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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