I don't mean in the connoted sense of criminal or sexually degenerate—though there's certainly a story or two about that. What I mean is, I violate social norms.
What is "normal" is determined by every society, big and small, for that culture in that time. I am generally law-abiding and productive, but my personality—the persona of Stephanie—is often camped firmly in the fringe of normal.
Pretty much everything falls onto a bell curve. If you classify virtually anything and rank and sort it, then graph it in that mathematical way that has eluded me for years, it makes a pretty, curvy shape, in which the majority of "stuff" is in the high center and the extremes are on the low sides.
I'm almost always on one of those tapered ends.
Doing my neverending homework this week, I was reading about social deviance. My textbook was talking about different sociological viewpoints of deviance. Emile Durkheim's structural-functional analysis says that deviance is a necessary function of society. What is unnormal is defined by what is normal and vice versa—there can be no evil without good. How a society responds to deviance clarifies its moral boundaries and brings people together in the process, sometimes encouraging social change.
Robert Merton goes on to purport his strain theory, which basically says that some deviance may be necessary for society to function but that too much, especially when caused by a lack of means to help members of a society achieve cultural goals, places a strain on that society. Conforming to cultural goals through approved means can become difficult, if not impossible, when there are no opportunities to do so. This points to why street crime is so prevalent in poor neighborhoods, where people don't have the educational and socioeconomic means to provide for themselves or further lives outside of the poverty and circumstance they've been socialized in.
Eventually, deviant subcultures can form: criminal, conflict, or retreatist.
Walter B. Miller adds that subcultures have certain characteristics, no matter their underlying cause:
trouble – frequent conflicts with authority figures
toughness – especially value of physical size, strength, and agility
I've always been at odds with authority figures. I've never been inclined to listen to someone just because they were in charge or I was supposed to do so; if they could give me a reason to respect them, I would. If not, I would question it and fight back. I am certainly taller and bigger and larger, both physically and mentally, than most people. All that testing when I was a kid proved I was smarter than even the above-average bear. I'm easily bored and constantly shifting gears to the next adventure. I have a strong belief in both fate and Fate. And I want nothing more than to be free to live my life as I see is best for me.
As ridiculous as it sounds to say I rebelled and formed my own subculture, that's kind of exactly what happened over the last four years. I was unhappy—fat, in a crumbling marriage, unfulfilled in most aspects of my life, seeing no way out—and I fought back. I had everything everyone says they want, and I was miserable. I bucked the norm and started to live as Stephanie, more than Wife and Mom and Daughter.
I am finding more opportunity now, because I am making more opportunity for myself. Working three part-time jobs and being in school full time, plus being a full-time mom, is hard as hell, but it was my choice. More than a couple of people have suggested I should find another husband to support me and pay for my life. Fuck that. If I can't rely on my own talents and worth, no one else should be able to, either. (Conflict subculture.)
There are days I want to run away and leave it all behind. (Retreatist subculture.) I often talk about living on Glamazon Island, where men aren't allowed to live—unless they're a Hooha and only then until they grow up. (Hoohas are the general name for children of inhabitants of Glamazon Island, 'cause that's where they came from.) Eventually Glamazon Island will just be me and my girls, having tea parties and craft time on the beach every afternoon, before our daily walk.
(There are all kinds of secondary plans, involving whose daughter is in charge of defenses and ninja skills to protect us from the ousted Hooha forces that invade on giant, flying Death Chickens.) (This is also why someone recently told me that my mind is like a playground for adults.)
Look: I am as batshit as they come. And it's not that I strive to be substantially different from everyone else. I am not like other girls because I'm just made that way. I don't live in the middle of the bell curve because I'm not happy in the medium. My place of comfort is pretty far removed from most other people's.
And I am happy that way. It can make for some pretty extravagant turmoil sometimes. It can be hard, being able to understand emotional extremes so readily because I have lived them. But I can't imagine being normal. Maybe if I were, I wouldn't really know the difference. What I do know is that my pretending to be normal did no damn good for anyone.
So I embrace my differences and live them as fully as I can. As Queen Frostine joked yesterday, "The standard deviation is not enough for a kinky statistician."
But that gives me hope that somewhere there's a 6'4, 240-pound, dark-haired, blue-eyed, Irish statistician who might be able to keep up with me.
After a conversation with Hot Pocket and my therapist, I finally made the decision last night to go to the Hunter Hayes show at the Fox, just to see if Bounder would show.
He didn't.
It was okay. I'd told HP that I expected he wouldn't. But I knew if I didn't go and give it the opportunity that I would never know what happened. I would constantly be rolling around in the What-ifs.
It's over. It's done. It makes me a little sad that I'm unsurprised by his refusal to show--or even his cowardice at not letting me know so I could at least sell the tickets. But I'm honestly okay.
I don't know what's coming next--or who--but I'm ready. I'm ready to just get on with my life without this constant dark cloud chasing me.
So tonight I'm going out with a new friend. It's a second date. And I'm okay with that, too.
Fate has something else in store for me. I probably won't see it coming, and I'll probably flail about when I feel her hot breath on my neck. (She always comes in from behind. She's like that, you know.) But that's okay, too. It'll happen when it happens, and I'll be better able to handle it with one less albatross haunting me.
I've been caught in a loop in my
head for the last few days. There's
nothing new about that, honestly, but my heart has been especially
unrelenting.
There's a lot going on right now.
Some days there are so many balls in the air that even a well-practiced
juggler would have trouble keeping track of them all. And if the actual logistics of my life
weren't difficult enough, there is still my shredded heart to contend with.
Tomorrow is October 17th. That doesn't mean much, except that I have
tickets for a concert. Hunter Hayes at
the Fox Theatre.
Oh
hell.
I have historically loathed country
music, but something with that shifted in the summer, directly because of my
relationship with Bounder. I fought the
twang as hard and long as I could, but when the man sang (quite off-key, mind
you) country songs and danced to said songs with me on my deck in the middle of
the night, it was hard not to get caught up in the emotional sap. A couple of songs in particular became stupidly
poignant—Jake Owens' "Anywhere With You" and Hunter Hayes' "I
Want Crazy"—and they always seemed to start playing at just the right moment.
When tickets went on sale for Hunter
Hayes at the Fox, I bought the tickets and immediately texted Bounder:
October 17th. I have plans.
You have an invitation to join me.
You
are a brat.
Apparently he was about to buy the tickets himself when the text came through. They were intended to be for our
collective birthdays, which were just days apart at the end of the summer.
"I'll give you your
ticket," I told him. "Just in
case."
"Just in case we break up
again," he replied, laughing in the dark on the deck that weekend, in the
middle of the summer solstice.
"We'll meet up—"
"—at the show—"
"—October seventeenth."
Oh
hell.
So here we are, and I have no idea
what to do. From the night we met, and
then at every turn, there was a strange sense of Fate shoving us together. Typhoon
Bounder collided with Hurricane
Sassafras in weirdly tragic, romantic perfection. And every time we think it's over, something
else happens that forces us into each other's orbit. (Fate,
you really are a raging bitch.)
We seem constantly drawn back to
this place of choice to make, of some junkture
in our path. Is this the place of
Fate (divine intervention) or fate (because of choices we've made)?
There are four primary scenarios:
I go to the Fox, and he doesn't
show. (In which case I will leave,
because I can't see it with anyone but him.)
He goes to the Fox, and I don't show
up. (Like doing your homework the night
before a possible snow day.)
Neither of us shows up, and we never
know if the other did.
We both show up, which creates a
whole new branch of this flow chart of possibilities.
Queen Frostine feels strongly that I
should skip it completely. Her position
is that I have come so far (so she says) in getting over this man, that to open
myself up to even a moment of heartache again has the potential to set me
back. She says I'm better, that I've
shown progress in moving on, but it's hard for me to see it. A step or two forward, maybe, but mostly I
feel like I've stumbled ahead and am still trying to get up from this path with
a skinned knee.
No matter what I do, it will
hurt. My heart will ache, and I will
still miss him. I don't know that I ever
won't. I can remember feeling that way
about other men, and I did eventually find a way to move on, given enough
time. But if the time to heal (as best
as possible) is proportionate to the depth of emotion felt for another, it will
take a damn long time to get over this one completely.
I loved Bounder. Deeply.
Maybe more than I've ever loved anyone besides my children. I still love him and likely always will. He is never not there, whether in my heart or my thoughts or my dreams. Most days are okay, but some are hard as
hell, when there's a reminder at every damn turn and I can feel him so
intensely. And the nights can be brutal.
No matter how I feel, there are
substantial issues with us. The perfect
storm is at times decimating in its cleansing of our worlds. As beautiful as the lightning is, it sometimes
strikes too close and sets the underbrush afire. Maybe it's just destructive, and maybe it was
needed to clear away the dead wood and allow for new growth. Either way, neither of us will ever be the
same again.
The thought of standing in that
darkened theater, listening to those love songs that seemed to mimic our
hearts, is terrifyingly beautiful, whether it's with or without him. Something ingrained in me can't help but love
the tragic romance of it all. But love
is not a love song. My heart will still
be racing and aching when the three-minute swell is over. I just don't know if it'll be dancing with
him in the dark.
I have ludicrous amounts of
coincidence in my life.
It's far beyond thinking of someone
and then they call. I have quit being
surprised when I dream of someone and hear from them the next day, or even when
I dream very detailed, seemingly random events that later come true.
It's really more a matter of
synchronicity. In the 1920s, Swiss
psychologist Carl Jung developed the term to explain "the experience of
two or more events as meaningfully related, whereas they are unlikely to be
causally related." It's meaningful coincidence, though the
events do not have to happen simultaneously and there doesn't have to be
explanation of their meaning in terms of cause and effect.
For Jung, synchronicity gave a basis
to his concepts of "archetype" and "the collective
unconscious".
For me, it means a whole bunch of batshit.
It happens so often that it's become
a fucking joke within the Castration Committee.
But what also regularly happens is that these patterns of synchronistic
events precede the most poignant and profound moments in my life. They are like omens for what's coming, both
good and bad.
When my crying jag started last
week, it took about two days to run its course.
In addition to all of the stress I've been under, Friday brought a
series of events that were both unexpected and unsurprising. Unrelated to each other, but these two currents
in my life that should be skew—meaning they are not parallel and do not
intersect—began to curve toward each other and resulted in a momentary
traversion.
That continuum of crisscross marked
yet another landmark event in my life, specifically with Bounder—the person with whom I am most synchronous.
Days before it happened, I told Hot
Pocket and Growler that something was brewing.
("Something penis this way comes," I said.) I could feel it, the shift in energy around
me. I'm very sensitive to such things;
Absolem once told me I was like some kind of freaky, voodoo static magnet. I just feel
other people's energies. With the people
I'm closest to, I can do it from a distance.
I just know when something is
wrong or happening.
The synchronicity often comes in
waves, and inundations of it often herald the approaching crazy.
Right now, and especially tonight, I
am swimming in portent.
I don't know what this will be. I almost never do. I just know that it is coming. It doesn't feel
bad, though it does feel colossal. Based
on what happened in the past week and what I know is supposed to happen over
the next month, I could take a guess as to what (and whom) in involves, but the
details won't be revealed until the actual time.
Part of it is that I am open to the
idea. I am willing to see signs and
meaning in the strangest of things. I do
actively look for it in my life, though I try very hard not to see more into
something than is actually there.
Sometimes when I call something out and name it for being important, the
person on the receiving end of the prognostication will tell me I'm full of
shit. All too often, I get to tell them I told you so.
I pay attention to these things,
because my life has consistently shown me that there's reason for me to do
so. I get these vibes, for lack of a
better term, and they almost always happen just before my path shifts
dramatically.
In the past, when it's been this
strong, Fate has stepped in and forced me to come face-to-face with my next
step, the impact so strong that it leaves me figuratively bruised and
shaken. She's a bitch, for sure, but I
know better than to fuck with her.
There's a reason for it, every time, although I don't always see it
until it's too late to even beg her to let me turn back.
Whatever it is this time... okay.
I can rail against it and be a petulant, ungrateful little brat about
it, or I can just accept that something crucial is about to happen and conserve
my energy for when it actually plays out.
Someone important is going to
need those energy stores, and I have the feeling that it's someone very, very
important to me.
It feels like a test, of everything
that has come before, of everything I have learned over the last three
years. And I hope I'm up to the
challenge. I hope I have the skills to
fight this battle—and maybe even the Vorpal sword one of us will need to slay
that Jabberwocky.
NOTE:
Just as I was finishing this piece, getting ready to post it, my phone popped up with a push notification from my Facebook fan page. Earlier in the evening, I posted asking for suggestions for what to write about for a new blog post. This is what I see when my phone got my attention:
For months I've been toying with
what to write next.
I always knew I wanted to do
something else from the Junkture stories.
I went to Mardi gras and Mobile earlier this year to do research for the
next book, Mantissa. (That's Alex Wheeler's first wife's
backstory, if you're interested. If you
don't know who I'm talking about, read my first novel Persona Non Grata.) Most of
it would be totally fiction with bits and pieces of my youth and stories from
friends' lives as well.
There's also the story of Talia
Wheeler, Alex's current wife.
Sequentially it happens just after Persona
Non Grata but is told from Talia's point of view. I knew a lot of it would reflect my real life
in the aftermath of separation and the process of divorce. I haven't had enough closure or distance to be
able to delve into it quite yet.
I had a dream in the spring that was
the catalyst for an entirely new story.
The details were swirling in my head, and I did hours and hours of
research. While utterly fiction and
having nothing to do with Junkture, the tempest that is Sass and Bounder was
strongly influencing how these characters were evolving. This was true the first time we were together
and even moreso the second time.
I was stuck, though. I couldn't quite see these new characters.
Queen Frostine was asking me regularly where this book was—she knew the
gist of the story and wanted to see it come to fruition. Even Hammer was intrigued by the idea.
"It's all in my head," I
would answer.
When Bounder and I broke up in July,
I was on my way to Mobile again. I
needed time to think and wrap my head around what was happening. The day after it finally happened, I drove
out to Dauphin Island. I sat on a
mostly-deserted beach in the rain, listened to music, and cried. I purged a lot of
emotion that day, giving it to the wind and the rain and the withdrawing
tide.
And somehow over that tempest, I heard the names of the
new characters. Layla and Michael.
From that point, they had
identities. I could hear and see them,
knew how they acted and moved. I
borrowed Lady Hammer's laptop and wrote what would become the first draft of
the first chapter on Sunday. It took a
few days, but I eventually got into the groove and the energy needed to write
this story.
Like all writers do, I'm writing
what I know. Even though the story
itself borders on paranormal romance (but is as about as genre-specific as PNG—which is to say, not at all), the
emotions of Michael and Layla are effectively Bounder and me. Like I did for the first book, and like I do
for Muchness and Light, I am drawing upon
my very real life to drive my writing.
But just once I would like to not have to live a traumatic
relationship just to get a book out of me.
"Most women gain twenty-five
pounds when they break up," my editor said. "I'd say emotional writing is much more
productive."
I agree, but it's hard to relive the
good and the bad just to reframe the sense of emotion. It's hard to see the texts and emails and
then remember what was occurring in the midst of that. It's as difficult to the middle-of-the-night
"I miss and love you" messages as it is to see the "This is too
hard, I don't think I can do it" ones.
It breaks my heart all over again to see all the times we were messaging
simultaneously that we were listening to the same song, or to see when he'd
text me that he was on his way to come and kiss his girl.
In some ways, it leaves me even more
confused about what happened. He was
there, plainly and constantly, and then suddenly not. I knew when
and why I think it happened, but I
don't know how. It seems like there was literally one moment
in time when something shifted and everything fell apart. If I mapped it out on a storyline, I can see
the day that's pinpointed as the climactic turning point. But there are still details I'm missing.
I have to accept that I may never
have that insight. Writing Original Sin is kind of my way of making
sense of it all, though our specifics are differently complicated than Michael
and Layla's. I get to build the monument
to this as I see fit.
"This is what your lightning
strike was for," Hot Pocket said.
She's probably right. And I will take the lessons I learned from
writing Persona Non Grata—step out of
chronology, limit the emotional punch, break down the specifics to only what
you need—and write this story as best I can.
The energy for it is abundant right now, and I'm let it flow openly and
unabashedly. If it's anything like my
actual relationship with Bounder, it will come quickly and then be gone, leaving
something entirely new in its wake.
Once again, I have let my arrogant, trusting heart bite me in the ass.
In the course of a few days, I dealt with my wedding anniversary—19th, but the first since DH and I separated—as well as the demise of my relationship with Bounder. Again.
I have been over it with him, with the girls, and in my own noisy head about a hundred times. Here was a man who said, “I am done being afraid. I love you. I am committed to you and to this. I want to be with you and not just so I don’t have to be without you. You are wonderful, though you deserve more than I can offer in my damaged, fragile state, but I am willing to try fully to meet you in this, with the goal of moving forward in our life wherever that may lead.”
But when it got real, when I got real and challenged his excuses for being suddenly and irrationally unsupportive and distant, I was told it was my fault—that I was just too much.
At every turn, I was blatantly honest with him. I told him from the very beginning that he would always know where he stood with me, because I would be sure to tell him. I was just as quick to remind him that I loved him and supported him and cared about him as I was to tell him I was upset or unhappy about something. Because of his own damage and his past, it was sometimes hard for him to understand how someone could actively love him, how they could do it not in spite of his plethora of issues but openly and accepting of those as what made him into this enigmatic mix of strength and vulnerability, of hurt and hope, of love and loathing.
Bounder and I met at an incredibly emotional time in our respective lives. We were each in process of divorce, which included the unmitigated difficulty of examining what in each of us had led to the unexpected death of dreams and plans and intentions. But we understood each other like no one else and were instantly, constantly connected. We could often seem to read each other’s thoughts.
When he came to me in June, he asked me if I really wanted this, meaning him and his baggage and the hardships that might come from that. I told him yes, that I loved him and that I was willing to take the risk of being hurt again because the potential for good far outweighed the potential for the bad. I asked him, again, if he was ready to really be in this with me and accept my own flaws and baggage and logistics. He was adamant that he was. But
there was always the issue of his sobriety. I wrote after our initial breakup in the spring that I was pretty sure he was an alcoholic. He denied it then and later. Truthfully, alcoholism can be tricky to determine. There is a difference between having a high tolerance, being a problem drinker, and being an alcoholic. Even when some people drink heavily or regularly, that doesn’t mean they’re alcoholic. It’s the impetus behind the drinking that determines whether it’s a problem or an addiction. There are alcoholics who’ve been dry for long periods of time but who make the same choices, perpetuating the addictive behavior, even without the use of substance. I’ve often heard it referred to as being a “dry drunk”.
Like so many others, he functions well and lives an active, productive life.
“You have to be sober for me,” I said.
“What does that mean to you?”
“You can’t let alcohol or any substance be the thing that allows you to create and maintain emotional distance between us. It can’t be the tool to drive me away.”
But when I needed him, and needed him most, he did just that; he let a drink become the excuse behind why he couldn’t be there for me. He let that be the place to escape his own tormented head and to drive the cycle of self-flagellation.
I know his history intimately and fully understand like almost no one else how and why he came to this place in his life. So much of our respective pasts is mirrored plainly in the other’s. We have always been openly cognizant of the pitfalls and respectful of the fact that we each had to tread very carefully and consciously in that minefield. But he assured me, time and again, that he was willing and able and ready to do that. He told me he loved me, that he supported me, and that he appreciated me.
In the end, the breakup happened over an email while I was 200 miles from home.
I didn’t go into this blindly or easily. I didn’t forget what had happened before. I did choose, consciously, to put those things aside and do everything I could to healthily support him and our relationship. I refused to constantly be waiting for him to fuck up, because that is no way to love or to live. Even when I was afraid during the last few days that this might be happening, I told him, asked him again to face me and talk to me, to tell me if it was more than he could handle. He reiterated again that he was in it, no matter how scared he was of disappointing me.
But his excuses won out over his intent. He let it be easier to push me away than to face himself and do the work needed to mend his own soul; he let it be easier to be overwhelmed by the fear of the difficulty than to actually make the attempt. His refusal to believe that he could ever be healthy or deserving of good things fueled his fears, and he bailed. Again. Rather, he pushed me to the point of saying I’m done.
It hurts, make no mistake. I loved him deeply and passionately and honestly in a way I’d never been with anyone else. All of the lessons of the preceding years, all of the work I’ve had to do to deal with my own past and mistakes, allowed me to go into this thing with him with my eyes open. I always knew I could get hurt. I had no specific expectation that I would be with him for the rest of my life—if it happened, so be it. I also wasn’t interested in being in a relationship with this man if I knew there was expiration date. There was no way I was willing or able to go into this without accepting the potential of something long term. Regardless, we agreed to see it through to the end.
Instead what I got was a man who wasn’t brave enough to face his own demons and who used excuses to justify running.
“I appreciate you and everything you’ve done in my life. I wouldn’t have come so far if I hadn’t met you when I did. I love you so much more than I can really express, and I’m afraid I will disappoint you.”
You disappointed me not because you decided this wasn’t right. Even if it was that I wasn’t right for you, that would have smarted but I get how that happens. It’s that you yet again chose to let your fear stop you from accepting what you want most: to be loved for who you are rather than who you should be or what you can do for the people you care about.
You did it knowingly and decidedly and didn’t try not to hurt me in that. You made excuses for refusing to move any direction in your life, and you intentionally misled me to your place of stagnation and then had the balls to both blame me and say that you’d always warned me it might happen.
It’s childish and toxic and cowardly, and you had no right to drag me down with you.
So now I’m back the place of grasping for stability. Eventually I will have to start the process of regaining ground, but right now I just want to ground to stop spinning beneath me.
Before, I wished him healing and peace and hoped that he would find his way to a healthy place, whether or not it led him to me again. Now, I just don’t care. I refuse to do it. When I did care, it brought me this. Again.
My heart hurts, undeniably. My head comprehends the how and why, really, but my heart is unlikely to ever grasp how this could happen again, given the intricacies of intimacy that occurred between us every single day. I wasn’t delusional about any of it, I am confident in that.
But maybe I shouldn’t have been, and I probably won’t be again. I don’t want to be. I don’t want to trust someone again, let alone love them. If you’re not in my inner circle now, don’t expect ever to be. I worked so hard to come to a place where I could even be willing to love another person again, and it got me this. Again.
Hot Pocket says I will meet someone one day who can love me like I deserve and want and need. She says I am a generous, light, and shining spirit who deserves someone who appreciates that.
I may be, but I feel pretty sure that person doesn’t exist. Every time I’ve come close to that, when I have someone who looks me in the eye and says, “I see you for who and how you are, and I love you for that,” they back the fuck away and let their own baggage drag me down. I feel stupid and humiliated. I don’t trust my own judgment, let alone my heart or my head or my gut. And I don’t want another person ever to touch me if it means they might have the power to hurt me.
So for me, it’s not worth it. It makes me question my own worth, undoubtedly, and whether I was right two years ago when I suggested that my lifetime value was bankrupted when I gave birth to my sons. Was my purpose in life fulfilled when I procreated? Did I really have everything I deserved at 32?
Life is complicated, and love is hard. I was willing to take on that challenge, for me and for him and for others before him. Now? No. So even if Fate herself appears before me and says, “Sass, you gotta do this. You gotta see this person and go this way. I’m going to make you,” I will tell her very clearly to fuck off.
I would rather incur the wrath of the gods than ever let my heart be open to another person again.
A couple of weeks ago, I was moving
on with my life.
Happily, carefully, trepidatiously
(if excited), I had met a couple of new people and scheduled a couple of first
dates. Summer was unofficially here, and
I took a couple of days to get away and see some friends. While out of town, I was trying to catch a
cab in the rain and decided to call another friend quickly.
I stepped into the edge of the rain
and hit her name in my contacts, hit her number and heard the first ring. Shifting my purse in my hands, I glanced down
at the phone and saw not that friend's name but a face smiling at me.
I hit END as quickly as possible,
and my heart started to pound in my chest.
Maybe it didn't ring on his end.
It rang twice. He heard it.
Maybe he won't notice.
Come on!
It's Bounder we're talking about.
I texted him and apologized if it
rang through, explained that I was out of town and trying to catch a cab in the
rain.
Ten minutes later, he replied, Fate really is a bitch.
Turns out he was at home, phone in
his pocket. He hadn't heard it ring,
though he certainly noticed the missed call and subsequent text. It also turns out that he was reading Muchness and Light, catching up on what
he'd missed in the weeks since he'd seen and talked to me.
An hour-long telephone conversation
in the rain outside the venue led to his coming to see me the next night, after
I returned home. What was exchanged
between us is ours, especially his, but suffice it to say that the conversation
was intense. So much so that we agreed
to try this again, to not let the fear of emotion and connection and unplanned
upheaval keep us from being together.
With all of our problems and issues
and concerns, there is this force that not only keeps pushing us together, but
keeps reminding us that we are supposed to be together. If I doubt for a moment—usually because I am
overwhelmed by the fact that this amazing man loves me so intensely and that I
love him back just as much—I get some reminder, some prodding of song or
feeling or intimate memory, and he usually somehow gets it, too. There's almost always an immediate text or
call from the other. We are very much in
sync.
And the thing is, I was done.
I was finished with the trying and the crying and the hoping that he
would accept how very much we meant. It
was never a matter of his not seeing
it; it was all about his being ready for it.
I was over keeping myself from calling or texting, somehow able to talk
myself down and not react immediately to the emotion of missing him. I had stopped waiting for his attention and
fully expected that I would never see or talk to him again.
The hardest part was always knowing
that I would likely never find that connection with another lover. Not like that. My time with him—those incredible moments of
just the two of us—had altered my desires and expectations on so many levels. I honestly didn't think I would ever be able
to find it that good again, and I really don't just mean the sex. And the reasons we were apart seemed
ludicrously unnecessary.
As with every bigger picture, there
were other, hidden reasons we needed that time out of each other's immediate
orbit. I knew he had things to work out
and work through. What I couldn't see at
the time were the remaining lessons I
had to learn before we could ever move forward.
Even when I did that work, I had no inkling that the process was making
room for Bounder.
Every day, I get some reminder from
the outside, some little push or sign from the universe or Fate or my
subconscious or his, that this is when and where we are supposed to be. We are
supposed to be here now.
Because I lost him once and have
been given this second opportunity to be wholly with him, I refuse to waste
it. I am cognizant of our separate and
collective pasts, cautiously aware of how close we came to not having each
other. I am thankful and grateful that
I've been given the chance to be both truly myself and to be what he needs and
wants, but also to have him reciprocate in all of that in a more honest way
than any other has ever offered to me.
He is a remarkable man, and we are incredibly lucky to have this time.
So I'm still moving forward, just
not in the way I expected three weeks ago.
It is truly better than I could've hoped or wished, and it is happier
and healthier than it would've been three months ago. I have more lessons to learn, more work to do
in preparation for whatever path my journey takes from this point. But now my lessons and my work take on a
whole new dimension by accepting Bounder into my life. It's not just what I get from this; it's what
we get separately and collectively as we step onto this path together and head
toward whatever is on that brilliant, shining horizon.
In the past few weeks and months, as
in the past few years, I've lived an extraordinary series of mostly-unrelated
events. They've been varied and crazy,
giving rise to a whole new batch of Stephanecdotes,
as well as providing some serious fodder for each of a few planned new
books. Sometimes they were things I
sought—Mardi Gras with Hammer and Lady Hammer and Glee and Roadkill—as research
for a new project. Sometimes they were
utterly random—the dozen balloons floating colorfully into the rising sun over
Atlanta. And sometimes they were fated—like
a lightning bolt straight to the ass.
I'm a firm believer in Fate. Some things are fated in the sense that
there's only one viable choice, based on all of the previous choices you've
made. There's nowhere else to go but here, because you've come from there, and that makes it feel
important. But I also believe in Fate as
an outside, blinding force. Maybe it's
because of other people's choices, maybe it's sheer dumb luck, but it feels
like divine intervention, twisting and turning you wildly or slightly. Either way, you can't help but look at what
it wants you to see.
I'm adamant that Fate is what
brought me to so many watershed moments in my life, as in Tierney's. My forty years have been significant and
stellar, even when splattered with the remnants of my heart. She hasn't stopped working her magic, or so
I'd thought. Then I was given a series
of gifts, only some of which I was able (read: allowed) to keep for any significant length of time. But I did and am continuing to do my best to
take those simple lessons learned and move forward.
So
what now?
In the aftermath of several recent
events, I was shocked to realize that I'm really,
really scared to move forward again.
While I do actually have a choice in the matter, I refuse to be still
any longer than necessary. It's just not
who I am. But in my search for a deeper,
more profound experience in which to immerse myself and fully comprehend, I am
in a cycle of seeking out more varied
experiences, in search of my next rabbit hole.
Given the things I've done and the people I've known, how the hell am I ever going to top this?
It's not that there's a competition,
with myself or anyone else. I don't feel
especially driven to do more things.
Those actions and events are simply a delivery vehicle for experience
and understanding—a mode of enveloping me in deeper learning and the psychic
tinkering I so love.
Some of these things I've lived,
especially in the last three years, have left me with my bars set very high—the
problem being that someone else placed them way over my head, just out of my
reach. And for an Amazon, that's pretty
damn high. Unfortunately, I have no
control over where those bars rest.
After the events of even my year so
far, I feel taunted by what I want, that it was and sometimes is so damn close. But when I reach for it, it falls away like
sand. Over and over, I'm in someone
else's sandbox, but it's warm and velvety and strangely soothing, so I keep
digging deeper.
Okay, Fate: challenge me. Dare me.
Give me reason and excuse to reach again, to reach for something bigger
and better, something truer and more astonishing. Because I know
there's something there for me to learn, something important and pressing and
profound, I will all but destroy myself to get to that locus, to that kernel of
truth at the center. It's something
that's just for me, and sometimes I
have to step into the journey through Hell to gain it.
Even in my brashness, I am fearful
that I will never again reach those same heights and depths of learning and
love and sex and hope, that I have somehow stumbled upon something (and
someone) so exquisitely good that any future attempts will, at the very least,
fall short of those expectations. The
worst case scenario is that even trying
to match that will be cataclysmic to my heart and soul, if only because it's
doomed to be a fruitless effort. While I
know the real joy should be in the journey and not the destination, the last
thing I want for the last half of my life is boredom and unfulfilment.
"Maybe the point is to be happy
and content in what you do have, to enjoy the person you're actually with as
fully as possible," Queen Frostine advised. "Maybe that's your ultimate goal."
That feels like settling, though,
and I don't ever want to do that again.
As selfish and strong-willed as I am, I will actually compromise when
the need arises. I am very good at
negotiating settlement, in general, though that's rarely so successful with my
heart. While my ideal isn't perfection,
what if my idyllic can only ever fall short of faded and dreamy memory?
I knew what I wanted; I seemed to
have it within my careful grasp. Not as
an object or a trophy, but as a treasure that was tarnished and neglected and
buried under so damn much rubble, trying desperately to breathe under the crush
of years. But it slipped back into the
sand and seems to be washing out with the tide.
So now I have to walk the shoreline again, combing through seaweed and
jellyfish and craggy, broken shells, hoping to find another pearl yet afraid
all I'll have are slimy oysters.
Those are the most ludicrous words
after a break-up.
It's not that I think men and women
can't be friends. I have lots of male friends, running the gamut
from casual to intimate. (Poor Hammer
knows waaaay more than he'd probably
like to know.) While I do tend to
gravitate toward women for those very close friendships, there are and have
been a few exceptions over the years.
Even within the bounds of
Stephanie-Dude friendships, sometimes the lines have become blurred by deep
emotional or spiritual connection. Sometimes
by both. If there's also a sexual
attraction, the relationship can become complicated rather quickly. Sometimes I've been able to pull back from
that and maintain the platonic relationship.
Sometimes not.)
Usually what happens, though, is
that I go through this experience with whatever man, and the relationship is
damaged by sex and love and what has most often felt like compromise that was
unevenly anchored to my side. Hot Pocket
would toss in the words "unevenly yoked" right here. Moonshine might suggest something about
unbalanced equations. My therapist would
kindly and gently advise me to determine what I'm willing to accept to maintain
a healthy relationship and where I can confidently draw my lines—with the
mindful acceptance that I must defend those boundaries if push comes to
shove.
Bounder and I went back and forth
for days that turned into weeks about how and where our relationship was
going. He says he's not an alcoholic; I
still question it openly and to his face.
Almost regardless of that, there's still the issue of my caring about
him. He is special to me. Tierney says it best, to Alex, during one of
their last conversations in Persona Non
Grata:
"Look, I don't
love a lot of people. I don't like a lot
of people, and all these people in my life have really hurt me over the
years. I have reasons to be wary of
letting people in. When I do, and
especially when I choose to let them in far enough to love them, they're
special. You are a very rare breed of
human being that I both like and love, and not just because I have to. That's why I get so mad about it all. That's why it feels so unfair. I don't want that to have been a waste of my
energy."
Part of the issue for me is this
idea of being compartmentalized, of feeling like I'm being shoved and cajoled
into a box that keeps me away from the other person. Yes, it is something men tend to do more than
women; it seems to be an innate coping mechanism for them. Again, Alex and Tierney discuss this early on
in their relationship:
[Alex Wheeler]
"That's how I am; if someone makes me mad or bothers me too much,
I'll just ignore them—won't answer their calls or texts or emails. I'll just stop."
"Are you that way with everything? Do you just ignore what you don't like?"
He thought about it for a moment. "Yeah.
I compartmentalize everything. I
have to, in some ways, being on the road all the time. It helps keep me sane. I'm really good at keeping everything in its
own neat, little box, where I can deal with it or not, as I choose. I'm probably too good at it."
"I think that's a guy thing," I
commented. He nodded in agreement. "I think it's much harder for women to
take their feelings out of the equation.
Men are much better at tucking their feelings out of the way."
When a relationship is ending for
whatever reason, what do you do after you've been through an intense period of
time with this person whom you both like and love (on whatever level), with
whom you've shared deep intimacies, and without whom you feel a little lost?
While I still occasionally have very
platonic contact with Absolem, he was always
an exception to the rule—though that was no real surprise given the nature of
our relationship. I know damn well that
I will always have that tie to him, that weird connection that brought him in
and out of my life as a catalyst to upend me and bring about my own
transformation. I owe him so much, and I
owe him nothing. But I know that even if
I weren't to hear from him for twenty years, he would know within moments of
making contact exactly how and where I was in my head and my heart and my
soul. We are, in so many ways, two sides
of the same coin.
I made the break, privately and
publicly, from Bounder, but he didn't disappear. It was confusing. It started with the careful arguing and the
constant discussing of what this relationship had meant and was supposed to
mean and how impactful it was for each of us and why, along with where and when
what went wrong—like an emotional debriefing with the only other person who
could truly understand it because
they'd lived it with me. The inner
circle was great about listening and advising and letting me cry when I needed
to do so, but ultimately the answers and solutions would only come from me and
from Bounder.
Our relationship could stop or move
forward in myriad ways. We could take
the leap of faith and delve into this and see what happened. We could agree to part ways for some period
of time and plan to meet back up, if the time was right. We could date slowly for a while and move
along at a more reasonable pace, ignoring everything that had pushed us
together in the first place. Or we could
just say our goodbyes and be done.
Eventually it was plain that we were
tired, dancing wide, serpentining lines around this place and time that wasn't
yet right for us. No matter how drawn we
were and are to each other, here and now
wasn't going be ours. Not like
this. And the seeming pressure of divine
intervention felt yet again like Fate had played a cruel trick, taunting me
with, "Oh? You want this? Too
damn bad! You can't have it!"
So, again, I told him no, that I can't do this, that I can't watch him
from some nebulous place of distant care and be flirty witness to his
life. I am worth more than that; at
least on this we agree. I told him to
find me if and when he was ready to accept the whole of my affections and to
reciprocate healthily in kind. I wished
him well.
"You haven't given me a chance
to tell you what I want out of this
right now," he patiently stated when he called.
Well,
I've given you plenty of opportunity.
It's not my fault you've refused to take it when it was offered.
"So what is that you
want?" I asked, feeling a little defiant underneath it all.
"I want you to be you, and I want to be your friend. I want to still see you and talk to you and blahblahblah."
"So you still want me in your
life and want to maintain that connection with me? But you can't commit emotionally, no matter
how badly you say you want to be able to?
And maybe you want to have sex with me, if it feels like the right thing
to do?"
"Yes."
What
the fuck?
The truth is I don't want him gone from my life. He is sweet and funny and smart. He knows me incredibly well and has seen
through my facade of bravado from the moment we met. Even though he is often willing to grant me
the freedom to maintain that glittery face, he also doesn't hesitate to call bullshit on it and on me. He's one of very few people (especially men)
who call tell me no. I want a healthy
relationship with him. I care deeply for
him, and he has impacted me in ways very few men, or people in general, have
been able to do. But I also don't want
to spiral back into the dark place of striving for attention, of flustering for
a fleeting moment of care and affection.
I don't want to be told no just
because he has the power to do so; sometimes I get to be right.
And as
Tierney sums up later:
Alex had kept me in a box, but within those
confines I could expose myself totally, free to explore the ever-expanding
boundaries of my soul without fear of judgment.
If he couldn't handle what he saw, all he had to do was close the
box. It was how he handled his own
soul.
To ask this of me, to negotiate
platonic friendship with the possibility of an eventual more, is unquestionably
an effort to compartmentalize me and our relationship. I
understand that the fragility of this cat is undercut by recent and deep
trauma, that he could very well crack at any time. It's a defense mechanism, undoubtedly, and he
has every right and reason to seek that comfort in his world in the hopes that
he can heal from what came before me.
I have every right and reason to say
no.
I'm
not going back in the box.
Having lived the life that brought
me to this version of Stephanie, I am very wary and sensitive to that kind of
one-sided consideration. I was left on
my own for years, emotionally, and
tend to gravitate toward people (again, especially men) who are selective in
their attentions. Whether their reasons
are emotional or logistical in nature serves only to explain the behavior; there
are reasons but no excuses.
Because of my sensitivity to feeling
dismissed or ignored, I will never not
respond to the boxers. I cannot ignore
their calls to attention. I know
precisely how that hurts and loathe the feeling so much that I would never wish
it on anyone I care about.
I will always be his friend, but
right now I don't know that I can be just
his friend. I want and am ready to be
special to someone else (though I am not actively seeking anyone to fill that
role), and we both thought at first that he was ready for that, as well—that we
were both ready to be special to each other.
But intention and fruition don't always fall in line with each other; no
matter how much it looked like this was supposed to be here and now, that's simply not how it's working, even though I
question his direct role in that creating and maintaining that obstacle.
The thought that I could go through
this with him, that yet again I could meet someone who could alter my own path
so dramatically, and that he won't be at the end of this leg of the journey
with me is simply terrifying. Right now, while I care about him so deeply
and want him to be healthy and content in himself, the risk of seeing him fall
for someone else when he's finally ready to crack his own facade for another
person... it's just too much. Maybe it's
not me, and it is him, as he's said so roundabout, but it's still me that faces the greatest possibility
of being hurt again. To keep me in his
web of care means that I will feel the vibrations of secondary movement. It could be him shifting slowly toward me, or
it could be him scurrying in another direction.
Either way, it leaves me stuck and slowed by his gossamer threads,
grappling at my feet.
But to turn away from him leaves my
friend in need.
I don't know where this is going any
more now than I did when it started. The
good part is that it has given me an opportunity to understand and accept that,
no matter how much influence I may or may not be able to exert on a force,
sometimes the situation simply isn't mine
to control.
So for a little while longer, he and
I are in this weird, nebulous state of... what?Friends? Not friends?
Not lovers? I don't know, and
I'm honestly tired of not thinking and thinking and overthinking. I will do what I do, be who I am, and
whatever comes from that is what will be.
While I won't attempt to unduly influence the outcome of this situation,
I'm also not sitting passively by, waiting for Bounder to take me out of the
shiny box and play with me.
Every so often, when you need it
most but expect it least, the universe gives you a gift.
Mine came three weeks ago, though it
began with the unleashing of a torrent of anger and resentment directed at me
that sent me curled into my bed for most of a day. I seriously debated just staying between my
cozy, flannel sheets for the weekend but decided at the last minute to go out,
to get out of my battered head for a while.
I was supposed to be meeting up with a friend.
That fell through at the last
minute. Instead what I got was a
lightning strike, straight to the ass at 1:34 in the morning.
Yes, it came in the form of a boy—no,
a man—who could see me for who I
really am. And I could see him. All within ten minutes.
Once again, Fate intervened and
turned my head to make me look at what it wanted me to see.
"What
the fuck?" I asked myself.
"Did that just happen?"
Why,
yes. Yes, it did.
It's like the universe looked at all
of the work I've done over the past three years, the lessons I fought so hard
to learn through my crazy time of transformation, and said, "Okay. Let's see what you do with this."
It's so plainly, painfully obvious
that I have to practice what I preach with this. I have to walk the talk. So which lessons are most important now?
Don't
hide yourself away. I am a force of
nature. Hot Pocket said recently that
even she has a hard time keeping up with me.
"It's like chasing a preschooler in the sunshine," she
said. "It's beautiful but
exhausting sometimes." I'm not
offended by that, especially coming from a sister from another mister. I know how I am. But I hid much of that from myself and others
for so long, and it almost destroyed me.
I have to be truthful to myself and let my inner disco ball shine
brilliantly. I seriously debated reining
that in, to keep some of the glittery, blinding brilliance from him at least
initially, afraid that I would overwhelm yet another man. To be less than I am would be detrimental to
me and wholly dishonest to him. And any
man who wouldn't want me to be completely Stephanie is exactly the kind of man
I don't want in my life. Turns out, he's
not intimidated and barely even fazed by my muchness.
Open
your mouth and say what you want.
I'm not a little girl; I'm a grown-ass woman. I have the right and responsibility to
express my thoughts and desires to a potential partner. No matter how in sync we may feel, he can't
read my damn mind. If I want him to know
something, it's on me to make that clear.
Again, it seems less threatening to dance around an issue or to
insinuate or imply. That's a sure-fire
way to foster the miscommunication that will eventually lead to distance and
anger. It's hard sometimes to let
someone else into the cacophonous din of my head and my heart, and I have to at
least offer to be their tour guide. He
not only understands why I am so open and forward—he appreciates it.
Stay
in the moment. Oh, being still is
the hardest for me. I like a plan; I
like to have expectations for the future.
Even if the best-laid plans go awry, I am flexible and resourceful
enough to shift quickly to a new, diverging path. But to be here,
peacefully, is very difficult for me. I
don't know where this will be in six weeks or six months or six years, and
every time my head tries to go to that place, I clamp down on those thoughts
and tell myself to shut the fuck up. He is here and now; that is where I will get
to know him and where he will really get to know me. And I find that,
historically, when I've had a serious expectation of long-term, that's exactly
the moment I begin to take my partner and that relationship for granted. Anticipation of a lifetime or longer has
often given me an excuse not to care for now,
because my missteps can always be forgiven when there's an indefinite amount of
time before me. Now, with this man, I
have to work to be present rather than projecting for a future. My frenzied head has to give up control to my
patient heart and let it lead me slowly toward whatever adventure awaits.
I realized this week that I spend so
much time reacting to emotion—mine or someone else's—that I often forget to
simply let myself feel what's
happening, good or bad. And what's
happening, right now, feels spectacular. He's amazing for reasons that would take me
days to express, not the least of which is that he is totally accepting of my
relationship with my girls. Growler both
unexpectedly met him ("That boy is dazzled, Stephanie.") and gave him
his nickname (Bounder, which I will not explain in this forum). Hot Pocket got the Tingle of Truthiness when
I told her lightning had struck again.
Even Queen Frostine has given him her stamp of approval from a
distance.
In the way he always does, Hammer
nailed me with the most honest appraisal of this point in my life: "You'll
never feel normal again because your normal has changed. This is great progress and I'm happy for
you."
