bulging
(anchusa azurea, also known as italian bugloss, summer forget-me-not, or alkanet, is a flowering plant that symbolizes everlasting love and memory)
4/26/24 - implantation
turns out my cycles align with the moon’s, to no one’s surprise. two weeks is how long I can withstand ambiguity. two weeks is my capacity to hold a question at bay, to wait and see.
I don’t know if I’ve ever tracked this specifically, but I can say without a doubt that this is an improvement.
I asked questions of z again. I have therapy tomorrow and as I imagined myself wrestling with my insides on the outside, I realized I needed clarity. again.
“I’m curious how all this is feeling for you” is all I could muster to open.
“morning” he replied. then said he needed clarification, or coffee. then offered something he’d written the night before. it was beautiful, inscrutable, and about surfing.
I’m writing this in the in-between. I’ve asked, he hasn’t answered, but I know what he will say. I am laying on a blanket on my lawn, hearing a marching band play in the distance. I just finished the book I ordered as soon as he left. still life with woodpecker is a love story about two redheads, one an outlaw bomber and the other a princess activist. sigh.
today I am learning the limits of my capacity for unrequited affection. in two days it will be the anniversary of a voice memo I recorded titled “new love lessons,” in which I came to the realization that what I needed to learn most was to give love freely, without expectation or need for reciprocity. to give love and to release myself from the responsibility of receiving love. it was a soul-washing moment. I bathed in the idea of it, and it has carried me far.
preceding and following that voice memo were two relationships in which I yearned for more from people who were neither willing nor interested in giving it. the first was torturous for both of us. the second, post-voice-memo, started off much stronger. it held such deep intimacy for both of us and yet came crashing down around us in much the same triggered stalemate.
in both I just. kept. trying. and eventually, that led to hurt all around. I recognize my own footsteps in the territory I’m treading now, and I can feel the end of my emotional rope approaching.
love is meant to be given, yes. love is not meant to be extracted, won, commandeered, or stolen. it is not up to me whether or not another chooses to love me.
and.
the sustaining of love requires reciprocity.
still life with woodpecker is concerned with how to make love stay. the questions it asks have enchanted me since I first read it in my early twenties. to me now, it reads like an erotic children’s book for young adults. bless it.
today I think that love feeds love. one person alone cannot carry the love of two people. love is alive, like a kombucha mother. it has to be fed to remain so.
my affection has been sustained on fantasy, contact, attention, admiration, and compliments. like a sugar rush. but my affection has not been fed affection. love not fed love. so now I watch as my little soft serve ice cream machine of a heart can no longer pump out its ooey gooey sweetness. no wonder the mcdonald’s machine is always down. who is there to love it?
it is not about boundaries, self respect, deserving, or worth. it is a recognition of remaining resources being limited. maybe in this way it can hibernate, go dormant instead of exploding and disappearing forever.
waxing, waning
4/27/24 - gestation
this week I asked for stories from others about their crushes, and I got them. when dre came over last night she told me how freeing it had been when she finally admitted she wanted partnership. I was like WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO SAY, but I knew. this morning I woke up to celebrations of success from my fellow crushers. bitter bitter sweet sweet.
the bigger the feelings, the more there is to learn.
I think about the desires that arose in me, the gaping yawning mouth that wanted to burst forth and eat the life this man had led. I think about the ways I was taught to approach the world through men. people love to talk about comphet but that’s not what I suffer. I want access. I have wanted to ride trains since I learned that was a thing people did. but I also knew I couldn’t, not alone. I have such deep envy for the freedoms he has had.
the day we spent at the quarry was the first day of mercury retrograde. it was eclipse week. I looked up what it was hitting in my chart. fourth house. the house of your roots. we talked about it, briefly. I talked about how hard it has been to learn to be with other people because it was never safe growing up. I curled up in to his stomach as I spoke, and he got an erection.
leading up to his visit, I’d started listening to an herbalism podcast hosted by a self-proclaimed “real man,” a catholic, a libertarian. I’d been enjoying the challenge of disagreeing with him and respecting him at the same time, regulating my body, opening to the complications. when I talked to z, I heard stories of him doing this constantly: having conversations with strangers and building connection around the difference.
it inspired me to reach out to my dad last week.
it was a hard conversation, olympic level compared to the podcast practice. he said “…on the drive back from florida, when you broke my heart for the first time.” I wanted to barf, I didn’t know what he was referring to, then realized it was when I finally told him I wanted to quit gymnastics. I don’t know why he wanted me to do it so badly. I’d like to ask him but I am not ready to speak again. I wonder if he saw that as the only way for me to be free, to live a self-directed life.
I had therapy today. I confessed things I’ve never said to anyone, and ended the session dissociated and in tears, we scheduled a follow up in a week.
I crawled in bed and stayed there for the next five hours.
I asked for help but it wasn’t available.
I finally made myself get up. I turned my phone off. cleaned the litter boxes. I sat outside in the sun with my face wet with tears. I climbed the crepe myrtle. something bit my left ring toe. I started the dishes, brushed my teeth, and finished the dishes.
I put on a shirt that had been my mom’s when she was younger than me now. a short skirt with a slit that showed the bottom of my period underwear. I went to carroll street and sat at the bar like I always used to. I saw two old coworkers, one had a particular twinkle in her eye that told me she couldn’t wait to tell someone who hates me that she’d seen me. I got a vinho verde spritzer and a spinach bacon salad. the menu never changes. I started a new book, it was surprisingly easy.
I got a blanket out of my car and walked into little’s looking for one beer to take to the park. they didn’t sell singles so I bought a six pack. naomi lavender flirted with me, I don’t think she recognized me from our past lives. I walked to esther peachy lefevre park but there was one man sitting silently on a bench staring at nothing, so I kept walking and went to cabbagetown park. my shins were sore. I laid the blanket under a streetlamp and read my book, it was dark by then.
after a while some kids came by, two on scooters and one on a bike. the first kid asked what time it was and I said I didn’t have a phone. the second kid said you don’t have a phone? it was lovely that seemingly none of us did. the first kid asked me to guess what time it was, like I wasn’t already about to. I said I thought it was 8:30ish, that I have chickens and usually have to put them up when it gets dark around 8:30. and that I thought it’d just gotten dark. they seemed satisfied with this answer and went to play on the playground. not too long after, a woman approached. she had generational cabbagetown vibes. we exchanged greetings and she asked if I was kin of ben. I said what and she repeated herself, gesturing to the kids. I said no, unrelated. she went and stood with them, I stopped paying attention.
I read awhile, watched a man in a loud suit enter the house with the purple lights out front. I drank one beer and considered another but already had to pee and knew I wouldn’t want to finish it. I used the evening primrose I’d picked on the way in as a bookmark and packed my things. I picked red clovers for tea on my way out.
4/28/24 - birth
the strength of feeling I feel for this man can be attributed to so many things, and here I am devotedly teasing each one out of the little yarn tangle.
some of the sensations I am learning I may be able to view as an indicator that there isn’t reciprocity present, that some core needs are unmet, that this person has now entered the realm of the dad wound. these are the sensations that mark the psychological coping mechanism of idealizing a parent who is unavailable so that you can still get your needs met. its so functional, and it often has the high cost of self-worth. tight throat. urge to contact to maintain connection, any excuse. the roller coaster when we haven’t talked. the belief that I’ve finally found it. the fear of losing it. anxiety, fantasy.
at first, I thought about the fantasies themselves. what desires has this person drawn out of me? what kind of life was I imagining for us? this is a fun part, like shopping in a store that’s full of my favorite things. I imagined sharing my home, having someone around who would also appreciate the beauty of it. this is one of my classic fantasies. but, in this version we also shared his van. in this version, I could afford to work less because we split rent. I could focus more on writing like I’ve wanted to, and I could travel. not only could I travel, but I could do it either with or with the advice of someone with a ton of experience doing it the ways I want to. flying-by-the-seat-of-your-pants travel. scraping-by-on-what-you’ve-got travel. surrendering-to-the-currents-of-the-universe-and-letting-it-take-you-where-it-will travel.
I thought about boats. how much he loves them, how much I love them. we honestly didn’t get to talk about it much and I’m a little thankful because I don’t know how much more romanticization the z that lives in my head could have taken.
I thought about kids. I googled if that’s even possible for me. I never wanted them personally, but over the past several years I have opened to the idea of having them if a partner did. I have started to understand the appeal a little. I still can’t imagine actually having them, but… its information. what was appealing was the idea of raising little people in this unconventional way. becoming some band of feral humans roaming the earth together. deeper community, interdependence, adventure, exploration, hard work. I even kind of wished I had accidentally gotten pregnant, which is mortifying to type, but truly what is the point of hiding it?
mostly though, I thought about him. about his experiences. how slowly he talks, like he’s not in any rush to get to the point or get the conversation over with. I thought about the things he’s seen and experienced: the things I haven’t that I wanted to lay my head in his lap and listen to until I fell asleep, and the things I have that I so rarely get to talk to people about. I thought about how open he is to people. how he thinks about things in the same weird way I do. how rarely I get to talk to people in that language. I talked about some of the shit he said in my work with clients. it was profound, and that isn’t just my fantastical dad-wound talking.
after examining the fantasies, it came time to sort out what I wanted with a partner, what I wanted with myself, and what I wanted with him. which of these things are still available to me and which do I need to grieve?
I turned first to travel. I envied that in him, wanted it with him, and wanted it from him. I explored that idea and made a map of all the people I could visit. I wrote a list of all the barriers that might come up, and started integrating solutions into my life. I made hypothetical plans - first I’d do a short trip to athens, then asheville, then to my friend’s off-grid homestead, then to my friend’s sock factory (then to outer banks where z is) and then home. this could be a baby trip, a trial run. then I could do one with all those stops, plus philly, plus new york. then I could do one with all those stops, and then I could go west to eerie, ohio, chicago. then another with all THOSE and then farther west to the olympic peninsula, to portland. I could see humboldt and the bay area and LA. I could see slab city for myself, the salt flats, THE DESERT. I still like these plans for my future self, but there are so many unknown roads to get to there from here.
that didn’t satisfy fully though, I don’t want to become this man. I mean a little maybe but not fully. I like me. I realized a lot of what I was feeling was scarcity. he represents people that I had connected with in abundance in my early twenties. travelers, seeds tossed to the wind, people with empty pockets and unending curiosity. in order to release the death grip I have had on this one person, I need more of them. I need to be reminded that he’s not the only one. I also needed to find that person in me. which is why I went to carroll street alone without my phone last night. why I went to the store, to the park. I listened to marta rattling by and it felt like I was reaching through time to connect to my past self. I felt so at home.
yesterday in my bed-rotting phase, I watched innumerable tiktoks. either a lot of y’all are also feeling this right now or tiktok really knew what I was looking for. probably both. I went to the comments section of one that really harped on the absolute devastation of realizing the magic you’d experienced with someone hadn’t been shared in the same way and this woman said “you were sent to them to teach unconditional love and they were sent to teach you self love. it wasn’t for nothing.” bless you, miranda, because I think you gave me the final puzzle piece.
this morning I woke up and logged into my old couchsurfing account from 13 years ago. I read my bio and I was filled with love for her (me), then grief at having lost touch with her (me). I thought about everything that had happened in that time to distance me from her. how many people I’d let tell me who I was, how many people I’d believed over myself. I thought about the relationship that knocked me into this place of desperation, and how long is has taken me to come back to the parts of myself I abandoned in it.
when I got an astrology reading about my work a couple weeks ago, this experience with z kept interrupting the session. I pulled a moon card at the end, the gibbous moon, and its description was “bulging.” aja and I giggled. I thought of my secret pregnant wish. I thought of emotionally motivated erections. I thought of my heart, bursting at its seams. I wondered where I was bulging, about to burst. I wondered where I was bulging, about to birth.
the strength of my feelings for this man aren’t just “crush psychosis” or “limerance.” they were a crying, screaming, shouting invitation from my past and future selves to PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD WAKE UP. wake up and live, my love. yes, it could be easier to ride on the coattails of some lanky, funny, vulture-bodied canadian redheaded skateboarding surfer (goddamnit) but this is MY life. I am laying here begging this strange man to start my life for me because I am tired and scared and deep down I don’t believe I am capable of seeing so many of my desires through but I can’t keep waiting for someone to come do it for me.
one of the griefs I have found that I haven’t mentioned yet is the grief of my raising. the grief of being raised as an accessory, as a wife. I won’t go into details of all the ways this was made clear to me as I was growing up, but it was. the purpose of my young adulthood was to prepare me for market. to prepare me for desirability. this experience has a lot to do with my transness, and I won’t go into that now either. but one of the things I envy most about z is what I perceive as his belief in his own ability to just… do things. to just go out into the world and do hard or dangerous things and be okay. I don’t want to gender either of our experiences and I’d encourage you to resist this as well because these things aren’t universal. I don’t know how he was raised, I can only look at his youth and know that he felt enough safety to ride trains when I didn’t. or maybe it was a desperation that I never had. sometimes I don’t know if I’d actually have been unsafe or if I’ve just been told so many fucking times that girls can’t do dangerous things because of rape that I believe them. didn’t keep it from happening, regardless.
I’ve been wondering how to finish this and I just realized I started writing it after I’d asked him questions but I never told you what he said, although you may have inferred it. I told him it meant something to me that we’d been talking every day. that I knew how I felt, and he knew how I felt, but that I didn’t know how he felt. in retrospect, his lack of telling me how he felt may have been communicating plenty that I just refused to receive. I was watching his actions, not listening to his words. my brain says “if someone cares for you, they will tell you” and dre says “you can’t make rules about these things. they don’t work and they won’t protect you.” anyway, he said he thinks I am interesting, creative, that he likes talking to me. he said he thinks of me as a friend and that he’s not trying to have a slow romantic burn. I told him we were unfortunately on different pages there, that consistent communication builds intimacy for me, and that I needed to take a step back. he understood, and I thanked him for being clear with me, again.
I used to have this thing I said to clients, I’m not sure why it hasn’t come up as much lately, but I thought about it the other day in my desperation. I think sometimes the thing we are trying so hard to get from someone else is the thing we are withholding from ourselves. I think about those relationships that bookended my thesis that I just needed to give more love and I see that that was not at all what they needed from me. what they needed from me was for me to stop trying to get what I wanted through the back door. what they needed was my honesty and my boundaries. what they needed was for me to stop repeating the pattern of love I’d learned as a kid: that if you just keep giving maybe someday you’ll get it in return. those people didn’t need more love from me, I did.