**

No sign of Dan for well over two months. I’m still stuck, struggling not to sink into the sticky, sucking mud of melancholic inertia. My enthusiasm and vitality have ebbed away; I feel the way I might if our blazing western sun had been blotted out behind drizzly, slate-colored clouds for weeks. Not only have I not been writing (I’ve been reading about writing, but not writing, which makes me a poseur, and possibly a fraud), I lack the energy to meet the demands made upon me by others which, while already out of my control due to an unconscionable lack of boundaries, I could at least handle before. But I no longer have the blood to donate. Right now I just need to halt the slow drain.

Further depleting my powers are the daily mea culpas and second-guessing about where I went wrong with these folks. How did I let it come to this?

**

But first, in other news: Stoner Rick is back at the call center.

Oh, I am not going to go there again, trust me, but it’s fearsome strange having him around again after everything that’s occurred. I’d be lying if I claimed he didn’t still attract me, in his odd, arrested, overgrown-slacker-teenager way, still wearing the backward baseball cap at thirty-one, looking like Silent Bob after Jenny Craig. Only now it’s the history, it’s my embarrassment about things said and done three years ago that make me nervous, that infuse a tension into our limited interactions. He relieves the tension somewhat by rolling his eyes and making goofy faces. Rick was always a funny guy. I can see that it was a combination of his humor and his friendly earthiness that made him so attractive to me before. Things he projects when he’s not all red-eyed and checked out, as he still is, and often.

But the history…I know he remembers it too, you can’t erase that stuff no matter how much you smoke. Sometimes I feel like my predilection to get vulnerable and make a fool of myself with men is a huge liability. Did I really say all those things to Rick? Yes, I sure did. Damn. I totally put myself out there. Now I’m embarrassed. Embarrassed for telling him that I was dying to have sex with him. Embarrassed for leaving him a voice mail that I’d fallen in love with him “a little bit.” I don’t even know if he got the message. He was in jail at the time. That last statement is the most embarrassing thing of all. What the hell did I think I was doing?

Then again, anyone could say that about Sam. What the hell did I think I was I doing, starting something with a kid half my age? What the hell did I think I was doing, sleeping with my supervisor? What the hell did I think I was doing, getting mixed up in his illicit nocturnal activities?

I guess the big difference is that Sam was an extraordinary kid, who requited me, and gave me a so-called “corrective experience” amid all the madness. It was crazy and inappropriate and memoir-worthy, and I’d do it all again in a heartbeat.

I once read the autobiography of a woman who married her gay, AIDS-infected best friend. They had a difficult marriage, complicated by drug addiction, sexual incompatibility, and disease, but they also had two healthy and much-loved kids. People make all kinds of choices, some of which make no sense to others (who may be quick to judge, citing damning emotional issues), but this woman had no regrets.

Unfortunately, I kind of regret the whole Rick episode.

**

That kind of regret is characteristic of us perfectionists. We hate and abuse ourselves when our risks don’t work out. (So of course we take fewer and fewer.) We want to do just the right thing and say just the right thing at just the right time, not too soon and not too late. We want to sail through life authentic and triumphant, like fully competent, fully realized and enlightened beings who manage never to do any harm while never allowing others to harm us.

Yeah, I know. Good luck with that.

As I mentioned, lately I have been kicking myself, berating myself for being a less than decent human being, about my inability to lay down crisp, clear boundaries right out of the gate with people who take my goodwill further than I ever really intended. Witness the fiftysomething alcoholic at work, the one with the Ralph Kramden physique, who was coming to my cube multiple times a day to pet me, and who finally let slip that my “stubbornness” would one day relent — that I’d eventually “come around.”(!) I began to distance myself and to actively avoid him after that revelation.

But what the hell kind of strategy is that? And how did I let it come to this?

I could ask, what’s the alternative now? To say, “Stan, there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell?!” That’s to say nothing of the 300-lb. giant who reeks of inadequate hygiene and was until recently coming to me for hugs. He also came around asking me for allergy medicine because “all the plants and trees are having sex.” That was awkward.

I want to be kind. I want to show compassion toward the people who need it most. But almost unfailingly that kind of caring, especially with men, or at least the subset of men I don’t want to be giving the wrong idea, is mistaken for another. (Why can’t Eric Bana make that mistake?)

**

Nor do I know what to do when I find myself spending way more time and energy than I can spare trying to deal non-destructively with those who have already taken up more than I intended to spare of my limited time and energy, because I let them. After eight aborted attempts at nonviolent communication that took me a total of twelve hours, I found myself asking again: how the hell did I let it come to this?

Usually with good intentions, if the above is any indication.

Now, of course, the damage is done: I’m trying to bail out the Titanic without alerting the passengers, because they’d be traumatized. I don’t know how to be Maureen. I wish I knew how to be Maureen.

Maureen was one of my closest friends ten years ago, when I was severely depressed and borderline suicidal. We used to go out to lunch about once a week, where I bent her ear at length about my multiple woes while she kept me updated on the status of her divorce. I had introduced her to my therapist of ten years, who had helped her figure out that she needed to leave her husband and that she wanted to go back to school. I just assumed we had a more or less equal give and take going, that she was equally fed by the relationship.

I was mistaken. Sometime after most of Maureen’s temporary trauma and drama had ended  — mine continued unabated — she told me gently but firmly over chili rellenos that she needed to take a step back from our friendship. It was “too intense” for her. She didn’t have the energy for our lunches anymore.

As you can probably imagine, I was stunned. Devastated. I felt as if I were being abandoned, without any warning whatsoever. My face burned with the shame of unexpected rejection. But after a moment (in which Maureen looked at me as kindly as ever), I nodded my head and said, “Okay.” I asked her a few questions, some of which she answered, and some of which she didn’t. I didn’t offer my own assessments as to why she might be “running away” from our friendship, nor did I try to argue with her calm resolve. I accepted it at face value, as what Maureen needed right now. She seemed quite clear about what she needed right now. (I did my wailing and gnashing of teeth later, at home.)

To this day, I have to admit she loosed herself from me with as much tact and class as anyone ever has. It was very gentle, but at the same time very firm. I had no doubt she meant business. I also had no doubt she meant no harm.

It had never occurred to me that my own negative-integer energy might be canceling out or depleting the positive integers of my friends, but a year or two later my friend Deb (who counseled refugees — she was no stranger to psychological issues) backed away as well, saying gingerly, “I need to be around people who want to have fun and talk about fun things.” I am quite sure I was no fun.

I had leaned pretty heavily on Deb emotionally (which, needless to say, was part of the problem), so this loss was equally devastating. I never realized that she wasn’t also leaning on me. But I respected Deb then and I respect her now for being able to take care of herself. Our relationship may have been serving me, but it obviously wasn’t serving her.

Of course, both of these women had “let it come to this.” But it had only come to this because they cared. They wanted to help me. They wanted to be a good friend. It had all started out innocuously enough. I also know that if they’d continued to show up day after day out of loyalty to a relationship that took more out of them than they got back, they would have eventually come to resent me and the demands I made on their time and energy. I’m glad they didn’t wait any longer.

In those days particularly, I wasn’t exactly someone you’d invite along on spring break. A high school friend compared me to Eeyore, which was harsh, but not entirely inaccurate. If I had been a Peanuts character, I probably would have been drawn with a little black cloud hovering over my head wherever I went, like Pig-Pen with his aura of dirt. I couldn’t help it. I was doing the best I could. But so were Maureen and Deb.

Maybe today I’m still a self-hating, self-absorbed, narcissistic mess, but I like to think I’m a slightly more lighthearted self-hating, self-absorbed, narcissistic mess…one who wants to enjoy her life a little more than she needs to obsess over stories about the ways she’s sick and broken. From time to time, now, I can actually step outside the familiar mental narrative in which I’m a massive and serious problem — like global warming — that needs an urgent and focused solution. Some days I can even attain total presence in the moment, and experience (gasp!) happiness. Which, ironically, turns out to involve a lot less work.

**

For the past couple of weeks, however, I have been unable to find that kind of presence. I’ve been too busy flogging myself for not knowing how to handle everything and everyone as impeccably as the Dalai Lama. I’m sure he never finds himself in these kinds of situations.

But speaking of situations in which the Dalai Lama never finds himself, the individual who adds the greatest positive charge to my personal batteries seems to have left the building — for good. The staff schedule no longer lists Dan with an ‘LOA’ for ‘leave of absence.’ He’s just gone.

I’ve been putting in applications and sending out resumes again, in order to leave the premises myself. Even without having made my confession to Dan, the place is like a minefield anymore. Between Rick and Ted and my plus-sized wannabe beaux, I can scarcely turn a corner without one of them in my face. But assuming I did eventually have the opportunity to say something…however it went, it might not create the most ideal working conditions. Believe it or not, more than a few of our coworkers have made connections that broke up marriages, and not only did they live to tell about it, some of them are still together. But even anticipating the most favorable scenario, who wants to act all that out in a fishbowl?

I still intend to reach out to him, however, if it becomes clear that our paths won’t be crossing again as a matter of course. Otherwise, not telling him may become a lifelong regret…and not because I’m a perfectionist.

**

In case you’re wondering what ever happened with my Match.com experiment, the answer is: not much. I went on two dates all month. (Even on the crappy free site, the odds were a helluva lot better.) The first was the bug-eyed professor, who had me daydreaming about making dinner; the other was a pleasantly nerdy 31-year-old MBA from Canada named Kip.

Kip was slender and swarthy, with lively, darting black eyes behind an academic’s glasses, afflicted with the early onset of what could informally be called Salman Rushdie pattern baldness. He was highly intelligent, interested in world travel, and we hit it off pretty well — the conversation flowed with ease — except for that point where he informed me that his sense of humor was too subtle for most Americans, and that I wasn’t getting it either. Subtle humor I may miss, subtle condescension I do not. I could still have seen spending more getting-to-know-you-time with him, but he was already jumping the gun by making innuendos. (Those weren’t too subtle for me, either.) By the time I’d finished housesitting my friend Constance’s mini-zoo a week later, and had my evenings free, I didn’t have any real ganas to see him again.

Honestly, if a man’s going to deprive me of the pleasure of my fetish for a thick, wavy head of hair, and be someone who will have to grow on me, it’s best if he not start by implying I’m dumb, and then act like we’re already sleeping together.

Is that unfair? I know it’s not really fair to any guy to have been preceded by exactly what I’m looking for.

I’m still acting like a chooser, when every day I’m inching closer to beggardom.

**

All told, I’m not in the best frame of mind to be heading back east for my parents’ 50^th wedding anniversary party. Even if it’s only for a long weekend, I’m going to have to set foot in my old fundamentalist church, and see people I left behind without a backward look 25 years ago. I’ve already made plans to deprogram on the last day with my best friend from college, but the two and a half days preceding that may be a trial. I anticipate a Come to Jesus ambush or two from my mother, if not an outright “intervention” with the entire clan in attendance. Failing that, I can just picture my brother’s innocent homeschooled boys asking their mythical Prodigal aunt wide-eyed questions — at the table, in front of everyone — like “Aunt AB, why don’t you believe in Jesus?”

I’m kind of sorry I committed to it, especially at a time when I’m feeling weak and constantly second-guessing my integrity and self-awareness. Recently someone volunteered the professional opinion that I might be dissociative. I thought: Great! Just when I thought I’d roamed to the outer perimeters of my vast fucked-upitude, and figured out how to go on with life anyway — something new and huge to worry about! I just don’t feel like myself when I don’t feel mentally ill. For all I know, she may be right; my feeling is that I’ve already got enough crazy on my plate to last me through most of the rest of the picnic.

In this instance, however, I wish. I’m going to have to “check out” somehow, just to get through the whole ordeal with my sanity at least partially intact. Maybe I can drink on the sly. In the latter years of high school, after I lost my religion, I did “escape” the religulousness of my devout family by means of vivid fantasies. I was like Brazil’s Sam Lowry in the dental torture chair, leaving behind an intolerable environment by visualizing a daring flight to faraway places. In my case, these fantasies usually featured my brilliant, edgy classmate Damien Moreau, who was the antithesis of everything in our perfectly square, repressed, G-rated household. My mind would drift off into far more compelling and subversive scenarios, like losing my virginity to Damien in a VW bus in France, while my body remained in attendance at our prim dinner table, eating mechanically like a decoy robot. I’d been using fantasy this way since early childhood: when the neighborhood kids decided I was too little (and too lame) to play ball with them, I went off by myself and jumped from the swings, pretending to be Wonder Woman fighting off a host of invisible foes. I was too busy saving the world to bother with their stupid ballgame. When things sucked, my imagination was my escape.

I don’t think that’s the same thing, though.

**

It’s hard to be at sea when you can’t find north.

I’m referring to the phenomenon I talked about at the end of my last post: that non-rational sense that you know what’s real and true, and that even if it seems nuts to everyone else, you’re convinced everything’s going to turn out.

I am missing that sense right now. For a couple of months, there was this feeling of inevitability, of this will be, which I imagined was comparable to that “faith in the unseen” that keeps people like my mother going. I was sure that I was going to succeed, that I could and would make my dreams come true. I was so convinced that Dan and I were destined to be together that I told Russ, “If he and I aren’t together in five years, I owe you fifty bucks.” I was certain of my own moral compass, that even under conditions of extreme fatigue or stress I would still do the right thing. I had faith in myself, and faith in my future. And I got shit done.

Now I have little left but doubt. Doubt about my own goodness and talent and competence to make it in the world. Doubt about the benevolence of the universe. Doubt that I will ever see Europe or publication or a penis again, before I’m pushing a walker or pushing up daisies.

Maybe wanting to be full of confidence and belief all the time is just another kind of perfectionism. But I envy people who don’t seem to ceaselessly question themselves and everything else.

**

“Fifteen years ago today I met my Ishta Devata,” Shasta writes on Facebook, ever the yoga teacher. The words caption a photo of a friendly-looking, stocky young man with shaggy hair and a goatee, wearing a patterned white short-sleeved shirt. He looks like the kind of guy you might expect to hand you a joint at a Phish concert.

An ishta devata, in Hinduism, is one’s personal deity, one’s favorite god-avatar, the source of one’s inspiration. I consider how Shasta, by her own admission, used to be a self-loathing, pill-popping party girl. Now she speaks with an authority and assurance I can’t begin to imagine having. A majority of her posts are about gratitude; her current mission appears to be to spread the proverbial love and light.

Of course, she was able to shit while she still had the pot around.

So many of us, perfectionists or otherwise, seem to be chasing the tail of our own perfectibility, whether it be through therapy or spiritual practices or any variety of self-improvement techniques. We seem to think that once we’ve finally made it through the decontamination chamber, then someone will want to hold us. Taking it even further are those innumerable New Age spiritualities that assert we must become entire of ourselves, completely self-actualized and whole on our own, at which point we’ll realize that we don’t need anyone else. Then, of course, everyone will love us! It’s almost taboo in these circles to suggest that the experience of both loving and being loved could effect any kind of deep emotional healing. You’d think you were suggesting that people not tie their own shoes, or wipe their own butt.

Ishta devata. Divine inspiration. Shasta claims to have been transformed by a big, scary love she almost didn’t have the courage or wherewithal to reach out and grasp. Hell, it was mostly the tequila talking at the time. He was married. She was engaged. Everything about the circumstances was wrong.

I find myself wondering if the faith only comes to you after you make the leap. Maybe the longer you wait to make the leap, the more your existing faith — in your own gifts and abilities and even your basic goodness — drains away. Maybe the point, after all, is just to act. You’re bound to go about things all wrong, no matter what you do, because you don’t know what the hell you’re doing and never did. But if you’re being sincere, and true to your own north, maybe that’s the only way you’re going to find your way. Maybe that’s just how it works.

And maybe, just maybe, one time, your stumbling, fumbling wrongness won’t be wrong to the right person.

It’s a theory.

I’ve been stymied on my current Matador assignment, which isn’t even as challenging as the last one, for three weeks now. I have no ganas, to borrow from the Spanish. No drive.

My best work buddy has been gone for over a month; his energizing and invigorating “influence” has dissipated. And the winds of initial triumph died out of my sails after I got into a heated but futile argument on my essay thread at that site for ex-Christians. The initial response, if you recall, was overwhelmingly positive; it felt like a homecoming. I was excited to think I’d finally found a community where I could build up a readership before trying to break out into the larger world. But the exchanges I got into with a few of the commentariat turned that first sweet taste to bitter.

**

“At some point you just have to let your baby go,” offered one of my gay boyfriends, Danny (not to be confused with Dan), a designer/musician who supervises me at the political campaign. “You have to release it into the world and let it stand on its own, like you would a literal child.”

My biggest misstep, he suggested, lay in getting too involved in the comment thread and trying to micromanage its goings-on, especially when it turned in a direction I didn’t like. There were going to be haters everywhere, he reminded me, probably far worse than what I’d find on what is generally a supportive site for people who have left their faith. Besides, they weren’t even reacting negatively to my essay — they were reacting to another commenter I was more or less trying to defend.

He’s right, regardless: I’ve got to learn to publish, and then just let things stand, the way the pros do. No matter how tempted I am to jump into the fray.

**

This isn’t a problem for the time being, however, since I don’t feel like writing much of anything. I’m as listless now as I was jazzed before.

I did nudge myself to start a couple of other “projects,” while my influential buddy is on hiatus. For one, I subscribed to Match.com for exactly one month.

I’ve had a basic profile on there for a long time, and they kept offering me discounts and sending me alerts like “Member X just winked at you!” and “You have 1 new unread email!” It always bothered me whenever someone sent me a message I couldn’t read, but you have to be a subscriber to read messages. I used to see those alerts and think – what if The One is desperately trying to reach me? How will I connect with him if I don’t join?

Well, now I can see all two of those enticing messages. Unfortunately, one email sender was not only physically less than inspiring, but borderline illiterate, and the other had a hidden profile I couldn’t even look at. Half the “winks” I’ve gotten so far are from these “hidden” profiles. WTF, guys? Why wink at me if I can’t see you? Are you a man, or are you a bot?

At any rate, this endeavor is only a test. An experiment I decided to undertake in the absence of my all too inspiring friend. I call it Operation Last Ditch.

Part Two of Operation Last Ditch is a one-week trial of Arielle Ford’s “Soulmate Secret” course. I can cancel at any time during the first week and pay only a dollar. (She’s an affiliate partner of our old Calling in the One friend Katherine Woodward Thomas.) I figured, one buck, why the hell not?

**

This time, I don’t have any expectations. If you remember, the free dating site I tried over a period of a year never turned up anyone who “stuck” except one freakishly tall, wife-beating Polish chemist with a racist streak. The Salon.com personals and free promotional weekends on Match and Chemistry got me a handful of mildly interesting emails, a couple of fascinating but disappearing prospects, and one wildly disappointing date.

This is really just my baldfaced challenge to the universe or Fate (or whatever forces may or may not have anything to do with what happens): if I’m not “supposed to be” coveting my neighbor’s husband, if he’s not The One, if telling him I love him is a huge mistake, well, this is my good faith effort to throw open the doors and say BRING IT.

This much is certain: whoever that One may be, I’m not going to grovel or kowtow to snag him. My current profile, unlike so many of my past profiles, doesn’t attempt to be cute, charming, or coy; it doesn’t beg to be liked, because now I know at least one fully desirable man who likes the unscripted and unrevised version of me. And I’ll no longer settle for less. What I wrote is unapologetically feminist and says explicitly: I’ve finally learned how to be happy, after decades of not being, and I’m not going to let any man change that!

If that alienates 99 percent of the men on Match, so the fuck what? I’m letting it all hang out, just to see if anyone even halfway interesting and attractive bites. That’s why I’m calling it Operation Last Ditch. I figured I’d cover all the bases, put myself out there, “as is,” before I have one more opportunity to take the kamikaze plunge almost no one approves of and declare my incurable and anarchic love to my otherwise committed buddy, come what may.

In other words, I’m open to the possibility that there could be someone else, but he’d better fucking show up now.

**

Maybe the so-called Law of Attraction doesn’t work like that, but it seems to have worked for me in at least one other case. After I’d found myself wishing I had the means to do something interesting and sexy with my hair, a fellow employee who goes to cosmetology school started canvassing for hair models. So I wound up going to the Aveda Institute and having my hair given high-contrast, blonde-on-top-of-blackish-brown highlights by a student – for free.

It looks pretty hot. I haven’t looked this good since Francois the Gypsy did my hair. And it’s just in time for my re-introduction into the online dating world.

I can’t help but wonder how Dan would like it, though. He seems to like me plenty already without chemical enhancements.

**

The day before he went on leave, I overheard part of his conversation with one of our directors. She was asking him a lot of questions about his wife, his wife’s background and career, and his school and career plans. As they talked, an entire edifice rose up from the words, an impenetrable fortress of consensus about what is and what should be — the conventions of homeownership, traditional occupations and matrimony fortified as if by walls of iron. The imposing solidity of it all was dispiriting; beside it I, and my unorthodox little feelings and aspirations, felt utterly irrelevant.

Where I come from, that’s how it’s supposed to be: you find one thing — a vocational trajectory, a person, a belief system — and stick with it. For good. No matter what. Dig yourself into an embankment of permanence, and hunker down for the long haul. (For people so sure their true home exists in the hereafter, they sure do like their security in the here and now.)

Suddenly I heard Ben Zander’s voice in my head, like a bugle call out of nowhere. It’s all invented.

Zander, as I’ve mentioned before, waxes philosophical in The Art of Possibility about how the human brain filters and constructs experience. “The meanings our minds construct may be widely shared and sustaining for us, but they may have little to do with the world itself. Furthermore, how would we know?” He illustrates how we mentally “box ourselves in” with the puzzle of the nine dots, which I reproduced in this post.

He goes on to say

When you bring to mind it’s all invented, you remember that it’s all a story you tell – not just some of it, but all of it. And remember, too, that every story you tell is founded on a network of hidden assumptions. If you learn to notice and distinguish these stories, you will be able to break through the barriers of any “box” that contains unwanted conditions and create other conditions or narratives that support the life you envision for yourself and those around you.

It’s all invented. The stories we tell about whom we’re supposed to love, and when, and how much…how things are supposed to be, and happen, and continue, forever and ever amen…even Katherine’s stories in Calling in the One…they’re all just constructions. I’m sure Katherine discovered this when impermanence crashed her own Happily Ever After. But even she’s moved on now. She’s seeing someone else. She’s not some shattered mess still weeping on her bedroom floor, clinging to the coattails of a vanished reality.

Maybe I’ll find someone this time on Match. Or maybe I won’t. Maybe there’s someone out there, some guy from the neighborhood, who has loved Mai his whole life, and is dying for another chance, is just waiting to catch her if she falls. When I was debating quitting a job that was draining the life out of me, someone told me that there was someone out there who would love to have my position. By holding on, I was preventing that candidate from having it.

This is a metaphor. Furthermore, how would we know?

**

Just to recap my current social life for everyone: besides hanging out at a popular coffeehouse all the damn time (where I’ve met a number of friends, including Reginald, who is sitting next to me as I write), I go to my friends’ parties. I attend political protests and rallies. I go to Couchsurfing meetups. I attend cover-free music jams. I go to author events. I help my jewelry-maker friend at her various trade shows. I don’t barhop, but I’m obviously not hiding under a rock. I’ve been followed around the bar at a friend’s party by a weird, frizzy-haired old man named Ralph. I’ve let a beefy Couchsurfer fireman from Florida buy me a beer. I’ve been chatted up by MILF-loving twenty-five-year-olds. I’ve dodged Eli, made peace with David, and run into Padraic, who managed to convince me within a period of thirty minutes that not getting involved with him was an excellent idea.

So far none of the guys from Match I’ve emailed have responded. At all. That’s always a little rough on the self-esteem. I’ve responded to IMs from a few (mostly older) men from out of state who didn’t interest me, just to be polite. I’ve even had a happy hour drink with a painfully bug-eyed English professor from Nebraska who had “favorited” me sometime before I subscribed. Within the first ten minutes of our date, I was already daydreaming about what I’d make for dinner. He was pleasant enough, but the chemistry was completely nil. And if someone doesn’t appeal to me physically, there has got to be chemistry.

A man you find downright handsome, with whom you have crackling chemistry, is a very tough act to follow.

**

“You’re doing everything right,” says my best friend from college. She knows I’ve been above-board in all my dealings so far, trying to respect existing boundaries, trying to meet other people. Trying to color inside the lines. Trying to do what everyone else wants me to do, and be a good girl.

But – as she points out – I’m also being true to myself, because I wholeheartedly acknowledge that I love Dan. If I said I didn’t, or pretended I didn’t, I’d be a liar. I may not have done anything about it at this point, but I’m not denying it.

And I’m exhausting every avenue I can think of before acting. Who (other than a fetishist) craves humiliation? Conversely, what ethical person aspires to be a homewrecker? As I said before (talking about the “magnet”), it feels bigger than both of us. Yes, I can hear your collective eyeroll. Why believe any of the rantings of The Girl Who Cried Love? I can scarcely believe them myself.

Clicking through motley Match profiles like apparel in the L.L. Bean catalog, I feel homesick for Dan. Yes, I said homesick. Like I just want to go back to Kansas, but I’m trying to sell myself on Oz, because it looks impossible that I’ll ever get back to Kansas.

Maybe I should call this Operation Consolation Prize.

**

Speaking of varieties of sickness, my physical issues have returned with a vengeance in the past few weeks. Add to my raging acid reflux a lovely hiatal hernia — a gastric phenomenon naturopaths attribute to emotional tension in the solar plexus. I can barely eat. Maybe I’ll finally lose the spare tire, but it doesn’t feel good. My skin is drier than the Mojave: I’m breaking out in dermatitis all over, and my lips are cracking, while my face has erupted with tiny zits. It’s like some kind of full-body revolt, the likes of which I typically only see while under dire stress.

Honestly, I don’t think I can keep stuffing it anymore. Stuffing conflict, stuffing feelings, stuffing confrontations – including confrontations that could change my life. Stuffing my appetite for vocation and adventure, because I may fail and wind up homeless. Stuffing what I think I know, from some wholly unreasonable place in my being, because it’s both too wonderful and too terrible to be true, and everyone will scoff, squirm, or judge me for it. Or else watch me fall on my face and say, “I told you so.”

**

The argument on my aforementioned essay’s comments thread originated out of the collision of one commenter’s faith with violent antipathy toward that faith. I always identify more with the skeptics, myself, because even when I was a believer, I was riddled with doubt. I’m still riddled with doubt about most things. I barely even trust myself these days, which I’m sure has contributed to my paralysis in every area of life. I seldom know what to do, what information to act upon. I postpone decisions in order to gather more data. I never gather enough data.

But maybe after all is said and done, this is faith, in its essence: taking a chance on something other people find ridiculous and/or indefensible, simply because you have a deeply felt sense, an intuition, of its truth – an intuition you can’t impart to others, no matter how hard you try.

I have never had a faith like that before. I have never had cause for a faith like that before.

**

I zone out listening to one of Arielle’s Week One recordings. It’s all ground that Katherine has covered before in detail. I start checking my Facebook and email, doing other things.

What brings me abruptly back is when she begins talking about how we can’t rush the natural order of things — that while we’re sitting around impatiently, waiting and working on ourselves, our Person may be in the process of moving cross-country…or getting a divorce.

Having not chosen their soulmate the first time.

**

There is a famous short film of driving through Paris at dawn, C’etait un Rendezvous, which the Scottish pop band Snow Patrol uses in their video “Open Your Eyes.” The seamless blending of film and song speaks to a wanderlust Dan and I both share, and I can’t stop watching it tonight. The ending makes me cry, every single time.

It ends with the same lyrics that began it: All this feels strange and untrue/and I won’t waste a minute without you.

**

**

That one afternoon I ditched work with my parallel-universe husband seems to have supercharged my writer batteries. I went home that weekend and cranked out a fully-formed article for an ex-fundamentalist Web site that got published a week later, garnering rave reviews. To my delight, one visitor called my prose “delicious;” another wanted to know if I was writing a book. During the following week and a half, I finished a particularly long and involved assignment from Matador that required me to rewrite the same travel story for three different markets. (That’s the project that had previously stymied me.) Not to mention the post I published on this blog, two days after we played hooky. We’re talking about a total of at least 7000 words right there, in the space of less than two weeks. Well over twenty pages!

Say what you will, Dan is like a match to my creative fire. And not in the angst-ridden sense of so many of my past muses, inspiring morosely poetic ruminations about perennial longing. No, I feel motivated and empowered to pursue my dreams with all the more gusto. I want to finish as well as start multiple projects. I want to leave behind the soul-sapping grind of pay-the-bills phone work, and just write all day long.

I wish I could do the same for him. At last count, his workshop languished abandoned; he hadn’t played a music gig in ages. In the meantime, he struggles mightily with his left-brain homework, on the road to becoming a productive member of society and pulling his own weight.

I want to say: Let’s run away together — to some sunny place, somewhere by a crashing foreign sea — and create beautiful things. Let’s live a bold, courageous, and impractical life, while we still have the time. Let’s not strain against the grain of our natures just because other people told us it was the grownup and responsible thing to do. But above all, dearest man, whatever you do, whatever you decide, don’t believe — as I did for so many years — that the world doesn’t want your gifts.

Have I ever mentioned that Dan’s first major was Creative Writing?

**

He is on an extended leave of absence after a death in the family. The one day he did appear, right after it happened, I wanted to put my arms around him, but I reined myself in, as I always do. I have never so much as hugged Dan (despite the fact that I hug practically everyone there, even the enormous gentleman with compromised hygiene) — nor have I even friended him on Facebook. This, my darling readers, has been my way of attempting to respect some semblance of boundaries. It was never my intention to seduce another woman’s husband, after all. This insubordinate love took root with all the tenacity of a morning glory, despite my best intentions.

I miss him terribly. I’m restless and impatient, looking over the shoulders of my colleagues, wading through the repetitive tedium of scripts and rebuttals, barely tolerating the inevitable abuse. I have neither the time nor the energy for the usual psychic vampires who come around to feed off my (now somewhat diminished) excitement and joie de vie. Did he miss me as much, while I was gone? His performance plummeted — coincidentally or not — to rock bottom during those five weeks. He thought they were going to fire him. (The week after I came back, he hit the top twenty.)

I still haven’t had a decent opportunity since that day to fess up, to pull a Shasta, and see what transpires (and I mean other than my irrevocable consignment, in the eyes of All Who are Good and Righteous, to hell). Given my history and my self-image, not to mention the hard data, it’s difficult to be optimistic. But I’ve gone over all that already.

And now I have no idea when I’ll see him again.

**

In the past, the only man I ever knew about who wanted to forsake all others — including his wife — for me was a morbidly obese theatre actor aptly named Karl Bacon. He was married to my friend Maureen, a sweet, bonny Irish lass with naturally red hair. I was stunned when he confessed his undying desire for me later, after they were divorced (and unbeknownst to his current girlfriend), because he had always been insufferably pompous and diffident around me. I had always wondered, frankly, what a wonderful woman like Maureen saw in this unattractive character. He was testy, to say the least, with most people; to her he was occasionally abusive. Apparently he would also have jettisoned her without a second thought upon my cue.

Needless to say, he was never the remotest temptation.

**

Liz, that pretty blonde alpha female from my wedding dream, who is married with a young toddler but who seems, at times, to covet Dan, appears to have attached herself to our old friend Ted in Dan’s absence.

I am more than a little relieved by this. Women like Liz have perpetually bested me; they seem to be able to get whatever they want, and sooner rather than later. Few men can resist the queen bee, and I fear that if Liz truly set her sights on Dan, he’d be hard pressed (no pun intended) to resist. But may I say, emphatically, that she can have Ted, with my sincere blessing. If she’s bored with her unglamorous domestic life, and shopping for an affair, he’d make a stellar candidate. Not only does she fall within his favorite physical demographic, her marital status makes her ideal for his distinctly noncommittal purposes.

The reason I bring up this TMZ-grade gossip is that my ongoing unease with Liz provided the occasion for a thoroughly lucid moment the other day. When I halted my anxious beta-female thought processes for a moment, the honest question arose: so what if she did manage to seduce Dan? Even go so far as to break up his marriage? He does ask after her when she’s not around.

On the other hand, what if Dan’s ultimate response to me were that he loves Mai, and knows they are meant to be together — forever?

What could I really do about it? Any of it?

Sure, it’s painful to lose out one more time to the sought-after blonde every man wants – that will always rub salt in old wounds. Thanks to Cheyenne and her precious ilk, it’s a built-in trigger for some pretty intense and unpleasant feelings.

But in the grander scheme of things, if Dan truly doesn’t feel the way I do, it’s not like I can make him. Any more than Mai can make him not love me (regardless of whether she invokes the attendant rights of her position).

“If it’s right,” a friend of author Diane Conway once told her, “nothing you can do can screw it up. If it’s wrong, nothing you can do can fix it.” (Clearly this friend was not an evangelical of the there-is-no-right-person school.) I don’t know what gives me the impression that this is far from over, regardless of how long Dan is gone. Oh, I’ll keep meeting people; I’ll even date if I feel like it. I was prepared for Dan to have all but forgotten me after my long hiatus…but when I saw the naked joy on his blushing face, I knew that that just wasn’t the case.

If you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink, you can’t expect to lead a horse away from water, and make him not thirst.

Or to quote Dan’s man Warren Zevon, They say love conquers all/you can’t start it like a car/you can’t stop it with a gun.

***

This week I dreamt about Ron and Stephanie — the widower of interest I mentioned in a previous post, and the (beautiful, slender, younger) girl friend who captured his heart on the sly. Like the wedding dream involving Dan, this is one that lingers in my mind for days.

I am casually visiting the two of them, and get left alone with Ron for a bit when Stephanie has to run some kind of work-related errand.

I make lighthearted reference to the fact that Stephanie has snapped Ron up before the rest of us could even have a shot. I have no agenda at this point; they’re engaged, I accept that, and I wish them nothing but the best. But I do nevertheless imply, impishly, that I would have liked a chance myself, and punctuate this flirty (but hardly serious) jibe with a wink and a grin.

The unanticipated force of Ron’s reaction astonishes me. Looking stricken, he flushes a deep crimson, and starts to stammer about how maybe things won’t work out with Stephanie after all. He’s backtracking like crazy, as if I’ve just given him a game-changing piece of information.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, I’m no longer the jilted “Jen,” I’m the “Angelina” — the irresistible, potentially homewrecking temptress — and not just to a Karl Bacon. (If anything, Stephanie should be the Angelina.)

I have no desire to steal Ron away from Stephanie, but you could sure knock me over with a feather. This has never happened before. I’ve just expressed an interest in someone, however belatedly, and it’s given him an honest-to-god life crisis! I’m too desirable, instead of too pathetic!

When I see Stephanie soon thereafter, I inform her that Ron has provided me with some much-needed practice at humiliation-free confessions — although for obvious reasons I leave out the bulk of Ron’s response. I am aware, in the back of my mind (even as I’m dreaming), that Dan is next, and that the “real thing” will be much harder…though not as hard as it might have been without this overwhelmingly positive reinforcement.

I wake up feeling far more confident than usual about my feminine appeal, and far less certain that revealing the extent of my feelings to Dan would be a huge and characteristic AlienBaby crash-and-burn.

**

Writing this post at the neighborhood coffeehouse, from which I’ve composed a majority of posts over the past four years, I relish the afternoon sunlight streaming in the open garage door. Brendan has gone to Australia with his doctor girlfriend; I hope they’re having a great time. A former “girl crush” of mine, a gorgeous bisexual yoga teacher with multicolor hair, not quite thirty, who knew me back at the studio, chats with me at my table for a few minutes. In parting, she offers me a free class, as her guest, and kisses me on the lips. The entire two percent of me with lesbian tendencies is tickled to death. Once again, I feel yards more attractive.

I intend to find a place like this, somewhere across the globe — a sunny, social spot for coffee and writing where the locals gather, a home away from home. I don’t need much else. It’s amazing how little I require to be happy. I would be even happier sharing this blessed simplicity with someone with whom I feel I belong, someone who feels more like home than any location ever has.

I intend to get there — I believe I will get there — with or without him.

But I do seem to be a hell of a lot more productive under the influence of certain individuals.

That jolt when you first laid eyes on each other, that instantaneous feeling of recognition, that ease that flows between you as if you’ve known each other since you were five aside…he could easily have turned out to be critical, or unkind, or just boring. He could have had values and dreams utterly incompatible with yours. Or you could have discovered that you were infatuated with his haircut, or his waistline, or any number of other superficial and impermanent details. He could have disrespected you in some way, cut you down or invalidated your experience, the way so many men have. He could have been disappointing the way you’re so used to being disappointed.

There are a million ways to become disenchanted, especially when you’re looking for ways to become disenchanted. Especially when there’s a lot at stake, when the continuation of life in its current, sanctioned, socially respectable form depends upon your ability to be disenchanted. But the biggest thing you can find wrong with him is his sometimes lowbrow humor. That, and the fact that he has no ass. His jokes about the fact that he has no ass are hysterical.

**

You can hardly believe yourself, when you look at your situation in terms of the cold, hard facts. And almost no one else believes you, either. You have cried wolf so many times, with your foolish obsessions and your self-defeating behaviors, that everyone who knows you well, including you, is tired of seeing you be stupid and blind, of seeing you fail. Your oldest girl friend doesn’t even have to say anything; you can tell by the look on her face that she doesn’t want to talk about it. She knows what a blunderer you are. She’s watched you do this for thirty years. But this time you’ve really taken the cake. You’ve crossed a new line. You’ve hit a new low.

You can see it like a scientist. You can assess facts and probabilities. Nothing about this looks promising. All the data is on the side of the marriage, and you, you arrogant interloper, are barely a factor. Who the hell do you think you are? Your history seems to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you are a know-nothing and a fuckwit when it comes to relationships. In the solitary lab of your nocturnal afterthoughts, you posit theories that discourage action. You formulate rational escapes.

**

Of course, there’s another big thing you believe you know, but it’s not something you can prove…so why should you trust yourself this time? No one else does, not anymore, not after all your epic fucking up. Well, no one except maybe your best girl friend from college, to whom you’ve told everything. She’s one person who has never stopped trusting your competence to navigate your way through the world. She says, “This time feels different.” Shown his photo online, she exclaims, “Oh, I love him!” (About Sonny she said, “He is certainly a handsome man.”)

What you know is the two of you together. The entire world can scream wrong, wrong, wrong, and only you know that nothing has ever felt quite this right. He doesn’t frighten you. He doesn’t carelessly hurt you. He doesn’t minimize or compete with you. You feel safe with him. You feel seen. You can’t even find the lifelong, gargantuan self-consciousness that has made you bumble like Don Knotts in the presence of most of your acute infatuations. You don’t worry about how you look. You feel as if you could say something completely inane — even fart audibly — and it wouldn’t be the end of the world. You realize, while walking through downtown by his side, that you could walk anywhere in the world with him, through chaotic Moroccan markets or along the Baltic Sea, and it would be all right, because beside him feels like where you belong.

When you see one another, you both light up and smile; it’s spontaneous and irrepressible, and you wonder if your feelings are being broadcast to everyone. Surely your frequent outbursts of boisterous, shared laughter are a dead giveaway. You find yourself, like the woman in Song of Songs, almost wishing he wert as thy brother, so that you could embrace and kiss him and yea, thou shouldst not be despised. He wants what you want out of life, something you knew even before you asked him, but has had to back-burner his dreams — because he has a mortgage, and because he is a man, and men need to make a good living.

**

Elephant magazine posts a very timely article to Facebook that makes you break down in sobs of incredulous gratitude. It’s one yoga teacher’s autobiographical testimony about mustering the courage to say yes to love, even when your situation seems like a cruel cosmic joke, even when it seems more impossible than any of the other impossible things you’ve attempted.

Shasta Townsend was at a wedding when she met him.

Suddenly there he was. Looking up into the clear blue sky, the sun hit my eyes and then there he was. His face backlit so he actually appeared to be glowing. He was a jolt of electricity. He was a magnetic force. He was a stranger I felt I had known for a long time or in another life. He smiled and said his name.

I can’t remember what happened next. I don’t remember if I stood up from my seat or remained where I was. I don’t remember what I said. I must have introduced myself in return. I looked up and all stopped except for his face. There was a remembrance at the back of my mind of this man and yet we had never met before.

Sounds awfully familiar, doesn’t it. Shasta immediately shut down, of course. She didn’t want this to be so. She wanted to stay in her comfort zone, and go on with life as she knew it. As she writes,

How many missed chances have we all experienced? How much has humanity suffered because of what appeared to be circumstances that we could not overcome or personal fears that kept us locked in our own prison? How much of our depression, addictions, sorrow and even warring has been created from denying our heart’s deepest longing – be it love, passion, grace, freedom, purpose? How many of us have turned away from the deep well of knowing to return to the surface of suffering because we thought that was expected of us or simply because we didn’t believe we deserved any better?

I felt it in that moment. I saw the possibility of love, truth and desire and then quickly pulled away. We could not be. We would not be. How could we possibly be together? It was a cosmic joke for we were both in other relationships for one thing and secondly, I was not ready to love like this.

I spent years denying my desire and deep connection to this man. We became friends, a sweet torture. He married someone else. I became engaged to another and addicted to sleeping pills, partying and self-loathing.

Her soul-connection man married someone else.

Maybe this man was contentedly committed to a woman he felt lucky to be with — the way your friend is. Maybe Shasta’s girlfriends scolded her, If you love this man, why would you want to destroy his happiness? the way Hugh Laurie memorably scolded Rachel in that episode of Friends. Maybe she realized the deck was stacked against her, which is why she didn’t act, why she instead tried to anesthetize herself, the way you did last fall with alcohol, food, and DVDs, until you got so sick you could barely eat, and certainly couldn’t drink or venture out to a Redbox.

But that isn’t the end of the story. After the point seemed moot, Shasta finally broke her silence.

In a tequila-induced haze I told him how I felt. Not the proudest moment of my life but probably one of the most important. Something within me was ready to be vulnerable even if it was a little too late.

It turns out I was not too late. That man is now my husband and is one of my greatest teachers. Love and marriage is not easy and continues to be a journey ever deeper into vulnerability, trust and transparency but I now know the power of an intimate and loving relationship as a way to experience my own beauty, truth and potential…

Love wants its way with you. Love is the most powerful energy the universe. It is far more powerful than fear, hate or shame. Love took over. It occupied, crucified and then rarefied me. After all the denial it persevered and I finally gave myself to it though it has been and continues to be a journey of allowing, surrendering and opening the flesh deeper.

**

You write an emotional, private appeal to Shasta via her public page, and hope to God she writes back, because apart from your best girl friend from college, she’s the only one you feel you can talk to completely openly about this. She understands firsthand what you’re going through. She understands the obstacles and taboos and mountains of reasons not to act. She understands the fears: that you will lose your beloved friend, that you will humiliate yourself, that you’re good enough for a fling, but nothing else; or, on the other hand, that your life will radically change forever, that you will be given more than your habitually solitary self can handle, more than even a sweet, lost, drug-addled kid could give you. She understands that unshakable sense of having met the love of your life, even if he didn’t come along neatly and cleanly, the way he was supposed to.

**

You wake up thinking about your grandmother Ella at the end of her life. In her nursing home, she spent most days drugged up and dreaming. Consciousness must have been as painful as the cancer when she did awaken, realizing that her opportunities for participating in life were over, that she could only look back from a gurney. Incoherently, she urged you over and over again to “close the gate.” She must have been talking about something that happened on the farm, some sin of omission from the distant past that still haunted her.

What will haunt you? you wonder. Life is lived forward, and few of us, if any, are psychic. You couldn’t have known ahead of time that in 2009 you’d be weeping over your childhood buddy, the one who loved you more than any other man ever did, because he was dead at 41 from lymphoma. It’s only 1986, after all, and you have your whole life and the wide world in front of you, and you’ve known Jonathan since the first grade. Why would you want him, when there’s a universe of possibilities out there, over six billion people? There are plenty of fish in the sea.

And you tell yourself this for the next twenty-five years.

**

You listen repeatedly, morning and night, to a song by Del Amitri* about a man and a woman on a long drive: she’s at the wheel, and not about to turn the car around, even though they’re heading into the middle of nowhere. Their conversation skirts around the elephant in the car, which may or may not be an abortion she’s just had. (A “kid” was involved in “the thing we’ve done.”) But it’s the chorus that provides the goosebumps, a lovely, melancholy arrangement of minor-chord, folk-rock-ballad sound, Springsteen by way of Scotland. The lyrics are simple but powerful, and pierce right through to the heart of your (voiceless) dilemma:

When you’re driving with the brakes on,

When you’re swimming with your boots on,

It’s hard to say you love someone,

And it’s hard to say you don’t.

______________

* a terrific live version is on YouTube here.

The last time I lost my voice, I was itching to say something to Ted that I just couldn’t spit out. This year, not only did I have a major throat infection, I became literally itchy – all over. Coincidence? You know I doubt it.

**

You’d think that with all this time on my hands I’d be plowing through the Matador program at hyperspeed. Not so. I’ve found myself blocked and stymied so often, I’ve only just completed the assignments of the first week — in one month. Granted, Week One is a multi-part assignment that includes setting up a blog and posting three different posts, one of which requires more than cursory research. Who completes these fool things in a damn week? Already I’m feeling inferior to my fellow students, mainly energetic and tech-savvy young things who have Twitter feeds and Tumblr accounts and who have backpacked through the Andes with naught but a burro and a tent.

All of my insecurities, all of my violent envy and feelings of rivalry toward other writers have come surging back, and the World Wide Web seems to me like a river choked with excess content, like floating garbage, that no one will ever read. Who needs more word pollution? Why do this? My voice is going to be drowned out by the deafening cacophony of more aggressive (if not more talented) voices. What makes me think I have what it takes to succeed in this clogged, competitive, relentlessly fast wired world?

As a quieter counterpoint, I hear Jonathan Goldman’s voice again, his raspy, ebullient baritone, good-naturedly attempting to calm my agitated mind. Long before the dawn of the Internet, I voiced these tortured thoughts to Jon, who was a highly talented writer in his own right. He, however, didn’t see the ever-increasing output of innumerable wannabe writers as a noxious glut any more than he envisioned the market as a single, crowded stage where competition was fierce for scarce attention and acclaim. “There’s room for everybody,” he insisted. He didn’t seem to view his own success as necessarily someone else’s failure, or vice versa. He believed abundant opportunities existed for a multiplicity of unique voices.

Jon’s perspective stopped me in my tracks. I’d never heard anyone frame things in such an expansive, non-competitive way before. (I was a senior in high school.) For me, fighting for scarce resources had always been a way of life.

**

But even assuming, like Jon, that there’s “room” for me, there’s still the practical problem of travel. Beyond the most obvious question – how does one make money doing travel writing when one has no money to travel in the first place? – there’s the lead boot of my weak immune system, of which I’ve been so thoroughly reminded. I was on a long weekend, visiting my best friend from college on the East Coast for a long overdue vacation, when I came down with the fever of 102 that began this nasty business. I did drink a lot of alcohol, and combined the drinking with some extreme temperature changes (getting in and out of an outdoor hot tub in winter weather)…but alcohol and extreme temperature changes are par for the course in a lot of travel situations.

At home, I can carefully control my diet and my environment, taking a daily regimen of supplements and other preventative foodstuffs and staying out of extreme temperatures. On the road, that amount of control can go out the window — even in-country, and among people who know me. (Almost every time I go back East to visit family I get sick…although that may be another story.)

In my house, growing up, it was as rare for my mother to be completely well as it was for my father to miss a day of school. Unfortunately, I inherited more of her immune system than his. Since early childhood, I’ve been plagued with skin problems and urinary tract disorders and sinusitis and multiple pneumonias and snail-slow recoveries from the most ridiculously common ailments. Once I was even tentatively diagnosed with fibromyalgia by a clinic specializing in autoimmune diseases. I like to ignore these facts, and pretend that I’m completely normal, even if I have to slather myself with cortisone cream every morning or find a restroom once an hour. (Maybe I can turn that into a selling point: travel for people with overactive bladders.) But I fear my less-than-robust health may be a liability when it comes to my dreams.

**

These are the some of the things one thinks about when one is home sick and has nothing to do but think.

One may also think about how one is alone, and how there is nobody, really, whose job it is to look after one.

Well, if you’re me, that is. I’ve leaned pretty heavily, too heavily, perhaps, on Greg, who has driven me to the hospital, the enrollment clinic, the Japanese noodle house, and the grocery store (just to name a few), bailed me out and bought me lunch, and who is neither my brother nor my boyfriend. It’s gotten to the point where I don’t dare ask him for one more thing for fear of becoming a bona fide pain in the ass. I asked a girl friend to take me to the enrollment clinic one morning, but she isn’t the sort of friend I’d ask a favor more than once.

So then I venture out on foot or by bus or bike, in an effort not to ask for any more favors, and wind up making myself sicker again.

When well, you see, I can be independent and get around on my own, without bothering anyone; made dependent, I’m afraid I’ll spend the last of my friends’ goodwill. In these sorts of situations of weakness and vulnerability, it’s usually one’s “flesh and blood,” or one’s significant other, that steps in to help. Obviously, I have neither. My mum may fuss about my ailments from two thousand miles away, but there’s a very good reason I vowed never to depend upon my kin again. So I don’t. And despite my best intentions and efforts of the past couple of years, I’m still as partner-less as ever.

Being ill can really underscore one’s existing loneliness.

**

In those wretched moments when you feel as if you’ll never be well again, when you start to imagine that the authorities will find your lifeless body in your bed three days from now, you also begin to think of everything you haven’t done. When you’re healthy, you act as if you have all the time in the world, as if you’ll live forever, which is an illusion. Illness strips away illusions and makes you revisit your priorities.

Which brings me back to the recurrent location of my dis-ease. Is it wholly unreasonable to relate persistent throat and voice issues with the inability to speak one’s truth?

**

One day, a few weeks ago, I lost the “battle.” The battle my kinfolk would no doubt characterize as being against Satan. One Sunday morning at the beginning of January, I stopped waging my moral struggle entirely.

I was in the sunny front room at work with Dan and our friend Eric, who can get some hilarious banter going with Dan when you put them together. They had been making me laugh helplessly to the point of tears, but when Eric took a call, the talk turned more serious, and I started telling Dan about Matador.

I don’t know what it was…the way he listened to me so attentively, or the look in his eyes, those shining eyes so absolutely full of Dan, but all at once something just gave way inside of me. If the feeling had been a thought, it might have been something like: Fuck it. I surrender. You win. Even if there’s absolutely nothing in it for me, I love you, Dan, because you deserve it. Because I can’t help it.

There wasn’t any pain, not at that moment, anyway, only a sort of inarticulate joy, and the relief that comes at the end of a long, strenuous, futile effort. I relaxed and enjoyed the Dan and Eric morning show until Dan left at noon.

Another day soon after, he was sitting next to me in a sun-drenched cubicle during a client briefing. It was warm, and close beside me my lovely friend stretched out his big body drowsily in his chair, his head by my shoulder. The light, even in that relatively dull environment, was exultant, beaming off every surface (cup, keyboard, cubicle wall) as if in praise or celebration…and suddenly I felt as if I were in sunny, magical Italy again, not some godforsaken call center. Not a thing was missing; I was where I belonged, right now, nowhere but here, in this light, beside this dear, beloved man, my friend. All questions of should or shouldn’t were meaningless. Life was beautiful, rich, and whole. I could scarcely draw a breath, fearing I’d disturb that moment of perfectly crystallized happiness. I hoped the briefing would go on indefinitely.

**

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase each other

doesn’t make any sense.

- Rumi

Rumi loved another man in a time when loving another man that much was punishable by death. It’s still that way under fundamentalist Islam. Whatever else anyone wants to say about me – however they want to judge me – I’m unlikely to get executed for my propensities. They don’t stone adulterers anymore, either; otherwise most of Congress would be in trouble.

**

I am wondering what I’ll find when I return. Perhaps my absence has made the effects of my presence fade. Perhaps my friend will have made new friends; the company has a constantly revolving door, with new trainees arriving every week. Will he even still be there? The only constant is change, after all, and I’ve certainly made the mistake of overestimating my significance to other people, particularly men.

All of these ponderings may be moot. If, after my month-long absence, Dan keeps more of a distance from here on out, it may mean that our moment has passed. Such moments pass in all kinds of relationships, not infrequently those at work. Every one has a greater or lesser lifespan. Today’s confidante can become tomorrow’s water cooler acquaintance. More rarely, that person can become your friend for life.

For the umpteenth time, I never wanted to bark up the wrong tree. I don’t want to complicate Dan’s life or make him unhappy, or make his wife unhappy. At the same time, in some strange way, I believe that the words stuck in my throat are less ambiguous and less harmful now than they may have been before. Without the moral judgment, without the teeth-clenching self-control (that pushes Dan out of my conscious mind and so vividly into my dreams), they don’t get so mixed up with ancient resentments and injuries having to do with my deserving and/or unworthiness. So fucking what if I love Dan? Who’s gonna tell me I can’t?

**

Greg told me about a friend who divorced his wife amicably simply because she wanted to move somewhere else and pursue a life he couldn’t envision as being his. “Who was I to hold her back?” he explained to Greg. I’ve encountered this generous attitude elsewhere, but it’s more European than American, more like the unapologetically secular French with their more flexible (to put it diplomatically) approach to commitment than our Judeo-Christian tradition, which tends to view spouses as personal property.

It’s a stance I’ve had to embrace more of necessity than by choice, relinquishing loved ones who had other ideas. Of course I hadn’t gotten a promise to stay from any of them. But what if we were all that generous with each other? Can you imagine? Not only could I accept (if not be thrilled about) Dan saying I like you a lot, but I love my wife, she’s the one for me…but Mai could also accept (if not be thrilled about) Dan saying I’ve fallen in love with someone else, and I want to be with her.

I can just hear my mother having paroxysms as I write. O the selfishness! O the worldly permissiveness! In my comments section last time, I posted a link to a fundie article on “Biblical marriage” asserting that “there is no right person,” which was shared on Facebook by (of all people) my sister-in-law. Interestingly enough, right above that in my feed was the “testimony” (ironically named) from exchristian.net by a woman who had tried to be a Good Christian Wife by rejecting the agnostic she loved, and marrying a Good Christian Man. Twenty-five years later, she would leave the Bible-believing abuser and be reunited with her godless first love – with whom she has been happy ever since. So much for “Biblical marriage” and “no right person.” I don’t know how people continue to live within the born-again bubble, you have to filter so much conflicting information out.

Strictly speaking, by the way, “Biblical marriage” would mean that Dan would be perfectly justified in taking me as a second wife or a concubine, in the tradition of Abraham. Or Solomon. Or countless other wealthy patriarchs. But that’s beside the point.

**

My aforementioned friend on the East Coast, who is in the middle of a divorce, and has found her soul mate at last in a much older man who was just getting separated when they met, had this to say: “Can you continue to just be, like that, with him, in the moment?”

Maybe that’s all there is to be done. I’m not convinced, however, that my voice will come back if I don’t speak the words that have been sticking in my throat. I’ve swallowed an awful lot of them in the course of a lifetime. If this godawful antibiotic-resistant bacteria were going to kill me either way, I wouldn’t want anything important to be left unsaid. I’ve done more damage with silence than with words anyhow.

Matador offers a 12-week online course for aspiring travel writers and photographers. Their faculty and alumni write for paying travel blogs and magazines like National Geographic Traveler. I had been trying to figure out how I could pay for “tuition’ ever since finding out about their program. My initial plan had been to get a better job and save up, but that obviously wasn’t happening, and I could see myself putting off the course indefinitely in the meantime. I seriously considered charging it on my high-balance, consolidated-debt credit card, but I have enough trouble meeting the monthly minimums as is.

Instead, the crazy-making job I do have, after my many attempts to leave, provided me with the unexpected means. Go figure.

So I have taken the first step toward at least one dream.

**

The day before Christmas, I had a massive shock: I found Sam.

Online, that is. On Facebook. Through a mutual friend. He had been loath to join Zuckerberg’s internet playground back in the day, but his girlfriend must have convinced him otherwise.

Yes, I said girlfriend.

Given that Sam has never tried to contact me again, I didn’t attempt to ‘friend’ or even message him, but as the contents of his page weren’t hidden from me by privacy settings, I simply looked at his info page, wall, and photos. I guess you could call that Facebook stalking. Since I’ve known nothing about his life after he left, however, I don’t think anyone will blame me.

There was a relationship status and anniversary. Sam had apparently gotten involved with a young woman his own age eight months after leaving me. They are still together after a year and a half; living together, in fact. I like the look of the girl: she has that sweet, slightly bug-eyed vulnerability of a Jane Adams character, sweatshirt-clad, sans makeup, with a pierced lip that defies midwestern conservatism. She’s not the type to inspire violent jealousy in other females. Sam still looks ineffably Sam, of course: a sly smile flickering in only his eyes in one photo, breaking into an unabashedly happy grin beside the girl, who looks delighted to be with him, in the next. She should be delighted to be with him. In one photo he is kissing her, and I remember his knee-weakening kiss. I helped him perfect that knee-weakening kiss. I helped him perfect a few things. Blessed art thou among women, I think. It’s all hers, now. But Sam…he looks so terribly adorable, and so terribly Sam, I miss him all over again, and burst into a torrent of hot tears. Sam!

**

It is a bittersweet Christmas. I am both gratified and newly heartbroken. Finally I know where and how Sam is; finally I know Sam is never coming back.

By way of consolation, I find myself contemplating Dan Savage’s “campsite rule,” which has been summarized thus:

If you’re in a sexual relationship with somebody significantly younger or less experienced than you, the rule that applies at campsites shall be applicable to you: you must leave them in at least as good a state (physically and emotionally) as you found them in. That means no STDs, no unwanted pregnancy, not overburdening them with your emotional or sexual baggage, and so on. Younger partners and particularly virgins will often take everything given to them by an older, more experienced partner as being “written in stone,” and will carry around everything they learn from them for the rest of their life: so treat them right!

My young friend had, at the time I met him, only recently lost nearly half his body weight. He had had considerable social difficulties all of his life because of his extraordinary but differently-abled brain. I was, all things considered, writing on a fairly blank slate, one belonging to a boy of twenty-one who was far more vulnerable with me than any “grown man” had ever been.

I thought of all the positive reinforcement I gave him almost continuously, all the many ways in which I told him he was wonderful and beautiful and amazing, how sincerely I enthused about his marvelous natural abilities as a lover. I showered him with well-deserved praise. The feeling comes overwhelmingly back – that enormous, grateful love I could scarcely contain at the time, which overflowed in words as well as in kisses and caresses. I wanted to offer him anything and everything for everything he offered me. Our lovemaking was more deeply satisfying than anything else I’d ever experienced, nourishing both my body and soul. I loved it, and I loved him, and I told him so at every opportunity.

In the end, what Sam gave me even he couldn’t take away. And perhaps my loving words overwrote some of the noxious messages, some of the neglect and cruelty of his own past.

After all, here he is, two years on, in a longer and more serious relationship than I’ve ever had in my life, with a young woman who posts adoring messages on his Facebook wall even though she’ll see him at home later. Sam looks happy. She looks happy. They look happy together.

I’d like to say it’s a campsite rule epic win.

**

The kicker comes when I go back and read the emails I wrote to Sam in those months after he left, when his silence drove me to speculate wildly and to drink. I had expected them to be more oppressive and scolding than they were; I was startled to find some beautiful, heartfelt words that expressed sentiments even I’d forgotten expressing. I’ll leave most of it between Sam and me, but here’s the passage that contained the words (italicized for your benefit) that caused me to burst into tears one more time.

I thought: Whatever (Sam) has to do to reclaim, or save, his life, I’m all for it. I don’t even know if that’s what you’re doing. You once told me you didn’t care to get well. But so help me God, I would give anything, I would give you my blood, baby, I would give you up entirely, I would give you to another woman…if it meant you could be well and whole and healed and happy.

I guess I said it first, didn’t I.

I had no idea I was predicting the future.

**

One door closes. And then another. This week I learn that a girlfriend of mine is engaged to a widower who had caught my eye more than once. I hadn’t even known they were an item. Well, bully for her. One more possibility bites the dust.

Matador is, I suppose, my way of prying open a window – not quite far enough to escape, yet, but at least to let the air in.

Escape does not seem to be in the cards.

**

Escape from what, you ask?

Look here, people: I have tried to be good (even though Mary Oliver tells me in “Wild Geese” that I don’t have to be). I have not indulged thoughts that could easily have taken over my idle hours. For well over a week, I did a decent (at times excellent) job at work while Dan was absent, and I took the aforementioned steps toward my future as a writer. I didn’t wallow. I didn’t obsess. My sexual fantasies consisted of syndicated reruns of The Best of Sam — at least until Christmas Eve. I flirted with the Asian Adonis, who returned to the call center a few months ago. I tried fantasizing about him instead.

None of this seemed to matter when Dan came back. Nor did it matter that he’d cut off his beautiful thick hair, or that he told a lame poop joke, or that he has a paunch in lieu of Adonis’s veiny arms and tight little body. My struggle doesn’t stem from lust for his physical attributes; it’s not made more difficult by intellectual accord; it’s not even quite such a matter of emotional attachment, at this point, because I prevent myself from confiding too much in him. Seriously, I’m clutching the reins so tight, I’m drawing blood.

No, it’s as if there were a magnet inside of each of us, some kind of subtle gravitational force that keeps drawing us back together. If I stay away from him, he finds me (and so help me God, I’m happy to see him). Break time the other day found us standing together in the hallway by the credenza, munching on our respective apples, through absolutely no effort of my own. I had actually deliberately gone somewhere he was not. But when he came toward me, grinning affably in his way, something in me rejoiced in spite of myself.

Don’t think it’s Dan being “bad,” either. He’s not seductive or a flirt like Ted. He’s not seductive at all. That’s not his modus operandi. He just apparently really likes being around me, probably without even knowing why. I really like being around him, too. At the time, it just seems to flow so easily. It’s no big deal. He treats me like a good friend, a buddy, telling me about what he and Mai did over the holidays…but I know we can both feel the magnet. Don’t ask me how I know that. It sounds insane, even to me. But I understand now what people mean when they say “It was bigger than both of us.”

**

I could always write off married men before, no matter how charismatic or handsome. A ring on a man’s finger was tantamount to an electrified fence as far as my crushes were concerned. (My fondness for my friend Ben paled in comparison to my grand Greg Schulz obsession, anyhow.) How harshly I judged people who couldn’t restrain themselves! I thought they were being willfully stupid. All of that drama, it seemed so avoidable.

“The heart wants what it wants,” said a disgraced Woody Allen by way of explanation, after breaking an even stronger taboo. “What you resist persists,” cautioned Dr. Jung, who failed to resist his troubled patient Sabina Spielrein. In the Whole Foods restroom, I happen to hear my old buddy Melissa Etheridge, who wrote the soundtrack to my agonized twenties, growling and howling over the sound system

Now we make our choices

Doing what we think is good

We deny our own dreams

‘Cause we think we’ve been told we should…

She looks up to heaven

And wonders why love is so cruel…

Can’t stop the wanting of you

Even Sonny weighs in, quoting Kierkegaard in his Facebook status: “To cheat oneself out of love is the most terrible deception; it is an eternal loss for which there is no reparation, either in time or in eternity.” I can’t help but wonder what it was like for Sonny to meet Elyse, his on-again off-again girlfriend of almost seven years, the willowy, stunning kids’ yoga teacher who precipitated the end of his fourteen-year marriage.

Personally, I think I summed things up best in a comment on my last post: “All of my malaise of the past several months can be attributed to the bitter realization that someone else has married my husband.”

**

Soon after writing that comment, I dream that I am wearing a gorgeous white wedding dress. There is a wedding happening, and it’s Dan’s, in a facility that looks less like a church or government building than Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory (of the 1971 musical). A setting I’ve associated since early childhood with wishes and dreams, with finding that mythical golden ticket. (The song “Pure Imagination” puts a tear in my eye to this day.)

Even though I’m in a wedding dress, I am nevertheless aware that my job is to walk Dan down the aisle and give him away. The bride-to-be is nowhere to be seen at this point, and I’m passing time with Dan outside before the ceremony. The one person who is around is a woman from work who I’m certain (given some barbed offhand comments) has grasped what’s going on between Dan and me. She can be a bit catty, and seems jealous of him at times, in that competitive alpha-female way former homecoming queens can have about them (despite being married, with a baby), but (unlike me) she’s not one to be shy to speak her mind.

For my part, I am suffering tremendously and at length over the concept of “speak now or forever hold your peace.” Oblivious, Dan is talking to me like I’m his best friend. Maybe I’m the Best Woman? Liz, the coworker who can tell how I feel, gives me a tight hug of support in passing. In contrast to waking life, I feel like she’s the one person on my side. But still I wait, and say nothing.

At what seems like the last minute, I blurt out to Dan that this joyous occasion will, in fact, go down in history as the worst fucking day of my life. Dan looks stunned. I flee.

I run right into Liz, and tell her that I’ll be drinking a bottle of wine by myself tonight and crying my eyes out. She shocks me then by telling me, very sharply, how disappointed she is in me – she had thought I had more ‘fight’ in me than that – and stalks off in disgust. Dan has still not walked down the aisle. I start to meander tentatively back toward the wedding, but at that point I wake up.

**

Don’t ask me to interpret that in detail. I will point out that it’s the first dream I can remember having in which I’m wearing a full white wedding dress. It was strapless, as I recall. An elegantly simple, satiny, form-fitting thing. Quite lovely, really. I felt like Audrey Hepburn.

I do think it all points back to my lack of a sense of entitlement, and the fact that I’ve always felt forced to “give away” the men that I love…whether the man was León in my teens or Sam in my forties. Liz probably represents the part of me that’s disgusted by the way I just lie down and roll over. There’s no ‘fight’ in me at all. I don’t believe I’m deserving…and even if I could believe that, I still wouldn’t believe I could do anything but lose in the most humiliating manner imaginable. I’m not the kind who would ever stand up in church and stop a wedding. Easier for me to buy a bottle of wine and go home, get drunk alone, and cry.

**

Not that I don’t believe I did right by Sam. At least I have one thing I can be proud of. If nothing else, I seem to have left his “campsite” in such primo condition the next visitor decided to stay permanently. In general, I try to leave people better off than I found them, although the Jeannies and the Elis of the world, who are probably off somewhere right now feeling aggrieved, sometimes can’t be helped.

León used to claim that I saved his life, even as my experience with him left me licking the stab wounds for years. I let Jeannie tear me down mercilessly without even putting up a hand, despite the cruel words I could have thrown in her face like acid. Somehow it’s always me who winds up in the worst sort of pain, regardless of whether I did the “right” thing. I wonder if I shouldn’t do the crime, once in a while, if I’m going to do the time.

Bold words from a coward. No matter how much Dan may like me, he has a nice, comfortable life he probably likes a whole lot better. I’m not the woman men want to run away with, anyway; I’m the one who gets left behind without a backward look. I’m Jen, not Angelina. Or is that just what I believe?

**

But here’s an interesting exercise: read my dream again, just as it happened, and ask – what if the bride is actually me?

I thought I had at least one emergency hatch at the ready. Not so, apparently.

**

I could launch, in detail, into all that has come up for me lately because of my feelings for Dan: about my history of feeling like the least important person in the universe, the one perennially expected to sacrifice and keep a low profile and not complain about going without — essentially invisible — the Good Little Girl, who never harms a fly, or even upsets anyone. As Hamlet said, But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue. One finds oneself with powerful, taboo desires that disturb absolutely everyone, and they all say My god, keep that monstrous business to yourself! For heaven’s sake!

But say one imagines oneself on one’s deathbed, or bleeding to death in the street, in five years or forty, one never knows. And the regrets come flooding in: Why did I tiptoe through life, fretting at every moment that the very act of my breathing might offend somebody, taking a poll before deciding what to have for breakfast? It has recently become very apparent to me that the cacophany of conflicting thoughts that fill my head about the best course of action, or what my priorities should be, nearly always arise in someone else’s voice, evoking the terror of What Everyone Might Think Of Me. The tireless local activist, shaming me for not being more selflessly involved in causes, for even thinking about my personal desires and dreams. The well-meaning friend, concerned about my underemployment, commanding me to dispatch a flood of resumes in every direction. The fearful buddy, certain catastrophe lurks just around the corner if I say or do the “wrong” thing. My frowning mother, whose shadow always hovers, even from two thousand miles away.

In the end, I decide and do very little; I am passive, immobilized by social pushes and pulls in every direction. None of which, I find, I can honestly own as mine. I live to please. And if not to please, to avoid offense.

Which is no way to live at all.

**

But I don’t feel like talking more about it, because that will only invite discussion and exacerbate things. Instead I thought I’d be lazy, and go back to Wallace Stevens, on whom I’ve riffed in the past — stealing once more from his “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” It’s been done a million times, but I liked the way the post title sounded.

I did mimic Stevens’ stanzas and language to some extent, wherever possible, sometimes (hopefully) to comic effect, in case anyone wants to compare the two. It’s no great work of poesy, but like I said, I don’t feel much like talking. And sometimes a poem is worth a thousand words.

**

I

Among twenty single men,

The only moving thing

Was the married one.

II

I was of three minds,

And two of them

Were not of the mind at all.

III

The whorls of hair sweeping over his ear

Catch and dizzy me in the eddying.

IV

A man and his wife

Are one.

A man and his wife and his coworker

Are not.

V

I do not know which to attend,

The joy of proximity

Or the pain of departure,

The hand on the shoulder

Or just after.

VI

Ice streaks the sidewalks

With dangerous glass.

The shadows were longer

Before, when he came.

I knew

On that hot summer day

There’d be trouble.

VII

O ex-cons of The Fund,

Why do you imagine I can’t perform?

Do you not see how I flush,

Dropping my gaze to the feet

Of your buddy beside you?

VIII

I know the inflections

And the processes of fundraising;

But I know, too,

That a poverty

Creeps into my voice.

IX

When my friend walks out of sight,

It marks the end

And the beginning of my life.

X

At the sight of this big man

Grinning, beaming like a lamp

Even the sternest lesbians

Relent and are charmed.

XI

They flew to Chicago

On a Thursday morning.

Once relieved of that piercing

Reminder, I took

A total in afternoon pledges of

Sixteen hundred.

XII

The clouds are flowing.

My friend must be breathing.

XIII

It was evening all afternoon.

It was snowing

And it was going to snow.

Alone was more alone

Than alone was before.

**

But before I follow up on that teaser of an opener, let me backtrack to the Occupation. As everyone knows by now, the “Occupy” protests have been happening in many major cities around the world, including my own, since late September. I’ve made a commitment to attend every Saturday rally and march. It isn’t wise or practical for me to try to camp out, but I otherwise support the Occupation in whatever way I can, whether it’s by waving at rush hour traffic alongside the sign-holders or bringing the food table a case of hot cocoa from the dollar store. This week, police in riot gear evicted people forcibly from the park with clubs, tear gas, and pepper spray, making dozens of arrests, confiscating sleeping bags and tarps, even destroying the food station with fire extinguishers. This violent crackdown has apparently been part of a coordinated national effort (according to the mayor of Oakland); the Wall Street occupiers have taken their case to court. I’m sure I could spend an entire post on what’s happening in my city and elsewhere, but there are plenty of savvy bloggers covering it already. This movement isn’t going away. And I’ve got smaller fish to fry at the moment…

I do feel badly for not camping out in the cold night after night like some of these intrepid kids, with my hyperactive bladder and my prodigious talent for creating pneumonia out of the simple head cold. Granted, I’m not nineteen anymore. I don’t have health insurance. But the limitless self-sacrifice and perfectionism bred into all good fundamentalist females nags at me that nothing short of dying of exposure for the cause is good enough. I feel guilty for sitting outside on my day off, enjoying the sunshine far from the Occupation, letting the rays work their magic on my moods. I feel guilty for not spending all my free waking hours with the dedicated core, who have been beaten and tear gassed and spent nights in jail. I feel guilty for using a good part of my time at the rallies scoping out the menfolk. Truth be told, I’ve learned to live on less than a shoestring and a prayer, and what I still want more than anything is to cherchez l’homme.

**

Apropos of that very issue, my biggest problem at the Saturday marches has not been police in riot gear. It’s been the problem of having to constantly dodge Eli. Every week, whether I come alone or am “shielded” by my activist friends (usually gay boyfriends like Greg or Danny), there he is, reappearing at every turn, no matter how many hundreds or thousands of people surround us.

Eli had called and emailed a couple of times since our unsavory little hiking expedition. I had not responded. “Don’t dignify him with a reply,” was the advice I received from friends both male and female. I didn’t know what to say, anyway. I couldn’t act as if everything were fine. And I really didn’t want to see him again, even if he had one of my favorite Tom Waits CDs. I didn’t want to have to attempt to explain myself, and face “who-me?” denial or supercilious condescension. Nor did I feel like inviting further unkindness about my ill-conceived drunken flirting.

It would all just be a repeat of the old and unhappy pattern I fall into, practically without fail, with very clever men who, when confronted with my intuitive or emotional grasp of a situation (especially one that may not reflect well upon them) have to pull out their semantic bag of tricks to demonstrate that they’re more “rational” and “objective” than I am — not to mention inarguably in the right. I don’t want play that tiresome, rigged game anymore. I’m done trying to date Dad. I’m OK letting Eli feel superior and right forever, if he wants; I just don’t want him around while he does it.

After one particularly obvious “dodge” at another Saturday march, he emailed me and said that since I hadn’t been responding, and seemed to not want to talk to him at Occupy, he had concluded that I didn’t feel like interacting right now. But he still needed to get my CD back to me.

After some thought, I wrote back:

That’s a fair enough assessment…

I dread ‘breaking up’ with friends, but it dawned upon me quite suddenly that our association has been a somewhat labored exercise in vanity. Yours and mine both. And life is simply too short to waste one’s time. (That’s a lesson I took, anyway, from the recent passing of a loved one.) If you’re looking for some further explanation, well, I don’t really feel like arguing about it. Which is why I postponed reply indefinitely.

I know I’m not such a big part of your life that you’ll miss me terribly much. I do miss my Tom Waits CD, though…you could just stick my name on it and drop it off to one of the dreaded hipster baristas at (the coffeehouse) the next time you’re in the neighborhood. I’m sure they’d get it back to me safely.

All of life is a series of experiments, no? Some of them work, some don’t. Cosi e la vita.

Eli did not reply. I was relieved.

But when I see him at the rallies now — he seems to make a point of stalking angrily by my friends and me — he shoots me the kind of stink-eye you’d typically only see coming from a wet cat who’d been thrown in the bath.

Surprisingly, I can live with that.

**

Thus ends the story of Eli. It was a rather lengthy dead-end street, but I guess I needed to follow it to its natural conclusion to see where it ended up.

Let’s move on to a tale Katherine Woodward Thomas tells in her book Calling In The One, which, as some of you know, I diligently workbooked my way through a year and a half ago in a concerted effort to be more relationship-ready.

Thomas’s client “Melissa” was a lesbian, but otherwise had a couple of essential things in common with me: she struggled with deep feelings of unworthiness, and she secretly feared that surrender to another person in love might mean surrender to control and even abuse. The latter was thanks to a frightening, domineering father; I got my love vs. control issues from both Mom and Dad and their nasty despot of a God.

Anyway, this was Melissa’s experience after working on her relationship blocks with Ms. Thomas:

As is often the case, the first several opportunities that Melissa encountered for romantic liaisons were again with people who were unavailable. One was an actress who was on her way out of town to do a play in another city, with an anticipated long run. The next was a smart and savvy bisexual woman who, it turned out, was still living with her ex-husband. The third, Alison, was the “woman of Melissa’s dreams.” She was everything that Melissa had hoped for — charismatic, bright, funny, spiritual, beautiful, and extremely accomplished. Unfortunately, Alison also happened to be in a long-term relationship with another woman, and together they were co-parenting a child. He was only five, and Alison made it clear that they were committed to living as a family unit until he graduated from high school. Talk about a no-win situation. I wish I could tell you that Melissa wasn’t tempted, but she was. It was agony for her to turn Alison down. But, after a few topsy-turvy weeks, turn her down she did. She made the difficult decision to avoid an avoidable drama, even if that meant that she would be alone in life. Two weeks after making this decision, Melissa met her partner, whom she considers to be the love of her life and her soul mate. Looking back, she now shudders to think how close she came to missing the opportunity to be with her mate, for what would surely have been another heartache and disappointment.

**

I guess you could say I’ve met my “Alison.”

Which, given this story, could be a good sign.

**

To return to the opening line: of course I know no one is “perfect.” The person to whom I refer is not even “perfect” in the way I used to define “perfect.” He’s not a scintillating graduate-level intellectual or committed progressive activist like Eli. He’s not a sculpted yoga god like Sonny who can quote the Dalai Lama while standing on his head. He makes the occasional very bad joke.

Our chemistry, however, was instantaneous and powerful, from the day he walked onto the call center floor three months ago. I felt like I’d been whacked upside the head by Cupid’s Louisville slugger. I didn’t know what hit me. And unlike nearly all the other men (save Sam) to whom I have traditionally been attracted, he makes me feel really, really good. He laughs heartily at my wisecracks, flushing red and showing a broad, irresistibly dimpled smile. He tells me I’m interesting/smart/awesome. He gets neither defensive nor aggressive about my diet, something I’ve come to expect from meat-eating men (cf. Herman Cain, “sissy pizza”). Nor does it seem to bother him one bit that I’ve read (insert intimidating philosopher here) and he hasn’t. Frankly, I couldn’t care less that he hasn’t read (insert intimidating philosopher here). The man seems wholly unthreatened by and is entirely respectful of me. I have nothing to battle or defend. This feels as strange, relaxing, and delicious as sliding into soft suede slippers after years of training one’s feet into hard, pointy pumps. Ahhhh.

Dan’s vocational passion in life is to build beautiful wooden furniture. He’s a master of his craft. His flawless pieces look like they should be sitting in the palatial homes featured in glossy style magazines. He even studied and apprenticed in Romania, his ancestral homeland. So yes, he’s another artist doing grunt work to pay the bills. (Next year he intends to start school to become a radiologist, which will pull in a better income.)

And no, he’s not another seductive, elusive tease like Ted, looking to snare groupies or score with pretty young things. He’s more like some big, friendly, handsome dog, a Labrador with his tail wagging, winning over the prickliest people with even-tempered bonhomie. The surly but essentially good-hearted old alcoholic who snarls at every newcomer chats him up amiably; even the hardcore lesbian feminist who criticizes almost everyone and everything finds him undeniably appealing. He seems to have absolutely no clue what a dreamboat he is (I think he resembles nothing so much as a proletarian American version of Colin Firth), which is totally refreshing after God’s various Gifts to Women, and makes him just that much more attractive. Dan belongs to my generation, so he remembers all the odd pop-culture ephemera from our childhood (e.g. the short-lived, silly TV series “The Greatest American Hero”) unlike our young cohorts. He loves to shop thrift stores. He digs my funky secondhand shoes.

But the real clincher is that he was raised by a fundamentalist mother and stepfather (!), so he knows right-wing Christian insanity intimately, from the inside — although it appears to have done him less damage than it did me. He’s not terribly interested in organized religion these days, but he’s not bitter. Long story short, it is very difficult not to fall in love with this guy. Madly. And in a tedious job where hours creep by like days, talking to Dan makes the hands of the clock fly.

He makes a point of mentioning his Asian-American wife, Mai, fairly frequently, as if to remind us both that he’s taken. His marriage appears to be harmonious; at the same time, our affinity is so strong even our hardcore lesbian coworker has noticed and commented on it. One of these days I need to inform Surly Alcoholic Stan (who is fond of me) that Dan is married — he seems at times to be trying to nudge me in Dan’s direction. I’m obviously not the only person who thinks we’d make a fine match.

It’s times like these that I almost wish we were renegade Mormons living in Idaho. That wouldn’t really work, though, because none of us want kids, and that’s the main justification for polygamy.

If Dan were my husband, however, I wouldn’t want to share him.

**

You-all don’t need to panic or get your knickers in a twist. You know me well enough to know that I have my own personal Hippocratic oath to “first do no harm.” I’m going to have to trust that the Right Thing is either just around the corner, as it was for Melissa, or that unforeseen events will dramatically change the current situation somehow, and let this become the Right Thing.

Dan has said, in a wholly unrelated conversation about his childhood, that he believes in Fate. I’ve always been an agnostic on the question (regardless of all the philosophers and theologians who have argued themselves blue in the face for centuries about it; let’s please not go there again). But say, for the sake of argument, that there were such a thing as Fate. I wonder, then: to what end would Dan enter my life at this precise moment in time? Ms. Thomas might say it’s a kind of test of my progress and resolve, like what Melissa went through with Alison. On the other hand, a romantically minded biographer of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (whose mantra is All’s Fair In Love And War) might disagree. You do, after all, hear stories about eventual couples who were married to other people when they met. It’s not unheard of. Many unpredictable things happen in life. Mai could have an affair with her coworker, and decide she wants to leave. Nearly half of all marriages don’t survive.

Unfortunately, I am neither omnipresent nor omniscient, and am forced to live my life forward, without 20/20 foresight. What I do know for sure is that whatever happens, it’s essential for me to hold to my own integrity. And have, dare I say it, a little faith.

It’s worth noting that I went through something like this once before, many years ago, with my dear friend Ben — and I (mostly) behaved myself. Ben was a brilliant Buddhist scholar with a wry sense of humor and impish blue eyes, and he was as fond of me as I was of him. He also married his fiancée, a warm and compassionate woman he loved, during the time that I knew him. I managed my feelings toward him pretty well, most likely because I didn’t feel as deprived around him as I did around the men I usually chased after. I felt loved, seen, and appreciated by Ben, and for that reason most of the time felt as if there were no significant lack. The only thing I ever felt I lacked, where he was concerned, was an intimate sexual relationship…on those nights when the gang would go out for beers and nachos, and I’d had a drink or two, I’d look across the table at him and feel a hopeless yearning (not to mention a wicked horniness). It was a bittersweet sort of ache, without the sharp edge of rejection that made my usual romantic obsessions so consistently and profoundly painful. I truly felt that if Ben could have been two people, he would have been with me too. Somehow that was a consolation.

**

It is heartening to meet someone wonderful, whom you find incredibly attractive, who also finds you wonderful and incredibly attractive. More often than not, I’ve wound up spending my time with an Eli or a Ted, someone who keeps me handy merely to stroke his ego while he chases other women. Once in a while there will be someone like Bart, the old college classmate who, despite my attempts to discourage him, cultivated a long-term crush on me, and recently announced that he was coming to town with his two daughters to scope out real estate. He wanted me to meet him and the girls. I nixed that meetup in genuine alarm. I was always slightly repelled by Bart, for reasons other than (or in addition to) his substantial girth. Possibly pheromones, possibly personality. But here I am, apologetically groping for acceptable reasons to refuse him.

And why should I? Sometimes I buy into that old double standard that women must look and act as alluring as possible (men being the visually oriented ones, after all), but must be able to “see past” a man’s slovenly exterior. The old Beauty and the Beast trap. And sometimes I resent that. There’s a voice (Mom?) that always whispers, “At least Bart likes you. You should take what you can get. The attractive ones are all jerks, anyway, who play around or think they’re better than you.” You may have heard this called conventional wisdom…

Meeting Dan gives me hope that the so-called conventional wisdom isn’t ironclad. Because, damn, the man is fine. He flips my switch like you wouldn’t believe. And he’s not a jerk. He’s not a player. He’s not aware enough of his own hotness to even think about being a player. I’ve seen pictures of his wife, and she’s not Zhang Ziyi.

Dan is an astoundingly modest man. Dan is an astoundingly attractive man. Dan thinks I’m astoundingly awesome just the way I am.

I sincerely hope that there’s another one out there just like him for me.

My first official boyfriend, and first halfway reciprocated love, was killed by a massive heart attack on the 9^th of September. I found about it through Russ and other Facebook friends in the wee hours of the following Tuesday.

I’ve told some damning tales about León, the first man (outside my family) to truly break my heart, and at one point I even believed he didn’t wish to be in contact with me. I was decidedly wrong about that. He found and friended me on Facebook, and for the past year and a half we had gotten to know each other again, exchanging private messages and interacting almost daily in the more public forum of news links, photographs, and statuses. León had a so-called “bleeding heart” and a finally tuned sense of outrage, so we were nearly always in agreement politically. In private, he was warm and affectionate, reiterating how glad he was to have reconnected with me. I felt the same way. He had only in the past couple of years finished a doctorate in Art History, and gotten married.

At long last, he told me, he was happy.

**

It took a few hours for the shock to subside and the exposed nerves to begin screaming. I wept in my bed nearly all night long, falling into an exhausted sleep just as pale light began to show behind the curtains. When I resurfaced into consciousness, and into the terrible realization of what had happened, the feeling of awfulness returned in the form of that giant jagged wound in the chest I had only recently been rid of, that feeling that someone was trying to cut out my heart with a rusty saw.

I cried on and off uncontrollably all day, calling in sick to work and staying glued to Facebook, where many of us had virtually come together to mourn and reminisce. I spent an hour and a half on the phone with Nathan Roth, who had been one of my closest friends freshman year, and who had also been the boyfriend of my “close friend” Cheyenne. She was the girlfriend who, for about a week during our sophomore year, believed that she and León were meant to be together. (Never trust a California-bred woman with a precious name.)

**

Yes, that’s an old and tired story: girl meets boy, girl falls hard for boy, girl loses boy to friend who, it turns out, didn’t really want him anyway. It all played out in a particularly painful way – and not just for me – with Cheyenne breaking up with León over the phone (to go back to Nathan) while León was home in Nebraska at his disabled brother’s funeral. He returned to school a shattered man, and in the midst of my own reeling betrayal and emotional disintegration I hovered by his side, trying to gather up the pieces. Our band of friends had fallen apart, splintered into hostile factions. León just couldn’t cope with all the loss. He packed up and left school; I took to my bed with a gallon jug of cheap wine, skipping classes and contemplating a fatal jump into the Chesapeake. Life seemed over. I never spoke to Cheyenne again.

(What was it about her? I asked Nathan the other day. What was it about this liberal-arts-school Helen of Troy that caused such a destructive war? “I don’t know,” he answered. “She was stupid…and not very attractive…I guess I just wanted to be in a relationship.”)

**

But before all that, before all that…there was just León and I.

In my post about destroying my old notebooks, I shared my first impression of him as some pretentious class clown, some egotistical attention whore. Avoid At All Costs! That was at freshman assembly. He wound up in my seminar (evening philosophy class), where he failed to disabuse me of my negative preconceptions by holding forth windily without saying much. Then one day, not long after that, this annoying character sat down at my table in the dining hall, across from me…unavoidable.

In person, he turned out to be disconcertingly warm and personable, even down-to-earth. Everything about him up close seemed to belie the impression he gave at a distance. Not only that, but he had the most beautiful almond-shaped green eyes I had ever seen, transparent and vulnerable-looking, with a glimmer of sadness in them. I felt a weakening flush when he met my eye. Uh oh.

At a weekend “coffeeshop party” (a rock dance party in the basement café for students) we wound up dancing together into the wee hours. I specifically remember grooving to “Play That Funky Music” with him, stealing his felt top hat and putting it on my head. He walked me back to my dorm room and kissed me briefly on the mouth before bidding me goodnight. I stood there watching him go, still wearing the hat, a smile spreading slowly across my astonished lips. No one but a friend’s mother had ever kissed me on the mouth before, and that obviously didn’t count.

Interestingly, in the days to come, I completely freaked out. I already had a terrible crush on someone utterly unobtainable, an exquisite little prude of an upperclassman named Titus who ran around with the all the pretty (if closeted) gay boys on campus. Titus was impossibly beautiful, and clearly not interested in me…and I had another golden opportunity to fall into one more hopeless obsession with an idealized god-man, which was familiar, or to start something with this far less perfect oddball of a fellow who might actually be interested in me.

The latter was unfamiliar — uncomfortable — an actual risk.

León took me out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant in town. My ambivalence was snowballing by that point. In brief, I blew it that night. I turned León down, pre-emptively, in a way that he found utterly insulting. When he was good and mad and not speaking to me, then suddenly I was filled with panic and regret. But of course.

It took some doing — apologies, tears, virtual prostrations — before he was willing to so much as spend time with me again. When he finally did, we wound up staying up most of the night in one of the campus common rooms by its huge stone fireplace, talking about our pasts and our worldviews and our fears and our dreams…the kind of Before Sunrise conversation I’d had with Jonathan on the tour bus. Nothing else happened that night, but on a subsequent evening in my dorm room, I confessed to having growing feelings for him, and he confessed to the same — and then he kissed me. Really kissed me. I had had no idea up until that point what exactly could happen in the body when lips met lips. I was innocent to the point of retarded. León had this incredibly sensuous mouth with soft, full pink lips, and he knew exactly what he was doing. He was the PhD of kissing. He flipped my switch. He turned the oven on. It’s all his fault, really. He awoke the slumbering beast.

After that, he pretty much owned me.

**

Before long I found out why León’s eyes looked sad, and why his humor tended to be of the gallows variety. His family’s secret burden was a mentally ill brother so miserable and self-destructive he had jumped in front of a truck to kill himself, but had succeeded only in needing 24/7 care in a hospital bed for the rest of his life. León’s was not a family that processed trauma together or openly; his cultured, old-country doctor father coped by making bleak existential jokes of the Woody Allen variety, and his mother was all brisk pragmatism.

In addition, I wasn’t León’s first love – that honor belonged to his high school girlfriend Michelle, with whom he had had a very passionate and volatile relationship. Their parting had been difficult. He still pined for her. I was jealous.

Nevertheless, we had a couple of happy months of relative reciprocity, although it pains me to think of the times, out walking in a group of friends, when I dropped or avoided his hand simply out of acute self-consciousness. He took it personally, but I was simply clueless about how to act, how to be a couple in public. I had never done it before. For his part, he would sometimes wound me with offhand but barbed jokes about women when we were hanging out with “the guys.” Typical adolescent posturing and inexperience, but I was tremendously vulnerable. It was, after all, my first relationship.

We did attend the college dances together, the formal “waltz parties” in the Great Hall, and I was seldom happier than when we were doing a breezy swing while Frank Sinatra crooned a tune like “Witchcraft.” The only time I was happier was when we were alone together in his messy, undecorated dorm room, on sheets that smelled of him, listening to Depeche Mode or Kate Bush and continuing my remedial tutorial on the birds and the bees. Thanksgiving week I could barely wait to get back to him after the break, hungry for the taste of him, running down the hall of his dormitory and waking him up from a nap. He was tousled and unshowered and redolent of his own skin. I wanted to eat him alive. I thought he was so beautiful, this skinny Argentinean boy from Omaha, with his wispy dark hair and sad eyes. I had forgotten all about Titus.

Everything changed after winter break. He had seen Michelle, and what had happened between them confused, angered, and upset him to the point that he didn’t think he could continue with me. He was violently jealous of Michelle, and furious with her for moving on, even though he appeared to have done exactly the same thing with me. In the following months, we would come together and apart several times. His flirtations with other women were excruciating for me to watch, but he seemed to feel I was unentitled to my own jealousy and was angered by it. León’s double standard! Doggedly I courted him, wrote him poems, pined away, listening to “our” music.

By the end of the school year, however, we, had kissed and made up. I was loath to go home for the summer.

**

The rest of the story has essentially been told already: girl loses boy.

Now girl has lost boy for good.

**

The grief has been complicated and intense. Complicated because the experience with Cheyenne scarred me deeply, intense because I was so young and impressionable and full of desperate longing. I loved León; I saw things about him he hid from others, and I hungered so hard to take away his pain that my ribs ached. I would listen to the gorgeous Depeche Mode song “Somebody,” a song to which he had introduced me, and yearn to be León’s Somebody. That Somebody with whom he shared his innermost thoughts and his intimate details, who helped him see things in a different light. I didn’t want him to turn into the bitter, lonely old man he fully expected to become.

What I understand now, at forty-three, is that only time and experience would temper and mellow the suffering he was grappling with when we were barely more than kids. I tried to make things better for him…and he chose someone who made him feel powerful (his explanation) instead. Who, after all, doesn’t want to be the rescuer? It’s always easier to see the other person as the needy one. It might have behooved me back then to need help more openly and often, and let León be the hero once in a while.

But back in the day, I believed I was ready to endure any amount of pain if it meant León wouldn’t have to. (I probably endured a lot of pain unnecessarily that didn’t do either of us a bit of good.) In the end, León survived all his youthful turbulence and tragedy, and got to leave the earth at the point of arrival at fulfillment in work and love, at actual contentment. Whereas I’m the one left struggling with vocation, singlehood, and this terrible grief, weeping at my kitchen table alone.

That fiercely loyal (and probably unhealthily selfless) nineteen-year-old would cry: So be it!

I’d been so worried about León. My worry, as it turns out, was unwarranted.

**

Unable to return to the brutality of fundraising calling for a week (don’t ask me how I’m going to pay next month’s rent), I took a long walk in the early autumn rain to the art-house theatre to see Midnight in Paris. It was a spirited, funny, and entertaining film not unlike Allen’s earlier work, free of the lethargy and dark redundancy I’d found in more recent films where he seemed to play the same one-note, never-satisfied protagonist.

What struck me most about the film’s time-traveling aspect was that it underscored how incredibly quickly time passes. I couldn’t help but think of how these once-vibrant partygoers and artists of 1920s Paris had long since grown old and died. In the present moment, here was the young Ernest Hemingway sitting before Owen Wilson’s Gil, drinking whisky and dispensing manly advice; the cessation of his existence seemed an unthinkable distance away. But in the morning, Gil would be in 2011, and Papa would be dust. Everything was so ephemeral.

It seems to me that my vivid memories of León could have happened yesterday, the intervening years have slipped by with such alarming speed. That first night after the news came, as I lay in bed sobbing, I said out loud, over and over, “I have got to change my life.”

**

Moving out of the late summer of young adulthood into the early autumn of middle age, I want to do so many things I haven’t done. And I don’t know how. Still living on the periphery like a nineteen-year-old student, I am always just few hundred dollars away from getting kicked out on the street. I send out inquiries and feelers this way and that toward the dreams that I have, and I tell myself that my small actions are baby steps toward the life I envision. But León’s death makes me wonder: am I doing enough? Am I stuck? Am I a coward? What would I do if I knew I had a week to live?

I know that at heart – my Canadian coach Lisa Lane Brown helped make this very clear to me – I don’t believe that I’m qualified, that I have what it takes to “make it.” I don’t have the requisite self-confidence or belief in myself to trust that I can make things happen. In a world increasingly framed as full of ferocious competition, the only thing I’m certain of is failure. I want to change this. I have to change this.

I have a stack of library books on my kitchen table right now about how to change the core negative beliefs you carry around about yourself that sabotage you. Even if they can’t help, I don’t imagine they’ll hurt. And maybe I’ll learn something.

Because if I’m going to keel over at the age of fifty from a massive brain aneurysm, I’d like to do it by the shores of the Mediterranean with my beloved husband by my side, and be mourned by the hundreds or even thousands of people who were helped by something I wrote.

The horror of death, said Norman Brown, is the horror of dying with unlived lives in our bodies.

I suppose that’s the bottom line.

___________________________

Note: the post title was taken from a poem by George Gordon, Lord Byron, one of León’s favorite poets. The full text can be found here.

I realize I haven’t published anything in well over two months. I had my best friend from college visit me in July, and in the midst of that my little Mac iBook, the one I bought in 2006 with my grandmother’s money and took to Italy, finally bit the dust. With any luck (and some money I don’t currently have) I’ll be able to retrieve the hard drive data at some point. I lost the entirety of the post I’d been working on in June/July, but now I’m back in business with a Powerbook G4 (the same vintage as my iBook), which I obtained from our old coffeehouse buddy Dex for a hundred bucks.

The good news is that he left a whole cornucopia of music in the iTunes library for me, from classic jazz, salsa, and soul to newly minted alt-rock bands — including all kinds of indie hipster music I’d never even heard of. (I’m listening to Arthur & Yu as I write.) Dex may just make me cool yet. What’s more, I finally have MS Office, which means that creating documents (like resumes and cover letters) in my computer’s word processing program will no longer create obstacles or present major compatibility issues when it comes to prospective employers and writing gigs.

So at the end of the day I’m essentially better off than when I started.

Some adversities are blessings in disguise.

**

That statement could apply to all kinds of situations, as a matter of fact.

Oh, where to start? Anyone who took the time to read the comments thread on my May post knows that that cute little artist guy Nick turned out to be disconcertingly paranoid. Whether it was because of being alone in the studio all day to obsess upon his neighbor troubles, or because of the quantity of weed he was smoking every day, I have no idea, but I didn’t stick around to find out. He backed out of our dinner date, amid some rambling about being busy (did I mention that he also called himself “fucked up” and “out of my mind?”) – which I found to be an actual relief. I was sorry to see those sinewy arms go, but even I’m not willing to deal with a whole lotta crazy anymore. I’ve got my hands full maintaining my own mental health.

That’s the new policy: no more blank checks, no more extending limitless credit, no matter how tasty a guy is. (Or how smart or talented, for that matter.)

But that brings me to our old friend Eli.

**

Eli texted me right on schedule, wanting to get together for a drink. I was happy to hear from him after the letdown over Nick. After all this time, Eli was a free agent again. What might happen with us now?

In my last post, I framed Eli as a possible Mr. Darcy figure, someone who had caused me to revisit my initial impression of him as a curmudgeonly misanthrope and intellectual snob. I had become impressed, over time, with his attentiveness to his ailing mother and grandmother, and had been pleasantly surprised to hear that he had read Eckhart Tolle (without derision or irony). More recently, I had wondered if his renewed interest in world travel had been in any way prompted by my divulgence a while back that his commitment to staying in-state with his family had been something of a crush-deterrent.

So I was primed to explore the possibilities with Eli – short or long-term. I felt ready for anything. I arrived at the neighborhood bar (our favorite meeting place, owned by the same couple who owns my neighborhood coffeehouse), snagged us an outside table, and waited.

And waited. The tables filled up with the chattering happy-hour crowd. I began to wonder if Eli had forgotten. It wouldn’t be the first time – although the first time it happened, I reasoned that any busy person could forget a single date. (Not that I would ever forget about a drink with anyone who even remotely interested me romantically.)

Finally, after twenty-five minutes, I called him.

Indeed, he had forgotten. He was there within the half hour and was apologetic; I made his penance my second glass of wine. But I couldn’t shake the knawing thought that he found me so forgettable. So I drowned it in alcohol. Under the table, our knees were touching; looking at Eli’s model-worthy face in the fading twilight, I found myself thinking that even at his current heft, he was a damned handsome man. I was purring uninhibitedly about how I had often managed to “get my needs met” outside of relationships, and referring to how his ex had “starved” him. He was regarding me with an inscrutable (but what I thought was an interested) look. When he walked me home, he declined my offer to “see my apartment,” but I felt hopeful nonetheless. He had, at one point during the evening, proposed taking a day trip to the mountains next week, so I emailed him the following afternoon with my work schedule.

His reply, several days later, was brief to the point of curt, and seemed more like an evasion than a genuine excuse. He’d hit a curb, supposedly, and didn’t want to go anywhere until he got the car looked at. “Bummer,” he appended unconvincingly.

Disappointed by his anemic response, I replied: Well heck, Eli, if you changed your mind and don’t want to go, just say so! You don’t have to go and hurt your car!

I didn’t hear anything from him for three weeks.

**

At this point I guess I had to have been pretty clued in that I couldn’t (and shouldn’t) expect more than lukewarm ambivalence – at best – from Mr. Eli. (Whooee! More ambivalence! Be still my beating heart!) So why did I consent to go on a hike with him when he finally emailed me back? Well, for one thing, I was just so darn surprised that he got back to me at all. Two, I like going for hikes in the mountains. And three, I was still willing to extend him some credit, because of our two-year relationship, because I thought I might be wrong – like Elizabeth was about Darcy – and because, let’s face it, he’s a damned handsome man.

Without a real destination, we meandered along the mountain highway, through a number of old mining towns. Eli found it necessary to point out the old mine building, now a museum, where he and a girlfriend had had a quickie in the gift shop restroom. I didn’t know what to say to that. I certainly had no comparable bragging story. The precious little sexual intimacy I’ve enjoyed in my lifetime has generally taken place in the standard private locations. (Later I would remember a drunken handjob administered to Seamus while he drove down a major city boulevard, but at the moment, no such misadventure came to mind.)

Here I must observe that there’s something fundamentally unsexy about the way Eli talks about sex. It’s so detached and cerebral, he may as well be talking about a surgical procedure. I’ve encountered this phenomenon before among extremely well educated men; Erica Jong made no small fortune writing about it. The more these guys talk, the less you want to actually do anything with them; you sense that you’d feel like a bacterium under a glass slide, subject to only the most scientific scrutiny and analysis. Any shadow, any sparkle or sizzle conjured by the erotic imagination dissipates like a vapor under the bright fluorescent light of their droll and sophisticated reductionism. I didn’t have the words to name this at the time, I just knew I was the opposite of turned on.

But I digress. We finally arrived at the large lake adjacent to a popular ski resort and took the exit, driving along the lake’s edge until we found a trailhead. It was here, at the outset of our hike along a service road, that Eli decided to treat me to descriptive tales of all the fascinating women he’d been dating lately.

**

First he brought up the ever-so-interesting hipster chick with tattoos and piercings that he’s apparently been out with several times. And then there was the friend of his friend’s girlfriend, whom he was apparently successfully “vibe-ing off of” when they all went out together. But he still didn’t think either of these excellent ladies could hold a candle to the PhD in Economics from Italy (yes, you heard me right) who had given him “butterflies…for the first time in a long time.”

Oh. Is that so?

He definitely wanted to see this femme fatale again (“this could really BE something”) but couldn’t figure out what or how much he should tell Tattoo Girl. What should he do? Any advice?

Such a dilemma. I feel for you, pal. Fuck you very much.

I could feel the tips of my ears burning, the way they had so many times before when it dawned upon me, terribly, how low my status actually was in a romantic or sexual interest’s romantic or sexual ranking. I was being given the buddy treatment, yet again. As if there were nothing of any interest to him whatsoever between my legs. As if I were some benign, neutered being — a maiden aunt, an elderly nun.

That’s surely the coward’s answer to unwelcome sexual interest from a friend: waxing enthusiastic, passive-aggressively, about the people who actually excite you. I know, because I used it myself in high school on the unfortunate Jerry Baines. I don’t use it anymore. It’s really an adolescent tactic, as disrespectful as it is immature. And disappointing to see in adults.

But it did show me, once again, and very starkly, that side of Eli I had glimpsed in the beginning that had turned me away: that ruthless ranking of people on a narrow worthiness scale of his own invention, the personal vanity that brings with it a sense of entitlement to minor offhand cruelties. I had been here before. Déjà vu.

I feigned nonchalance for the rest of the hike, refusing to betray any inkling of humiliation. But my balloon had burst. The rage would come later.

**

It’s been difficult not to slide back into the depression that dogged me for years: that helpless, hopeless feeling that the relationship I’ve longed for my whole life is out of reach, that I am constitutionally incapable of drawing in or holding onto mutual love and attraction.

It was hard to get out of bed the week following my excursion with Eli. Not because I missed him personally and wanted to be with him – he had shown me some true colors, and they weren’t pretty – but because I’d invested (and wasted) so much time believing there might be something, someday, between us. In retrospect I don’t know if I’d have met him for drinks so often if he weren’t so bloody good-looking and clever – an “objective” catch. To be honest, I get ten times more enjoyment and emotional sustenance out of coffee with Greg or even just an email conversation with my best friend from college.

I picked up Calling In The One again, to find I had bookmarked a certain page:

Our fantasy is that, once we see our pattern clearly and make a definite decision to do things differently, our external world will begin to change immediately. In lieu of meeting yet another unavailable person, we will suddenly begin meeting only available people who are ready to make a commitment. Instead of meeting more mean and abusive people, we will suddenly begin attracting kind and gentle souls who offer nothing but love and encouragement. This is rarely the case. What is more likely to happen is that, instead of immediately attracting a whole new kind of person into our lives, we find ourselves attracting exactly the same kind of person, or a person who at first appears to be different but isn’t really. (Emphasis mine.) We are challenged with temptations that are similar to the ones we have faced in the past. Only this time we’re wiser. This time we know exactly where a particular path will lead. We must make the more difficult choice by saying no to the enticement of doing the exact same thing while hoping for different results. We must choose to remain empty-handed rather than settle for repeating past mistakes. This temptation will generally happen not just once, not just twice, but usually several times. It’s as though the universe is testing us –are you truly finished replicating the familiar and known? Have you really given up the need to prove that you aren’t worthy of love? Are you willing to stand in the void rather than compromise yourself again?

Now there’s the million-dollar question. It’s not exactly my choice to remain empty-handed (the choice seems to have been made for me), but my usual M.O. is to go running after the person who has thrown all manner of ambivalence and even humiliation in my direction, in the misguided belief that I can somehow win him over this time. “Doing the exact same thing while hoping for different results.”

Part of the pattern is, of course, to put the most generous possible spin on everything, no matter how unlikely it is. Eli is a busy guy…so busy that he forgets dates (would he ever forget Miss Italy 2011?) and is incommunicado for weeks at a time. He really was worried about the effect bumping into a curb would have on the car. His boast about the gift shop was actually an ill-conceived attempt to seduce me. And he talked about all those other women to…to…well, to impress me, of course – in some weird, counterintuitive way – or perhaps to make me jealous. Yeah. Because that’s just how clueless Eli is when it comes to women. Sure, that’s it. Gee, poor Eli. I’d better give him another chance

The difference now is that I can actually step back and ask myself: Why the hell do I even want Eli? Why would I want someone who thought it necessary to communicate with me in such an indirect and potentially hurtful manner, for whatever reason? Why would I want to be an easily forgotten item on his to-do list? Why would I want to subject myself to further comparisons to ostensibly more accomplished, exotic, attractive women?

Eli and I had talked in the car about Obama’s “framing” problem – that he accepts uncritically the terms the Republicans set out for him when it comes to the debt, taxes, government spending, etc. I could add here that I don’t want to be continually subject to Eli’s ways of framing things: his hierarchical ranking of people according to their surface merits, his emphasis on intellect and academic achievement, his cerebral de-eroticizing of sex. I find his “frames” quite frankly depressing. This is not what I want. This is what I thought I wanted in 1986.

**

Those origami love-cranes still hang from the “love and relationships” corner of my apartment. I lay across my bed for a while on Sunday afternoon, watching them twirl in the apartment’s cross-breeze, searching for some handle on the sadness I felt.

The choice not to do the same thing over again: surely that’s the beginning of change. What Katherine Woodward Thomas called “standing in the void” is simply refusing to repeat history, and waiting, unoccupied, in the quiet faith that there will be something else. Faith is hard for me – for obvious reasons – but I do already have one experience of “something else.”

What I can’t help but wonder is whether it would behoove me to broaden my search parameters – not just beyond the borders of city or state, but beyond the borders of country. I just found out from a mutual friend that Tony DeRocca (the surly music critic about whom I obsessed for three years) wound up in Sweden after meeting his mate online.

I wonder which site he used? Internet dating got me 50 first dates and an unstable Pole. I’ve been thinking that perhaps I should turn my efforts toward pursuing my secondary dream in order to facilitate my primary one.

**

Here are some interesting recent synchronicities, to that end:

I run into the ex of an old bookstore friend at my neighborhood coffeehouse. He urges me to get in touch with Melanie, who now lives elsewhere, via Facebook. I locate her easily, and we exchange a number of affectionate catch-up messages. I happen to mention my dream of living in Europe, and how much I miss Italy. She turns me on to the United World Colleges, whose pre-university program teaches its students socially conscious, ecologically minded, hands-on engagement with the world around them. At one time she had explored teaching there. The program sounds like something I could definitely get behind. What’s more, the UWC has a Duino campus – where Rilke wrote his famous Elegies – and when I view its campus on the Web site, perched on a high cliff overlooking the Adriatic Sea, I gasp audibly. I ask Melanie for more information about her experience, and she puts me in touch with an Italian alum she worked with in DC.

Yesterday I’m at a different neighborhood coffee bar using their Internet. The owner has donated some tattered books from his personal library to a bookshelf beside my table. I notice that the one on top is a beginning Italian (college-level) textbook. Excited, I ask the barista if I can borrow it, and she can see no reason why not since I live nearby. I bring it home immediately and am inordinately delighted to sit in my kitchen re-learning Italian vocabulary over dinner and pronouncing the lilting words out loud. Ah-bah-STAN-zah BEH-neh. Pretty good. The language itself makes me happy. It fills my tongue, to borrow from Rilke, like a beautiful fruit. I’ve missed speaking it.

Once more I feel as if, in some small way, I am taking steps toward the life I envision. And you know how I love those swarthy brown-eyed brunets.