I give up

[I give up]

Triggered

everyone is talking about where they were when Trump was elected in 2016.  

I was lying on my stomach on a conference room table with you next to me, actively aware that you were staring at my ass in *that* pencil skirt, one high heel Mary Jane-clad foot draped over the other, for decency’s sake.  

We had planned to work until they announced that Hilary won, and then we’d go celebrate.  Except she didn’t.  And it was 7, and 8, and 9 pm.  And she was calling you because she was home all alone crying, and she wanted you to go home and be with her.  And you said to me: “I’m afraid to leave you alone.” And I had to look you in the eye, a man I loved, a man who loved me, and tell you “go home and be with your wife.”  And we left, but you took the train with me 4 stops in the wrong direction.  

[I give up]

What do you miss, from the Before Times?

I don’t mean like “seeing family and friends”, or “travel.” (of courseI I miss those, too).  I mean *specifically.* 

I miss FlyWheel on a Saturday morning.  45 minutes to sweat, and hurt, and be proud of myself at the end.  

I miss going to the Ferry Building Farmers Market to get a porchetta sandwich from RoliRoti and eating it on the pier.  

I miss doubling back to the Wing, to shower and change, take a lazy nap on the couch, pretending to read.  

I miss a different weekend day too: driving an hour out of the city to go climb a mountain.  Gulping down the fresh air because i don’t have to pull on my mask when fellow hikers pass me on the trail.  Drinking as much water as I need because although the public bathroom at the trailhead is gross, it’s open and won’t *actually* kill me.  

I miss weekdays, too: NYTimes crosswords on Caltrain, making a latte in the office kitchen, “Good morning, Howard!”  

I miss getting off the train a stop early, ending up at Piccino, nursing a glass of wine at the bar while the kitchen makes pasta right in front of me.  

I miss catching John Vanderslice at the Rickshaw on a Tuesday, and walking home smoking a joint.  

Tomorrow I’ll tell you what I missed then that I get to do now.  

[I give up]

The New Couch

The new couch arrives on Wednesday.  Which is almost four years to the day after I brought home the last one.  The day that I conclusively found out that my husband was sleeping with another woman.  

I had been suspecting for months.  I asked him about it.  He denied it.  Then, on the way to IKEA in a rented cargo van, he kept hiding his phone from me.  She was texting him. 

After we got home, and unloaded our new couch and arm chair, he said: “i have to tell you something” and confessed.    I remember sinking down to the floor.  I remember crying.  I remember washing an Ativan down with whiskey, letting work know I wouldn’t be in for a few days, and lying down on the new couch. And then I don’t remember much at all for the next 36 hours.  

I slept on that couch for the next few months.  Because my husband told me that they had sex in our marital bed.  I sold that bed for pennies, I couldn’t bear to look at it.  But the couch?  The couch did nothing wrong.  

I brought the couch with me to my new single girl apartment.  My friends sat on it in gatherings large and small.  Dates reached over and kissed me for the first time.  And yes, I fell asleep on it many a night when I couldn’t bear to sleep alone in my new single girl bed.  

Four years later, I bought a new home.  When I moved, I brought the old couch with me.  I wanted to settle down in the new apartment before I decided what kind of sofa to get.  

My new boyfriend came to live with me.  Together we decided we needed a sectional to fit us both and our new cat.  It arrives tomorrow.  

[I give up]

“does he make you happy?”

how do you answer that question when the person asking is a man who’s loved you quietly but intensely from afar, for more of a decade, through your marriage and his?  a man who once told your husband “take care of her, hang on to her like grim death, because she is special.”  a man you’ve loved just as long, but told yourself you didn’t.  

because what you want to say is: 

“i don’t know what happy is anymore.  i thought i did, but i was so so wrong..  but he’s here, and he makes me feel whole for moments in time, even if he strains against the sutures of my heart in all the wrong places”  

and 

“you could make me happy.  but i could never make you happy.  not enough to overcome the hurt of making you leave your children”

and 

“when did she stop making you happy? and how long are you going to pretend?” 

but you’re not that person.  so you say: 

“we’re having fun.  we’ll see where it goes.”  

and you change the subject.  

[I give up]

My Type

“Oh, you like dudes with giant beards and like… sleeves, don’t you?!” my coworker laughed in the passenger seat.  We were stuck in traffic, thinking about grabbing dinner, and I made the mistake of telling him that I had gone through a stage of dating a bunch of chefs, so now quite a few of San Francisco’s best restaurants were unfortunately off-limits.  

“No!” I protested.  “I don’t have a type… the last guy I dated was half-Japanese, half-white, and grew up surfing in Hawaii.  If that’s a type, I’m screwed.” 

Months later and 3,000 miles away, I recalled this conversation as I squirmed in my seat, pretending not to notice the handsome man sitting to my left: tall, long-haired, bearded.   A doppelgänger of the man I had been dating for the past three months.  “Do I have a type?!” I wondered as if my coworker had been prophetic.  “Or do I just miss my ‘boyfriend’?”

How much of our preferences for physical appearances are hard-wired biology?  And how much are they bias, extrapolation from previous experiences with certain people based on a physical characteristic?  

After all, my tall, bearded gentleman caller was the favorite lover I’ve ever had.  Traveling for work, I viscerally missed his body in bed next to mine.  So was it any wonder that I zeroed in on his twin in this crowd of skinny, cleanly shaven hipsters? 

This is particularly ironic because I spent over a decade of my life in a relationship with (you guessed it) a skinny cleanly shaven hipster.  When I first started dating after our divorce, those were the guys I sought out: smart but slight, glasses, no facial hair but complicated asymmetrical undercuts.  Still missing my ex, I wanted to replace him with more of the same.  

But just a year later, finally having gotten over him, I found myself so attracted to a Paul Bunyan lookalike from afar that I handed him my number as I exited the bar. “Call me, if you’re single and date women,” the first and only words I spoke to him that night.  

Is it possible that my “type” had changed? Unlikely.  Chemistry is unpredictable.  I still can’t tell you why I have it with some people and not others.  All I can promise myself is that I won’t rule anybody out because they look a certain way.  But I also can’t promise that I won’t favor certain people because of the way they look, either.  They can thank their predecessor for that.  

[I give up]

OK, so, it’s been a year.  It’s been a very very bad year.  Which means this is a new year, and what do we do for New Year’s?  We make resolutions.  

My resolutions are: 

1) Don’t look at facebook memories. 

2) Don’t look at their social media.  

To be continued…  

[I give up]

Unniversaries

A year ago today, my life as I knew it ended.  Except I didn’t know it yet.  

The person I loved more than any other human being alive or dead, who had been my best friend for 18 years, betrayed me in the most frivolous and fundamental way.  

It would be another 3 months before I found out.  So the next couple of months will be filled with the most awful anniversaries:  when I began to suspect, when he lied me, when he did all the terrible things he did, when he attempted to make things better but didn’t have the will to actually try.  

Last year, as my future heart was being broken hundreds of miles away, I went on a hike without him.  It was a hot and miserable slog up a steep mountain, but I was so proud to have finished.  Yesterday, I went on a hike with someone else.  That doesn’t mean I’m “fixed,” or “better,” but I’m proud to have been able to do that as well.

There will be bad days.  But I also know that everything is temporarily and it’s about taking it one day at a time.   And although it’s been a year, it’s really just been a day.  

[I give up]

Who doesn’t hate being wrong?

M. is proving me wrong for breaking up with him.  

I go for two weeks without talking to him.  But that doesn’t mean that I don’t think about him.  Every day.  I think about texting him, but don’t.  Finally, he does:  “alright.  this not seeing or talking to you isn’t working.  Can we please meet up?”  

He doesn’t have to do much convincing.  So we get drinks.  

I love the places he picks.  Old school San Francisco bars, no TVs, no fancy cocktail menus, just grown ups, and quiet booths, and whiskey.  

Spending time with him is intoxicating.  He’s like a drug, he turns my brain to mush.  First, in anticipation of seeing him, I’m all anxious energy, unable to get anything done.  Then, when I’m with him, washed over in his calm, somehow certain that nothing bad could happen so long as I’m around him.  

I am reminded of it again on Monday.  The bar isn’t crowded, and we have our own booth.  But one of the men standing next to it encroaches on my space bit by bit.  I roll my eyes, scoot closer to M., readjusting my bag under the table.

“I’m so sorry!!!!”  I look up.  The man is apologizing profusely.  To me.  “I apologize.  I didn’t see.  I’m so sorry!” he pleads.  

I turn to M.: “What just happened?  Did you say something?”  “No, I just gave him a look,” he shrugs.   

Of course he did.  Because one look from him is enough to send a cocky Silicon Valley biz dev exec into an apologetic frenzy.  Of course.  I shouldn’t find it such a turn on, but I do.  

I spend the length of my Old Fashioned poking fun at him.  About how I’m nuts, but he puts up with my nonsense.  About how much he likes me.  He’s a good sport.  I get drunker, and poke more.  When I’m being particularly bratty, he leans over and kisses me.  That shuts me up.  

He walks me home.  Of course he does.  There’s never a question that he’ll pick me up at work, walk me home, wait until I’m in the elevator before he leaves.  

Somehow along the way, I tell him about the time someone slipped rohypnol into my drink in college.  “Hold my arm, please,” he says.  “Why?”  I ask.  

“Because I need you to right now,” he tells me.  And of course, I do.  

[I give up]

This is a song about the loving times between a person and his or her partner — it’s not really gender specific, everyone can have a relationship go to total hell overnight. When that moment comes, I want you to remember that we’re all one under the skin. That’s not usually the first thing that you think when you wake up and your life is upside down, you know. But that should be when you realize that we’re all in a big family; a large and terrible family that mistreats one another terribly daily and never learns any lessons from any of it ever.

John Darnielle introducing No Children, Bottletree on 2013-06-22
(via tmgbanter)

Jess and I have long had this idea to create a playlist of just John’s banter, but this is better 

[I give up]

I obviously made a mistake (no, I didn’t)

What is it about men, that when you break up with them, they tell you: “Well, let me know if you change your mind in a couple of months.”  I have *never* said that to another human being who has broken up with me.  

To me, a breakup is a carefully considered decision that after evaluating all pros and cons, you decided that this person is not for you.  Any change of mind that comes in the future would have to come from additional pros and cons coming into the equation, not just dulled memories about how con-ny the cons were.  So that’s only going to happen, if we continue to interact in real life.  If we met online, and I’ve never seen you before in my life until we decided to go out and see if our private parts liked each other, and will never see you again, odds are my decision will not change.  

And yet, both of my recent ex-pseudoboyfriends have said this to me.   I mean, I know what it is.  It’s that pervasive sense of male privilege that automatically assumes that anyone who rejects them for romantic partnership made a mistake which they will eventually grow to regret.  

I swear, I need to start dating women exclusively.