Like Jumping Out Of An Airplane

Hello, beautiful new space. I realize you aren’t precisely new; I realize you have history and that there are archives still sitting in local copies on my desktop that I will eventually upload here. I realize that there is much work to be done to make my web presence the right shape and size again. And I realize this isn’t much of an introduction.

What should the first post on a blog be about? It’s rather like the first piece of art hung in a new apartment, no? The ritualistic part of me wants to treat first steps as prophetic, predicting that the contents here will drive the tone and style of this site in its next wobbly steps of growth. But that is much too complicated and prescriptive. Or maybe it’s spot on. I don’t know.

I know there’s something I’d like to record, so let’s start with that, shall we? I want to talk about family, and confusion, and wonder.

Last month, 3:30am on a Friday morning and riding the high of a panic attack and a night of hysterical crying, I called my Dad and we made up.

Since then I have had a hard time finding words. We fixed something that had been hurting me for a very long time. I didn’t tell many people, I didn’t rush out and celebrate. I didn’t know how to untangle that hurt from the skeins of my life over the past three years immediately, but I am working on it and I am hopeful.

It feels a little like losing a tooth. I keep putting my tongue in the gap and being amazed by the newly exposed tenderness.

What you should know is that the draft of this post is a month old. The first draft, in fact, is what provoked the panic attack that led to the phone call. So it started out very differently, and it took me a long time to come back to it and edit with a gentle, rather than ruthless, touch.

I’m out of practice, so this feels a little bit like writing in sand with a stick and the tide coming in. When I started, before that Friday morning, this post was a list of grievances, the oft-repeating, poisonous thoughts that make me less Zen. Now the list is missing an anchor point, making many of the other points look smaller and making me question the entire practice of listing these things out in the first place.

I read Stone Butch Blues recently, and it simultaneously ripped me open and shut me tight. It gave me new context and language to understand myself when I say “I’m fine” even though I am clearly not. I am not emotionally stone, but there are a lot of bricks built up here and there around my heart. I am trying to find places to open, and ways to write about my sexuality again, because the topic keeps me soft and makes me feel connected with queer history. It’s tricky, though; I have had a hard time blogging in the past two years. I used to be a very gutsy, no-filter, down-and-dirty sort of blogger, because most of the things I wanted to expose to the world were things that didn’t fall within my scope of necessary privacy. My period, my sex life, my body, my relationship highs and lows.

Then a bunch of other stuff came up that very much did (does?) fall within my scope of necessary privacy, partly because holy-hell transitions and partly because the edges of my scope changed. Things like:

• My relationship with my parents, my family
• Hideous break-up and subsequent mourning, processing, rage and contentment
• New job, career paths and something resembling workforce trajectory
• New predominant partner, delicate growth patterns
• New other partners, complexities of dating
• Activism: queer, kinky, community, history, silence and the refusal thereof
• Anonymity, advantages, disadvantages, past hurts and future dangers

But with one of the major points on my List of Grievances (which is only a stand in term for “Reasons Not to Write,” in case you didn’t know) unexpectedly crossed off, I think it’s time to write again. Perhaps to bounce up against some boundaries, to use some nasty words, to talk about transitions, growth, sex, money, craft, relationships, technology, art and whatever else comes to mind.

It seems this has turned into a decent introduction while I wasn’t looking, riding that potent, persistent newness of creative space. Here’s to the beginnings that keep on coming. (Change is ongoing, and never outgrown.)

So, in keeping with that theme, and instead of a story about woe-is-me or why-bother-now or what-the-fuck-am-I-doing-again?, here is a story about something good. Deeply, deeply weird, but good.

I have a new friend named Devon. Devon is, in surprisingly literal ways, closely akin to a fainting goat.

Devon is also charming, and professionally funny. He has grown his mustache long on the corners and taken to waxing it in curlicues. One night after taking a small group on a tour around the New York Renaissance Faire, he and I got into a snark fight over the table at an Outback Steakhouse. At one point he threw his hands in the air and declared “Please, let’s analyze my problems, what’s WRONG with me?”

“Well, you’re not very funny,” I said seriously, and his jaw dropped a theatrical three inches.

“Oh. Oh wow. Well…okay, I guess I’ll go away then.” He turned away and put his forehead on the wood panel wall. “I’ll just be here in the corner…crying and masturbating. See, you’re laughing!” and he pointed at me triumphantly as I choked over my water glass, grinning.

When I met him Devon had bright red tips in his light brown hair. Over the past few months he’s grown them out and cut them off.

“What happened to your red?” I asked him when he came over for dinner one night. I made pasta from scratch, the easiest (and only) recipe I’ve ever encountered that makes me look like a genuinely good cook.

“My friend and my sister are both getting married,” he explained.

“Not so much on red in the wedding pictures, huh?”

He nodded. “Basically my friend asked me if I had a funny head. She said ‘Have you ever had a crew cut?’ and I was like, uh, yea, back in college I did. So her next question is ‘Do you have a funny shaped head? Because I don’t want you to be mad if you wake up the morning of the wedding with your head shaved.’ and I said “okay, I’ll cut it.’”

I laughed, and we took our pasta into my bedroom to curl up on the green velvet couch. I scrounged the couch from the lobby of the building last spring, and it is the sort of violent pea green color that mid-priced retailers make into quirky double-breasted coats.  Devon likes to talk about himself. It’s good; he balances me out.

“Why are all of your stories so us-and-them?” I asked him as we finished our noodles. “The way you speak about the past couple of years of your life, there’s such a separation from the people you used to be close with.”

He shrugged. “Hard couple of years, you know?”

“Mmm,” I said. “I know.”

After we put our empty plates on the dresser I threw my legs over his lap. He stroked the skin of my calves as we talked. Then I pulled him over gently and we kissed. I like to kiss.

After a little while, I brought a hand to the side of his face with the tip of my thumb behind his ear. Then his eyes rolled back, and he stopped breathing.

“What the fuck,” I said. Then: “What the fuck. Devon, “ – with a shake on his shoulder – “wake up.” He started, gasped, his eyes refocused and he sat back up.

“What happened?” His voice was far away and woozy, slurring a little at the edges. “Did you clock me?”

“What?! No! I put my hand on your face and you blacked out,” and I brought my palm down on his stomach lightly. “Like this.”

“No way, no. You clocked me.”

“I swear I didn’t.” He looked at me with his eyebrows knit, red eyelashes narrowed together. “I promise I did not clock you. I barely touched you and you fell over.”

He sat up further, stared at me with his mouth open. “I was in a field,” he said.

“You were what?”

“I was in a field of daisies. Except not daisies. Smaller than daisies.”

“Seriously?” I asked, and he nodded and started laughing. “I’m fine,” he said with a wave of his hand. “I promise. I faint sometimes. Let’s do that again.”

We kissed again, but not before I moved him gently to the floor. He leaned against my knee and I ran one hand through the stubble of his newly short brown hair. The he collapsed against me slowly with his eyes closed.

I counted to ten and then shook his shoulder again.

“Did I fall down?” he said when he sat back up.

“No babe, I put you on the floor. Do you remember?”

He slid back, stretched out full length on his back and put one ear down to the floorboards.  “I was rolling around in mushrooms.”

“What kind of mushrooms?”

“Big knobbly ones.”

“That sounds not so fun.”

“No!” He framed a space between his hands in the air above his body, and I started laughing. “It was nice. They were big, like this – no, this big and puffy and” – he stopped and looked at his fingertips. “My hands feel like pillows.”

I laughed harder, sliding down the edge of the couch to join him sprawled across the wood. “This is the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen. Doesn’t this worry you?”

“No. I feel fine. I trust you.”

“You’re sweet,” I answered. “But I hope you realize I have no idea what I’m doing.”

He sat up suddenly. “I feel creative. I want crayons. Do you have crayons?”

Later that week Devon booked an appointment with his doctor and had an EKG. (He may have a history of fainting, but we’re not idiots either. Just to be clear.) He called me afterward to say he was fine. “She thinks I was just overexcited.”

“I have to say,” I answered, “That was wacky. But also kind of amazing.”

“So we should kiss some more, is what you’re saying.”

“I think yea, if you’re all right with that.”

He made a low purring sound into the phone. “It felt great. It was like jumping out of an airplane. And oh,” he added. “The flowers I saw? Were edelweiss.”