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.