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. 

i just wanted him to like me

I have used sex to get love. And I've used sex to get sex. I've used sex to feel hot. I've used sex to feel good, to feel powerful. I've used sex to get care and affection. I've used sex for touch. I've used sex because I really just wanted him to like me.

I always believed that I was broken for lacking the delicious inner and outer boundaries espoused by fierce girlfriends and strong women in French films who kept sex at bay so men could pursue it, and weak for lacking the strength required to withhold the need to be loved. I longed to be aloof and blasé about a man's affections—some people call this "game" but to me, withholding was the ultimate in female agency and French af. 

objectifying the hell out of myself 

Hookup culture and the ease with which sex could be accessed kind of fucked up my lifelong dream of eventually making a man work for it! At some point in the early 00s, it seemed like he'd never have to, so even when I'd state up front that I wanted more than sex, I'd resort to using sex for love anyway (then feel disappointed and empty when I could tell that our sex was purely transactional). I say this knowing that I didn't always end up liking the guy, and truthfully more often than not, 99% of the men I dated via apps or bar hookups turned out to be dudes I'd never be able to fall in love with—and isn't that the real fear of men? don't they protect their simplistic natures in the face of our depth and beauty? aren't they rebelling against their mother's wombs, unconsciously railing against separation from women in ways that must feel interminably lonely? Or is that just what I tell myself in the face of rejection?  

AND YET, I never stopped wanting love and affection, (even when I fucked their brains out and intimidated the hell out of them) because I craved love with all my being. Owning and voicing those desires, both for love and for sex, is the greatest source of my agency today. I am not a victim of my beauty, or my sex, or my desire for love. Now when I say I want more, I own it, even if the guy isn't able to provide it. I feel empowered knowing what I want even as I often feel lonely and frustrated in search of it. 

My version of feminism is the one where women are messy, sexy, responsible, empowered, and whatever else they fucking want to be and where sex isn't relegated to a place of weakness and dependency (even as I admit my own weakness and dependency) because one of my greatest sources of power is my sexual freedom and agency in choosing and wanting it. And still, I'll admit that, with some exceptions, I still really hoped he would like me.    

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. 
 

all figured out

As we’re eating, I moan satisfaction at the food. 
“You make a lot of noise,” Hotman remarks. 
“Do I? Weird I hadn’t noticed that.” 
The way he mimics my mannerisms is mean like a mean girl, like the hottest, coolest bitch at the party who gives herself the authority to rank and file the clothes, bodies, and mannerisms of anyone who approaches. Hotman’s made several of these types comments during our afternoon together and I become self-conscious. When I’m anxious like that around a man, I either clam up or go into seduction mode. Seduction comes out in many ways, but its purpose is to erase bad feelings and encourage both parties to think only of sex; sex being the great anxiety neutralizer, of course. Not long after dinner, Hotman lays out on the couch and reads a magazine and I sit reading in a chair opposite him. All I want is a man who I enjoy reading with (and looking at) and Hotman is fully embodying my fantasy. Half an hour into reading, I yawn and suggest a nap in bed. 
“Uh oh, a ‘nap’ she says,” he says making air quotes. He refers to me in 3rd person a lot, much like he does with himself, and honestly it’s weird. Then again I also a habit of making people into characters for stories. Everything about Hotman is just way too close to home. Or maybe Hotman is juuuust right. 

__

Years ago at a party, after several vodka shots and glasses of Champagne, I told a psychoanalyst at the party that I write a lot of long emails. She cringed and said, “Ugh god I hate long emails. People who write long emails and texts are control freaks.” I remember feeling resentful when she said it because writing and sending long emails and texts was almost my passion! I’d write to men I was obsessed with to feel like I was on top of the issue at hand and HAD IT ALL FIGURED OUT. I’ll figure you out in poem, essay, and prose. I’ll manage my feelings in emojis, clever one-liners, and walls and walls and walls of fucking texts.

__

After dropping Hotman off at the metro that night, my first instinctual thought about our day together is: he’s bad. Not a bad person, but bad for me. But then my brain works hard against my instincts and begins building a case for his worthiness and goodness. It does this for two days straight, making him the real hero of my life, letting him move into my apartment, the strong bricks softening into porous mud. I write him a long poem, and more long texts wondering where he is, what he's feeling. Eventually he responds: 

"Carmen, I'm at the same place I was a week ago: tired, overworked and hiding it. I'm in love with someone I can't be with, who I'm worried about, who doesn't feel like herself these days. If I've ever felt empty, it’s now. I barely have energy for myself right now, so no, I don’t have much to offer you. I'm choosing to take care of myself before anyone else.

That is probably what you’re talking about when you question my enthusiasm. I'm not meeting you where you are. But I just can't. You are special, intriguing, talented and a lot of things I don’t know yet, but it feels now the intensity you need is not one I can provide. Am I wrong ? I like our times together as well, but I need to hide. I’ve been trying to hide for a while actually." 

__

He presses his empty weight onto my body with his empty superhero strength and I flatten out like a flat female character.   
 

another word for control

“I don’t know why my friends care about my life choices – just because I’m not married with kids or obsessed with my career, like I have a different kind of life.” 
“Maybe it’s less about judging your life and more that they want you to be happy. Are you happy?” 
“I work too much and I’m not good at saying ‘no’…to anyone,” Hotman laughs his loud, vivacious laugh, “well, actually I’m getting better at this, I’ve been hiding away more. But happy? No, not really.” 
Hotman is heavy. The weight is more than the big superhero suit and all the different characters and the narcissistic friends and the married girlfriend and the being overworked, it’s the visceral g-force of circling these issues without a sense of resolution and a willingness to change. 

Change is really fucking hard. 

I’d anticipated talking to Hotman about our unavailable interests but now that we’re hanging out and cuddling, I don’t really want to tell him the truth about the married man who holds that place in my own life and connect with him through pain. Instead, I want to be soft and accommodating and warm. Though given what I already know about him, and about myself, being soft is the wrong move. I should resist my affections, be glassy and difficult, observe, and then give myself the option to decide, but because of something he said on Sunday night, I’ve already concluded that Hotman and I are good together. 
That night, I explained my love conundrum: “I need to be alone a lot and it’s weird because I’ll catch myself having like, moments of real loneliness, but then I’m so happy when I’m alone and safe in my own world…” 
“’Safe’ can be another word for control.” 
“Sure, right, and I get that I protect myself, but my time alone is also the source of my creativity, or at least it’s the nest. I feel very protective of it and I haven’t yet experienced intimacy with someone where that part of me is seen and understood but not fucked with.”
He chuckles and eats a spoon of ice cream, “I think only Aquarians get other Aquarians. We spend a lot of time in space.” 
“Yeah I guess wow. I’ve never really met any other Aquarians, or I haven’t dated any that’s for sure.” 
“I’m a rising Leo so that’s where all the vanity comes from,” he moves his hand through his hair and poses for a second.  
“I fucking love talking about astrological signs even it’s anti-intellectual or whatever, I love it. I’m a Cancer moon so I love making a home and like, loving people into submission, but then if you hurt me, I’ll pull deep into my shell.”
“That sounds about right.” 
“This is the conundrum in love – wanting the safe, warm, loving home with another person and also the safe, warm, loving home with myself. I want both.” 
“I’m right with you on that. That’s the dream.” 
Hotman puts his right arm around me and I soften into his body, lifting my legs up onto the bench and laying back as he smells my hair and kisses the top of my head.
We’ve talked about authors we love, but he doesn’t yet know what kind of writer I am and I’m eager to share. “Can I read you my story?” I ask.
“Ahh yes, of course the writer comes with her stories. I’d be honoured.”  

brick walls

Allow me to zoom out for a moment in the interest of understanding emotional unavailability. I live in Montreal which is a predominantly French-speaking, functionally bilingual city. If you want to speak French or English (or other languages depending on neighborhood), you’ll likely be understood. In many moments over the last seven years, especially during elections, it's felt hostile and isolating to be non-Québécois but at the same time, because of cheap rent, it’s the kind of city where you can deliberately hide away and never grow up. Technically all cities are “choose your own adventures” where we can integrate or isolate as much we choose, but this is particularly true for Montreal as an English-speaking person. My story with MTL goes back 15 years when I came as an Albertan summer student and decided I’d live here when I was grown up. However, at 21, my main goal in life was to travel and live in foreign countries, essentially be a foreigner and Montreal was a place to be foreign while living at home. Foreigner = outsider. Foreigner = separate. 

Consider my living in Montreal as a brick in the wall. 

I’ve lived in five different Montreal neighborhoods and along with each new phase of my experience, have made new friendship circles. That is to say I’ve met a lot of people and have even become very close with some of them, but at some point, have retreated in the interest of protecting myself from those same people. 

Consider the changing nature of my friend groups another brick in the wall. 

If there’s such a thing as a dating pool that’s limited to one metropolitan area, I can confidently say I’ve lapped out in Montreal. It’s a really strange and awkward feeling when, after going off dating apps for many months at a time, I periodically download Tinder or Bumble only to see many of the same men who were there the last time I logged on, some for years. The forever-singles. The brokens. The alones. The unavailables? Here are some of the ways that I’ve made myself unavailable in love: 
-    I talk too much and I don’t mean topically, or intellectually, but in the way that I create this giant cloud of “I” around me replete with smart answers about who I am and where I’ve been. You're going to enter my story, mine. 
-    I use sex as a weapon and seduction has been my killer. 
-    I have chosen to share my inner emotional world with men who were not interested in it longterm: married men, gay men. I have never made myself available to a man who was genuinely interested in me as a person. I have, of course, met men who were interested in me but I haven’t been attracted to them.

Consider my dating choices as many more bricks in the wall. 

After a series of moves, I finally landed in the southwest neighborhood of St. Henri about a year ago. I live across from a beautiful park with a fountain and an outdoor public pool which I’ve swam in a few times this summer. The Lachine Canal is a block from my doorstep and some of the best bars and restaurants in the city are right around the corner. I ride my bike to and from work every day and in winter months, take a 15-minute metro ride to work. 

But the best part of my new St. Henri life is my apartment. A brick wall runs its entire south side. I’ve arranged my books along this long wall along with some of my favourite prints by Hantaï, Miró. I’ve filled the sunny front room with plants and mid-century furniture. Most of the pieces I’ve accumulated in my seven years in Montreal make this apartment a perfect mix of contemporary and vintage. It’s my dream apartment. I self-indulge like crazy in here: lounge, admire my beautiful things, dance around, drink expensive tea, wear nice clothes and shoes, take photographs of myself, and take long baths with beautiful oils. Heaven. 

Consider the bricks in my apartment as the most beautiful, most exquisite of them all. 

__

Hotman arrives at my door looking dapper and humid from the heat. He loves my place. Loves it. Asks me how I got it, how long I’ve lived here. He’s immensely charmed by all the books and prints and furniture and plants. He can’t get over it. 
“God it just makes me want to move into my own place so bad,” he says. Hotman lives with a few roommates because he’s traveled a lot of over the years and has remained unsettled by choice. 
He and I have agreed over text that we’ll be “friends” but now he’s here in front of me and I feel our mutual attraction and want to immediately throw the friend boundary out the window. I want to touch and feel close to him. We take the blanket out to the park and lay down and I immediately tackle him. 
“Woah now, what about being ‘friends’?” 
“Yeah, I know but like friends can cuddle, right?” 
“Joy, you’re trouble.”
“No I’m not!” 
I am though -- I have trouble keeping my own promises. I notice that Hotman refers to himself in 3rd person sometimes and frets about these different characters he embodies. 
“You might not like today’s version of me. The version you met last Friday was ‘dapper’ me, then last Sunday it was ‘host’ me, but today I’m just 'tired' me.” He makes a different sound effect for each version. 
“To be honest, I’m less interested in ‘dapper’ you, but I get why you’ve constructed that personae, how it serves you in your career -- everybody wants a handsome, charming man nearby.”
I also notice that he’s teasing me a lot more than he did on Sunday night and some of it stings, but maybe he’s just tired. After we’ve been cuddling for an hour, he complains of having a headache and I tell him to lay on my lap so I can massage his neck and head. I stroke his temples, massage his perfect, meaty earlobes, examine the faint freckles on his perfect, tanned skin. We look like we might be in love on that white blanket just a few meters from the fountain. Being around his beauty is intoxicating and makes me want to be beautiful, too. Beautiful enough. I realize that this is the thing with beauty: it so quickly draws you out to a state of observation and cuts you off from being present. Yet I'm stroking his hair and rubbing his neck knowing this will only last today. Eventually we go get ice cream and pique the interest of the guy who works there and always sees me come in alone. We spoon up the ice cream under the hot sun, our faces are very close but not touching. We admire a sweet and cherubic little girl playing nearby. Earlier in the day, I'd gone to the market to get groceries and bought two steaks just in case he wanted to keep hanging out for dinner. We head back to my place and he swoons over my apartment again. 

“Love the brick here, love it, love it, love it.”

"Do you want to stay? I've got steaks to cook."

"Yeah, sure I'll cook the steaks, you do the rest."

We quietly make the dinner together listening to music. At one point he turns to me and says, "We're a good match." 

empaths

“I’m a true empath,” Hotman tells me while we’re sitting at the fountain. I hear this a lot lately from my friends. Maybe I know a lot of Indigo children, artists, and empaths, or maybe this is what we say when we feel a lot of things, and especially when we’re porous and spongy to the world, to others.

“I don’t know if I’m an empath, but I know I acted like a container for other people’s stuff, shit that wasn’t mine, until I couldn’t do it because there was no room for me. But I did that to myself, and try not to do it anymore…”

“I have a lot of narcissists in my life, people who need a lot of attention and validation and I get tired. Really tired, I’m kind of tired all the time.”

I put down my bowl of ice cream and stand in front of him. I want to raise his arms up so I can take off his heavy suit with my own hands, peel the armour off. I want to be the superman-sized person he can sit on in that moment, a deep enough bassinet to hold all his discomfort and fatigue, a journal with a locket that he can write all his secrets inside. I put my hands through his beautiful, shiny, black mane and massage the back of his neck. He purrs and leans into me. His body is like mine, pliable and warm and full of love it’s never fully given over.

__

Hotman and I agree to see a movie but he flakes. I text him: “I’m not really the kind of woman who takes rain cheques, but I’ll make an exception this one time.” He’s very grateful, even calling me “Joy”, promising to text the next day to reschedule. I really want to be light and fun and totally chill except I’m full of anxiety and starting to wish I’d never met him. Still, I'm doing my best impression of a woman who stands still and waits for the hunter to hunt.

When I don’t hear from him the next day, my head starts to creak. To people around me, there's nothing sounding out from inside my skull, but I can hear it moaning and creaking from spinning really fast; whirring; sorting through hundreds of devastating scenarios and things I’ve said or written. It's a deep and penetrating ache, one that breaks through silence with blunt force; it wants relief; it wants a drink, a drug, a text. Just one word. One. It wants love, a kiss, a hug; it wants meaning; it wants God and beauty and chocolate cake.

The ache is a million dandelion puffs in a windless field. 

I re-read his text like a hundred times as I walk myself to the Aesop store to drop cash on really nice skin products I can’t afford, but hey, I don’t text. And just as I'm almost getting home to make myself dinner and put on a mud mask, a gentle summer breeze rushes through my hair and the last of the anxious waves passes and the sun is shining and I'm back to normal, back to myself, he texts:

Sorry for my lateness, shitty day. Tmw I have a brunch at noon in old Montreal, but my afternoon is open if ever you are free and fancy doing sum'thin'. Hope your week was decent. xx

who's the hottest of them all?

I can’t sleep after the superhero antics and ice cream and kisses. I toss and turn in bed and fight with my brain for calm doing my best to let it settle. The next morning, my co-worker Jean Hugo, AKA my work husband, asks me how it went and I’m wall to wall smile.

“Soooo what did you do? You two looked HOT together on Friday.”

“He made dinner and we walked to the fountain and made out and I biked home in the pouring rain…best date.”

He immediately starts gaming with me. “Okay so he’s really masculine and men like to chase so let him chase.”

“Oh, yeah, I’m chill. I’m chilling. Totally not boyfriend material.”

“Hmm I don’t know. That’s what everyone said about my boyfriend and we’ve been together seven years. You never know.”  

An hour later, a female friend passes by and notices I'm beaming and asks what’s up.

“So you met my buddy on Friday?”

“Yeah!”

I’ve always had an unnameable but tangible romantic affection for this woman. And the feeling is mutual, but for a variety of complicated reasons we never really say it out loud. “What’s that smile?”

“Nothing! We hung out last night.” Her face drops and she zips behind me to the window looking agitated and confused. She paces a few times not saying anything then, “It’s just really weird, like two separate worlds mixing, you know he’s one of my best friends?”

I don’t say anything but watch her pace, completely mystified about what’s happening. Wait, is she jealous? "And I’m friends with his girlfriend…” she says, wringing her hands. I turn my head and frown, making that “what?” face. She continues, "Who’s MARRIED!” then quickly turns and walks into a meeting. I look out the window for a moment. I can’t believe it. Hotman is way more of a mirror than I thought.

I get up and walk to the kitchen and see a Nutri Grain bar beside some empty beer bottles, take a photo of it and text it to Hotman. The night before, he showed me his “favourite commercial”, a weird, grainy spot from the 90’s where a guy in a dull grey suit, situated in a yellowed, corporate office takes a bite of a Nutri Grain bar and gets all pumped up like he’s on some mad steroid cocktail and starts spreading it around the office, gritting his teeth, repeating: “GREEEAT, I FEEL GREAT, YOU LOOK GREEEAT…” and his co-workers catch it and they all reek total havoc together. He texts me back right away: “LOL!” And sends a Google image of a logo that reads: “Hotman Style of Living”.    

“Your friends are acting weird about our date.”

“What do you mean?”  

“I’ll tell you later.”

During our fountain talk, I realize Hotman and I have a lot in common. Many of the things he’d lived as a child and teen were similar to me, or at least fit with the current model I’ve constructed around my childhood. He was a writer in his heart but had done a lot of commercial work in his career. Where we differed was he’d lived the life of a very tall, very attractive man who’d had doors opened to him everywhere he went. He existed in an upper echelon of the human experience like tall people at concerts who have a literal head above everybody else. It’s not something he necessarily earned, but he didn’t not earn it either. He’d clearly had a lot of fun and made a success of his beauty even as he affected a kind of melancholy about it simmering just under the surface, describing the burdens of “this face” or “this body”. I believed his sadness, but I also recognized the melancholic affectation as, well, affectation. A story. In other words, having Hotman as a mirror wasn’t necessarily a flattering image (I’d been tempted to Instagram a few times that evening but resisted tbh), but, in moments, a rather unflattering one.

Instead of just texting Hotman a direct message about his married girlfriend, I take the back door and write him a long detailed thing about my history with unavailable men; details I intuitively know he’ll relate to. Sure enough a few minutes later he responds:

I know unavailable married interests too well. The last four years have been about a married woman; we actually have known each other since we were 18. She has kids. We took some time apart to think of what's left of us. She's amazing but it’s not sustainable. I’m giving myself the summer to think about it.

I think you're very interesting, and special, and everything about yesterday was very nice. I truly hope to see you again, get to know you more. Be it as a friend. Can't say much more at this point.  Foggy times.

(That long message is probably not so well put together. I just wanted to write it before I start texting you silly things, or have you think I'm avoiding responding. Hope it's alright.

The rest of the week I take careful measure with Hotman. A small part of me is weary of the married woman thing but a larger part is elated. I’d spent so much time refining my understanding and working through piles of slushboy theories that I believe I’ve got this whole “unavailable” thing thoroughly figured out. I can also tell Hotman likes to be punished a little bit and has a bit of a mean edge so I do my best to be stern and charmingly difficult.

As I’m picking up my bag at the very end of our date, I remember I’ve brought a book by VS Naipaul called “An Area of Darkness” because I’d read something that reminded me of our Friday night conversation and wanted to discuss it. Serious intellectual stuff. Friend-on-friend action. I eagerly open to the page and begin reading to him in a hushed whisper. He leans his face in close and whispers, “Why are you whispering like we’re at the Vatican? I'm way too ti--” He’s about to say something else when I madly kiss over his mouth and he pushes me backward against the wall, lifting me up.

Mmmmmirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the hottest of them all?

superheroes aren't real

I was warned about Hotman by my friend before we met: “Carmen you’ll looove him, he’s hot and charming, and you can fuck him, or be friends with him, but he’s nooot a viable dating option. Just remember that.” I Googled him and he was indeed a tall, chiseled-jaw model that I’d never go for anyway. I think I’m attractive enough to date hot people but in my limited experience, hot people who make a career of being hot have an extra layer of self-conscious fragility that can interfere with their personhood. As I was getting ready to go out that night, I observed myself feeling self-conscious about how I looked. Judging oneself like that is akin to picking up a big, heavy lens and putting it over your own eyes. I hadn’t picked up that lens since I used to go out to bars. These days, where my own being and body is concerned, I’m a perfect 10, an expression of nature, a child of God. 

Even so, with all my self-love intact, I showed up at the restaurant ready to be a little extra.  

Not only is Hotman tall and handsome, he also has a deep, booming, buttery voice and a style that not many straight men would try to pull off. Three of us at the table work in the same office so the conversation is dominated by work stuff, but he engages where he can, orders us our shared plates of food, chooses the wine which the three of them are drinking fast. An Instagram-famous woman who knows Hotman comes to our table and sits down. I squeeze in a little closer to him and he responds in kind – his warm body language is very familiar. Now it’s the point in the night when the drunk people are getting loud and yelling over each other and I start wondering how much longer I’ll last when Instagram-famous lady asks Hotman who I am. “She’s my future wife,” he says, putting his arm around me and squeezing tight. I’m amused because this is the kind of thing I usually say. Hotman is using all my moves. 

We move onto another bar. I’ve hit my second sober wind and tell Hotman my stories. These are the kind of moments when I feel most self-assured, in any situation really, because I’ve done a number of interesting and impressive things including write a book and he also seems to be well-traveled and well-read. I sort of half grimace and shrug when I mention I’m divorced, but he responds with, “No, you know, you took a risk, you went all in. I admire that. Nothing is guaranteed, but you took a chance. I’m bad at that.” The drunkies finish their final sips and we head out. My friend runs across the street to get into her cab and Hotman and I are nuzzling a bit, taking our time. I take out my phone to call an Uber when he offers to take me home in his. I’m wearing these insane green suede Lanvin stilettos and my feet are yelling at me so I appreciate his gentlemanly gesture. 

Hotman gives me a drunk, sloppy kiss as I get out of the car and we promise to hang soon. 

The next morning I’m half buzzed from the fun of the evening, but I’m also mildly annoyed: It’s been explicitly communicated that he’s only interested in having fun which has unintentionally set me up to want to conquer him. My unavailable man spidey sense is tingling and I deeply resent it. But I do hear from him and get an invitation to his place on Sunday evening. Thankfully between my Saturday morning resentment and our Sunday evening date, I’ve managed to turn my annoyance and his unavailability into the possibility that we might just be friends. I basically turn my desire off. Or I try to anyway. On the way there, I look up into the window of a senior’s centre and face the reality that one day I might be housed in a place like that but decide that I’ll be satisfied because I tried everything and went everywhere and looked beautiful while doing it. I will be full of grace because I loved my life and filled it with beauty. 

He’s dressed down in quality linen and making chicken with hot sauce on the BBQ. As he busily grills the chicken and steams some yellow beans, I have time to look at his form. He’s very manly in a Javier Bardem kind of way; thick; a body that makes you want its protection. It dawns on me that being a big man looks kind of heavy, like wearing a giant suit you have to carry around all day. I wonder: who protects and comforts men like him?  I can tell that he’s been around a lot of people with big personalities because he’s not acting surprised at how forward I am – this is especially apparent when he says he’s always wanted to eat on his roof but there’s no table. I immediately volunteer to scope it out and climb the ladder. He tells me to wait there and re-emerges from the apartment with the food laid out on plates on a big tray. What happens next is perhaps the most impressive and romantic moment I’ve ever experienced on a date. With one hand on the ladder rungs, the other carrying the huge tray, he maneuvers upward, narrowly passing it through a circular railing to me where I lay on the pebbly rooftop ready to receive. He moves with the grace of a real superhero. 

Under an iridescent dome of psychedelic sky, sitting knee-to-knee (mine a little bloody from the pebbles), our fingers sticky with chicken, we talk and laugh, both of us our handsomest selves. Later we walk to a nearby fountain with bowls of ice cream and cuddle on a bench. We learn our astrological signs (both Aquarians) and I read him a story I’d recently written. He explains semiotics, tells me about his father. There’s a tiny bit of warm rain falling and we kiss long, enthusiastic kisses as tiny drops wet our noses. I ride home on a Bixi in the rain and ruin my pale blue dress but I don’t care because I’m so happy, so so happy. Impossibly so. 
 

slushboys

What does being emotionally unavailable even mean and why have I been obsessed with this idea for years? Well, I can tell you what classically unavailable is because many of the men I’ve obsessed over have been in relationships. That’s a pretty straightforward way to be unavailable! I even have a journal entry from age 17 that says: “I’m only attracted to boys who have girlfriends already”. Technically an attraction like that lights up in the brain but you feel it in the whole body. There have been moments when an unavailable man has just entered the same building I’m in and I can feel him. I can actually tell he’s there like some people feel the rain in their knees.

I have a lot of dreams about these men with very specific motifs: Ice, frozen lakes, slush – when feelings are seized or stuck or conversely starting to melt and move and resolve. Stairs, weddings, ceremonies – when I feel left out, uninvited, or doggedly in pursuit. Elk, moose, cows, whales – one dream had a frozen elk with very beautiful with antlers like icicles; one dream had live, docile cows laying everywhere in half frozen slush. I rode a blue whale in a dream once for hours. I don’t really know what the mammal dreams mean.

__

After that wholly unpleasant but totally necessary experience with the editor, and after several manuscript rejection letters, and just this overwhelming feeling of NOT wanting to be transparent and exposed, I put my online life in privacy mode, like the whole thing. I put passwords on my websites, quit Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter. It was the best feeling in the world. Have you ever felt really exposed but you knew you'd support your own being no matter what you wrote or showed on social media or spread in bed and no matter how much shame you felt exposing yourself, you felt safe doing so because you would not betray your own being?

Maybe you were born with it, but not I. I had to get sober and write a book and expose myself online even though it was humiliating and go to therapy and cry to strangers and feel every fucking feeling and trace advances in my mental health based on the mirrored unavailability of the guys I was attracted to. And each time I emerged and opened myself up, the men seemed to get a little better. Have you ever felt a savage need to contain your selfhood and keep it safe? I can’t believe how savagely I wanted my own being. I understood why I had to expose it because I needed to feel that feeling I had when I shut it all down which was savage and protective and maybe for the first time in my life, private...

So the next guy after the editor did seem nicer. He had a jovial sense of humour and a talent for harmless puns. He played the piano for me and we bathed together and he let me put a mud mask on his face. The first night we had sex he whispered, "So much beauty" into my left ear. He liked really enigmatic music and film but he still fell into a category of nerd I feel safe with. I really enjoy weirdos because I want to get into weird spaces with people in every, single way. I felt way better about dating him right off the bat because he hadn’t read anything I'd written so he wouldn’t know about my past. After just one romantic weekend (much like the editor), nerd guy totally flipped out and completely cut me off. In fact, when I ran into him again, he actually turned and went in the other direction. Yeah. The guy who I’d told myself I couldn’t sleep with (because, like, new boundaries), and did sleep with (fuck), was by Monday afternoon of our three-day relationship, physically running away from me.

So one was scared by the book, the next one was just scared. This seemed like progress. I was hurt but also just really annoyed. Annoyance was real progress though because the pain washed through me quickly and his insane behaviour helped me feel superior. Like the slush in dreams, each slushboy melted and moved something through me. Spring flowers, spring melt, spring, running, rushing spring. Uh oooh, here comes summer.  

Enter Hotman.  

emotionally unavailable

Friday evening, after our successful lunch date, Andre sends me a text to explain why he doesn't believe we're a good match. The gist of it is: you're not emotionally available. Mind blown. That's the way I describe the men I date and now this descriptor was being used on me. In response I concede that this may be very true.

Now it's Sunday and I'm sitting in my apartment with the strangest feeling I've ever had, but perhaps one I've unconsciously been trying to uncover for a lifetime: I'm fucking emotionally unavailable. This feels honest. This year, I holed myself up in my beautiful apartment in St. Henri because I have contracted what I can only deem "escapist fatigue". I can't escape anymore but what's better is I don't want to. Holding myself to one place has meant feeling through all the shit I'd normally escape. It'd seem a little masochistic or irritating to just sit home and feel feelings if I hadn't become forensic where my own myths and stories are concerned. I'm getting to know them. I'm intimate with their shape and colour. I can tell when I'm lacking sleep, when I'm actually hungry, when I don't like someone, when I'm being manipulative, when I need a muse, when I'm really sad, when I'm hormonal, when I'm projecting. I mean, most of the time anyway. 

I like to sketch the mean voices, make strange charts, trace the messages around a pièce of paper.

I've also been dating on the regular. Dating AKA: Painfully wading through intimate experiences with a familiar mix of submission, rejection, vulnerability, confusion, expression and strengthened self-awareness. There was a magazine editor in the spring who took his turn at burning out my desire. First with his nervous, performative sex, then with the reason for it: he would have to "deal" with my book.   I wouldn't normally show someone my entire life's work, but after seeing me on a dating app, he'd pursued me through Facebook and I viewed him as a possible professional connection in the local (and minuscule) literary scene. So I met him. And shared my book. What he meant by "dealing" with it, now that he'd put his penis inside me, was that the sex with other men I'd described in the book was an issue to be dealt with. A self-described feminist, he said this to me with a book by bell hooks staring at me from his bedside table. I felt immediate shame. And anger at myself for feeling shame. Then more shame, and a desire to defend myself, to say all the sex came from pain! I'm not really slutty! I was lost! They didn't matter! This was how our romantic weekend began. It devolved further into multiple shame spirals. Like, this is what dating can be like for me! 

The following week when he told me he felt triggered and threatened by some things I'd said (reminders of his ex-girlfriend), I struggled to keep my head straight and not puncture it with dark, evil thoughts about how unworthy I was. I gripped at my those thoughts, babbling to my friend as we walked down the street for lunch, "I have to say it all, I have to express it or I'll get sick, or I'll get sick, I have to write like that, or I get sick, I'll get sick...". I resented the fuck out of that man for a month but later felt grateful for the spring cleaning and the extra space I needed to sit in my own mud. Any man who was interested in me for real would have to be cool with my book and my level of transparency. That's just the kind of artist I am. Or so I thought. 

(to be continued...)