Later Today

Later today, we have plans with a friend who is also your confidant, and who knows more about our internal struggles than I think I am comfortable with. I love that you have finally found someone to trust with your demons. I can’t battle them all alone. I love her, too, but I don’t know how to feel about showing my scars in public.

Later today, we will have a conversation about where we are now, almost a year to the day since you told me you wanted out forever, and eleven months after we knew it wasn’t just bad lab work. I don’t think either of us really knows, and we’ve been living with I don’t know for a long time now. Maybe it’s not time for that conversation. Maybe it never will be.

Later today, we will pretend for a while longer that everything is back to normal, again, and maybe if we pretend long enough it will be. My work won’t make you feel abandoned anymore. Your needs won’t make me feel suffocated. My needs won’t make you feel trapped.

Later today, we will be cautious with one another. We will skirt around the edges of words spoken, of thoughts and reactions that can’t be undone. We will put on a good demonstration of a “normal” lesbian family for our friend who knows our secrets, but lets us pretend anyway.

Later today, I will love you the way you want me to, instead of the way I do.

Projects

Because I spent so much time driving and pondering and pondering and driving, I guess I am not totally shocked that I came up with a writing project on the road last week.

It’s going to take a long time, and it’s going to be slow going.

And like most of my projects that start ass-backward, it’s going to begin with a working title.

By a Thread: the gay partner’s guide to hanging on with your loved one

Because I am here to tell ya, if this book already existed, I would have bought it by now. It doesn’t exist and it totally should.

I think it is long past time that we talked, realistically, about the million tiny deaths that a gay relationship must survive in spite of the legal/medical/societal systems that occasionally seem designed specifically to destroy us. Even when we are already dying/ill/changing. What I would really love, though, is to include real stories from women like me, like you, like your partner/girlfriend/wife/whatever epithet you choose.

I may end up narrowing or broadening the scope of this project, depending on responses, but here’s what I’m looking for.

Know someone, or you yourself, who have been through a major process in support of a partner? You define major, I can’t. Mine’s obvious – end of life issues. But I would include stuff like the heterosexual divorce you went through to be together. Or the chronic disease you are fighting together through the medical profession. Or depression. Or major surgery. Or the death of your partner. Or the death of your partner’s identity.

I love these partners, but I don’t want their story. Let me be very, very clear. I want the “supporting” role. If you were going to write it in essay form, I’d say give me three paragraphs on the partner’s situation, and three pages on the supporting cast. Get it? I want the story that never gets told, that vanishes in the every day just-keep-this-shit-running that our lives become.

So if you know someone, or if you want to tell the story yourself, or if you want to call me and I will transcribe and take notes, I’m good with all the above. But these stories need to be told.

Email me. soulofjolie at yahoo dot com.

I’m looking for my own voice, trying to scream through the silence. Come scream with me. We’ll find your voice, too.

Arrivals, Departures, and Deaths

We arrived there today. My timestamp on this blog shows last night, the 10th, but it should show the 11th because I stopped and then restarted. Except now it’s after midnight, so I guess it should show the 12th. Confusing thing, time.

Funny things, arrivals.

They imply a certain amount of pomp, don’t they? A certain… joie de vivre around the event.

This one couldn’t be further from joyous, for me.

This arrival, in my life, is fraught with terror, uncertainty, and, at best, darkness.

I have moved my entire family for a job that I have failed at miserably over the last four months.

I have left the only real home I have ever had, and am hoping that I can somehow still manage to make good in spite of the previously mentioned failures.

And wrapped around all of that is the knowledge that I have moved the girl to the place where she will (probably) die. That parenthetical probably is blind hope talking. She believes she will die there. I no longer know what I believe.

All that is from last night. I was in a bad spot, does it show?

Tonight, I’m sitting in our new house. We were going to stay in more rented lodgings until our possessions managed to chase us home, but I just couldn’t face it. Two dogs, two cats, two adults, and one Sharkman in hotel rooms for three nights… I had had enough and then some.

The big dog, my baby boy, is totally unsocialized because for his entire life we have lived in the boonies. So, people, not really his thing. Even less his thing is being trapped in a tiny room with strangers walking back and forth outside.

Then there’s the two cats, who loathe me on our best days. One is a scratcher. Not the furniture. Oh no. She claws the carpet. Repeatedly. After 1:00 am. Every blessed night of existence. The other one, the front-claw-less one, just beats on doors. Pounds on them. But not until she is sure we are all asleep.

All of which leads the kid to toss and turn. And we can’t so much as leave on the tv, because that just leads to more tossing and turning.

Sleep deprived Jolie, that’s what you get when you add all that into the mix.

And now I am more sleep deprived.

Because I could no more sleep tonight than fly to the moon.

It’s a really sweet little house. There’s a perfect spot out front for a climbing rose, which I will be planting as soon as I figure out a) whether the damn finicky things will even grow here in the sandy soil, and b) when exactly one plants a rose bush when there is no real winter dormant season. Research is warranted.

It’s on a nice, tidy little street, albeit one of the three busiest in town. Of course, busy is relative. I have heard exactly one vehicle in the last two hours. Our little corner of the waterfront rolls up the sidewalks early unless there’s a high school football game at the home field, which is about five blocks away.

It feels good to be here, to be in walls that aren’t going to change tomorrow. It’s still scary as hell – although I have to say that right now I’m more scared for my BFF than I am for me. She hired me and dragged me all this way. And I proceeded to thank her for that by falling flat on my face. Jeez. Not my finest hour, these past months.

I worked, though, on letting go of that during the drive. (I’m a great one for beating the crap out of myself) I have some ground to regain, and some real apologies to make now that I am here, but those things are do-able.

The important things – loving my wife, loving my family, being good at my job again, being in a beautiful place with people who actually seem to like me (for some unknown reason) – those are here. This is where we are supposed to be.

Even the sunniest, clearest of days have shadows, so that you can better see the brilliance of the sunshine in comparison.

These are the thoughts I am trying to cling to.

In the meantime, while I work on that, I’ll be keeping my eyes and ears posted on redneck insanity to bring to you, live and in color, as I wend my merry way through the South!