girls are lucky this way) and you then realize you’re actually ATTRACTED to her, in love with her, which takes this fabulous best-friendship to a completely different level, you actually get to have sex and watch movies naked under a blanket and wake up in the morning with the person you talk to about nose-picking and dreams for the future. But the fights were horrid, man. I’ve never been involved with someone anger-phobic before, and every time my mouth wasn’t turned in a smile she would absolutely flip out, say she “needed time,” and flee in one way or another. But it was always my fault – my expectations were too high, my needs too great, my insecurities too insurmountable. It’s true I didn’t feel safe with her, and the less safe I felt, the more unsteady and unpredictable my behavior became. We were as bad for each other as two people could be when it came to the rockier parts of our relationship: she set off my stuff, I set off hers, and suddenly we were in it only for ourselves, protecting our own precious territory instead of walking onto the other’s battlefield with swords sheathed. We weren’t ever mean, but we both felt enormously unsafe, I think.