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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