All I Want for Christmas. . .Is YOU. . .

Last night, my mom and I sat on opposite ends of the couch in her comfy basement, a bowl of caramel popcorn between us, to start the film "Love Actually."  The film's fantastic:  a cast of famous characters ranging from Hugh Grant to Emma Thompson to Keira Knightley, and intersecting plot lines that are heartwarming for various reasons that are not all cliche.  Although I've seen the film several times, I never tire of it. . .and I always cry.

I cry, and I think, damn Christmas movies, because even "White Christmas" makes me cry.  I cry when the judge in "Miracle on 34th Street" declares that Kris Kringle is, indeed, Santa; and I cry when George Bailey realizes his life is precious and important in "It's a Wonderful Life."  Again and again, the Christmas movies insist on the magic of the season, on the particular recipe of white lights and cold air and the possible jingle of sleigh bells.  The recipe that allows unlikely people to fall in love with each other, or unhappy people to become transformed.

The last time I watched "Love Actually," in Christmas 2011, I sat with my arms crossed the entire movie, bitter while my mom laughed in delight.  It had only been two months since A___ died, and I didn't want to be in the world anymore either.  Guilt and sorrow and love weighted my bones, made it difficult to move.  No happy story in "Love Actually" would end happily, I thought cynically, newly wise.  Our story was supposed to be one of those where all has been an enormous misunderstanding, where a few months have elapsed but then I turn around in the sunshine and she is standing there, looking at me the way she always did.  And we are on the coast of Spain, or in a villa in Italy.

But no, instead, she was dead, and there's actually no way love can continue forward from that point.

That was two years ago.  Two years.  I dreamed the other night that she did walk toward me across green grass, and that I stood in a red barn organizing, and my heart filled with such gladness to see her, to know we were going to get our second chance after all.  Always, she's real to me, just around the corner, waiting.

None of that explains why, after "Love Actually" ended and my mom took the empty popcorn bowl and kissed me on the forehead before she headed upstairs to bed, I took out my laptop and created a profile on match.com.  Ugh.  I feel nauseous just writing it.  The entire hour it took me to answer all the questions, my body numbed as if I was committing some horrible crime.  This morning, when I sat at the breakfast table with my daughter and my mom and step-dad, the mere thought of my smiling face and "36-year-old woman" on a profile page on match.com turned my stomach.  What a mistake.  I'm not ready and never will be.  I found my "love actually" in A___ and one or both of us read the script wrong, and now it's ended.  No more takes.

But now I've just checked the site, 24 hours later.  I'm not the only lonely lesbian in this area looking for at least like-minded companionship, a hiking partner, someone to share a coffee.  If I'm brave, I could respond to some of these notes I'm getting already.  Or I could delete my profile now.

Part of me wants to wear black and stay celibate in mourning forever.  Part of me wants to live.  I could depend on the chance encounter sometime in the next decade, or I could advertise, which is what sites like match.com do.  Here I am.  Waiting.  I marked the categories for "widow" and "one child at home". . . I'm not a simple match.  But I never have been.

If I don't do this in the window of this season, with all the magic in the air, etc., etc., I won't do it at all.  So. . .I'll leave the profile up for a week, just to see.  After all, a cup of coffee with a woman would be nice. . .

Thinking about 1st grade crushes. . .

My sweet little girl TK had a playdate today with a new friend.  Mostly, they built gingerbread houses and giggled, ate dinner together and giggled, and danced across the living room -- and giggled.  They're six --innocent, wide-eyed, amazed by the world.  The two of them are quite a contrast:  TK's coffee-brown  and K__'s creamy white, TK's got tight black curls and K___'s got white-blonde locks.  But their age makes them more similar than different.  At dinner, they both wanted to talk about crushes.

Crushes?  At six, shouldn't they still be friends with everyone, chasing everyone around the playground, regardless of gender?  Evidently not.

"Who do you like?" asks my daughter conspiratorially.

"I like Alex.  Who do you like?" K___ giggles.

I attempt to offer the adult voice of reason.  "Do you think first grade's the right age for crushes?" I wonder aloud.  Both girls shake their heads.  Definitely not.  "Not 'til you're in 8th grade," K____ declares, using her older sister as a gauge.  But then she and TK return to their discussion of all the cute boys in 1st grade, matching them up with their friends, wondering aloud if they'll get to sit next to Alex or Hunter tomorrow.

Do we shape this culture, or does it shape us?  As a lesbian mother, I should casually ask, "Don't you think any of the girls are cute?" but I stay silent and eat my chili, thinking about a world that still insists princesses end up with princes, that most people get married, that girls who finish their chili should spin and twirl as ballerinas until it's time to eat candy canes.

It makes me think of a phone call I had with a friend yesterday.  She and her husband are struggling because their 3-year-old son wants to play with "girl" toys.  While I can blithely tell her to let him be himself, to support what draws him, I understand her concern.  This isn't an easy world -- not for boys who want to wear dresses, not for girls who think the girls in class are cute, not for anyone outside the Disney version.

What can we do?  I changed the topic at dinner tonight, and TK and K____ were just as happy to talk about what it would be like to live in gingerbread houses as they were to talk about crushes on boys.  Another day, I'll push them to think more openly about relationship and gender.  For today, I'll hand them candy canes and play hide-and-seek, a game with clear rules, a game that includes everyone.

The Beginning of Us

Riptide Publishing has just released my novella for pre-sale!  

http://www.riptidepublishing.com/titles/the-beginning-of-us

Written with a college-age audience in mind, The Beginning of Us is a romance, a social commentary, and an exploration of the human heart.  

Blurb:

Eliza, 

Where are you? I'm listening, watching, waiting for you. I need you. How dare you run away? Where’s the courage, the fearlessness I fell in love with?

I don’t know what else to do but write. It’s dark in my dorm room, and the wind rattles the panes of my window, and I’m supposed to be driving to my parents’ right now for winter break, but I can’t feel my arms or my legs, and my chest aches because I don’t know where you’ve gone. Or why.

I know I shouldn't have fallen in love with my professor. But you inspired me when you stood in front of the class, telling us to find our authentic selves. And I did—with you. How could I know that you would be so afraid of this, of us? That you'd be so terrified of . . . yourself? Wherever you are, Eliza, hear me—and come back to me.

Love (yes, I'll write that word, Professor), 

 Tara

http://www.riptidepublishing.com/titles/the-beginning-of-us

Talking to the past. . .

This weekend, I went out for dinner and drinks with an old college roommate, S_____, who was visiting the Denver area for a conference.  It has been over fourteen years since we graduated from Luther College, and we haven't seen each other since that day because of life -- travel, relationships, work, parents, deaths of people we loved, graduate school, geography, births, adoptions.  And anyway:  we graduated from college in the days before Facebook and iPhones (though S____ and many of our other college friends, like B_____, who also joined us for dinner, have stayed in touch fairly well).  It's mostly me.

I've always had this flaw.  Put me in the moment with a person, and I'll be a good, loyal, present friend.  Take me out of the moment -- to Alaska, maybe, or Guatemala -- and I'll forget to check in regularly; I'll forget to write.  Not even email or Facebook have really helped.  Ask my mother.

But what I had to confess to S____ this weekend is that I HAVE talked to her more recently than fourteen years ago, and that our conversation will be in print for people to buy after January 27, 2014.  I told her within minutes of hugging her hello, while B____ drove us to Mateo's, where we planned to have dinner.  "So. . . S_____, you're a character in my novel!"  What a strange confession to hear from a woman you have not seen for fourteen years.  S_____ took it well, asked how she'd been portrayed, what part her character plays in the story.

Then we went on to dinner to catch up in real life, as real women drinking real white wine.

As the night continued, I realized just how accurately I had portrayed S____, when I had really just imagined that I had based a supporting character on her.  She is truly a sensible, trust-worthy friend with a grounded sense of humor, just like my character Trace.  In my novel, my protagonist, Tara, risks talking to Trace about what she's just beginning to understand about herself:
      Tara:  "But how do you know you're a lesbian?"
      Trace:  "I just know."
      Tara:  "But how do you know?"

How would my life have been different if I had figured out I was lesbian in college?  So many lives' trajectories would have changed -- not just mine, but my ex-husband's, A____'s, her ex-husband's, their children's.  Wouldn't I have gone east, or to a foreign country?  Wouldn't the self-knowledge have calmed my restless wandering?

In the real Mateo's, drinking real wine, S_____ tells me that she never guessed I was lesbian in college.  "Me, neither," I say, shaking my head.  "If I had, it would have solved so many problems."  S____ shrugs.  "But you didn't know."

I didn't know.  That's why I wrote the novel, because I wanted to find out what would have happened if I'd discovered it then, instead of at age 28.

S____ and I never talked about being lesbian in college, though.  I was far more ignorant of the world than my protagonist, and I was certainly more ignorant of myself.  I had a boyfriend; I had a 4.0; someday, I expected to have a good job and be married with children.  I don't remember thinking any further than that.

Does it matter?  I could (and will) write a hundred fictional alternatives for my life, and this is still the one I've lived so far.  This one, the one in which I raise my wine glass to toast my friend S____ after she listens carefully and gently to the long complicated story of my last fourteen years.  In fiction and in real life, she is a damn good person and a steady friend.

And maybe "staying in touch" by crafting fictional characters isn't so different from Facebook. . .

Movie recommendation, "Kiss Me" (2011, Sweden)

On a more positive note than I've been writing (but WHO is reading these words, anyway?), a movie recommendation:  I watched the 2011 Swedish film "Kiss Me" this weekend, and loved it.  Two women become connected because Mia's father marries Frida's mother -- and they find they are irresistibly drawn to each other.  This is complicated by the fact that Mia is engaged to be married to a man in a matter of weeks.

The story is beautiful, passionate (sexy!), and the landscape of Sweden is lonely and wistful, windblown -- exactly the kind of place where snuggling into bed in the white-gold light of early morning sounds exquisite.  One of my favorite scenes is a nod to the mythical mermaid, a moment when Frida and Mia jump into a pool in the woods and find each other beneath that glassy surface.

I've added this film to my list of "Best Lesbian Films".  Here are the others:

1.  "Unveiled"  (Iran)
2.  "Purple Sea"  (Italy)
3.  "When Night is Falling" (Canada)
4.  "Aimee and Jaguar" (Germany)
5.  "The Secrets" (Israel)
6.  "The World Unseen" (South Africa/UK)
7.  "I Can't Think Straight" (UK)
8.  "Orlando" (UK)
9.  "Tipping the Velvet" (UK)
10.  "A Marine's Story" (USA)
11.  "A Room in Rome" (Spain)
12.  "Fire" (Canada/India)
13.  "Kiss Me" (Sweden)

What else, mysterious readers of my blog?  What other movies are as good as these?

I'm Lesbian and So Are You

Tonight, a friend invited me to her house for dinner, and I went, since I often go to this friend's house for dinner.  She wanted me to meet a visiting friend of hers, which is also fairly usual.  But the conversation was academic -- my friend and her husband and the visitor are all in the same field, all PhDs -- and I couldn't figure out how to get into the conversation intelligently; they talked about people in their field and projects on which they are working, and I felt painfully young, under-educated, out of my league.  And then the visitor turned to me and said, "So I do have some lesbians in Boulder you should meet," and I knew.  I had been invited because I am lesbian and so is this visiting friend, and everyone hoped she would be able to introduce me to other lesbians.

Straight people don't experience this.  Can you imagine?  "Hey!  You should come over for dinner tonight!  You and Stanley are both straight, he's a man, you're a woman!"  To be fair, people do set friends up like this, but they do not invite them over primarily because they are straight.  Of course, the world contains a higher percentage of straight people and it's more difficult to find other lesbians, so it does make some sense to introduce them to each other.  My friend Lynn:  "I'll have to introduce you to _______; she's lesbian, too."

However, this isn't how people fall for each other.  Romance doesn't stem from the fact that we're both wearing purple, or that we are the same age and have the same three hobbies on a dating website.  The world is more complicated than that.  It's nice to meet you, but just because we're both attracted to women does not mean we're compatible.

I'm not being fair.  My friends are trying to help.  But I cried the entire way home (silently, so my daughter in the backseat didn't feel alarmed).  I'm not ready, and if I were, I wouldn't proceed in this way.  My friend T___ worried aloud last weekend that I'm searching for "everything to happen like it does in the movies".  So?  My story with A______ is better than any book or movie I've read or seen; why shouldn't I hold everything else to that standard?

Until then, I just want to make friends who have real commonalities with me:  hiking, literature, travel, cooking.  Now I've just made my blog sound like a post on a dating website.  Time to go to bed.

Time for what? Pink Match.Com?

At a family wedding last weekend, three different well-meaning family members told me it's time I started dating.  No one said it obnoxiously.  All three said it with love, and even with sensitivity.  It's only been two years.  And it's been two years.  You're only 36.  Maybe it's time?

Weddings motivate some people to try to scatter the hopefulness of love like grains of rice, like the bubbles that were popular for awhile, like the butterflies my sister considered having released at her wedding until she found out they die shortly afterwards.  Here:  look at this young couple, so much love and hope in their eyes.  Now you try, too.

I have, twice.  With my former husband Matt ("ex" connotes anger and bitterness that does not exist between us; we're dear friends, still), I had the traditional wedding, registry and all, the move to our own apartment, the attempt to set up a life together.  Then I met A___, gradually understood I was lesbian, struggled through the grief of a separation and divorce from Matt. . .and then with A__, I had passion, a deep sense that soulmates actually do exist, the hope of a long life side by side, the planning for the future.  Then she died.  (That's a condensed version of eight years).

Sure, only 36.  It seems most people haven't lived so many different lives already.

Yesterday, Matt and his second wife Sarah (as in, her name is Sarah, too) had their first baby.  I'm happy for them.  But maybe I can't help feeling a little self-pity, too.  I am living life, I am moving forward (that's far more than I could have said about myself a year ago), and yet sometimes my sadness about living life alone overwhelms me.  I never imagined I'd raise a child alone, or that I'd go to bed every night alone, or that I'd plan my future alone.

But my family is wrong that dating is the solution to my sadness.  It's A___ I miss.  It's A____ for whom I look on the streets, for whom I listen in new friendships, about whom I hope to dream when I fall asleep.  If I'm always longing for her, it will never be fair to attempt a connection with someone else.

Anyway, I don't know how I'd even begin.  A lesbian friend (in a long-term partnership) told me this weekend that Boulder's odd:  progressive, open-minded, but entirely lacking in GLBT hang-outs -- no cafes, no bars, just a small "Out Boulder" office on 14th Street and Spruce, a few websites, an annual Pride Fest.  Meeting someone here depends on chance, the eye contact that informs the other that yes, we are looking for the same -- the accidental brush of a hand that contains more fire than a stranger's would normally.  My friend joked that maybe I should wear a sign announcing my identity so women could find me.  A lump formed in my throat.  I don't want that, I don't want that.  I catch myself peering down the street, wondering when A___ will come striding toward me, her dark eyes sparkling with laughter; I wait for her to whisk me away to a place where we can finally be alone after all this time.

Another friend -- a straight one -- told me just yesterday to sign up with Match.com or to find one of the iPhone apps that match people with other interested people who are within 100 feet.  I stared at her, incredulous.  Really?  You're too young, she told me, your life isn't over.  DO something about it!  You can't go the rest of your life with no sex, no one to hold you, no one to talk to at night.

I had to turn away to watch our children play together on the playground dinosaur.  No, I don't think I can live the rest of my life that way, but I don't think I can allow anyone else into that space that I gave so fully to A___.  It's true that I long to be touched -- just tenderly, lovingly.  A dad at the playground reached up to move a strand of hair from my eyes yesterday while we talked and I nearly burst into tears at the touch, which would have startled him.  How I miss the comfort of a body that loves me.

After my daughter went to bed last night, I actually looked up a few of the dating apps.  Photo after photo of women, of varying ages, marketing themselves:  "Looking for a friend and something more!" "Love to hike and have fun!"  I don't belong in those web pages any more than I belong at a bar.  And I'd much rather be at the bar, sipping a glass of wine, listening to music.  I'll wait until Boulder has one.  Maybe, when that happens years from now, I'll be ready for the next step.  Not yet.  For all my loneliness and my disappointment that I am so utterly alone in this life now, I am still in mourning. . .

in passing. . .

Ali and I used to talk about how the process of making new friends is oddly like dating:  the initial meeting, the awkward discovery of each other's likes and dislikes, the more awkward arrangement for the next meeting.  Now that all feels painfully true.  I can be friendly, but I'm not adept at making friends.  Today at the Boulder Farmers' Market, Mitike spotted another Ethiopian girl and marched right over to her, introduced herself.  I followed reluctantly.  I don't feel like I know how to function well in new social situations.  Of course, I had to awkwardly name that:  "Hi, my daughter's far more social than I am, but I decided I'd better follow her lead.  My name's Sarah."  The other mother seemed glad to meet us, relieved even to find another mother of an adopted Ethiopian child.  Of course.  Most people want connection.  Why can't I remember that?

The awkwardness goes on, though:  I feel compelled to sketch my difficult history immediately, to warn people about what they will be taking on if they enter into friendship with me.  My partner died two years ago. . . we were in Fort Collins and now we're here. . . I didn't intend to do this alone. . .   I out myself, too, making certain that I mention Ali's name or use the pronoun "she".  There.  Do you still want to be friends with me?

This woman does, I think.  She emailed me later to say she was glad we had met.  My daughter is two years older than hers, but they connected fairly well.  Maybe I've found a friend in Boulder.

Regardless, I needed that interaction to nudge me out of the sadness I had cradled all morning.  I woke from such sweet dreams of Ali, dreams I can't even remember except for the longing and the early-morning light and how content I felt.  All morning, as Mitike and I biked along the creek trail and then wandered the Boulder Farmers' Market, I thought how unfair it is that Ali is not here in this life she wanted all along.  Then suddenly Mitike announced she was going to introduce herself to the little girl across the grass, and it all catapulted me into now.  This is where I am.  Time to make friends.  My name's Sarah.  Do you want -- to get together sometime?

98.

When I told my grandmother, in a carefully written letter I mailed from Alaska, that my husband and I were separating because I had fallen in love with a woman, Gram wrote back almost immediately.  Just days later, I opened my mailbox to find the legal-sized white envelope with Gram's graceful handwriting, the canary yellow paper inside.  I wish I had that letter, still, but I know what it said:  I love you.  No matter what, I love you.  Maybe she also talked about trusting my heart, or about sadness, but what I remember is her unconditional, unwavering love for me.  "XOXOXO," she always wrote large beneath "Love, Gram".

That was seven years ago, when Gram was nearly 91 years old.  An avid reader of The New Yorker, she possessed a clarity and a progressive awareness of the world, and so she was unsurprised to have a lesbian granddaughter -- or at least not any more surprised than she felt to have a granddaughter who had chosen to live so far away in Alaska, so distant from beloved Iowa.

Gram loved Mary Oliver's poetry, and she read every word Willa Cather ever wrote (every time I visited, Gram wanted to know if I had visited the sand dunes in Nebraska yet -- Willa Cather wrote so beautifully about them, you know).  We never talked about the fact that both Oliver and Cather were lesbian; that wasn't the point, anyway, when we discussed Oliver's existentialism or Cather's astute observations about human beings' relationships to the landscape.  It wasn't an issue with Gram.  I think she might have said that people love whom they love.

Ali met Gram when Gram was 92, when we took her two kids on a whirlwind tour of Iowa before I traveled to Ethiopia to adopt Mitike.  I knew Gram missed my husband Matt, his gentleness, his quiet appreciation of her garden, the way he loved to stand at her tall windows with his binoculars raised to study the birds.  I knew she corresponded with him sometimes still.  But she embraced Ali, pulled her in, found love for her, too.  When Ali rose early to walk the neighborhood, Gram nodded at her from her chair, observing to me later that she appreciated Ali's wish to "greet the day".  She had always dealt with hearing loss in her life, but she could hear most of what I said when I spoke loudly and slowly -- Ali spoke too fast.  Gram just grinned at me.  Later, in a letter, she reminded me about Mary Oliver's partner Mary Malone Cook, the photographer, whom Oliver said in Our World had always moved at a different pace, and so had enriched their lives.

When Ali died, Gram was 96.  I couldn't write her for a long time; it was hard enough to breathe; it was hard enough to choose each morning to live.  Gram wrote to me:  "now live forward in the ways she showed you".  Months and months later, I drove from Colorado to Iowa with Mitike in the car, arriving at Gram's house late at night to find a note on yellow paper on the chair by the door:  "WELCOME!  You are LOVED. XOXO."  The next morning, while my younger cousins entertained Mitike, Gram and I talked for hours, sitting in the chairs in the living room, sometimes lapsing into comfortable silence while we gazed out the window at the sassafrass tree and the cardinals on the bird feeder.  Eventually, Gram told me about what it had been like to lose my grandfather 31 years before, how it had been several years before she could remember him healthy, how her grief had sometimes threatened to defeat her.  Tears blurred my vision.  How often had I railed at the unfairness of what had happened to me and Ali, that we had found such real love and then lost it in such an awful way?  Gram's voice:  "Now when I remember him, I'm comforted."  I nodded, feeling only sorrow.

Last March, Mitike and I flew to visit Gram, and I marveled that at 97 she was more current with world events than I was, that she was reading a thick tome about Thomas Jefferson, that she wanted to know if I knew of the poet Linda Pastan, who had just been published in The New Yorker.  I had gotten healthier.  I could feel my grief turning into something new in me, a stone, still, but more manageable, something closer to wisdom.  I had decided to search for a new job, maybe move to a new city, and I had made a plan to memorialize Ali in the Yukon.  Gram listened to all of this, observing my tears, too.  I can't remember exactly what she told me, but later she would write in a yellow letter:  "Go whole-heartedly with your decisions.  They're good ones."  And when I arrived at her house last week, for Gram's funeral, I found the piece of paper on which I had written the Whitman words I wanted to say in my Yukon ceremony.  Gram had kept it close by her chair all those months.

As I stood at the gravesite last week in front of the oak coffin that contained Gram's body, I felt sad, but I also kept thinking how utterly incredible ninety-eight years is.  I thought that Gram had gotten a rare chance to live that long and full of a life, and that she had made of her life something beautiful, and that she had loved so many people so well.  Grief for my grandfather, who has been buried at that site since 1980, or for Ali, who became ash at only 42, is of a different category.  Now, I cried for myself, mostly, for the loss of the person other than Ali who had always understood me fully.  For Gram, though, I thought of the Oliver poem "When Death Comes":  "I want to step through that door full of curiosity, wondering:/ what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?"  I can see her there with her walking sticks, peering ahead, sharp and interested as always.

The strangest quality of being alive is that we must live knowing we will die.  Wendell Berry wrote, "Be joyful though you have considered all the facts."  Gram did that.  I touched her hand for the last time, reaching past the edge of the coffin, and thought, I could live like that, too.  I could live joyfully though my heart aches, though I rage sometimes at all I find unfair, though I sometimes feel unbearably weary.  I could make of my life "something particular, and real", as Oliver says.

Gram would write in response to all of this:  "You ARE.  XOXOXO."

Ague.

In the Laura Ingalls Wilder books I read to my daughter until she complained (and if she'd been able to articulate it in adult language, she would have said something like, "Mom, I'm African and you're making me listen to all these pioneer stories about YOUR ancestors!" but she just whined and rolled half-way off the bed and started kicking me with her feet, which is a six-year-old way of saying the same thing), people catch something called the "ague".  Google defines the word as "a severe fever, like malaria," and Online Etymology explains that it's derived from the Medieval Latin word meaning "acute".  Serious.

Why don't we use this word any more?  We say people have fevers, or high fevers, or malaria, or they're dead.  I will say it:  I've come down with an ague.

Not really.  I feel fine, except for the slight sneezy feeling I have from the downstairs neighbors' cat.  Physically, I check out well:  low blood pressure, fit, slim, exercises regularly (um, not really, since hanging out with a six-year-old all the time means biking at about 1 mile per hour for about seven inches until she throws her bike down and claims she's tired, at which point, I raise my heart rate by saying something my father would have said to me, like "Don't be such a wimp!" or "Come on!  If you don't get back on that bike, we're not going to the pool this week at all!").  Yes, I'm just fine.

It's inside that I'm not fine.  I ache.  The simplest curve of a face, the curl of some stranger's black hair, the inside of a locker room return me to memory, and I miss her.  Damn, I miss her.  It's been two years since she died, and this morning I woke up certain that I had just walked with her on the sidewalk beneath the stars, because I had in my vivid dream, but then I fell asleep again and dreamed I walked into a room full of her bones and all the bones were fossilized.  The cruel truth:  she will not come back to me.  We cannot salvage what we have lost.  I cannot.

So I start this blog for no one, since I plan to give no one the address, thinking I could push myself into a greater community -- out of my lost sadness -- if I said, "Hey!  I'm not just a widow!  I'm a LESBIAN!"  And I live in Boulder, so there's the rest of the title.  But what the hell does it mean to be a lesbian without her?  I focus on biking with my daughter, reaching the pool (we do), making dinner later, conducting the ritual of bedtime.  Then:  9 pm, me and my brain and my broken heart.  If I were childless (I'm not), maybe I'd go sit at a poetry reading now, or I'd go to a bar.  Probably not.  I'd probably be hiking across the spine of the Himalayans, writing fragments of poetry that ask the same thing over and over, "Where are you?  Where are you?"

In the 1970s, maybe I could have gone down to Boulder's gay bar and found at least a sympathetic ear, but now there's no gay bar, and the lesbian community isn't one.  Is it?  There are the gray short-haired couples, or the tough single gray short-haired women with brown skin and buff arms, and there are the punk girls with the shaved heads or the pink hair and all the piercings.  Where is there room for a 36-year-old English teacher who prefers the quiet of the wilderness or the sound of her own fingers tapping out words?  Maybe my current location is my answer:  my own home, alone.  Maybe that's the answer.

What do I want?

The impossible.

Truly, an ague.

Origins.

I don't know who I expect to read my thoughts here.  Maybe I'm writing to Ali, my partner and best friend of eight years who died in 2011.  Probably.  I'm always writing to her.  Most of my work is in 2nd person.  You, you, you, you.  I want her to hear me.

But maybe I'm also hoping I'm writing to women who are like me.  Like me?  Lonely?  Alone?  Isolated?  Intellectual, serious, conducting a day job in a professional world (if middle school classrooms can be termed professional) -- but LESBIAN.  What does it mean to be a lesbian and be only one?

If Boulder had a lesbian bar like Seattle's Wild Rose, I'd be there tonight (I'm in the summer MFA program at Naropa -- my daughter's with my aunt in Breckenridge).  But what would I do there?  I've never been hip.  I don't have fashionable short spiky hair, tattoos covering my neck and arms, piercings all over my face.  Look at me:  I look like I was brought up on a hog farm in Iowa. . .because I was.  I grew up sitting in pews in a Lutheran  church on Sundays.  I don't even know what to do at a lesbian bar.  Ali:  have a drink there?  That's what we did, when we visited the place together.  In 2007, we visited the Lexington Club in San Francisco -- we had just decided to be out together after keeping our affair secret for two years -- and the bartender at the Lexington Club asked us if we wanted to play the board game "Apples to Apples".  I've hated that game ever since.  It represented the hum-drum.  Where was the wild, sexy loving of lesbian bars in movies?

Now I'm all by myself.  Now I'm in Boulder, because -- that's too long of a story to tell right now.  I want to know:  who am I now, alone?  Maybe I will only love one woman in my life.  I'm 36.  When I close my eyes, I only see Ali and the soft peach fuzz of her cheek.

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