Moving, moving, moving.

My life is moving at the speed of a freight train right now and I can't decide whether or not I like it.

But I think I'm erring on the side of I do. 

I started dating a guy in March of this year. Seven months ago. His name was Tyler. It was going to be my last date before I gave up on the apps and tried more traditional methods.

The first green flag was the fact that he wanted to come to me for the date. I don't live in a completely rural town, but I am kind of out of the way for most people so I have always been used to making the trip when meeting up with someone for the first time. But he asked me what cool things there were to do in my city, so I told him, and we agreed to meet here.

We clicked almost immediately. Any silences or lulls in the conversation felt natural and comfortable. He made me feel safe to be myself. 

We had Mexican food and then went antiquing, a very stereotypical lesbian date. I always think back to that fact and think it's funny, because as a cisgender man and a cisgender woman, we appear on the surface to be the most cis-hetero couple ever. But I am bisexual, and he is gray-asexual, so the reality of the situation is anything but.

He bought me a necklace. We got milkshakes and walked along the waterfront. The sky started to turn dark gray with an oncoming storm, so we were forced to end the date after four and a half hours.

We kissed.

It was magical.

After three months, I revisited the wedding playlist I had made on Spotify years and years ago. I made edits. I started a Pinterest board. We were seriously discussing our future together. I spent almost every weekend at his house.

By August, the weekend of the renaissance faire, we had come up with a five year plan. We wanted to buy a house together in a better city. We wanted to get married. We wanted to start thinking about kids.

A little over a week ago, his roommates announced they would not be renewing their lease and therefore would be moving out by November 5th.

This, of course, allows the space for me to move in.

In the span of eight months, I have gone from thinking I would be single forever to finding my person completely by happenstance. 

I interviewed for two different jobs closer to him (not all that different from each other, really, just different companies) and received an offer from one. I'm expecting the second offer to roll in later today.

Things are going about as well as they possibly can. But everything is moving so fast, things that happened a few days ago feel like they happened weeks ago. A couple months feels like last year.

My move-in date is November 17th and I am so incredibly excited to start this new chapter of my life. After being stuck for so long, I feel like my life is moving forward. I'm finally going somewhere. I'm so incredibly sick of plateaus and I am so glad I have the resources now to get off of this giant one I've been on for almost five years, only to go up a ski lift to the top of a mountain.

Things are looking good.

You have no idea.

 It was raining. We were going to take a walk on the beach, but it was raining, so we ducked inside of a bar instead, and that’s when you told me.

Right after I said I wanted to make it work. Right after I told you that my dad said that you were a keeper. You said you didn’t see the relationship going anywhere long-term.

I kept it together. I said I appreciated your honesty. I know we weren’t together for that long. But, holy shit, the emptiness and the loneliness that I felt when you told me was fucking devastating. I was so ready to let myself love. Freely and openly. And, god, really that’s all I want to do.

You have no idea how good it felt to kiss you, how every touch felt like electricity and warmth and safety. You have no idea how terrified I am that I’m never going to feel that authentically again.

I fear I’m just going to be single my entire life.

—

I wrote this in the heat of the moment, in the car on the ferry ride back home. Since then, I have spoken with my therapist and have discovered some things about myself. Namely, that I have a fear of abandonment due to losing my mother to cancer at a young age. This, obviously, makes breakups feel that much more crippling.

Of course, the logic doesn’t make anything feel any less real. It’s a coping mechanism of mine to hide behind the logical explanations for things to make them feel more distant, less personal. But, really, what’s more personal than a relationship ending?

Another thing I learned about myself in therapy is that it’s perfectly healthy to put my feelings away in an internal metaphorical container… momentarily. Not forever. The box doesn’t disappear. It only gets bigger and heavier with every little trauma that I put into it, and if I don’t deal with any of the contents, I can’t handle them at all anymore. I take out one, and they all spill out all over the place.

So I’m dealing with it. I’m using my safe spaces and free time to cry. Taking the trauma out of the box and confronting it. Looking it straight in the face and telling it I’m stronger than it makes me believe. I can survive this; I’ve survived worse.

And I’m also dating again. So there's that.

The One That Got Away

I made this blog to let out the thoughts and feelings that are too loud to silence. It’s an outlet for my racing mind, for when it gets to be racing, which is rare nowadays, thankfully. But, as it is now, it’s 2:47 AM as I’m writing this and, well… my thoughts are racing.

I’m getting ready to break up with my girlfriend of two months. Not a long time, but honestly it’s the longest relationship I’ve ever had and the thought of doing so is incredibly difficult. I like her. I like hanging out with her. We have a ton in common. I just don’t feel a spark where she deserves a whole-ass bonfire. I want her to be happy and fulfilled, which is why I need to let her go, so she can find somebody who loves her the way she deserves to be loved.

I think about the one that got away a lot (again, something my current girlfriend doesn’t deserve). We went on one date. He was good at holding a conversation where I was bad at it, and we had things in common but not everything, which left room for learning, which was nice. He was cordial, polite, responsible, holy shit a catch. And we just… stopped talking.

I think about what could have been with him a lot. A lot more than I probably should, more than is probably appropriate. I feel like we really could have been something if I had just been better at talking. I keep hoping and praying that he’ll text me again and want to sweep me off my feet. I wonder sometimes if I should text him first, but I’m sure he’s found somebody by now and that kind of behavior would be decidedly uncool. I don’t want to be that person.

I think I might be cursed to be single for the rest of my life.

To a Long Lost Friend

I had a dream about you last night.

We were in school again, this time in college and everything about you was different; you had dyed your waist-length hair blue and had taken on a careless persona, said you were an Instagram influencer now.

But I saw through everything and persevered — we became friends again. We became inseparable again.

It just reminded me how much I miss you.

I know it’s weird that I do. We were friends for one year in high school before going our separate ways because I was dead-set on Running Start and you… weren’t, I guess. You probably stayed in school, did well on your assignments, graduated, and went to college like your parents expected you to.

That’s the thing, though. Did your parents expect anything from you? I always assumed they did from the way you talked about them which was little to not at all. I assumed a lot of things about you from the way you talked about yourself, which was little to not at all. I assumed you were hurt somewhere underneath the jokes and the K-pop and I wanted to help you.

I never got the chance.

It turns out Running Start isn’t all that great. At least not when you don’t put your heart and soul into it. I didn’t. I failed. I got my G.E.D. I often wonder if I had stayed in high school whether or not I would have graduated. But mostly whether or not I would have been better friends with you, and thus more motivated to stay in school rather than sit in the library and draw Pokémon all day, like I did in college.

I’ve had other friend-flings in the past that lasted a year or two and then fizzled out, but the difference is we’re still connected one way or another, and the problem I keep coming back to with you in particular is that I don’t even know if you’re even alive anymore. You could have died and I would have no idea. Nobody would have known to tell me, I wouldn’t have known to attend your funeral, and so now I’m stuck in this limbo of half-grief, of possible grief, where I’m grieving the person I could have known better and didn’t.

I thought I knew you, but I probably really didn’t.

If you’re out there, I do really want to be friends with you again. I have the heart of an elephant that never forgets.

I miss you.

So I'm unemployed again.

I left my old job for a new job that was supposed to be more fulfilling and interesting but it turned out to be very physical and hell on my chronically-ill body so I had to quit.

I could say I wish I hadn't accepted the job when it was offered to me on the spot, I wish I had been more picky, I wish I had done a million and one things differently. But the thing is... I don't.

Lots of things in my life haven't exactly gone the best possible way, and after many things that were entirely my fault and could have been easily avoided that still haunt me to this day, it's easy for my anxiety and my post-traumatic response to wish I could go back in time and change it. Not do the thing. Not say the thing. But they all end in a simple three-word phrase: "Now I know." Now I know not to lie about stupid shit. Now I know to ask for help when I need it. Now I know that I can't work on my feet anymore.

The problem, though, is that I actually hate being unemployed.

When I have nothing to do, nothing to get out of bed for, I usually just... don't. And it makes every day the same. Everything blurs together, and I can only learn so many hobbies to the point of difficulty where I give up before I have nothing left and I'm standing in the middle of this endless plateau with no end in sight.

I keep feeling like I'm on the verge of creating something. Something good. Something big. But my muses are nowhere to be found when I need them the most.

One Big Metaphor

Boots have always tasted weird to me.

Not like some of the people who absolutely love to lick them of their own accord. I've had to, in the past, and it left a sour taste in my mouth.

The Boot in question has kicked my assailant to the curb more than once. It's let me go with a warning before. This is undoubtedly because I am a white woman, which is by far the Boot's most favored on the list of whom it has sworn to protect and serve. It sees me as a small creature, abused and weak, that constantly is in need of help and makes mistakes because it doesn't know better.

The truth is, though, I was going 72 in a 60 because I was late to work and I know that on holidays, the Boot Patrol is much fewer and farther between. I cried on purpose and lied that I was only following traffic because I knew it would let me off easy. And the shitty part is that I was right. I was only fined for going 5 over the speed limit rather than 12.

I am a white woman, and the Boot loves me.

Which is why it leaves such a sour taste in my mouth when it helps me, and other white women like me, and then turns around and stomps out a trans person, or a person of color, or both, just for the sole reason of existing.

And then the Boot gets let off easy, because it is the Boot. It gets off on the plea of, "I felt threatened," and, "Just doing my job, ladies and gentlemen."

Maybe the job is wrong.

Maybe the Boot should be dismantled and repurposed into other types of shoes that might be able to do the job more efficiently and less violently, like running shoes or sandals or loafers.

Black lives matter.

Queer lives matter.

This is not an opinion.

Defund the police.

Please Think. (Alternate title: I'm Too Nice)

On June 11th, 2019, my best friend (a cat) of 11 years passed away from fluid buildup in his heart and lungs. He was my son; my baby. I loved him like a human child. I still cry when I look at the memorial altar I put together for him on my windowsill for too long.

Then, around November, one of the neighbor's "barn cats" (who was really just a domestic cat that was banished to the wild outdoors) started showing up on our porch. He would crawl into my car through the window and make biscuits in my lap after I got home from work.

We had a dog at the time that he was afraid of, but on the day after Christmas, she was gone and the cat came inside.

I named him Ned P. Stark after my favorite Game of Thrones character, with the middle initial P. standing for either Pumpkin or Puddin', depending on your preferences. Later, as he stayed with us for longer and longer periods of time, I noticed different personality traits, like the fact that he didn't like Greenies very much but he would eat them anyway, and the fact that he wasn't very smart, which earned him the secondary name Winnie the Pooh, aka Pooh Bear; the tubby little cubby all stuffed with fluff; the bear of very little brain.

The neighbors really only lamented over the fact that they had a rat problem again, and not at the fact that he was gone. After all, the name they had given him was simply Orangecat, and they had told us that he was probably around four years old.

We loved him the way he wanted to be loved. We kept him inside when it was cold and windy and wet out. He slept on my bed almost every night -- my navy blue comforter is still covered in his fur.

All of this to give context to how devastated I had been when, on June 13th, 2020, Ned was taken to the vet very suddenly with a severe thrombosis in his back right leg. Other cats with similar conditions had about a 5% survival rate with constant treatment and medication, and those that did survive never fully regained movement in their legs.

Ned was still an outdoor cat. We couldn't let him live with such a lowered quality of life when the outlook of plain and simple survival was so low. We have coyotes in our woods; he had to be able to run.

So we put him down. We buried him the next day.

That was two days ago.

Last night, at 3:30am, I couldn't sleep because of hallucinations. So I took my antipsychotic, and as I was waiting for it to kick in and thus for me to get sleepy again, I decided to look through the memory card on my camera to see if there was anything I missed or had forgotten about.

There were. In fact, there were quite a few pictures of Ned that I had forgotten I had taken about a month prior. So I fixed them up in Photoshop, and decided to make a return to Facebook to make a little memorial post for him.

I rarely use Facebook anymore. I am formerly an avid poster, but in recent years, I've decided it brought a lot of judgement and negativity into my life. People were pretending to be my friend because they were curious, or just wanted to be entertained by the shitshow that is and always has been my life. It took me until recently to realize that not all attention is good attention, and I would rather be lonely than looked at as a less-than-human piece of performance art.

So, when Bruno Griffiths (an alias for the sake of anonymity), a guy I went to high school with and never spoke to (keep in mind, I was only in high school for two years), sent me a friend request about a year and a half ago, it took me around a month to accept it. I saw it, I just hesitated. Part of me hoped it would go away. Because, not only did I never speak to him, but something about his presence always made me uncomfortable. It definitely was somewhere between the fact that he would cosplay anime characters at school literally every day; the fact that he was a very tall bright red ginger with shoulder-length hair and his voice was very loud, deep, and intimidating; and the fact that the abrasiveness of his personality and the pure intensity of his presence was just plain unsettling to me.

Something I remember about Bruno was that, in high school, he seemed to hover around my general vicinity a lot. It could just be me being paranoid, but I remember him scaring the shit out of me in my freshman year of high school, when I finally decided I hated the friends I was with (which I very much did) and was sitting at a lunch table alone, with no lunch. He crashed into a chair next to me, and said something I can't remember clearly because I was so off-put by this behavior that I got up and left. I think I just wandered around the school campus for a while until class started, but from then on, he seemed to always be in my periphery, and I'm truly not sure if it was intentional. In sophomore year, I had Algebra II with him, and he used to talk endlessly about the anime Death Note and Bleach. Not even necessarily to me, just to anyone. I'm sure now there was probably ADHD or autism in there. That's fine. It didn't make me any less uncomfortable, because I simply don't feel good being around that kind of bombastic and weird energy.

So then, when he sent me a friend request out of the blue a year and a half ago, and his profile picture featured him with cropped short hair and a shirt & tie, I was... weirded out. Understandably, I'm sure. He always made me uncomfortable, from day one. So why would now be any different?

The first tick in the "Too Nice" column goes here, because, after a month of deliberation, I accepted the request. I didn't look at his profile. I thought, What's the worst that could happen?

Things were pretty innocuous for a while; he reacted to some of my posts, and that was about it.

Then I made the memorial post for Ned.

The wound was still very fresh. The dirt was still loose. He left a like on the post.

What he didn't have to do afterward, was leave the "wow" reaction on a picture of my Pikachu cosplay I wore for Halloween one year, a picture in which I look hella cute if I do say so myself, and also a picture which was intended for my actual friends who like Pokemon. That picture has been in my featured photos since featured photos have been a thing on Facebook. Why he didn't notice it until now, I couldn't tell you.

And, what he especially didn't have to do immediately after that, was send me a DM saying, "Hi, what have you been up to?"

Most cis men will probably read that and shrug or scoff. "It's just a friendly message, he didn't even say anything creepy."

Folks who were raised female know it's a Trojan horse. A way to get into your mental space and destroy it by draining your energy. They usually don't do it on purpose. But the context, the behavior directly beforehand, is the sneeze from the soldier inside. These messages, if you respond, will almost always end in them asking you out, or asking to fuck, or sending an unsolicited dick pic. Or, almost even worse than all of those, they'll shower you with slimy compliments about your physical appearance and decorate them with nasty emojis.

It didn't help that I was still mourning.

It also didn't help that I was in the midst of being gnawed on by the voracious jaws of depression.

The second tick in the "Too Nice" column comes with the fact that I didn't immediately block him. Because I thought of what my dad would say. My dad, who's a cis man, and as much of an ally as he tries to be, will never truly understand. His imaginary advice of, "Give him a chance, he's only being friendly," echoed through my mind as I sat on the notification, not daring to open it and show him that I read it, thus opening the floodgates to "Hello?" and "fucking bitch" that were most likely to follow later, when he saw that I left his message unanswered.

I deliberated some more. I wrung my hands. I worried for six hours about what he would say, whether "he" took the form of my father or Bruno.

I complained to a female friend of mine, one of my best friends, over chat, but she didn't seem to be around. So I posted to my Snapchat story, knowing that six out of seven of my friends on Snapchat are women and might offer up advice. (The seventh is a man and truly does not care.)

A different one of my best friends answered the call. They gave me a few pieces of very sage advice, which, although strangely enough coming from Snapchat messages, immediately changed my way of thinking.

One of those things was, "'Mean' is part of a bullshit politeness contract we all sign in this life that we are not obligated to follow."

It's true. I'm going to use plain binary language here, but I think women especially are brought up to believe that they are automatically everyone's caretaker, and that others' feelings come before their own. They are brought up to believe that if a man's feelings get put on hold so that she can take care of herself first, it then becomes her fault if and when he does something drastic, because men of course can't control themselves or what they do in response to negative emotions. This is a damaging image for both parties; women are seen as unbreakable emotional load-bearers which is exhausting on the daily, while men are degraded as weak, simplistic animals. Plus, it's interesting to me to think about, in this light, the fact that there has been so much propaganda in relatively recent history, especially pre-1920, that women are the ones that are weak, when the unspoken expectation seems to be the other way around.

The other thing my friend said was, "Stop caring about hurting the feelings of those that didn't care about yours to begin with."

This is also true, but I think it's going to be even harder for me to unlearn this.

My dad -- and yes, it always goes back to my dad, go figure -- constantly tells me, particularly while we are amidst the throws of the Black Lives Matter movement, that he is glad that he raised me to have empathy and to care about other human beings. Yes, I agree that is a good thing... to a certain extent. I think it is possible to have too much empathy, however, and I often feel like I do, including toward people who could not give less of a shit about how I feel. Bruno could have led with expressing sympathy for my loss. But he didn't; he was too distracted by how hot I looked in plush yellow ears, red lipstick, and a tank top. He didn't care. No matter which way that conversation could have gone had I responded, whether it was friendly or not, the fact that I had so much of a feeling that it was going to end with him demanding material to jack off to was, in and of itself, a red flag.

When I was thirteen, would I have given the grown men in the giant black pickup truck with the fuck-you back-woods headlights the benefit of the doubt as they blocked traffic to crawl alongside me and yell at me to take off my panties because they wanted to see how fat my pussy was?

Probably not.

It really doesn't matter if I was just being paranoid. Sometimes, "innocent until proven guilty" will get you caught in a really bad situation with someone who's incredibly guilty. In this era, with the people I've seen and talked to and witnessed in my life, it's better to be unsparing with whom you block, for your own safety and emotional well-being.

I blocked Bruno without guilt.