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.

I began my last post writing about the news of Iris’s passing and the course-altering impact it had on me. It was only because of her that I began working my way through the book at all. This month I was confronted with the untimely deaths of not one but two wonderful young men under the age of thirty. One was the son of my friend Peg from work. He and I had never met, but she always spoke of him with glowing pride, and as if they were best friends. Kirby was an accomplished exhibition skydiver, killed when a practice landing went wrong. He was all of 27.

The other was the son of Lynn, a woman from whom I rented a room eight years ago when I needed to escape from my apartment (situated over two ex-cons who fought loudly and violently). I lived for a year with Lynn and her then-teenage son in a small two-story 1930s house in West City Park. Lynn ran an almost entirely sustainable household: we recycled everything, flushed sparingly, composted, and hung our wash out to dry. Her son Mike was a tousle-haired, good-looking blue-eyed boy with an easygoing and affable manner. He provided a welcome counterpoint to his mom, who could be anxious and high-strung. Unfailingly polite and even-tempered, at sixteen he looked and acted years older. When we met for the first time, I think we were both a little taken aback and even a touch infatuated; there was a shyness and a subtle embarrassment between us as we shook hands and made conversation. Later we would become familiar and comfortable with each other, watching DVDs and eating our respective dinners on the living room couch. We both became addicted to the first season of 24, making dates to watch this or that episode together when he was home.

So it was a cold shock to hear that Mike, now 23 (the same age as Sam, I realized with an odd feeling), had suffered a massive asthma attack while working on a remote farm in New Mexico, miles from a hospital, and had not reached adequate help in time. It can’t be, I thought. Not Mike. Not Lynn’s beautiful blue-eyed boy.

**

But it was true. It was all true. And I attended two memorial services in the span of just two weeks.

Both of which were strikingly similar — and unexpectedly celebratory. Both featured slide shows set to music and abundant anecdotes supplied by friends and relatives. More impressively, what emerged about both Kirby and Mike was that they were tremendously admired by their friends, family, and peers as leaders who pursued their passions courageously and encouraged others to do the same. Kirby jumped out of airplanes on a weekly basis; Mike rode rapids, hiked mountains, and traveled out of the country alone at the age of eighteen. Laughter competed with tears as participants told hilarious tales of one-liners and pranks perpetrated by each of these mischievous boys. It occurred to me that Kirby and Mike would probably have liked each other very much.

More than ever, I was reminded of the old carpe diem, seize the day. “I’d rather die in the pursuit of my dreams than live without them,” I told a work friend after Kirby’s service. Even if I never get where I want to go, I have to believe that I’m moving toward it. I have to keep taking small steps every day, or at least every week. The black cloud of depression that used to engulf me held within it a sense of just biding time until the end, of having given up hope. It was while living with Lynn and Mike, full of despair one night about my poverty and my lack of achievement  — feeling stuck in my dead-end job, living in someone else’s house — that I very nearly downed a cocktail of painkillers and muscle relaxants. It may have been my lowest point in a twenty-five-year period of low points. (Mike was a bright spot in that dark time.)

Cynics would say I’m fooling myself in order to feel better…but which is preferable, honestly?

**

Self-belief and courage are more than half the battle, or so saith Julia Cameron. Through The Artist’s Way (and thanks to another departed friend with a zest for life, Iris) I am in the process of recovering both. As our astute friend from Down Under predicted I might, I have been further distancing myself from my family of origin in an act of (artistic) self-preservation. My “morning pages” — the three pages I now write every morning without fail — have revealed the extent to which I’ve let the dread of their inevitable disapproval thwart my every aspiration. (A mock article in The Onion perfectly encapsulated my adult life rather pathetically with the headline “Man Waiting Until Parents Die Before Doing A Single Thing That Makes Him Happy.” It may sound like a gross exaggeration, but it was one more harsh wake-up call. My chronic underachievement and chronic singlehood do keep me under their radar.)

Another thing that has come up again and again in my morning pages is rage toward my mother, much of it having to do with the shame I inherited from her regarding my sexuality, particularly my decidedly robust appetite for men. Watching Black Swan, I both laughed and shuddered with recognition at Nina’s frilly little-girly bedroom, full of dolls and stuffed animals. My mother, like the unhinged Barbara Hershey character, would have loved to keep me in that room, metaphorically speaking, for the rest of my natural life. “What happened to my sweet girl?” I will love Darren Aronofsky forever for understanding the infantilizing that young women endure at the hands of overprotective and/or religious mothers, the parental (and sometimes cultural) mandate to remain thin-blooded Virgins at the expense of their vital, juicy Whores.

**

Now that I’ve mentioned both the phrase carpe diem and my robust appetites, I suppose it’s only natural that I should arrive at one of my favorite subjects: men, and my ongoing quest for The One. Because a great deal has been happening there as well.

I might start off by mentioning that one of my Artist’s Way activities (and quite possibly my favorite to date) was to make a “dream collage.” Using travel and lifestyle magazines purchased from a nearby thrift store, I cut out dozens of photos, including pictures of gorgeous sunny places in Europe and on the Mediterranean, happy couples (including an appealing man feeding a normal-sized woman in a disheveled bed), a woman meditating by the sea, another woman riding a bicycle in France, and of course some seriously tasty men (including a wryly smiling Johnny Depp). Most of the men were anonymous models from the pages of a Details fashion spread; I didn’t recognize them. When they were all arranged in a visually pleasing manner on a black posterboard, I sighed contentedly. The images gave me joy. And hope.

Around that same time I found myself wondering how my old friend Eli, the beautiful doctoral grad student, was doing — and whether he was still with that visually impaired girlfriend of his or not. Things had not been going well for them when I’d seen him several months ago. They were fighting; she wasn’t meeting his needs, if you know what I mean; he had gained quite a bit of weight in his lower body. He was wearing his straight brown hair long and pulled into a slick ponytail, which with the added bootyliciousness made him decidedly less attractive to me (although he still had “such a pretty face,” as they often say about heavier women patronizingly). Thinking of him now, I considered whether, even in his more hefty state, I might possibly offer him some relief…if Jessica had finally driven him away by continuing to starve him of what he was really hungry for. I did care about him, after all, and he was still far from unattractive. Even if he weren’t the One, I might be okay with some good old-fashioned friendly tomfoolery. I had needs, too. I proceeded to entertain a few possible scenarios in my head.

Exactly two days later I got a text from Eli out of the blue. “I was just wondering how you were. Want to meet for lunch this week?”

He always does this. I don’t know how he knows.

**

We set a date for Friday noon. On Monday, for my weekly “artist date,” I dressed up in a special-occasion velvet top and matching scarf just for the hell of it, and walked down to my old neighborhood to check out an art gallery I’d never visited. When I tried the door, it was locked. Walking away down the street, I heard someone call out after me. “Hey!”

A wiry brunet with disheveled hair, roughly my age, was grinning at me from the doorway. He had big sleepy brown eyes and a scruffy beard and was dressed in a holey, paint-spattered sweatshirt and jeans. His look fell somewhere between “homeless” and “adorable.” I turned back and came into the gallery.

The artist’s name was Nick, and he was clearly a gifted painter. His large acrylic canvases were abstract and expressionistic, layering a variety of brushstrokes in a skilled interplay of color and form reminiscent of de Kooning. I knew Greg, my GBF (gay boyfriend), a talented abstract painter himself, would love them. I wound up talking to Nick for almost two hours. He had been living very much on the edge lately, having no other means of income, but seemed utterly confident that he was going to make it. He mentioned that he was also a writer, so I wound up divulging my own artistic aspirations. He showed me some of the paintings he had in back, and was floored when I mentioned Jesus at the wedding in Cana while viewing a painting he hadn’t yet told me featured the Sangre de Christo (Blood of Christ) mountains.

The whole space was practically vibrating with a sort of breathless and intoxicated energy. I found myself giggling a lot. Nick kept apologizing for talking too much, and said that I had a way of drawing him out. My eyes darted surreptitiously over his spare, compact frame when he looked away; he was just the sort of lean, hard, and veiny that makes my mouth water. I wanted to just sink my teeth into him, devour him on the spot. (My “scenarios” that night certainly didn’t lack for excitement.)

When I brought Greg back with me the following week (and yes, he did love those paintings), he was abruptly called away by a friend with a broken leg who needed assistance. Nick and I were left alone for about an hour. “Is he your boyfriend?” Nick asked, as if he dreaded the answer.

I could have danced for joy at the tone and the nature of the question. For once in my life, I could tell a guy I actually liked was interested! I was more than happy to inform him that Greg was gay and my best friend.

Greg called me from the car while Nick and I were talking — I didn’t hear the phone ring — and left me a message that made me laugh uproariously in front of Nick. “I’m on my way back now,” he said, “unless you two are having sex.” I didn’t tell Nick why I was doubled over. He looked a little crestfallen.

I haven’t been back to see Nick since that night, but I friended him on Facebook. I don’t think either he or the gallery has a phone; he’s that poor. If I want to see him, I have to go over there. And as I mentioned, I’ve had other things going on…

**

Eli and I met at my favorite nearby Thai restaurant. Walking in the door, I spotted him — his fine hair shorn to a far more flattering length, a day’s stubble on his face. He looked a lot sexier than last time, if still uncharacteristically thick.

Eli had two big pieces of news: first, that he had given up on his history Ph.D, and quit his ten-year amended and revised (and at this point loathed) dissertation. Second, that he was finished with Jessica. The relationship was good and dead. The love was gone, and they both knew it. He hadn’t officially ended it yet, however, because he still had “a lot of projects to finish around the house.”

Eli didn’t understand why this made me erupt into helpless laughter. He looked almost wounded until I explained that I found his sense of responsibility unbelievable. He had already filled me in on his current “job” taking care of his elderly grandmother, for which his family offered to pay — offending him in the process. He didn’t see why he should be paid for doing something he was already glad to do for his family. (Do you recall my mentioning that he also looks after his disabled mother?) Honestly, Eli is like no man I’ve ever met. He’s a caretaker, effortlessly assuming the role traditionally expected of the women in a family (on pain of being considered “selfish” otherwise). Of course I didn’t know any of this about him last year, when I jumped to conclude that he was exactly the kind of arrogant misanthrope I knew all too well.

Over Pad Thai and Panang curry, I listened while Eli further unburdened himself. He was having a crisis about having to enter the “real world” job market now and find some soul-crushing administrative or customer service position he really didn’t want. I argued on behalf of creative entrepreneurship and unconventional vocations; Eli felt he had to make decent money “because I want to travel.” This revelation made me pause for a second. No, he still wants to live here, I told myself. His family is here. He was very clear about that. Aloud, I maintained that there were all kinds of ways to travel on the cheap, and reminded him about my stay at Centro.

Toward the end of the meal I started talking more about my own life, actually gushing a bit (as is my wont these days) about my sunnier lease on life since the twenty-five-year cloud cover lifted — how learning to practice the art of simple presence and silence the torturous mental chatter had been so instrumental to my healing.

“Now you sound like Eckhart Tolle,” said Eli with a smile.

“You’ve read Tolle?” I gasped.

He had. In Cairo, during grad school. He had been in the midst of a painful breakup and undergoing chemotherapy (did I mention Eli successfully fought cancer, in his 20s, in a foreign country?) when he picked up a copy of Practicing the Power of Now at an English-language bookstore. And he began to try to practice it. “I got to the point where I did have these moments of incredibly vivid perception and clarity,” he recalled. “I remember gazing at something purple, and having nothing in mind but this really amazing…purple.” He chuckled. “It was like being on drugs or something.”

Privately picking my jaw up off the floor, I mused that I was beginning to feel like a Jane Austen character. Could this diffident skeptic who seemed so prickly and elitist at first blush (and whom I had written off a year ago, for all of Elizabeth Bennet’s reasons) be my Mr. Darcy, after all?

**

We parted ways with a customary noncommittal and platonic hug that gave no intimation of what more intimate contact might feel like. Shortly thereafter, I met up with Greg at our favorite coffeehouse for an impromptu debrief, and he came up with a brilliant unconventional career for Eli: leading history tours abroad. Greg’s roommate had gone on such a tour; apparently there was good money to be made at it. It sounded perfect: what a great way to combine Eli’s love of history, travel, and teaching with his foreign language skills! “And you could go along, of course,” Greg joked with an implicit wink and a nudge. Probably already envisioning our wedding. How I do love Greg. He’ll say out loud things I haven’t yet dared to think. It’s wonderful to have a friend who can both read your mind and be one hundred percent on your side. (Not to mention switch gears on short notice.)

A few days later I finally got around to buying a glue stick to affix those magazine images to the posterboard permanently. As I was pasting up photos of Rome and Sardinia and Athos and couples strolling in the surf, I reached for one of the male models, an intense-looking brunet with penetrating blue eyes and seductively parted lips. Looking at him again as if for the first time, I stopped dead. And then erupted into incredulous laughter.

Who do you suppose he looked like?

**

Eli and I exchanged a few emails in the days after that. In my last message, I informed him of Greg’s brilliant idea, and added, “If you like that, wait’ll you hear about my foolproof fitness plan.”

It was a teaser, and I feared he might have taken it the wrong way when I hadn’t heard back from him in almost three weeks. Was he affronted by my suggestion that he needed a fitness plan, or did he grasp the hidden innuendo and decide not to pursue it? Did he even think of me that way?

**

The morning after I finished writing all of this, I received an email from Eli. He had just unearthed an earlier message from me that had gotten buried in his spam folder. He apologized for not responding and asked me how I was doing. He must never have gotten the email about Greg’s Wonderful Plan For His Life either.

I don’t know what to do now, especially now that my schedule has settled down and I have time to visit Nick or turn more attention to Eli. I guess the risk you take with every choice or action — the risk I try to avoid — is making a mistake. But what’s the alternative? Stay in my room like a hermit? I’ve been there and done that. I have the spirits of two bold, adventurous young men haunting me with carpe diems…and two men who are very much alive prompting me to step out.

Contemplating my years of solitude and monastic simplicity, I was reminded of a Rumi poem I love, which reads very differently to me at this particular moment:

Someone who goes with a half a loaf of bread
to a small place that fits like a nest around him,
someone who wants no more, who’s not himself
longed for by anyone else.

He is a letter to everyone. You open it.
It says, Live.

Mark had left almost five years ago (shortly before my own trip to Italy) to teach yoga and practice massage therapy at a spa on one of the Greek Isles. Now he was back in town, and teaching at a new community studio. Excitedly I contacted Iris’ husband (a Facebook friend who was never on Facebook) so he could let Iris know about Mark. I hadn’t seen either of them in more than two years.

Iris’ husband sadly informed me that she had died of lymphoma last summer, after a battle that lasted only a matter of months.

**

I was devastated. Iris had been a source of inspiration to me. She was a vibrantly alive woman in her middle years, a lover of yoga, a maker of delicate, ethereal collages that she showcased in local galleries and venues, a teacher and advocate for educational nonprofits, and a woman madly in love with her husband of thirty years. “I want to be you when I grow up!” I gushed to her at the last art opening I attended.

It seemed so unlikely (not to mention unfair) that she should be gone, just like that.

Mourning Iris with a mutual friend, I heard about how Iris used to station herself at a table in a neighborhood coffeehouse with her journal and a copy of The Artist’s Way. Iris had apparently worked her way through its program. I knew the book well; we could barely keep it on the shelf at the bookstore back in the early 90s when it first came out. Snob that I was, I had always thought it somehow coarse and common. As if any old Joe or Josephine could be an artist! A real artist wouldn’t need someone else’s self-help workbook. The very idea!

Nearly twenty years later, remembering Iris’s utter lack of pretentiousness and her unmistakable fulfillment as both an artist and woman, on the heels of her death (which came far too soon), I thought about my own stuck-ness as an artist. I thought about my age and about how many more years I might have to make my own dreams come true. I thought, maybe I need to take another look at that book.

**

I am now on Week Four of The Artist’s Way. And so far it’s been a very interesting process. My dreams have become more vivid, memorable, even lucid (including one featuring Tony DeRocca the surly music critic, in which I realized I was dreaming my past). I have discovered new sources of inspiration and encouragement. Much of what has happened to me lately has seemed to flow together as a coherent whole rather than a series of disjointed and unrelated events. Even my fundraising numbers have improved. But the most palpable positive effect is that it has restored my sense of possibility.

I have also had some issues — which have threatened to turn into major obstacles — with Julia Cameron’s beliefs and her way of expressing them. But I’ll discuss that matter presently.

I should also mention that I quit the free dating site. For now, at least. I’ve rethought and rebuilt the profile I want to have, most likely on a paid site like Match. The facetious profile I had on the free site may have been entertaining, but it wasn’t helping me find Mr. Right. It was helping me find emotionally unbalanced European scientists, and the occasional married man. (My last chat-buddy mentioned his martial status right before we were going to make a coffee date. “Does that kill it for me?” he asked sheepishly. Uh, kind of.)

**

In the hours before I received that final, unhinged message from Jacek, the Polish chemist, I took myself to one of Mark’s new yoga classes at the community studio.

I had been feeling misaligned and achy, my hip and shoulder out of whack the way they have been on and off for the three-odd years I haven’t had a real health care provider. Brainstorming possible “artist dates” with myself (an exercise from the book), I had found myself wishing I could go get a massage, but a yoga class drop-in fee was already a stretch at $12. I knew that one of Mark’s classes would be good for whatever ailed me. One of his adjustments alone felt like a miraculous laying on of hands.

I arrived to find Mark standing alone in the room, gazing out the window at the street below. No one else had come. He came toward me with arms spread as wide as his smile.

When I say Mark is one of the most beautiful men I know, I mean that the way he inhabits a room and speaks to his students makes him that way. I’m not a fan of extremely tall men (a strike against the chemist); I’m certainly not attracted to bald men (Dad); I almost always prefer brown-eyed brunettes (my brother John). But I’d bet good money that one class with Mark is enough for a woman of any age or orientation to develop at least a mild crush on him. It’s hard to describe how he manages to project an atmosphere of total safety and utmost care into a room as he intones “gentle breath…easy breath” in his resonant baritone. I’ve run into my share of men who tried to pose as enlightened, sensitive New Age yoga gurus, who were given away by a celebrity-sized self-absorption. Mark is genuine.

Sitting cross-legged on the mat, I mentioned the discomfort in my hip. Mark started asking me a series of questions about the discomfort I was feeling there, and then about the pain I referred to in my lower back and my shoulder.

Instead of leading me in the class he’d prepared, Mark had me lie down on the mat and proceeded to give me what amounted to an hour of Thai massage. He was the consummate professional, of course, and I was in bliss. The touch of his strong, gentle healer’s fingers was enough to make me nearly weep with gratitude; I wanted to curl up like a newly hatched chick in one of his large hands. It’s a helluva thing to let yourself be completely vulnerable and in need of help with a man who heals you rather than hurts, diminishes or exploits you, whose only aim is to restore you to a sense of wholeness.

I found myself telling him about my years of depression, the intense agoraphobia and anxiety I had lived through four years ago, and about how Eckhart Tolle’s writings on the mind were the first to break through the leaden walls of my private hell. Mark divulged his own unhappiness upon returning to the States several months ago, fiercely resisting his circumstances. It had taken him a while to quit making himself miserable by wishing things were otherwise. (He had had to return to the States, or risk deportation.) This spontaneous intimacy didn’t feel any more dangerous than letting Mark put his hands on me.

**

I was still glowing from the session with Mark when I came home and found the email from Jacek in my inbox.

I was unprepared for the crazy tale of rage, betrayal, incarceration and general chaos he told, which made my blood pressure surge after all that rapturous relaxation. For brevity’s (and privacy’s) sake, I will only say that the man had done a couple of stints of hard time, and had been legally barred from seeing his ex-wife or their children — in his telling, because his wife was a “frigid monster” who wanted all of his money, and not by any fault of his own. According to Jacek, he was the greatly aggrieved victim in the story, the so-called innocent abroad, with no responsibility whatsoever for his heinous fate, and the American justice system was corrupt, and the damage to the kitchen (evidence of his violence) was negligible, and the bitch set him up, and that “Nigger judge” put him away.

Any credibility his rather incredible version of events might have had was pretty much undermined by the outrageous racial slur.

Well, that and the egomaniacal bloviating in his preamble, where he insisted that before he was so tragically framed, women like me would be lining up to date his handsome, successful catch of a self. (Please, Jacek. I didn’t even find you that attractive. I just was just trying to be fair.)

I did reply. First I told him that if the story were, in fact, exactly as he told it, I was sorry he had endured such an ordeal. However, I added, we are still responsible for whom we choose as partners — which is one reason why I was being so selective. My poor choices in men had led to a great deal of suffering for me in the past, “although not to jail.” But my last paragraph was where I really stuck it to him.

I told him that “the last guy I dated” (Jamal, and I know that’s a stretch) was an intelligent and creative black man who didn’t have all the trappings of external success, but who had a great deal of personal integrity. I wrote that he might have said “Well, Jacek, now you know what living in America is like for a ‘nigger.’”

In other words: Take that, you narcissistic racist asshole. (I wonder if he even got it. I have severe doubts about his level of self-awareness.)

**

Such madness could not have been better juxtaposed with its antithesis in the space of a single day. What have I been talking about? Moving away from crazymakers, emotional batterers, mental gladiators, and the emotionally illiterate and moving toward men who might actually enhance my newly recovered sense of well-being and wholeness. I could not have written a more marked contrast as fiction.

The crux of what I have been groping toward rather ineptly in these past few posts was partially brought into focus by Tom Shadyac, the director of such crowdpleasing hits as “Ace Ventura” and “Bruce Almighty.” An unlikely source, for sure, but the man underwent a sort of personal epiphany after suffering a traumatic head injury that for a time made everyday living pure hell and had him praying for the sweet release of death. He did recover, finally, and went on to make a film entitled “I Am” — which will probably not have one tenth the distribution or one hundredth the audience of his other films. In it, he asks the question: What is wrong with our world?

The answer he pieces together, through interviewing sources as disparate as biologists, Howard Zinn and Desmond Tutu, is that we have been living within a destructive paradigm based in erroneous assumptions about the natural world and our own psychological makeup. The depression with which I (and so many Westerners) have wrestled is a wholly understandable symptom of a culture that promotes separation, loneliness, competition, and selfishness, thanks to a willful misreading of Darwin (giving his “survival of the fittest” idea a larger significance the author never intended, and ignoring all of the symbiosis and cooperation in nature) as well as a macroscopic pre-atomic view of physics (that objects act and are acted upon, but are not intimately interactive). It’s an antiquated Industrial-age model of the world, in which isolated individuals, islands unto themselves, act in ferocious opposition to one another in the scramble to amass scarce resources, rather than belong to a community whose health is integral to their own well-being. The director points out that in early indigenous cultures, taking much more than one needs at the expense of others was viewed as a sign of mental illness. (When our body’s cells do this, we call it cancer.)

This outdated paradigm informs the way we in the West think and behave, the assumptions we make about reality. Including our fashionably alienated postmodern intellectuals, who are nothing if not islands unto themselves. I was trying (and probably failing) to contribute to an online discussion recently — begun by one of our favorite cynics — about the ostensible elusiveness of happiness. Here’s a clear difference between Eastern and Western approaches: as far back as the Greeks, we were asking: Is happiness possible? without ever once addressing the hidden psychological and subjective underpinnings of our premises and our subsequent reasoning. We strained at a gnat and swallowed a camel. It finally took William James, hundreds of years later, to suggest that such factors might actually have an effect on the way we think about things. Whereas the Buddhists have been asking for thousands of years: What is the cause of suffering?

They were way ahead of us. They started on the inside. They recognized how the mind’s existing narratives themselves can perpetuate misery, and strove (through meditation) to quiet that chatter and bring awareness into the present moment, in order to see more clearly. My former therapist used to say “beliefs are like wearing a glove to touch the Beloved.” (She could just as easily have substituted the word “philosophies.”) We get so insulated inside our brains, our versions of reality, that we no longer even touch the world around us.

I can’t even begin to describe the difference between a walk in the park while completely present with a clear mind vs. a walk in the park while chewing on the pain of my past or obsessing about the future. The former used to be a complete impossibility for me; at best, I could only hope to distract myself from the latter. And not very effectively.

So I guess you could say I want a partner who can really walk with me in the park.

**

As glad as I am to be working my way through The Artist’s Way, I’m currently having trouble with the author’s liberal use of the G-word. Julia Cameron is apparently a big believer in a helpful Creator. Now when I reframe this (as she suggests early on, for the atheist or agnostic) and consider that what I’m trying to tap into could also be described as my own creative unconscious, or possibly the collective unconscious, or even some kind of “spooky action at a distance” (to steal from Einstein), I’m fine with it. But I don’t think Julia realizes that for those of us who have been utterly traumatized by fundamentalist religion, when she uses the word “God” she may as well be saying “your rapist.”

In fact, while doing an exercise that involved identifying enemies of my creative self-worth, in addition to my mother (with her horror of my sexual curiosity and stories) and Jeannie (with her refusal to understand or respect why I didn’t want to sacrifice great swaths of time and energy to jobs that would drain away all my energy), I wrote down “the God of the Born-Agains.”

In that punitive parent’s universe, after all, initiative is crushed because you might do or write the “wrong” thing. Everything you might so much as think is subject to a line-by-line analysis according to the apostle Paul’s (or whomever’s) principles of purity and righteousness (with the critical Deity looking over his shoulder, frowning like a humorless deacon in his Sunday suit). There’s even that oft-cited verse in Genesis that talks about the imagination of man being evil from his youth. The message is clear: Watch yourself! It’s no mystery, then, why today’s “Christian” art is so bad.

So I wish she had understood that for some recovering artists like me, talk of “God,” with all its oppressive churchy connotations, can be damn near intolerable. For some reason those religions that speak of a more impersonal and somehow grander God-concept, something not even remotely anthropomorphized, don’t bother me much. Her use of the term, however, is just too close to that big-daddy-in-the-sky idea. The personification that taught some of us to associate “love” with subjugation, capricious punishment, invisibility, and shame…and drove our creative impulses underground. I have a feeling that if Julia had understood all of this, she might have chosen her words a little differently.

As it is, I do my best to work my way around the language. I know that the “trust” that she speaks of cultivating is that same trust in “invisible help” that David Whyte talks about, which he doesn’t associate with a personal deity but with the happy serendipities of a life lived intentionally from the root of one’s being. It may simply be that when one is alert — as our German friend has often noted — the opportunities are more apparent. Or we may even attract them to us, for reasons we don’t fully understand.

Perhaps my greatest objection is simply to the author’s certainty about things that no one is certain about. This bothers me in anyone, be it those who insist there can be absolutely nothing other than the material world (which is not exactly material, when you get right down to it) to those who insist there is one big God and his name is Jehovah and he’s coming to get you.

**

One of the things I’m putting in my profile is that I’m looking for someone who “believes in no god and every god.” That should vet both the fundamentalist fanatics and the Dawkins-style all-religion-must-die atheists, and just possibly find me somebody who recognizes the value in poetry and mythology without being a peyote-smoking shaman.

What do you think the odds are?

The light has been returning, as the days grow longer again and we set the clocks forward, and so has my equilibrium and happiness — unresolved tensions with Ted notwithstanding. (Per some breaking gossip, it appears as if he may have quit or been let go after an angry confrontation with management.)

As I continue to go on dates with strange men from the free dating site — including an extremely tall Polish Ph.D who cautions that he will “test my humanitarianism and liberalism” — it occurs to me: I don’t want any man to change this. In the past, I have identified so completely with my caustic amours that their pet miseries became (and added to) my own.

**

When I was younger, I used to think if I can just get with this or that guy, life will be complete, and I will be happy. Never mind that my interactions and conversations with that particular individual more often than not left me feeling the exact opposite. I have the unfortunate (or enviable, depending on your point of view) tendency to fall into the reality and thought-world (and depression) of other people the way one might slip on some slick tile and fall into a swimming pool. And it’s hard enough for me to climb out of my own thought-pool. It took me twenty-five years the first time.

Of course you, loyal readers, well know that one of my habits is to think everything completely to death. I went to the proper philosophy-oriented college for this, of course: the brain-wanking went on around the clock, and it was highly fashionable to be as grim as possible in one’s premises and conclusions. Somewhere along the line, I had become convinced that the truth of a thought was directly proportional to how painful it was to entertain. Perhaps because the “truth” with which I grew up depended upon the paranoid avoidance of all other, threateningly contradictory input, and facing that input and experiencing the subsequent disillusionment was painful. I felt deeply betrayed by those who had, I felt, sold me a so-called bill of goods.

Closed-minded cynicism seems to be common among kids who go through these kinds of betrayals: we tend to view the world through the prism of our personal injuries and disappointments, and take the good things for granted. What’s worse, we would rather be “right” (this time) than heal, or make the changes that might just possibly allow a thin sliver of sunlight to penetrate the gloom. Pessimism becomes a habit, a chronic disease that becomes part of our identity. We wouldn’t know who we were without our bitterness and our depression.

Funny thing is, I didn’t miss it at all when it went away.

And it’s hit me, amid all these coffee and lunch dates: I’d rather be by myself than with someone who triggers those old habits. I feel like an alcoholic might when confronted with dates who are big drinkers. I like being out of pain. I like enjoying the present moment. Simple presence — and not some constant remove from the now, the restless daydreams of a dissatisfied imagination, into which I’ve escaped since adolescence — is what saves me now, every day.

**

My saucy gay 74-year-old former monk friend, who turned me onto the contemporary English poet David Whyte, has lent me a DVD of David giving a live talk in San Francisco. During the course of the talk, David recites several of his poems with his gorgeous, resonant Yorkshire accent, including the poem “Start Close In.”

Start close in,
don’t take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.

Start with
the ground
you know,
the pale ground
beneath your feet,
your own
way of starting
the conversation.

Start with your own
question,
give up on other
people’s questions,
don’t let them
smother something
simple.

To find
another’s voice,
follow
your own voice,
wait until
that voice
becomes a
private ear
listening
to another.

Start right now
take a small step
you can call your own
don’t follow
someone else’s
heroics, be humble
and focused,
start close in,
don’t mistake
that other
for your own.

Start close in,
don’t take
the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.

**

Give up on other people’s questions, he says. Don’t let them smother something simple. This is exactly the danger when, like me, you have a tendency to get derailed by other people’s realities. Especially when those “other people” are men — who tend to have better-policed boundaries and a more robust ego than I do — particularly men to whom I form some kind of romantic attachment.

“You don’t let anyone take you away from the conversation that you were born to, and that you were made for,” David cautions.

In today’s world, we should be saying “no” about three times for every “yes” that we say…a good “no” says that there’s a bigger “yes” to be said…and it says that you have a promise inside you, and a faithfulness that you’re holding to that’s beyond this present sense of besiegement…

Lately I have felt somewhat besieged by the demands of my gentleman callers. Last week a man about whom I felt decidedly ambivalent (at best!) decided he wanted to see me again — right away! (Not free tomorrow? What about this weekend?! Soon! Soon!)

I could already feel my old habits kicking in on the first date, when confronted with his educated, urbane naysaying — the placating nodding, the disingenuous smile, the beginnings of invisibility. I wasn’t comfortable being myself. I was making an effort to identify with him and to please. The things women learn tacitly from our mothers and from cultural messages that relate the expectations for our gender (as wives and mothers): Take care of everyone! Don’t hurt anybody’s feelings! Don’t be disagreeable! (Even the most ostensibly “liberated” women I’ve met occasionally find themselves slipping into passive aggression rather than face a conflict head-on.)

After a few attempts to direct the flow, I let my date dominate the conversation, which, while certainly intelligent and even interesting, was not particularly warm or personal. I found myself glancing at my watch.

Of course he liked me; I wasn’t even there. I was a mirror. As I have been so often in the past. This is not what I’d call being “faithful” to the “promises” I’ve made to myself. This feels like a leap backwards, visiting unhappier days…and I have no desire to return to those days.

A “no” to this suitor may be a “yes” to me.

**

Words cannot express, however, the love and gratitude I feel toward David Whyte. I wouldn’t mind losing myself in his expansive and generous worldview, but he wouldn’t want me to walk any path other than my own. And for that I say: Can we clone him, please? He is precisely the sort of man I would love to meet.

I did actually meet him, once, at a signing at a local bookstore. He was as gracious, approachable, and good-humored as he seems on tape, a striking Anglo-Irishman with what they call distinguished graying at the temples of his thick shock of dark hair. With his look and his presence, he could easily have had a career as an actor. He is in an apparently happy second marriage now, and has two children, including a son who recently graduated college. But surely he can’t be the only man alive who perceives the grandeur in everyday objects and listens respectfully to silence? Who has such a finely tuned sense of the numinous he can elicit an almost religious awe in atheists like my former monk friend with a single well-spoken observation?

I’ve spent time with plenty of self-titled (why would one want a label anyway?) nihilists and pessimists and positivists and scientific materialists and existentialists and Marxists and hedonists and anarchists and academic Buddhists and all form of hyperintellectual wank-ists. I just can’t take the fluorescent-lit mental masturbation anymore, which turns arid and sore without the lush swampy wetness of feeling, intuition, and mystery — those “dark,” “irrational,” and yes, even “feminine” elements that resist pigeonholing, analysis, and compartmentalization. “Not everything that counts can be counted,” said Gandhi. A bumper sticker sound byte, but nonetheless astute.

I want a poet, damn it. At least one in spirit. Not a furious slammer-jammer or a conventional sentimentalist who pens syrupy greeting card verse, but someone who will get the things about me I need to get gotten. Who won’t attempt to make me feel crazy, or wrong, or as if I should just kill myself now. Who will help remind me of beauty, and of why human experience is unbelievably rich, instead of trying to make me forget it (again) now that I know it. Someone who doesn’t take every bloody fucking miracle of existence for granted just because the religious fundamentalists are out of their minds. It’s not an either-or proposition, for Christ’s sake.

**

When I got an email from my would-be beau after our second date, interpreting my own experience for me in condescending terms — that my hesitation to see him again was not because I didn’t think he was a good fit (I didn’t), or because I wasn’t sexually attracted to him (I wasn’t), but because I was “afraid” — that was the dealbreaker.

For a moment I flashed back to the various passages in Fear of Flying, which I had read again recently, in which Isadora Wing obediently accepts the arrogant armchair psychoanalysis practiced upon her by her cool-headed Asian husband and her potty-mouthed British lover. Erica Jong expertly captures how even the smartest, most educated women will still go on allowing the males in their lives to be the final authorities and to infantilize them (with an indulgent smile and a metaphorical pat on the head), as if Daddy still knows best.

Another story David Whyte tells is the old myth of an early tribe in Ireland, a peaceable lot, lovers of beauty, whose attitude toward strangers is hospitable rather than hostile. These gentle souls are confronted by a very martial group of new immigrants on a hillside. The latter group charges the former with their weapons raised, and the peaceable natives “turn sideways into the light and disappear.” David describes them as “refusing to have that kind of conversation.” They will not engage under the terms set by the aggressors. He warns us against falling into our habitual patterns of engagement and contention, the same old tired arguments we’ve had a hundred times. And I know as he speaks that I don’t want that.

One of the nicest things about being with Sam (who is twenty years younger than I am) was that he showed me implicit respect (respect for his elders?) without my having to fight, negotiate, or otherwise struggle for it. He didn’t seem interested in exerting or exhibiting power over me in any way. That was refreshing — and healing. It showed me that not all my relationships with men have to be about who wins. Just being with Sam felt like winning.

I want more of that. I want a peer and a co-explorer, not another father. Not another competitor seeking weaknesses to exploit. Sonny was, oddly enough, a movement in the right direction, when I think about things from this angle: his open-ended curiosity outweighed his need to label everything, including me. He was definitely more like a peer, at times something like a fellow traveler, not a self-appointed authority figure or scold. (Like what my brother used to be, before he bought his acre of land, became a father himself, and stiffened into rigid fundamentalism.) Sonny loves yoga, Eastern spirituality, women…and David Whyte.

So even while I was making not quite the best choices for myself, I was starting to make better ones. Progress. And then Sam. In this light, it’s hard to be pessimistic.

**

David also mentions that the root of the word “desire” is the Latin de sider, “of the stars,” suggesting that to have a desire is to hold one’s “star” inside oneself…to follow a sort of true North of the soul.

What kind of “star” was my irresistible, persistent desire for Ted? I never had it under control, even a year ago, when I felt pangs of jealousy about his fondness for young women and resolved not to surrender to my nascent feelings. A lot of good that did. Lately I fancy I see his face everywhere — on strangers in the street, in newspaper photos, on extras in movies. As if everything and everyone were conspiring to make me think about him. They say we see what we look for.

Now he may be gone. I may be delivered, belatedly. I’ll miss him, even though he was blocking the entrance for anyone else. I doubt he’ll contact me, either by phone or online. Part of me wishes he would. A large part, actually.

But what kind of “conversation” were we having, really? On the surface, a good one, an affable one between peers who liked and respected each other. He appreciated literature and Eastern thought and had an attitude of curiosity toward the larger world. Beneath that sunny veneer, however, existed the all too familiar narrative of the carrot and the stick — of one person subtly lording it over the other, hinting at rewards never to come. I said yes to being toyed with, alternately the object of intense flirting and casual ignoring.

Is it any wonder that the only way to take back my power was to ignore him right back?

Maybe that was my way of turning sideways into the light.

It’s been a bit of a welcome break. I lost my voice again (!), which means I haven’t been able to work. (The metaphorical implications of this I’ll leave alone for now.) I haven’t had to step outside my little studio and deal with people, Ted included, for almost a week. Not that I was actually dealing with him in any way, shape, or form. But when you can barely swallow and you have a temperature of 101º F, other concerns recede for the moment.

**

On the dreaded Valentine’s Day holiday I went back and read my ‘Candy Candy Candy’ post from 2009. Once again, unfortunately, it was all too relevant. Once again I’m finding myself confronting the same shame and paralyzing fear (not to mention the same agonizing frustration) surrounding my overwhelming but rarely satisfied erotic longings.

And I’ve never even told you about Greg Schulz, the Star-Trek-geek bookseller who consumed my imagination for most of my twenties. I wasted six whole years, between twenty-three and twenty-nine, hopelessly obsessed with a guy who not only spurned me, but at one point almost reported me for sexual harassment.

To be a woman rejected by Greg was truly a badge of shame. The only way I could have lived through more humiliation would have been if I were a staunchly conservative politician caught soliciting homoerotic dalliances in a public restroom.

**

Why was I so attracted to Greg? He was nice-looking, to be sure (with the kind of large, expressive brown eyes that never fail to slay me behind round nerd glasses), but there was also something extremely sexual about him — he “oozed sex,” in the words of a thoroughly unimpressed coworker — which made most of the other young women find him somehow creepy. These, of course, were the women he pursued. Aggressively. To the point of actually being accused of sexual harassment himself. He already had an unflattering reputation when I arrived on the scene.

Perhaps we had a similar injury.

The craziest thing is that I felt tacitly encouraged by Greg, even after he explicitly turned me down. Repeatedly. Maybe he enjoyed the unexpected admiration, but placed little value on it (and on me) as it had cost him nothing. I was a hound, not a fox — no doubt a turnoff for another hound — and I came running, hard.

Too hard. Desperately so. I couldn’t bear to accept rejection. It wasn’t all about Greg…perhaps it was very little about Greg. (“When you chase someone this hard,” as Tony the surly music critic said, “it’s never about the other person.”) I’m sure I was desperate to prove I wasn’t unlovable and undesirable to those who “mattered” (i.e. those who aroused my own desire). He must have been driven by a similar demon, forever turning his unwelcome attentions on extraordinarily pretty, fashionable young women, one of whom was the lead singer in a local underground band.

Truthfully, I felt not only crazy much of the time, but also ashamed, as if my lust for him were monstrous, and the sexual feelings themselves were what turned me into some kind of repulsive monster. Sometimes when he sauntered by in his butt-hugging jeans and shot me a knee-withering glance, which seemed like nothing so much as an invitation, I thought I would explode. I fancied I felt my ovaries literally aching — and, in fact, after two years of this torture, I started to develop painful ovarian cysts that would require invasive emergency surgery and a lifetime of medication. (One reason why I’m a big believer in the mind-body connection.) This madness continued for six years, and only ended when he left the employ of the bookstore.

I don’t like revisiting this memory, which is why you haven’t heard about it until now. It’s one of the most humiliating episodes of my past, in a past that hasn’t been short of humiliating episodes, and one that casts me in the most unflattering light.

**

But I return to it now because I’m sure the whole ordeal only reinforced that feeling I had already, of being some kind of sexual pariah (even the sexual pariah rejected me!), as if the very act of desiring itself was what made me so undesirable.

Of course, I had long been taught that “good girls don’t.” Truly, a conservative fundamentalist church and youth group is no place for a curious, hot-blooded young woman to come of age. Particularly when one’s very protective and territorial older brother precedes one among said youth.

I believed, as a teen, that none of my attractive male peers would come near me because there was something inherently amiss with me, that I was in some intrinsic way deficient in beauty or charm. Now I am willing to allow that maybe all those heavy religious prohibitions against unchaste pursuits, along with the looming shadow of my wrathful protector, might have acted as kryptonite to any interested parties (other than parentally-approved Jerry Baines, who seemed about as exciting as my dad).

At any rate, my idolatrous obsessions with certain comely members of the opposite sex seemed more commensurate with the breathless infatuations of my more worldly, “secular” girlfriends than in any way analogous to the wholesome games of basketball my popular friend Katie was playing with the church boys who adored and dated her.

I had learned early on to hide my inordinate sexual curiosity and feelings. The tight lips, the stiffening that occured in the spines of my parents when certain subjects were broached, told me that such subjects were shameful and not to be spoken of  — regardless of what they might dutifully if uncomfortably call the Joys of Married Life. (Mind you, I never saw any evidence of such Joy.)

In my last year of elementary school, I endured the single most mortifying incident of my life when my very pious and equally nosy mother found an innocuous-looking ruled notebook in which my unsaved Catholic friend Adriana and I had scribbled a tale which could best be described as pornographic. (We were both almost morbidly fascinated with the male sexual organs at the time, objects largely foreign to us, and these figured prominently, if inaccurately.)

She confronted me when I came home for lunch. I can still taste the Kraft macaroni & cheese turning to orange sawdust in my mouth as she lectured me for what seemed like hours about God’s Sacred Gift To Married People and the Tragedy Of Cheapening His Wonderful Intention For Our Bodies and all that precious holy bullshit that bore absolutely no resemblance to the nonverbal messages I’d gotten from both my parents since forever.

Staring at the yellow and green happy faces painted on my milk glass by the Wyler’s Lemonade company, I found myself hoping that the Four Horses of the Apocalypse would crash through the back screen door and whisk me away from our kitchen table, interrupting what was surely a fate worse than death and hellfire. As I recall, I didn’t get spanked. I might have gotten grounded. But my mother’s speech was punishment enough.

I hid my dirty stories in my desk at school after that.

**

I’m revisiting my Hall of Shame because I believe these past things shaped my present beliefs about my own sexuality. I suspect that at heart I still fear I am monstrous, that my sexual longings are something to be ashamed of, and that any frank expression of desire on my part will be met with violent repulsion and humiliating censure.

It’s true that Sonny, surely the most godlike of mortals ever to grace my boudoir, seemed unfazed by the expression — a thing for which I am still grateful, God bless his chiseled Greek torso and priapic attributes, not that size is necessarily preferable — but he was also a self-professed sex addict, as I recall. I was only one of many. The same could be said of my friend-with-benefits Jim, man-whore of the book-store (but even then, he made the first move, not me). What am I to think of that? That only the warped and the complusive can successfully come together in their complementary illnesses? My initial feelings for Sam, as you know, were not primarily overwhelmingly sexual. Had I come at him from that angle, would he have responded as positively?

Granted, it’s difficult to untangle these desires from what are earlier, pre-sexual spurned desires involving family and peers. Every rejection is a painful reminder of every other rejection. I clung to Greg like a rabid dog rather than accept that I might be unwanted — unwanted like the uncoordinated toddler banished from the vacant lot by the neighborhood kids, or perhaps unwanted like the daughter who wrote dirty stories in her notebook.

But I also know that while it’s easy to write here about how I long to do this and that with Mister So-and-So, I blush and tremble to think of saying such a thing to the person in question. On paper I may talk like Erica Jong, but in real life I might as well be Christine fucking O’Donnell. I expect to be punished. Rejected, perhaps, for being the “unfeminine” bad girl, the one who doesn’t wait to be wanted first. (As the late, former anorexic Caroline Knapp wrote in her brilliant book Appetites, “To be sexy is to be found sexy, to be permitted to want, you must first be wanted.”)

If it’s “unfeminine” or bad, it’s also who I really am.

**

What an interesting time to have lost my voice: while I’m beating myself up about my inability to say a word to Ted. I have had a conversation with him many times in my head. More of a monologue, actually. It goes something like this.

“Ted…I want you to know that my actions — the shunning and all that — have been actions of desperation. I just didn’t know what else to do.

“You saw 127 Hours, didn’t you? That guy cut off his own arm to escape. He was stuck between a rock and a hard place, and he had to get free. He didn’t see any other options. So he did something extreme, something painful, something that meant he had to lose something.

“I didn’t know how else to get free. I’m stuck, too.

“Look, you’ve got your Good Thing. You’ve got your place in the sun, right? I want my own Good Thing. I want my own place in the sun. I deserve to be happy as much as anyone else. I’ve been dating, but guys keep passing me up because they can tell I’m stuck.

“I had a really great guy, the whole package — smart and hot and totally into me — just up and walk away from me. He said I was stuck, and he wasn’t willing to be patient. He didn’t want to hear that he was my ‘healthy, conscious choice,’ or an attempt to ‘be better to myself.’ He didn’t want to hear that my decision to spend time with him was a deliberate, rational act. He didn’t want to hear that I was waiting for my feelings to catch up with the rest of me.

“Then again, what guy really wants to hear those things?

No, he wanted to hear things like: I want to taste your sweat. I want to feel the weight of your body on me. I want your hot breath on my neck. I want to feel the hair on your chest brushing my bare skin. I want to inhale your scent and feel your big, warm fingers rove my thighs. But not only your fingers. And not only my thighs.

“I couldn’t honestly say these things, because I didn’t feel that way…about him. God knows I wanted to. All that energy is just stuck. It’s not moving.

“You’ve had me on a chain, and you could yank it every now and again by smelling my hair or whatever — but I don’t want to be any man’s bitch if he’s never going to give me a nice bone.

“I don’t want to be stuck. I want to be happy.”

**

I also want to know how the italicized words would fall on Ted’s ears. Because they’re hot words. Not the explicit words you’d find in erotica, which seem to have more in common with comic books than with how people actually talk in casual company, but words you’d seldom hear a woman speak beyond closed doors with someone other than a Sure Thing. Words that attempt to start a fire in public — in the break room or the hallway or out on the sidewalk. They communicate my powerful sexual feelings for Ted in an unexpected context, blindsiding him while talking about another man.

The bottom line, I suppose, is that it bothers me to no end that he doesn’t even know they exist. When I spoke with him last fall, I was still just Christine fucking O’Donnell, professing nothing more than a chaste affection. As if I were ashamed of how I really feel.

I have misrepresented myself. Not that it would necessarily make all the difference, but at the end of the day, perhaps it’s better to be rejected as Erica Jong, if I’m going to be.

Would Ted be offended by these words? Aroused? Are they beside the point, because he’s way more serious about Ms. Whomeverthehell now, or already too angered and alienated by my silent treatment? Could he even handle hearing them? Lordy, he is a big old nerd. I could just see him turning beet red and giggling like a schoolboy. It’s almost embarrassing that he’s done this to me.

Of course I wish he’d be aroused….and ready and willing to do something about it toute suite. Perhaps fueled by an impassioned combination of relief and anger. What’s more likely is that he’ll just get defensive, and sing me some version of the old song It’s Not My Fault, that one we all know so well and learn so young. I’ve heard it a hundred times from various men, including Greg Schulz.

But maybe I’d get my own voice back for good.

For one thing, I don’t particularly enjoy having to give anyone in my family a violent verbal shove or contemplate total “divorce” from the lot of them, even when my mom insists upon continuing to pound my buttons as if they were nails and all she has is a hammer.

It also kills me to force distance between Ted and me when all I long for is the opposite.

I keep thinking of Aron Ralston, the guy who sawed off his own arm to save his life, or the animals who chew off a paw to get out of a steel trap. I feel like I’ve been trying to chew off a paw. It’s an act of desperation to cut off a part of yourself in order to (supposedly) save yourself and get free. It feels like sawing off living flesh.

**

I do feel much stronger about my exchange with my mother, because it was truthful, and confrontational, and not least of all (to be brutally frank) because it was more painful for her than it was for me. My worst agonies of maternal alienation and abandonment already happened a long time ago. Really all I did was quit being invisible in the name of protecting her. And the truth is, I feel much freer now.

In a nutshell: she pushed the religion on me one more time (after I expressed something resembling self-doubt in my Facebook feed) with the tired message that I “already know where the answers are.” (Wasn’t I just describing for you in my last post how fundies pounce on the faintest indication of vulnerability as an opportunity to proselytize?)

I lost my shit, kids. This time around it was the last proverbial straw hitting the camel’s back.

The first thing I did was to adjust my privacy settings so that she could no longer comment on my posts. Then I decided to take away her ability to so much as see them. Finally I sent her a private reply.

In my defense, I could have been a lot meaner.

Will you never let it rest? Oh, no, that’s right…you’re working on Commission. What you seem to forget is that you’re trying to sell me the same old lemon that never drove for me (subjectively speaking) in the first place – and a bizarre, bloodthirsty theology cobbled together from literalized myths from a plethora of ancient sources (objectively speaking)…

Do I ever try to force my beliefs (or lack thereof) on you? NO. Do I live and let live? YES. Why can’t you have just a tiny bit of respect for me, too, for a change? (That’s what finally gets to me. The constant picking. It’s like with parents who can never be happy with their child the way he or she is.)

Oh, no, that’s right…I’m going to “Hell.” I’ll tell you what…if “Heaven” is anything like that nutter Jesse Duplantis made it out to be (in that badly written book [my brother's wife] forced upon me), there’s no way I’m hanging out at that infinitely soporific church picnic. Send me wherever Mark Twain and Bill Maher are. I can’t imagine any decent god would want to live without them, myself.

I’m going to regret this outburst tomorrow, but…I just can’t take the picking, always picking. And the smugness of “being right.” You’re as bad as some of the more strident atheists I know. Fundamentalists (on both sides) and their certainties!!! I’m long overdue for a good explosion.

It took her a week to respond. Her reaction was predictable: shock, hurt, and the confusion that comes with years of stubborn, intentional denial. “I couldn’t believe it came from the daughter I have known and loved these many years,” she lamented (with a nice heaping helping of parental guilt), “and wondered what was going on in your life that produced such an outburst.” Ever the willful innocent, she continued “I never expected to receive such a hurtful attack, not ever.” My reply was an “attack,” as if it came out of nowhere, apropos of nothing. As if she had not been attacking my choices and beliefs for decades.

Clearly (and perhaps deliberately) misunderstanding what I meant by “respect,” she defended herself by talking about the admiration she had for certain thoroughly unobjectionable qualities of mine, like the “tender heart” that led me to take my first job at a local homeless shelter. (I swear on Lucifer’s balls, every time my mother talks about my “tender heart,” so help me Jesus, I want to go out on the street and kick a puppy or snatch a little old lady’s purse.) She expressed bafflement at what I called “picking,” and insisted she only wanted to “share” things like “videos and stories” that had “touched (her) deeply,” completely ignoring the fact that it had been yet one more presumptuous evangelistic prod that had pushed me over the edge.

With a feeling of weary, almost callous resignation (perhaps the feeling one has when it’s time to get an actual divorce) I realized that just because she was never going to “get it” didn’t mean I had to sit down and STFU. I wrote back.

Follow my metaphor for a moment. You’re sitting behind someone who used to agree with you. Now she just does her own thing, and tries not to bother you or anyone else, but you feel the need to keep intermittently poking, prodding and nudging her. It’s not good enough for you to peacefully coexist. She must agree with you!

For twenty-five years this goes on, you poke and you prod, and from time to time she turns around and politely asks you to stop.

Finally, after twenty-five years, she suddenly turns around and gives you a violent shove that sends you sprawling, shocked and hurt, onto the floor.

Honestly, can you blame her?

Of course, much of the problem here also lies in the phrase “Who wrote that?”

I’m afraid that no matter what I say, I will fail to communicate with you in any significant way. The fact is, I’ve tried several times in the past few years to “come out” to you — which would be easier if I were actually gay, then there’d be a thorny but concrete identity issue that might possibly work some change here — but at this point it seems like whatever you don’t want to see or hear is going to get filtered out. Or maybe it’ll be just chalked up to “evil” or “sin,” which are handy catch-alls for otherwise normal human traits and behaviors that often frighten and/or confuse fundamentalists of all stripes.

When I say “respect,” by the way, I don’t just mean “admiration for certain desirable traits.” I mean respecting other people’s boundaries — which runs completely against the whole born-again modus operandi of “witnessing,” I know, Henry Cloud notwithstanding. I also mean respecting the differences and choices of others, which in evangel-speak would probably be translated to “tolerating sin and destructive choices” — so there’s really no way I can win here.

I’d be lying if I didn’t say it was an angry outburst. I hoped to shock more than hurt, although I could write entire volumes about what, within the belief system I was raised in, has hurt me. Perhaps now I can start doing that publicly. What I couldn’t tell you before is that the work I did with that career coach revealed that one big thing I want to do is somehow help others who have been screwed up by Manichean evangelical Christian doctrine/culture. Franky Schaeffer (prodigal Greek Orthodox liberal son of Francis) is a role model of mine.

I have to say, part of my outburst, at least in my opinion, was damn funny too…what I said about Jesse Duplantis and church picnics and Mark Twain…that’s my real sense of humor: sharp, pointed, ironic/sarcastic, highlighting absurdity. It’s nothing foreign or affected — although I tone it down to the point of disappearance around every (member of our family) but (my brother). I don’t think he would have been as shocked as you, or found me quite so unrecognizable. He’s a lot tamer and more conservative than he used to be, but he still has a little bit of a subversive streak.

I’m more than a marshmallow peep, Mom. I’m not just sugar on the outside and a soft, chewy center. I’m also tart and I have bite. Don’t you like Macintosh apples?

Sorry to have hurt your feelings.

That was over a week ago and I haven’t heard from her. But at long last I feel freer than ever to say whatever the hell I want, even without the anonymity of this blog. Perhaps I’m that much closer to setting up my own fundamentalist-recovery Web site.

I thought the marshmallow peep comment was particularly inspired.

**

On Super Bowl Sunday I went over to my 74-year-old gay friend Richard’s house for wine and cheese, and we watched Howl instead of the game. It was an imaginative project, built around the 1957 obscenity trial of the publisher of Allen Ginsberg’s titular opus. James Franco completely inhabited the otherwise inimitable character of Ginsberg. He was astonishing.

The reason I mention the film is because of something Ginsberg said to a writer from Playboy during their lengthy recorded interview (shown between clips of the trial, Ginsberg’s first public poetry reading of “Howl,” and hallucinatory animated interpretations of the poem). He talked about how he would have been unable to write such an uninhibited, nakedly honest poem if he had ever thought about his “daddy” reading it. Instead, he strove for the kind of intimate self-expression one experiences with one’s closest friends. “Don’t hide the madness,” he said. “You say what you want to say when you don’t care who’s listening.”

I wish it hadn’t taken me so long.

**

But it’s been another film, or more properly a film series, that has given me a non-fictional character with whom I could wholly identify, who makes me feel less alone in my particular life ineptitudes, and who gives me some hope that I can eventually prevail.

Out of a longtime curiosity, I requested Michael Apted’s 7-Up series from Netflix. This is the ambitious ongoing documentary series that began in 1963 with a group of fourteen seven-year-olds from various areas and social classes in England. Apted intended to follow up with them every seven years, although as the years went by some of the grown-up children wound up opting out.

It’s fascinating. Even at seven, the children have distinct accents, opinions, and personalities. (One upper-class Londoner named John is practically a miniature William F. Buckley.) Some become more subdued by fourteen. But by twenty-one, a few have changed pronouncedly. Neil Hughes, a middle-class Liverpudlian, is one of those few, and the filmmaker’s interview with him made me burst into tears. I saw myself in the series’ only societal dropout — rejecting his upbringing, questioning everything, devoid of self-confidence, unable to find his place in the world.

A bright-eyed and precocious child at seven, Neil is, at twenty-one, perched on the edge of homelessness — living in a squatter’s flat and doing day labor after having dropped out of a third-class University. His expression is one of perennial woundedness and bewilderment. Battling depression, directionless, he has a strained relationship with his devoutly religious parents, who (as he relates, with a nervous calm masking suppressed rage) taught him that “if one was to survive in the world, one had to believe in God” and that he should “always think of other people first before yourself, to a ridiculous neurotic degree.”

I don’t think I was really taught any policy of living at all by my parents…I was just left to fend for myself in a world which they seemed completely oblivious of. I found when I even tried to discuss problems that were facing me in school, my parents didn’t seem to be aware of the nature of the problem.

At that point I felt such a powerful recognition and sorrow I started to weep. The cluelessness and helplessness of which he speaks is, I believe, part of the fallout from growing up within a narrow religious worldview in which all problems are “spiritual” in nature (rather than social or psychological), we are essentially powerless to direct or change our own lives, and everything is a matter of God’s will. That is, some invisible, inscrutable external Being is in control of our lives, not us. Decisions are made and problems solved through prayer and submission to His divine will.

Given the overwhelming silence and absence of said Being, and the reinforced belief in one’s own helplessness (and worthlessness), this does not prepare a child to go confidently into the world and shape his or her own destiny. What it does do is encourage passivity and paralysis.

When Apted asks Neil if he is “kicking against stability,” Neil replies that there never was any stability to begin with. “I think I’ve been kicking in midair the whole of my life.”

Ouch. I hear you, brother.

“How many parents really think of their children as individual human beings?” Neil blurts out passionately, tangentially, at another point, interrupting his interviewer. And I found myself thinking of my own losing battle to show my parents who I am. “I couldn’t believe it came from the daughter I have known and loved these many years.” That unwillingness to let one’s children, or even other people, be visible — it seems to also come with this religious territory.

At the end of the conversation, Neil rues his inability to “take any positive course of action” and hopes that one day he’ll be able to “wake up in the morning and feel this day is going to be worthwhile.” Which I couldn’t have said better myself.

By 28-Up, Neil is a drifter in Scotland, living in a rented trailer, picking up odd jobs. He waxes philosophical about what Thoreau referred to as the majority of men living lives of quiet despair. He never wanted the 9-to-5 life and evenings spent watching television. (Another thing we have in common.) I already know that by 49-Up he will be living in a small England town and be involved in politics, so somehow it’s reassuring to see him flounder, rootless and directionless, the way I have all these years.

If Neil can find his way, I can too.

**

But then there’s the ongoing story of Ted.

After a while, Ted seemed to grow used to the status quo, i.e. my assiduous avoidance, and by then I had become too passive and cowardly to change course. Following three weeks of no contact (other than being in the same big room), I was at last getting to a point where I didn’t think about him that much outside of work. I was going on some Internet dates, which, though unsuccessful, were at least dates, and resulted in some interesting conversations. (What would be even nicer would be if I could inspire interest in someone I actually found at least marginally attractive.)

Granted, on the days I did see Ted, I still felt that undercurrent of low-grade misery that comes from prolonged, unresolved inner dissonance, of behaving in a manner diametrically opposed to one’s true feelings, and my numbers suffered. (I’ve had four quota warnings in six weeks. Good thing they like me too much to fire me.)

Then those nonexistent rom-com scriptwriters decided to fuck around with me again.

Ted had, one particular evening, decided to be more in-my-face than usual anyway by taking an empty station just on the other side of the row partition from me. Perhaps because my (nervous) energy level spiked as a result, I started scoring some solid pledges right away. There had been a system crash earlier in the day, but we hummed along without incident for an hour into the evening shift. Then suddenly my computer screen froze. I kept “pitching” the donor without the use of my script, and had just persuaded her to donate ten dollars a month to the ACLU, when the line went dead.

Another system crash. The supervisor rebooted everything. In the meantime, I jotted down the donor’s information and phone number to complete the transaction manually, and went to the reception area to call her back. Twice I got voice mail. The second time, I left a message explaining what had happened with the system. I told her she would probably be getting a call from someone else in the near future. (Ruefully, I assumed I’d lost the pledge.)

When I walked back into the call room, Ted and the supervisor came rapidly toward me. My donor was back — on Ted’s line. Apparently when the system came back up, the autodialer must have redialed her number and sent her to his computer. I had to finish my call from his station. (Out of all the call stations in all the rows of all the sections of the call floor, as Bogart once said…)

With a laugh, Ted told me that both he and the donor could hear me leaving the message. It was the most we’d interacted in a month. Again, as in my last post, I experienced that fleeting warm and homey feeling of everything being all right with the world.

Ted either left of his own accord or got sent home at the shift break, but my performance continued to shoot through the roof for the rest of the night, and saved my whole week. That’s the good news. I can’t say if the indulgence of renewed fantasies involving furniture-smashing resolutions of sexual tension later that night, leading to certain unmentionable conclusions, is good news (Russ would probably say so) — but it might just as easily be comparable to the indulgence of a self-destructive drug addiction. After all, you come back to work the next day, and he’s way over there again, and it hits you that this is never really going to happen, and then you feel about as shitty as a junkie with a crack hangover.

Ted may be leaving soon. I know he’s had a number of interviews, and last week he was in the director’s office with the door closed, which may mean he was giving his notice — but not having talked to him, I don’t know. Yeah, I know. You don’t have to tell me how lame that is.

**

My rational mind tells me to get free and get on with my life. My emotions and my body still crave Ted. Avoiding him is an act of both despair and helplessness, because I feel on the one hand too weak to follow my mind’s ruthless resolve, and on the other utterly helpless to get what I want from him.

Is it worse to divorce yourself from what you know you want today, or to sabotage possibilities you might want in the future, but don’t yet know you want? Especially if you have no confidence whatsoever in your ability to win either way?

If Ted simply leaves, it will be taken care of for me, by virtue of my own passivity.

Which is how good little Christian boys and girls like me and Neil have been trained to deal with our life challenges.