Love in Shadows–Sweet Tooth and Company
Writing to Untangle
My past is prickly, and sometimes gets tangled up in my present.
There’s a poet whose tweets I love. Her name is Olivia Dresher, and so many of her tweets capture some truth about the inner workings of my own soul.

Since I tend to feel like my soul operates somewhat differently from that of many other people, there’s a comfort in reading words from her and other strangers that I can relate to on such a fundamental level.

I don’t play music, but I do write to untangle. I need to. I need to find the narrative threads in my life where no such threads actually exist. I need to impose structure on the structureless. Only by finding the stories and writing them out can I turn the past from an obstruction into a memory, and then be open to whatever might come next.
Sweet Tooth–The Truth Will Out
Etched on the wall of the lobby of the original CIA headquarters is the Biblical verse, “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” Ian McEwan’s novel Sweet Tooth is concerned with MI5, not with the CIA, but still, I couldn’t help but think about the verse as I read the book.

Sweet Tooth tells the story of Serena Frome (rhymes with plume), a young MI5 recruit who is brought in on an operation that requires her to make contact with the promising young writer Tom Haley. MI5 wants to support Haley’s work, but not openly; Serena has to contact him under the guise of representing a philanthropic foundation. The basis for their connection is a ruse, but the love Serena quickly comes to feel for Tom is entirely real. There seems to be no good option available to Serena. To be honest with Tom would likely destroy the relationship and would certainly be a betrayal of MI5, but how long can she go on both loving him and deceiving him?
I know a thing or two about love and deception. My first girlfriend and I loved each other deeply, and the happy moments we shared were some of the happiest I’ve ever had. (In high school, we’d sit in her car in the rain, holding hands and talking about how beautiful our children might be. In college–the college she left after one year and I stayed at for four–we held each other tight one stormy night during a power outage, relishing the way there was nothing but rainfall and darkness and each other.) But our love set off a storm inside me, as I was torn between the overwhelming desire to make a life with her, to love and be loved by her for all my days, and the knowledge that to do so would require a denial of the self that would make me miserable and that I would not be able to sustain forever. This made me insecure, which in turn made our relationship tumultuous.
She was uncannily perceptive, knew I was troubled, and even took to jokingly (but sweetly) calling me Katrina at one point. And yet I couldn’t bring myself to be honest with her. At the time, I couldn’t even be honest with myself. It’s not that I think things would have been so different if I had been honest with her. It’s just that I loved her, and she deserved to know the truth. Instead, what she got, as things between us got increasingly serious and I was ripped in two, was a disastrous situation I orchestrated without even thinking about it much that left her, me, and other people I love devastated. Surely the truth, as terrifying as it was, would have been better than that.
I don’t want to give away the ending of Sweet Tooth, but I will say that I read its final chapter breathlessly. That remarkable final chapter shifts Sweet Tooth from a story of love and deception into a story about the power of the stories we tell ourselves and others. It’s a simultaneously heartbreaking and hopeful novel about the ways in which the truth can restrict us, or liberate us.
You’re Living
The image of a dishonest life can be seductive to me still, the visions of “normal” relationships, of romances uncomplicated by the trials and tribulations of being trans. But I know that these are false promises, that that life was never available to me.

A friend asked me over lunch this week, “Are you happy?”
“Aw, jeeze, I don’t know,” I said. “I’m happy and I’m sad. I feel lonely and I feel loved. I feel incredibly fortunate to have what I have and I want so much more. I’m just trying to embrace all of it, the highs and lows.”
“So…you’re living,” he said.
It’s not that simplicity doesn’t appeal to me. It does. Simplicity can be beautiful. It’s just that it’s never been an option for me. We appreciate complexity in literature, in wine. Maybe it’s okay to appreciate it in life, too.

Thanks, Boss
She came from a country whose existence I was barely aware of before I met her. One day she wasn’t there and the next day, she was everywhere. She had a way of dressing and of behaving and of thinking and of speaking that was like nothing I’d ever encountered before. Though I don’t know if she would have thought of it this way at the time, she rebelled against gender expectations and then she embraced them, and I swooned for her no matter which part of the gender identity spectrum she was inhabiting at that moment, because she was always entirely herself.
She loved Bruce Springsteen, and I loved that she loved Bruce Springsteen. (Now I love Bruce Springsteen, too.) She thought that “Human Touch” was a wise and wonderful song.
Oh, girl, that feeling of safety you prize
Well, it comes with a hard, hard price
You can’t shut off the risk and the pain
Without losing the love that remains
We’re all riders on this train
She was right. You can’t shut off the risk and the pain without losing the love that remains, or at least I can’t. And the reality is that in a sense, I’m still in love with her, not at all in a yearning, aching way, but in a way that I carry around inside me always, and that the right memory or song or place or image can wake up, if only for a moment. In fact, in a way, I’m still in love with everyone I’ve ever been in love with. And I think I need to be, if I’m going to be alive to the possibility of being in love with someone again.
Days When the Rains Came (Again)

As I came out of Montgomery St. Station on Friday, I felt a few drops of rain on my face. My phone had shuffled up “Let It Be” and it seemed a perfect little moment of acceptance and gratitude. There’s nobody in my life right now who understands the rain quite like I do. Not yet. But someday, there could be.
Birthday Girl
I spent my 30th birthday with a boy I loved in Seattle. He baked me a cake. It was really sweet.

Last Friday was another birthday. My birthdays haven’t quite been the same since my 30th, but I did spend this one with a good friend, enjoying good pizza and good conversation, and that is something to be thankful for.

When I was 18, I was an assistant stage manager on my college’s production of the musical Company. Company is largely about the epiphany the main character, Bobby, comes to on his 35th birthday, an epiphany expressed in the song “Being Alive.”
When I was 18, the lessons of 35 (and beyond) seemed so far away.

Now, the excerpt above from Masha Tupitsyn’s Love Dog resonates with me powerfully. it’s hard to find meaning in anything I do just for me.
Now, when I hear Amy say, “Want something. Want something,” I say, “Oh, I do. Oh, you’d better believe I do.”
*blows out candles*
Notes
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