You Are

December 13, 2024

You are 

You are a bottle of champagne

lightly shaken, pop topped

bubbling over everywhere

sticky, sneakily intoxicating

You are sourdough starter

pulled from the fridge, fed a spoonful of flour

Spilling over the top of the jar

creating creating creating 

unstoppable

You are the sunrise every single day 

often bright and beautiful 

sometimes gray and cloudy 

bringing storms 

bringing cold 

leaving me to look east, wondering what the day will bring 

You’re a raging river 

after sudden summer rains 

relentless water plunging into valleys 

pulling houses in its wake 

my own voice lost in the roar 



You’re a warm tub of water 

a chest to lean against 

arms wrapped around me

your voice in my ear 

what I need to hear

You’re a cold stiff back

walling me off in the night 

my questions and tears too much 

you shut me out when I need you to say

"Shhhhhh, I'm here,” pull me near



Insecurity’s ugly

I wince to see it in myself

Believing you is what I want to do

But you gotta help me build that trust

You are an entire cast on stage 

The entire chorus and the lead 

The producer, the director 

The curtain itself 

You inspire me

You exhaust me 

You scare me 

You attract me 

You make me wanna turn away and protect myself 

You make me want to never step out of your radiance

Override

"Don't listen to your gut," my therapist tells me. "Listen to his words and accept them."

She's not really a therapist, more a coach who works for some app my employer gave us access to as a benefit—12 coaching sessions per year, for professional or personal use. I grabbed the chance for free therapy earlier this year when shit went sideways.

"But I did that already," I remind her. "I didn't trust my gut all summer, and you know what happened."

"Yes, well, give it a chance," she says. "It's different now. And if your gut tells you something, just put that aside and maybe in a month take a look and see if you notice a pattern."

Lady. Come on. 

I've been trying to do this, to trust the words and not my gut feeling. 

IT IS NOT EASY. I feel like I'm gaslighting myself—convincing myself that what I know is real is not. 

Friends have mixed takes on this approach. I listen to their perspectives. 

It is not, in some respects, a terrible approach: When my gut clenches up, I sit with it, think about it, give it time. And this is mostly serving me well, to be honest, but there are a couple of things that nag at me, dissonance that steps out of the rest of the flow and catches me later. Things that, frankly, don't add up. Is it a different perspective on details and timeframe, or are indeed some things missing or twisted? 

I don't want to always interrogate, which is how I come across. But I'd feel more secure with these loose bits in place. 

What we need is to find the line between my need for neat organization of facts and his need for...not sharing? Not being quizzed? Between my need for—let's just say it—honesty and his need for...the caginess a friend warned is unavoidable for him, the shapeshifting of truth, an essential need to lie so common with addicts. 

Again and again, the warning lights come on and I ignore them, like the lights flashing across the dashboard of my ten-year-old Outback. Sometimes when I restart the car, they're gone, and I'm calmer. 

The red and yellow words and symbols don't always mean the engine's about to blow; sometimes the sensor is tweaky. 

Right? 

I'm back.

 sometime early 2024

Hello. 

It's high time for a new blog. I know the glory days of blogging are over, the side lists of "blogs I follow," the online parties, the keeping up with each other or being discovered by new readers.

The need for privacy, the changes brought by social media, the risks of discovery, the need for anonymity. 

And yet. 

Journaling isn't the same; there's something about blogging that's like writing a letter to someone, a very personal letter, yet you don't have to make eye contact while doing it. 

So I am back, kicking my way through the risks, draping those around me with sheets and shadows, knowing so keenly the need to protect those I love. I'll protect them as fully as I can. 

But I need to write.

Run

August 3, 2024

I don’t know what to say about this run except that I didn’t enjoy it, I had more spiders on me than I prefer, everything was horribly overgrown, I got very sick of plants touching me, and it was unscenic and very buggy.

—————————

I found myself annoyed that I was not instead mountain biking with my group up at Yudicky and then spending the rest of the weekend lounging with M. Or spending the weekend at 24HoGG. Hell, taking care of some overdue yardwork at my house. Basically, anything but this obligatory long run.

I was mad at myself for signing up for a fall 100 instead of, as I had sworn I would last year, having a chill summer and fall with no serious training plan and a lot more time on my mountain bike.

Here is where it gets ironic, if irony is a good swift kick in the teeth just after you turn your attitude around: I started feeling good about this run, happy to get to know this section of the trail, confident in my abilities, wryly amused that I had gotten so turned around in this dreadful clearcut area that I found myself going the wrong way on the trail, meaning I had to go back through the awful clearcut, and it would be that much longer until I got back to my car.

Of course that’s when I stumbled in a weird way—basically a stick came up and caught my shoe as my leg was moving forward going downhill, so it kind of forced my leg to twist and shock of electric pain went down the back of my leg.

Running wasn’t really an option after that. I’m pretty sure my SI joint is about as badly torqued/rotated as it has ever been. 

I hitchhiked back to my car, getting picked up first by an older woman whose car was full of used ashtrays and counterculture and magic, with a Pomeranian in the backseat. She was going straight and I needed to turn so she dropped me off.

I limped down the road and then another car stopped, a couple. The woman was a runner and recognized that I must be an injured runner. I sat in the back with—that’s right, another Pomeranian!—on my lap.

Anyway, I guess the run really ended at mile 16 because after that I was just limping until I got picked up.

A Flashback to Christmas Night

 July 9, 2024

I'm talking to my kids about visiting my father, whether we should fly or drive. It's about the same travel time, door to door, unless you hit delays, like when I visited on Christmas night and there were no rental—

**********

—oh, shit, yeah. That's when I was texting M, when I was on the shuttle to the car rental place at BWI, and I told him that when he just vanished, it really hurt and I was sick of it. And he apologized, and maybe I declared something or was just being really open and honest about it, and I was crying, because this was the third? fourth? time he'd just been there and then been GONE, unresponsive, over the past few years and dammit, I hated it.

As recent as Christmas. 

**********

I pulled myself together and walked up to the car rental desk; I'd reserved a car. It was Christmas night, and I'd handed my kids over to their father earlier, after a rushed Christmas morning, and driven to the airport; my lover and his family would be dropping off their son later that day and he (my lover, tall and sweet) was going to drive my car home for me. 

It was 8 p.m., and I was on my way to visit my father, who in some ways died years ago, and I was dreading it but also feeling guilty for dreading it—you know how it is with aging parents, the guilt/love/obligation/dread one big tangled ball rolling around your feet threatening to trip you at every step, and I still had a 2-hour drive once I picked up the car. 

The man at the rental booth—older, Black, with a neutral but not unkind face—told me they were out of cars and wouldn't have any available for at least 4 hours, and as I had not actually entirely pulled myself together from the text exchange with M, I could feel myself coming undone. 

"It's not you—I need a minute," I gasped out, and he nodded, and I stepped away as I started sobbing, or I started sobbing as I stepped away, but in any case Mr. Car Rental Desk was exposed to my outsize reaction to his statement. 

I went around the corner, cried and cried and cried, washed my face in the bathroom, and got back in line. 

"Sorry, that wasn't about this. So, I had a car reserved, and you're telling me there are none available?"

It doesn't matter how that resolved—I did, eventually, end up with a sweet Tacoma pickup truck with all the modern features, and I visited my father, and I got home again, with my lover picking me up at the airport—but what I was thinking of now, with my children already moved on from the trip-planning, was that text exchange with M. 

**********

What had I said? When had I started feeling empowered enough to tell him he caused me pain? 

The kids returned to their video games and I went for a walk, scrolling through my texts with M— so very many texts, so mundane but necessary—to find that Christmas exchange. 

So much scrolling, only to find that our texts began in March. I'd deleted the previous ones, as I'd often done in the past out of frustration with him, with us, with the us that would never be but I so wanted. Not in my deleted texts, either. Just gone. 

**********

Curious this morning, I find the texts on my laptop, after much scrolling, and I also see the absence of texts, the excuses about missed meetups to run, the confessions of relapses. I'm feeling sick now. 

He was so different as recent as 6 months ago. I never thought I would save him, but I didn't think I'd be too close to see the changes. 

Oh, M.