Traditionally speaking today is the day things get better.
4 days ago really.
After the long winters of my discontent, into the spring of lions, lambs and winds of tumultuous change.
All the seeds I’ve planted start to break through the dirt.
I have literal seeds to plant. Morning glories, columbine, lupine and sunflowers. But today I have a dinner date with Mandabear and tomorrow the men are coming to rip the backyard up. I need groceries and I want to keep tanning. Plus my uterus is in a full revolt. I couldn’t bend over or work a shovel if I wanted to. Going downstairs for coffee is hard enough.
Small miracles, instead of crippling panic attacks, I am just in crippling pain. It’s been a shitty week in my world, and I thank whatever gods were listening or intervened on my behalf that the pain I am experiencing is physical and I was able to remain somewhat sane.
Thank you gods. Impeccable timing.
Sometimes sane for me equals feeling numb. And I am. Not my nether regions, they are hovering around a 7 on the pain scale and breached at an 8.5 last night. I laid in bed, doing my best to stretch and ride it out with tears running down my cheeks. But I didn’t cry.
It was my grandmother’s birthday yesterday. She died when I was 15, she was 65. Way too young for both of us. I didn’t know it at the time, but she was the glue that held that family together. It didn’t break all at once, but it broke. For me especially. The next fall I think I left home for the first time.
I cannot help but wonder how different my life would be if she hadn’t passed away before I could learn from her. She had this toughness to her love that might have kept me from flying apart and being an irresponsible asshole. Or maybe not. Who knows. She knew things and I’m still basically Jon Snow.
I could use her advice now. New moon in Gemini, time for sowing seeds of change and gifts of wisdom from our ancestors. Bring on the tough love Nana. Tell me what to do.
She still talks to me in dreams and in moments of heightened danger. Like the time I preheated the oven in my new, crooked apartment and I didn’t know the last person had left a sponge soaked in oven cleaner under the element. I smelled smoke, opened the oven door and liquid fire started rolling out towards me because the floor slanted on an angle, all the floors did. Not my best apartment. I heard her voice clear as day “you’ve got a box of baking soda in the fridge, use it.” And I did and me and my bestie ordered pizza and ate out on the stoop while my apartment aired out.
Why do I feel like that was a leap year? I split with a fiancé, my cat died, I had a miscarriage, lost my job and life just kinda sucked real bad. It was, it was 2004. Fucking leap years man.
I am struggling to remember what the Dalai Lama says, everything is as it should be.
Ya, ya. I get it but I don’t care for it.
I am starting to worry about money. Book sales have been abysmal the last 2 weeks. The next 3 books are all delayed for a myriad of reasons, one being its hard to write about sex when you are having none. Every fucking thing on the fucking planet is fucking delayed and I get about 4 minutes every morning or 55 minutes of a Game of Thrones episode every night where I can blissfully forget what is happening. The rest of the time it is perched on the edge of my awareness waiting to pounce on any hopeful or nice thought I might be able to summon.
I feel like the first half of the leap years are doomed to be ultra-mega super fucky and they pan out at the end. 2004 I ended up in a brief relationship with Jesus. Y’all remember Jesus?
He was my first Libra.
Had a huge crush on him when I was 23/24. My roommates and my bestie really hated the guy I was dating so they set up this elaborate plot to get us together, and it worked.
But I wanted to be in a relationship, and Jesus had just gotten out of a bad one and I had invested sooooo much fucking time and effort in this other dude. Who subsequently got really jealous of Jesus and decided, after a fucking year to finally take me seriously. There was a basketball game with like 5 of my exes and it got pretty fighty.
Classic case of neglecting a toy in the sandbox forever, then getting mad when another boy decided to play with it. But I was young and dumb and I fell for it.
And my mistake was expecting one man pay for the sins of the other. I had time and patience for one, and my well was empty. My bad.
I can now objectively look back on that year of my life, and realize how many things had to line up and fall apart to put me on the path I ended up on. Not good or bad, just the way it should be I suppose. I could have kept dating Jesus casually until he was ready for something more. But here we are 22 years later and I am digging in the proverbial dirt trying to figure out what to do in the here and now.
3 years later, I had split with the ‘other’ guy, Jesus was tucked into a newish relationship that would ultimately lead to his marriage with a girl everyone called my cardboard cut-out, and I became his mistress.
I’m currently trying to remember how that worked.
I remember deliberately getting dressed up super cute and going to a bar I heard he went to, I found him. We decided on a coffee date later in the week.
I remember walking home late one night with my friends, before it started. It was probably 4am, night life in the Gay village where I lived was just winding down, or up depending on how you looked at it. I was emphatically trying to tell my girl that we were ‘just going for coffee’ and this gorgeous bear of a man covered in sparkles and wearing fairy wings (and not much else) looked at me on said with the sweetest deep voice, “Oh honey, coffee always leads to cock.”
My very gay fairy god bear was not wrong.
Jesus did try to be faithful for a minute, I just made it really hard.
I remember seeing them walking down the street towards me and playing frogger in Saturday traffic across 4 lanes and streetcar tracks to get across Bathurst to the other side. I remember seeing them heading towards the restaurant I was in and immediately getting my food to go and slipping out the side door. I remember him deliberately showing up on the nights he knew I worked, very very late and offering to drive me home, but we never went straight home, we would eat and talk and watch the couple fuck through their condo window across the street on Fridays. And I remember my very gay roommate sprinting up the stairs to tell me “there’s a man at the door for you and he is just oozing sex.” Jesus ascended.
I remember one specific ride from point A to point B in his old Ford Taurus, sticker of Ganesha on the dashboard, Jane’s Addiction on the stereo. It was raining. We were talking about ‘us’ and ‘them’. I couldn’t tell you why I asked but I did…
“Are you in love with her or something?”
He hesitated, but eventually said yes. We hit a red light and I got out of the car, I swear to god it was raining, a lot of dramatic moments in my life had me storming off in a storm. He came after me, put me back in the car and drove me home. I can say with all honesty, I got out of the car with zero expectations of an outcome. In that moment I didn’t care if I ever saw him again. That numbness kicked in and stayed.
It would be a lovely end to the story if that was the actual end of it. But it wasn’t.
He picked me up from work the next week, 23rd verse, same as the first. I just stopped asking questions.
Whatever hope I had got washed away with that rain.
I ended up in another relationship shortly thereafter. It was really bad. The worst. I tried to leave a few times and Jesus was among the lovers of mine that tried to pry me out. Then he told me he proposed to her, still smelling like soap from my shower, the morning after I got raped and the only night I had ever called him and asked him to come over. I was completely out of my relationship and he fully committed to his.
That was my stopping point, there was a line drawn in the sand and I couldn’t cross it.
I never called him again. 5 years later a mutual friend said that Jesus had gotten a divorce and had been looking for me.
So I guess, I didn’t really handle it so much as I just accepted what was given until I couldn’t anymore, and it eventually worked itself out. And now he lives in Germany, we still talk, he has apologized a thousand times over, but there isn’t anything to be sorry about.
Like I said, we ended up dating eventually, and he pulled the come here go away patented Libra maneuver and I wasn’t interested in playing round 2 or 8 or whatever the count was at that point.
So I left and he chased me, and I just didn’t get back in the car.
She gets mad and she starts to cry
Takes a swing but she can’t hit
She don’t mean to harm
She just don’t know what else to do about it
Jane Says, Jane’s Addiction
