Another Door

I never meant to be away from this blog for so long.  Two sudden and unexpected deaths of loved ones less than a month apart crippled me -- stripped away my ability to think and function.  I'm more here now than I have been perhaps even before I started this blog, my secret space away from...well.  Away from.

This afternoon, the tiniest bit of who I used to be glinted through in a surprising break from my newly-learned fuck-off vibes.  Waiting for my transport, I took a seat in a mostly empty bar.  I ordered a shot of Patron and what turned out to be the most appalling tequila sunrise I've ever had.  Not that I'm particularly a fan of Patron -- it was just the best of the slim choices at the bar.

A young man, handsome and scruffy and sweet-eyed, looked over his shoulder, away from his two friends, to casually chat me up.  We flirted a bit, although I was careful to not say anything that might invite him to my side.

Eventually, the two seats between us were taken.  To my horror, I found myself confronted by a married man who made an awkward effort to keep his left hand tucked away and an awkwarder effort at conversation.  The sweet-eyed boy and I stole a few more looks at each other.  He slipped off to have a smoke and I considered joining him.  Instead, I weathered the married man with polite reserve and caught my handsome young man as he entered the bar.

I greeted him as if we were old friends who hadn't crossed paths in years.  It was ridiculous and wonderful because he was too tipsy from his beer to catch on right away.  He finally did and brought his last beer to my other side, where I warmed up to leading him through a merry conversation that surely couldn't have fooled even a man who thinks keeping his hand in his armpit will disguise his marital status.  Still, I found a way to give my young man my number, inviting him to call tomorrow (well, later today, I suppose) so we could "catch up."  I even managed to write a quick thank you and my first name on a napkin I'd used earlier to blot my lipstick.

That wasn't the only kiss he carried away, though.  His friends were calling for him to come along and I was wishing him a pleasant evening when the angle of his head, the cut of his eye, changed just a bit.  As simple as that, I knew what he was considering.

As simple as that, I touched a fingertip to the far side of his jaw and raised my own mouth.

It was a splendid kiss, hard, brief, wet, deep, and open.  He breathed "you're crazy" into my mouth, not breaking the kiss.  I smiled into him, my teeth first catching his lower lip then mine.

"Have fun tonight," I told him.  He smiled, sweet eyes a little glazed and a touch of a flush on his unshaved face.

"I'll call you," he said.

"You'll miss your train," I said, then turned to find my mirror and lipstick because I saw how much of my color he had on his mouth before he left to catch up with his friends.

"I would have caught the next train," said the married man in a strained voice, his married hand weakly holding the edge of the bar.

"And to think I barely recognized him, what with his hair so short now," I cheerfully lied.  I wondered what my handsome young man's name was.

I wonder if he'll call.

I know how to write the end.  It was only yesterday, after all.  It hurt more than I'd expected, seeing her features pinched and pale.  Her hair was shorter than it had been and it emphasized the weakness of her chin, the sharpness of her nose; it gave her features in profile a hatchet-shaped quality that hadn't been there in the brief time our lives overlapped.  Or if it was, I thought it beautiful and had no call to look at her from a distance.

What I'm no longer certain of is what actually marked the beginning.  There were so many things that had to happen to break me down and change my mind.  To make me take a chance on dating this emotionally damaged, mentally ill young woman nearly a decade my junior.  I'd never been adverse to the notion of dating another woman.  I'd just never met one I'd wanted to date.  Even now, I'm not entirely sure that I wasn't initially attracted to her because I saw so much of who I am and who I've been in her:  broken, scared, stubborn, and angry and wild with life.  She was my rage and my rebellion, my passion and my desperation made manifest.  I wanted to comfort her in all the ways I'd longed to be comforted; cheer her on even as my own detractors found ways to cut me off from friends now lost to me.  I wanted to be her friend and I found myself increasingly taken by her open interest in me.

Meeting her, running off with her for a weekend, finding myself happy to have her fall asleep in my bed...that's all part of the middle of the story.  For that matter, neither my narcissism nor my loneliness entirely marks the start.  No.  I think this failed affair began when I traded the frying pan for the fire in moving from an increasingly stressful situation in one city to a series of heretofore unimagined disasters and failures in another.  Without those disasters and failures, I wouldn't have broken.  Without that damage, I wouldn't have become desperate to seek additional help from a doctor I didn't entirely trust.  Without that desperation, I wouldn't have started on a medication that, unbeknownst to me, slowly began to change my brain chemistry for the worse.

I think that's where it began -- losing my mind by inches to that drug.  Six months later, I can see the shifts and changes.  Track all the ways I deteriorated without knowing that every time I medicated for anxiety, I was actually ramping up my panic responses and confusing my thinking.  Even so, that's part of the end again and it's still as fresh as the hurt of her sharp hatchet profile.  I know that part.  Know how to explain it and understand it.

The middle bit, then, is the blurry part.  Where I'm a little more uncertain.  I was lost in the increasing confusion of heightened, disproportionate emotions and reactions.  I was dealing with a fair number of hardships:  homelessness, unemployment, broken trust, so much grief.  (Thus the reason for overriding my qualms and trying that drug in the first place.)  In the midst of this, bright and lovely as silver thread, an online acquaintanceship unexpectedly developed into a friendship.  The emotional noise...I could usually shush it when we were sending instant messages or corresponding.  Phone calls were infrequent, but usually fun.

As I think on it now, maybe this is part of the beginning, too.  If I hadn't loved him, I never would have been changed enough to love her.  If I hadn't been hurt so badly by his parting letter, I certainly wouldn't have had his parting words running through my mind when she would destabilize into screams, tears, and incoherent speech.  His words described only a part of me -- the part I recognize now as having been most deeply affected by the stress in my life and poison in my daily meds -- but, oh, how they described the entirety of her.

Psycho, he'd written.  And perhaps that's the only word I need to repeat to capture how he perceived me; to explain the very quality about her that convinced me, for a little while, to love this emotionally violent feral young woman.

So, if that was the beginning of this failed affair and seeing her yesterday well and truly marked its end...how is it that there's so little middle in my mind?  The drug that was wrecking my emotional stability only provides a context for my actions; to suggest it was solely responsible for what I'd think and subsequently say or do is as ridiculous as the Twinkie Defense or shouting "The Devil made me do it!"  Even without it, I know I would have wanted to be more centered for her and to be kinder than him.  What I don't know is what I would have wanted for myself.  Not entirely.  To be accepted, I think, even as I deteriorated.  To have help recognizing that what I was going through wasn't typical.  To know I wasn't alone and that I wasn't disposable.

To some extent, those impulses were there.  Muddled and muddied by the the drug, but there nonetheless.  There was also a sense of wildness and freedom in touching her smooth, firm body.  I never told anyone that I never let her do more than touch my breast.  Then again, I never told her I came the night she pinched and rolled and tugged my nipple with her almost too-strong fingers.  I fucked her with my tongue and mouth, slipped my fingers into her until I was nearly fisting her cunt, stretched and teased her with gently curved vibrator.  Always, though, there was a distance and a caution between us.  It was she who increased that distance even insisting she wanted us, wanted me.  She wanted me to ask questions, but screamed because she didn't have answers.  She argued that she wanted us to be lovers, but wept that she couldn't be touched.  I had no desire to force her into a relationship or into relations she didn't want.  What she wanted, though, remained as elusive to her as it did to me.

That played its own part in why there's so little between the start of our friendship and the eventual spark of sexual attraction between us and yesterday, when I saw the bitter, aged quality to her features that revealed the face she'll grow into if she doesn't eventually find the help and the love she needs.  She started requesting more distance and I responded by letting her go as soon as I recognized that what we had wasn't healthy.  That I wasn't healthy.  In turn, I sought help from another doctor to get me off the medication I'd finally realized I should never have been on.  Riding out the side effects and withdrawal symptoms was a singular hell for me.  Unexpectedly, as that hell burned away, a genuine and almost unnervingly selfless love for her emerged.  I saw her fully for who she was, no longer confusing elements of our issues, and I loved her.

That's where the ending begins, where the middle ends.  She didn't want me to love her.  So, when she vanished, I let her stay gone for a month.  Until yesterday, at any rate.  For both our sakes, I sought her out because I needed to know if she wanted me out of her life for good or if she still expected me to wait, as she'd asked me to do so many times before she'd disappeared.  I'm so sorry I saw her hurting so much without being able to comfort her.  I'm so sorry I hadn't been healthier during our brief time because I think we might have salvaged the friendship; might never have damaged it and each other all the ways we did in the first place.  What I do not regret is knowing that contacting her again would only harm her more.  I love her enough to leave her alone and hope that she'll let others help her through this time.

And what of him?  The one whose words woke something beautiful inside of me and whose words made me aware of how otherwise ugly and unwanted I am?  I don't know.  With him, something broke all the way...the silver thread snapped, I suppose.  There was no love left, but I discovered his absence created an ache the way a phantom limb might.  We've resumed a cautious dialogue, although for the life of me I don't know why.  I don't know why I asked.  I don't know why he agreed.  I don't know if we actually want to be friends again or if we even can be.

I no longer have a chemical haze choking my mind and disrupting my reactions but, simply put, we don't trust each other any more.  I don't know what this is, this cautious dialogue we have now, any more than I know if it can be sustained.   Only time can tell whether this is where another story will begin, or whether we're playing pallbearer and gently carrying what we had to a proper and permanent end.

For now, for all that it's fragile and largely insubstantial, it simply is.  If this is the end, it will be one more story to leave behind when I finally close the door on this city.  I'll know how to write it because I've learned to be good with endings.  It's figuring out how to begin and begin again I find difficult more often than not.

Still, there's something to be said for knowing when to walk away without looking back, when to close a door, and when a story has come to its end.

I have been job-hunting in both my present location as well as the other places I'm considering.  The local job is one I consider disposable.  A means to the end of my time here so I can slide off into a new city, a new life.  The job hunt has not been easy or quick or remotely kind.  That's a first for me.  I've never struggled before the way I have here.

Then again, there's a lot I've done and endured out here that I'd never experienced.

I really wasn't certain I'd find a job that would suffice before I had to just leave, ready or not.  The timing is too close for my comfort.  Still, a job that will suffice has come through so I'll be staying -- marking time and making myself invisible -- until my savings account has recovered enough to see me through the next move.  If I live lean for the next few months, I might be able to leave by the end of next winter.  A year's time.

That seems like forever now.  I might have to go by summer's end.  I don't know how to be out here for another year without coming to harm or, perhaps more likely, succumbing to desperation.

I suppose we'll see what I can accomplish.  It's a disposable job, true, but mine has been a disposable life for so long now.  I just need a few months to hold still and breathe.  If those months turn into a year, so be it.

When I leave, as I've done before, I'm not looking back.  I've already started to ease out of the parts of my life lived too publicly.  I've changed my appearance:  different hair, different body shape, different gait.  I've even been brushing up on what has to be done to get a new identity legally.  That's how far I want to go to ground with this next move.  Unfortunately, I doubt I'll be able to because of a handful of obligations.  Those obligations won't last, though.

Nothing does.  That's the only true beauty in my disposable life.

I'm marking time, one journey finished but the next not yet begun.  I've packed up most of the stories and memories and set them aside.  Unlike my last move, I plan to travel light.

Unlike my last move, I plan to travel alone.

I keep records differently when I'm at a computer and when I'm in front of paper.  There's a distance and an anonymity, even from myself, when I'm at the computer.  My handwriting gives me away too easily:  all the smudges, the tangled letters, even the occasional rips or tears or blotted tea stains.  My mood is evident.  Too evident, in fact.  My emotions show through with every pen stroke.

Not so here, which is why I'm starting this blog.  It will hopefully track when I finally start the next journey, the waiting time left behind with the stories and memories I won't be taking.  I don't need all the emotions to bleed through while I wait, though.  I just need a place to make my plans and, eventually, note where I wind up next and what it takes to get there.