romantic love sabbatical

I'm getting into the Metro when she stops consoling me about my shitty week and changes her tone.  

"Okay, look, I usually save this speech for my single girlfriends when they turn 40, but I'm going to have to give it to you early."

"I'm only 38."

"You're advanced."

"I guess."

"Are you ready? Here it is. You work hard on your life, you have good taste, a great apartment. You have a good career, good friends, money in the bank. You're a good writer and, like, life is pretty good, but there's this nagging feeling that it hasn't happened yet, that the man hasn't shown up to complete the story..." 

"Someone to give me a hug."

"Yeah! And draw you a bath and ask you about your day and just give a shit." 

"Ugh I hate admitting I want those things!" 

"It's haaaard, I know, but you know what's worse? Hearing from me that the arrival of this man, and all the promises, is a myth. It's a myth sold to little girls from day one and you keep thinking that if you do all the good things, there's a reward at the end. But you gotta kill the myth." 

"Fuck. But my myth feels WORSE because I have the overwhelming impulse to PUSH people away, scare them with big feeling and big mirroring, and then obsess over how to fix myself so I'm worth loving."  

"Babe, what if I told you that there's nothing wrong with you? That you're not broken? Because you're not broken and there's nothing wrong with you."

I sit on this for the rest of the afternoon and evening. I think more about that myth and the shape of it. Was it that he'd "complete" me, or was it that he would "protect" me? A puzzle piece or a shelter? That night I had a dream about a father and his children—a booming voice in my dream said the man was supposed to "Self-develop to become a better father". Odd wording, but that's exactly what the voice said. Then there was this long musical piece, almost like the opening credits of a TV show, where the father "danced" on the children in different stages of their growth. Was he protecting them under his feet or trampling them? Maybe both. 

Every year for the last 5 years, I search "how to cure love addiction" on Google and find this article on Psychology Today that has a short quiz to find out if you're a love addict then a few suggestions on how to break the pattern. The article suggests taking at least 6 months off dating while you take inventory and learn to love yourself exactly the way you want to be loved: draw your own bath, tell yourself how your day went, make yourself dinner, be a good father, etc. I knew at some point I was going to have to take a sabbatical from romantic love, but I wasn't ready. My most recent Object of Obsession kept providing a mirror, however milky and inadequate, I still craved from time to time. Just today after an editor at a major publishing house wrote to say he found my writing "strong" and the manuscript "unique and literary", it wasn't commercial enough for them to publish—not the right fit, I never feel like the right fit! I'm an intense weirdo! My book is weird! I scare everyone away!—I forwarded the email to my Object to get a reaction. Silence. This is as sure as sign as any that the mirror is all-the-way broken especially since the entire book is about trying to get men to reflect this brokenness back to me. 

I actually like that I'm an intense weirdo who scares people with big feeling and big mirroring. I'm a deep and intellectually demanding person. I'm not a companion for the faint of heart—I demand courage and inquiry and responsibility. I want to see the whole thing, all of me, all of you, every corner, even the ugly, dusty, rejected shit. I want to see it all. Where I'm cracked open is where I'm really beautiful, where the really rich, dark mud is housed. 

The mud is going up and around me for awhile. I'm forming it into walls and then a roof. I'm going to build a shelter for myself, a structure strong enough to protect me and porous enough to survive a flood. Because the floods will come again. If you're too rigid to let them in, and through, they'll eventually destroy you. 

See you in 6 months. xx

some ways to not avoid intimacy

1. 

Ask people to tell you why they love you. Granted, it’s a very, very embarrassing thing to do. It’s whiny, indulgent, mildly pathetic even. Especially in such a heated political climate where sensitivity and understanding of other people’s very real and very serious pain is demanded of us. It’s the type of request usually relegated to funerals. Therein, people willingly speak up and share why you matter to them basically because you’re dead, and your value, by virtue of your absence, is suddenly brought to light. This outpouring of love is one of the only privileges of being dead! And still, in my comfortable very-alive life with many privileges, I sometimes sink to the bottom of my own psyche and discover it’s full of terrible, destructive ideas that lead me to feeling desperately and hopelessly alone. 

I got very drunk last Friday. It’d been some years since I’d been drunk in that fashion—two and a half to be exact. But it had been a long, dark week of discomfort. I was really angry at myself for having given SO MUCH attention to men who did nothing to earn it. Nothing! In fact, they did so little, that to even call my relationships with them “relationships” or “affairs” seemed humiliating stretches. That rotten truth made me horribly furious and disgusted and my stomach knotted. Curiously, it also made me heavy and lethargic. My apartment started to get messy, I was binge eating carb-y stuff. I felt LAZY and kept writing that word in my journal: “Lazy, lazy, lazy…”. I WAS TIRED OF SELF-HELP. Exhausted of fixing myself. Drained of “healthy” coping mechanisms. I wanted to surrender to the very untidy corners of my life. This was a state of anti-repair and disarray, a sticky, slippery portal down to the place in myself where I’m just really fucking disappointed. 

It was too much. I needed a bloodletting. So besides the food, and eventually the alcohol, I picked up my other guaranteed weapon of choice: an unavailable man. I began to really ignore the object of my obsession and instead of just maintaining our light detachment (which I’d peacefully been doing for a few months), I aggressively ignored him, forcing a blunt silence between us. He clearly noticed and quickly reacted, making himself very present and really getting in my sight lines. This charged up the hungry ghost even more, and when a bottle of wine was passed around, I poured myself three full glasses in quick succession. 

Loose. Tipsy. Drunk. 

Obviously I didn’t stop there. That lead to more wine, then beer and cigarettes, which lead to a bit more beer, some whisky, and finally two random make-out sessions with strangers. Ghost still not satisfied. All I wanted to do was obsess about the man object, roll his actions over and over in my head, blow life into the ghost, warm my whole body on it, form my pain around its elusive contours... 

Then the hangover. This was a part of drinking I’d clearly forgotten. The hollowed out, tinny, life- force-draining lethargy. The wobbly feet and foggy brain. The death wish, the sweaty sleep, the corpse body. The barely shower. The puke-y, room-spinning stumble. The Netflix as pretend companionship. The living nightmare. A state of nearly-dead.

As close to the ghost as one can humanly get. 

But in the dark, with the lights off for a few days, there was quiet. A bottom. By Sunday evening of that broken weekend, I had no other urge but to openly ask people to really love me. I wanted to open my heart to all of me, even the ugly shit, and in order to open it, I would need to bathe it in love; love from real people who might really love me. 

2.

Be a disappointment to someone you care about. Like a real selfish piece of shit. Be honest with yourself about why you made the decision (rational or irrational) to be shitty. Process privately. Tell this person you're sorry and really mean it. Acknowledge your shittiness. Listen to why they're disappointed. Let them be angry. Don't make excuses but ask how to repair. Repair.  

I have become quite expert at avoiding being a disappointment. There are a bunch of simple ways to do this: spend a lot of time alone, traveling, in foreign cities, with strangers. Tell people up front what you’re capable of (the “no-surprise approach”), be supremely pleasant, pliable and amenable, leave parties and events early, constantly mirror people and their feelings and make them feel heard, drench people in compliments and notice things about them no one else notices, leave every person feeling that they’ve either been very, very seen, or very, very impressed. 

Around my birthday each year, this avoidant tendency becomes exaggerated because involving other people in plans to celebrate my life is awkward. I grapple with the duality of this specific type of disappointment: first, the humiliation of being single on your birthday and having to invite people to do things they'll feel obligated to do because it's your "special day". And then having to initiate all the plans and arrangements yourself. This year, I once again hesitated to reach out but finally gave in and texted a girlfriend I made this summer, a woman I really love and trust who also happens to be my neighbour (double friend bonus). She said she’d love to host me and would get a cake. She’s the type of friend who shows up and does the hard stuff even when she’s tired: shares meals, talks, listens to music, reads poetry. Someone whose opinion I respect a lot. Someone I love. 

So how did I manage to NOT avoid being a disappointment this year? I showed up to her house late and stoned, unable to carry on a decent conversation, full of self-loathing, paranoid, in a weird manic state, and left early before we could even cut the cake. I trembled in my bed for a few hours then managed to have a bath. I couldn’t sleep so I descended down an Instagram wormhole before finally drifting off, still buzzing from asking for affection on my birthday, opening up the biggest, ugliest wound and witnessing as many people put real love on it. 

The wound was salved but still pulsing like a paper cut. I fell asleep. 

The next day, my friend told me she was really hurt and embarrassed. I apologized and asked how to repair it. She asked for space. Disappointment is intimate af because it means someone cares enough about your shitty self to be disappointed in it. It means someone actually had expectations for you and it may even mean their expectations of you were very good and will help you be a better person. 

If I want intimacy, then I must be willing to sometimes be a disappointment and let someone see all of me. It also means that I must open myself to real love, and return that love to the people I choose to have in my life in the ways that they need to be loved, honouring the gestures that matter to them. 

3.

Avoid relationships with people who don't like to hurt you. These include people who run at the first sign of making you unhappy, hurt, disappointed, and sad. An example of dialogue, held say yesterday, between a person who wants intimacy (love addict) and another who doesn't (object of obsession): 

Addict: "I'm sorry, I know I react in extreme ways toward you, but I'm hurt by how you treat me." 

Object: "Don't be sorry. You can react in whatever ways you want, you can be whoever you want—intense, expressive, needy, it's YOU, be you, really, you’re perfect, but I can't stand to make you feel pain." 

Addict: "But..." 

Object: "Please don't use me to be hard on yourself." 

Addict: "Maybe that's what I'm doing. Being hard on myself."

Object: "Yeah! So stop doing that! You’re perfect!" 

Addict: "Okay, yeah, thanks, it's my fault, I'll stop doing that." 

If you share real parts of yourself with another person, then they definitely have the potential to hurt you. Because the minute you open up and show someone your insides, you show them your wounds. When wounds are exposed, and touched, they hurt. When you love someone, you show up for the hard things, the wounds, the discomfort, the pain, and you work to heal them. 

4. 

Know your imperfections intimately and love them anyway. I am definitely not perfect. But maybe I’m finally willing to love and be loved. 

follow the pain

I carried on an emotional affair for most of last year. An "emotional" affair is actually a fairly significant improvement from the two physical affairs I had in years previous. But what is "an emotional affair"? It's daily or weekly (or hourly) intimate contact with someone who already has a partner, carried on in secret. It creates deep attachments and a near constant state of anxiety. It's a hidden place of shared wishes, dreams, fantasies, and expressions.

So, while this was going on, I started to build and develop a new website-concept called loveaddict.ca (.com was $$) because I'd cycled through these types of relationships so many fucking times that I thought I could totally corner the market on the love addiction thing (I never attended recovery meetings for it, or received a clinical diagnosis—this is purely self-diagnosis). I read many books on the subject, including the whole Harville Hendrix roster after I heard Alanis and Oprah discussing them on SuperSoul Sunday. After Alanis tells Oprah she's a love addict, Oprah asks what that is and Alanis sort of rambles on in her wonderful artist-intellectual guru fashion, saying: 

"...the withdrawal from love addiction is harrowing, it’s harrowing, it’s probably the worst pain that I have felt in my life…so treating a human being as object focus as long as that person isn’t interested, or if they’re really interested in me, I would tweak it so they would be horrified and run, then it was game on. Of course ‘love’ would be in quotes… it’s obsession and fear."  

Today, Heather Havrilesky in the Dear Polly column had a truly great definition of emotional obsession: "This is how obsessions work: We keep denying that we feel what we feel, but something inside of us gets more and more invested in exactly what we’re NOT supposed to care about. 'Caring about this makes you weak!' our culture tells us, and we repeat it to ourselves until it’s THE ONLY THING WE CARE ABOUT."

Yes, until we get ADDICTED to only caring about that thing (or that man). Until I started meditating every day, I wasn't able to really cool those obsessive thought patterns and though I could have returned to 12-step (SLAA, Al Anon, etc) or increased my therapy, at some point last year I figured out that my only way through (not out) was into the motherfucking storm of desire, the centrifugal point of the hellish feelings as they arose. This, my friends, is not considered following your bliss (even though it does get heady and manic in parts) but following your pain. And it turns out that there might just be bliss along the way. 

If I were to narrow this "follow the pain" theory down to a therapeutic technique, it would entail willingly having those affairs and getting into those sticky, painful relationships where the other person hits every single obsession-inducing button then actively acknowledging the messages that appear on-screen like Pop-Up Videos: repetitive thoughts, keywords or phrases (some of mine are "unavailable", "shame", "I'm sorry", "I love you") and tracing them back to the story of how you grew up all the while being immeasurably forgiving and compassionate about the whole messy process. I think one of the most important parts is allowing ALL the feelings to surface no matter how humiliating or unbearable, and giving the little beasts their due. The little beasts are my little beasts and they have a lot to say. 

Oprah picks that back up, "I remember doing a show about this years ago…so this idea, many women, and men, don’t recognize [love addiction]…it’s easier to see you’re a sex addict, but love addiction, how did you figure that out?” 

“I figured it out by the excruciating pain of the pattern of dissolving the same relationship over and over again with many people. And the deep pain. [...]”  

Oh Alanis, honey, I feel your pain. A simple illustration: In the early fall, I was debating relocating to Toronto because I was feeling restless and unsatisfied at having, once again, woken up to find I'd pushed my life and career into a lonely corner. I told the object of my obsession I was moving and I'd miss him. He replied that he'd miss me too, but we'd definitely keep in touch. I spiralled the fuck out, obsessing over him, crying for days on end, and finally, writhing in painful ecstasy, wrote and then mailed a perfumed handwritten letter to his office. YES I DID!! And this was following weeks of relative calm. 

So, why didn't I start the loveaddict.ca site and make myself the reigning expert on the subject? Because at some point I didn't want to be the love addict anymore. In October, I started meditating every day and following "flow" techniques, digging deep into how the brain works, voraciously reading spiritual books ("Seat of the Soul", "The Return to Love", "The Power of Now", "The Untethered Soul") and cultivating a deep relationship with my inner being and The All (as Oprah calls "God")—real soft, cozy, loving techniques to companion the visceral pain of addiction.

I ended the affair at the end of November. Some space freed up, but it was still awful, icky and uncomfortable. I want to say that my heart is really opening and healing and all that nice shit, but I won't know until I meet the next heartbreaker. And what I know for sure is that I have to follow the big feelings. If I meet someone and instantly bond to them, growth is close behind.  

I don't know if I love that man, but after I ceased contact, I found there were more big feelings left to feel: I invited his magnificent beauty to fill up the room and his intellect to deeply move me and his capacity to care to make my heart ache. I silently basked in my appreciation of him for a day then set him free. 

i'm sorry

I'm sorry to all the men I wrote long, rambling, emotional messages to. I'm actually sorry! Not that any of them are going to read this (lol) but I'm sorry. Like, who wants to get correspondence from a person you don't care about, or can't care about? No one. I realize this because when men who like me write me long messages, or talk about dating in real terms before anything real has transpired between us, I'm completely turned off. This kind of affection is all projection and who wants to be a white screen for someone's crazy movie? Not most healthy people.

Thing is, I've only wanted to write long, rambling, emotional messages to men who didn't like me! How embarrassing, right? But true. I'd get really juiced up and high and be practically exploding with feeling at the slightest hint of disinterest. Oh, wait...you DON'T like me? Or, better, you CAN'T? You're completely unavailable? PERFECT. 

I'm trying to figure out how to open my heart because when your heart is open and healing, you don't want to write long, rambling, emotional messages to people unable to receive them. I'm trying to figure out how to heal my mind because when you have mindful awareness, you don't want to write long, rambling, emotional messages to people unable to receive them. I'm trying to align my body with my heart and mind because when your body is aligned with your heart and mind, you're something akin to "whole" and you don't want to launch long, rambling, emotional fragmentations at strangers. 

Here's something else: I love every word I ever wrote to them. Deep, desperate truths about the inner workings of my heart, mind, and body were encapsulated in every, single rambling thing I ever wrote. And perhaps because I'm an obsessive writer type, I'd read those messages over and over to understand myself and catch some kind of saving grace swirling around like a leaf in the wind. 

A few weeks ago, before the holidays, I encountered a gorgeous, talented young artist and we shared an impromptu end-of-evening stroll. I was excited by his beauty, youth and talent, and by our gentle chemistry. As we walked under the silent dome of snow coloured warm tangerine by the street lights, I expressed my amazement at the romance of winter. He told me to say it out loud, to really scream out my joy and so I did: I yelled out my love for the snow. Later that night when I got home, he sent a friendly message to thank me. This was his first mistake—he should have left romance under the dome because I got high on his friendliness and launched fragments in his direction, even writing: "I find intimacy excruciating." 

I'm often advised to be measured with men so my ebullience doesn't overwhelm them, but when I'm inspired by someone's beauty, it's impossible not to show it. Some part of me knows that if I'm drawn to him, he must not be available, or well-suited to me, and soon the moment will be over and ruined by my addiction to loneliness and so I have to get it all out at once. Every moment of love is just like this one with the gorgeous, young artist: full, punctuated with desire, bursting with feeling and colour and warmth and most importantly, love is ephemeral—so ephemeral that love is barely a memory.

I can only hold love long enough to write it and then it's gone, melted on my chest like a snowflake. 

Maybe that's not so bad, that I went through life like that. Loving someone for a moment of pure ecstasy, launching feelings in their direction, then finally coming home to a state of wholeness, and picking up the petals, those fragments, and laying them on my heart like second skins, and picking up the diamond chips, those tiny, little letters, and fixing them onto my mind like scales, and picking up the snowflakes, those trillions of snowflakes, and warming them on my body to wash myself of myself. 

blush

Something magic happened today. My colleague and I went the food court to eat a Big Mac because we needed to do some research for a brief. (Yes, seriously!) After he and I parted ways, I turned up a side street to return to work when I spotted a tall man unlocking his bike. He was long and slim and had nice green eyes (I think) and he seemed to be looking at me too. I was wearing a lot of beaded necklaces and giant, beaded earrings I bought from the Senegalese man in Peel station—the outfit was really pulled together with beaded heels. Anyway, he continued to coyly walk his bike alongside me and I returned a few glances.

I crossed the intersection and so did he. I saw in the reflection of an office window that he was locking his bike up again and I continued to walk up the street not looking back, feeling a little shy, and also strong, telling myself that if he was really pursuing me, he could continue to pursue and I would continue to strut. I was at an intersection when he caught up to me and said, "Sorry, do I know you from somewhere?"

I laughed so hard, "No, I don't think so."

He nervously fidgeted, "Yeah lamest line ever but um, yeah, you're HOT..." and I blushed. I BLUSHED. I can't believe I blushed. I don't think I've ever blushed in that way. I felt it. I felt my own shyness and quietness and tenderness rising up and showing itself on my cheeks. This was not a shame blush but a shy blush. 

"...man I sound like I'm 16, which I'm not! I'm 31 actually and, well, do you think we could maybe get a coffee sometime? Or a drink or something?" 

I was laughing, he was shaking. 

"Ummmm..." 

"Are you like married or have a boyfriend?" 

"No, I'm single."

"Cool! Cool me, too, I'm single," he shows me his naked left ring finger. 

"Cool." I'm smiling and covering my mouth (this is weird habit I've kept maybe because I'm afraid of the power of my own voice and the loudness of my laugh and also because I had braces in late puberty). 

"My name is Carmen." 

"Chris." We shake hands. I give him my number and see how his hands are trembling. I'm smiling a lot. 

"Thanks for being brave." 

"I almost wasn't."

Then we part ways and I'm amazed that maybe, maybe I'm finally beginning to be available. 

how to be vulnerable

Many moons ago, at last call, I left a bar on St. Laurent with a male friend because he offered to give me a ride home. This friend had spent most of the evening ignoring me, but upon seeing me out on the street alone in -30 looking for a cab, called me over to his car, inviting me in. At this moment in my life, I would have considered that a benevolent enough favour to offer the sanctity of my body in return, so as soon as we got in the car, I offered him a blow-job. I was very drunk but that’s relative because I was never lightly drunk or simply drunk, I was always pushed to the furthest edge of drunkenness, a state where I could fully injure myself in the ways I longed to all day, every day, but with the shame that drove that desire to self-injure, numbed and frozen.  

We eventually rolled to a slow stop on a side street a few blocks from where we both lived. It was the dead of winter; the streets were barren and icy; silent trees with pure white limbs loomed over our car sex like immobile witnesses. Afterward, I shifted back into the passenger seat and pulled my long, black wool coat over my body like a blanket as he rolled down the windows a crack and offered me a cigarette. We smoked in silence listening to Nick Drake or some other moody melodic music he had on CD. I started to talk about my recent separation from my then-husband and feeling like a beach at low tide, shame momentarily washed away by sex and exposition, the stillest, oldest water sunken deep into the sand rose up and I started to cry. Once the feeling entered my body, and perhaps because this sadness was witnessed, I sobbed uncontrollably. He nervously turned the music down and blasted the heat as I pulled my t-shirt from the floor to cover my face. I pulled myself together and he drove me home. 

About a year after this, we went for dinner and spoke about that night. He said, “That was so intense. You were so raw, so vulnerable.” I received this as a compliment. I had been vulnerable but only in the naked exposition of feeling. Vulnerability as I'm beginning to understand it isn't drunk and numb, it's sober and alive. Now I see that momentary opening as a sharp pin prick on a solar system of vulnerability, a distant edge of feeling in the night sky. The reclamation of my own mind teaches me so much about deeper acts of vulnerability first through immense compassion and then through really loving someone else. Vulnerability is showing up to that person wounded, flawed, exposed, and ugly, and still asking to be loved in return. Pushing through the overwhelming impulse to hide and cache myself away is the kind of pushy, messy, bloody vulnerable I’m slowly moving towards these days. 

Writing this now is an act of vulnerability but it, too, is sheltered by the page, warmed and blanketed by the screen and by time. There are so many walls between us and feeling: our massive steel structures, our concrete floors, our rows of plastic goods, our drugs and our blinding lights convince us to retreat to the ever-protected and revered individual self; the market and its nasty Kings block, divert, stuff noise between us and the sticky, mucus-filled depth of our infinitely complicated souls. Under many more moons, I will try to stay in the mud. 
 

not you men

It’s not you men. It’s the space between us that I use to make words. Those two magnets held by a strong, bowed wire is the perfect metaphor: I never, ever want us to touch because my unconscious says men are selfish, irresponsible, and unsafe. 
Safety from all of you has been my muse, protection my raw material. I’m not addicted to “love”, it’s actually the inverse, I’m “addicted” to distance and space. I set everyone up to run away. My unconscious believes it’s protecting me from men because the first man of my life is not capable of loving and protecting me. He’s not safe or responsible. And over the years distance blossomed into many different forms; I took myself around the world; I never let anyone get too close; I made beautiful words with all that space and protection; I moulded it; I reformed loneliness. 

I’m reclaiming the space now. I'm moving into it. 
 

you men

Tomorrow evening I’m going to do a hypnotherapy session to find out what messages I received as a child that drive me to seek unavailable men. I’m pretty excited to get in there. More than any of the other stories that form the substance of my unconscious, this is the one that wants to be heard, taking its place as the singular story driving my creation. My unconscious wants to squeeze all my juice, everything, even tasteless pulp, from this story. I want all of life to emerge from this story. So, what’s left of me after the men?

“Dear Men,

You men are my instruments. You're the bodies between my thoughts, hopes, desires and ----------words. But because of this new feminist era, and how much you've been worshipped for centuries, I've fatigued of many of you. You gay men and your obsessions with yourselves and other men, the way you can consume and collect each other with unceasing appetites, and perhaps because of how you gay men wanted to collect me, too, in a long line of little toys, a doll amongst muscled plastic soldiers, I tired of worshipping all you men, but the more I repossess myself, the less you men become my instruments, your bodies my violins, piano keys, even racquets, singing out my poems, thick plastic strands between desire and rippling meadows of universe.

I don't want to talk about you men too much—my materials, my obsessions—most of you don't like to be my material anyway, you run from my pen, from my hands, "just a bum" one of you claimed. Maybe you run from being reduced to my strands of wolfish hair streaked with worried grey, my unruly soldiers, my protruding bellies from summer beer, my wildly shy eyes that never settle on one view too long in case it engulfs you. How I love you men. My strings, my chords, my clay, my sticks, my fountains, my fields, my conductors, my charge.

(I am the the water)

You men, I don't like it when you cover my eyes, bend my bow, conduct too much and eclipse my body, pull me away from poems becoming difficult and dense with form and personality. I like us to stay two magnets held opposite each other by a thick bowed wire, pulled toward one another with the force of God itself... but never touching. Between us, in the nothingness, time and space bend toward creation, all life is formed there, we eternally remain in the moment before the Big Bang. I am more than you men. I am more. I must be. I'm the creator.”

That is the type of thing that my mind writes on an idle Sunday afternoon staring out at the prairie sky. Have you ever seen that kind of sky before? It’s infinite. Have you ever felt addicted before? Like if you just got the thing, the taste, the fusion, the union, you'd be complete? Beyond the men, the beyond the drive to use them as instruments, beyond the music I make with their essence, my unconscious is also made of that infinite. My unconscious was formed on land that never stops trying to kiss the sky; ssshh listen to soft fingers of long, gingerly grasses rustling out birds to greet the blue believing just over the next hill is a meeting, a kiss, earth to earth, ocean to ocean, dust to dust.

(I am the water)

friends like these

I’m really glad I didn’t have sex with Hotman. We rolled around on my bed and made out a bit, but didn’t sleep together. If Hotman is my mirror, and I believe every person we’re attracted to reflects back aspects of ourselves we need to see (and often don’t like to see), then what I felt between Hotman and I was almost asexual in nature – a performance of sexual attraction rather than the real thing. I know this because I was informed of his un-date-ability before I even knew he was in love with his very own unavailable woman. Clearly my unconscious has its own agenda and part of why I pushed myself on him came from the central drive to “be” with someone who wasn’t open to be with anyone. Maybe Hotman and I simply stood before one another to be seen for a moment then continue down our separate paths. This is the essence of why I continue dating despite its hurtful messiness: to see someone, and be seen in return, in the hopes that the next mirror will be the good one, the right one, the one. 

A few days ago, Hotman texted me about what I’d written about us. Surprisingly, he didn’t have much to say about how I had described him or our time together, but did worry about the transparency of the story details and the chance that his married girlfriend would somehow find out. I admittedly love the irony of a cheating woman finding out that her lover is "cheating" on her, but what I love even more about our exchanges is that we’re actually having them. I haven’t cut myself off from Hotman or become angry at him, nor him at me. I haven’t rejected him, my usual MO when things don’t work out. I’d even venture to say that Hotman and I are kind of, like, friends. 

__

When I was 24, I carried a flame for a hot boy. Sandro was a cool musician who played at cool shows and had a cool style. He was brooding and difficult in the way most 20-something artist dudes are, writing dark but hopeful lyrics into his black notebooks, and impressing insecure 20-something chicks like me with his encyclopedic musical knowledge. I met him during a summer in Edmonton between long stints in France and Japan. I was going out a lot to “shows”, code for club nights featuring visiting DJs. These shows always had a contingent of hot, cool people but also tribal ravers with hula hoops and bar regulars and everything in between. A sense of togetherness and beauty was woven into these nights and though the drugs helped induce that sensation, nothing came close to the high of sharing giant swells of emotion a DJ washed over a crowd in chorus, bodies rising and falling unselfconsciously, shoulders shrugging, heads bobbing, hips twisting, everyone gyrating and sweating, even those Alberta men with their steam tickets, leaving the dark basements for hardhats and shit talk, lost themselves in the heat. 

Sandro often performed as an opener at these shows and along with all the other girls in the room, I’d stare up at him in awe, proud to know that he was my friend and that we’d be coming down together at sunrise. Sandro had a pretty musician girlfriend so we were just friends at the beginning of the summer, but months later, just days before I left for Japan, they broke up and we hooked up. I left for Japan carrying a giant, burning flame for him, writing letters and sending music and writing brooding but hopeful poems into my own notebooks. My first six months in Japan were wholly surreal so my feelings were amplified by the need to fixate on something real back home. When I came back to visit, I lavished him with specially chosen gifts, hoping he shared my romantic feelings. But sitting in that Boston Pizza booth drinking fountain Diet Coke, I could tell right away that he hadn’t kept the same flame burning for me. 

“Yeah, um, Laura and I are back together,” he said after I’d proudly handed over and explained each of the gifts. My stomach turned and my face got really hot. I was humiliated but I’d also had a hunch that it was one-sided because this was typically the case with every man I liked a little too much. He was gracious but noticeably guilty and we said an awkward goodbye. In the years following the Japanese gift debacle, we’d periodically write to each other. He went on to tour the world and open for huge musical acts and last year, when he was in Montreal with his band, he invited me to come watch. Seeing him on stage brought back a flood of old feelings, both lustful and painful, and I was surprised how my body remembered. Our conversation after the show was revelatory because we had both grown and changed so much. He was just as cool and hot as I remembered, but he’d also become more sensitive and disciplined and kind. When I told him about getting sober, he voiced how he’d been concerned about me during a particularly drug- and alcohol-fuelled period when our paths briefly crossed. To this day, he’s the only person from my past alcoholic past that voiced concern about it. That meant a lot to me, so much so that I cried when he said it. 
About a month after we saw each other, we were texting about the infamous Japanese gift incident and he asked if he could call me. 
“Carmen, I’m really sorry about what happened. I wasn’t clear with you and I’ve realized in the years since that what I did to you was really wrong. I’m sorry. I hope you can forgive me.” I felt a deep, full unlifting of something that had been lodged in my body, not just from Sandro, but from a long trail of men. I had no idea how much a “sorry” would unburden the residual shame of rejection.

He lives across the country but in the last year, Sandro and I have corresponded a lot by text and over the phone. This is really special to me because I’ve cut off so many men from my past and have missed the benefits of long-term friendship with people who know me intimately through different phases of life. Our conversations are interesting portals into our shared past, our present romantic realities (getting a guy’s perspective on dating is endlessly fascinating), and also our hopeful futures.  

Today, the mirror that Sandro offers is one of self-awareness, sensitivity, and even love. He is my friend.