Letter to Virginia

Dear Virginia,

Once, I wrote a fictional essay in which I burst into your room, where you sat surrounded by papers, your pen poised in ink-stained fingers.  I crossed the room to kiss you.  I suppose I did not imagine you as much as I imagined Nicole Kidman's you in "The Hours," but my point is that I wrote about kissing you.  I made love to you, and the pen dropped from your fingers, splattering ink across the pages on the brocade carpet.  You were surprised.  Vita didn't know half of what I knew.

How arrogant, that I believed I could move you to passion with my 21st century lesbian love.  I'm sorry.

I've been thinking about you.  About what's important.  I've been re-reading you, and wishing I could read you.  You said:  "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction".  I haven't thought about that as much as I should have.  I interpreted it to mean independence.  Financial stability.  But you were talking about space, too, weren't you?  About the mental and spiritual and physical space from all other people.  If I really want to become a real writer, I must hold myself somewhat apart.

Is it possible to hold myself apart and also love?

I want to know more about you and Vita.  I read Orlando and it told me only that you loved her, and that you imagined her as man and woman and also something more than either of those.  You wrote asking her to "throw over" her man and come walk with you in the moonlit darkness, and she wrote to you that she missed you, loved you, longed for you.  And?  When Vita was with you, finally, Virginia, did you merely wish to return to that solitary room of your own?

I read that you struggled to see yourself as a sexual being, and that Vita struggled because she wanted you to recognize her as a real writer.  Your affair ended in 1929.  "All extremes of feeling are allied with madness," you wrote in Orlando in 1928.

Is it possible to engage in madness and also to create art, or is the madness the art?  I recognize myself in you, and so I offer us Georgia O'Keefe as a reminder that it is possible to create art and not be mad.  It is possible to paint passion and be balanced.  Tempered.

When I wrote that fictional essay, Virginia, I wrote that you'd be saved by my passionate kiss, by my bold 21st century life.  I wrote that you'd never have entered the river with stones in your pockets if you'd had other options for your life.  What did I know?  You'd tasted that life with Vita.  You weren't oppressed by homophobia, but by the heaviness of your own mind.  The room of your own was not large enough.  It couldn't quiet the voices in your head, the persistent sadness.

I want to know why writing didn't save you.  What would have?  In Orlando, you wrote, ". . .We write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person.  The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver." But?

I want to know more about the room of your own.  About the room of my own.  I want to know if it could be enough.

Sarah

on second thought. . .

I gave Match.com one week. . . I've deleted my profile, though I never paid the $16/month to subscribe, so all I ever saw was that 24 women had sent me emails ("Subscribe today to find out who is interested in you!").  I imagine the messages:  Saw your profile.  Want to get a drink sometime?  Yikes.  I can't do it.  I don't want to do it.  Every day that I checked my email, I caught myself hoping SHE would "wink" at me, send me an email, mark me as her day's "favorite".  What if that was in my profile?  "36-year-old woman seeks deceased lover".  That's the truth.

The rest of the truth:  no woman will ever make me laugh as much, no woman will ever make me think as much, no woman will ever make me want to embrace the world as much as A__ did.  On the other hand, no woman will ever take me on such an emotional roller coaster, or simultaneously change my life for the better and the worse.  The loss of a woman will never plunge me to such depths again.

But.

I don't just want coffee, or a walk somewhere, or a kiss.

I want A___.

And because that's impossible, I bought myself a set of cross-country skis.  Ten years ago, A___ taught me how to cross-country ski in the rose-hued evening light on the frozen glacial lake in Juneau.  She teased me that I skied so slowly, wondering aloud if I stopped to journal along the way.  I remember her distant form in the moonlight, her curly hair silhouetted against the snow, her skiing stride graceful, easy.  The snow sparkled as I struggled along, somewhat frustrated that I couldn't master the skill, but mostly just glad to be out in the night, in love with the wintery world and with A___.  Always, A___ waited for me somewhere down the trail.  Her cheek and her neck and her collarbone were salty where I kissed her, and the woods were silent.  Perfect.

I didn't have those memories in mind when I bought the skis last week.  I've had the same 1970s skis and shoes for a decade, and I wanted to make nordic skiing my winter exercise since I can't afford to downhill ski here.  So I bought the skis, took an intermediate lesson, drove to Breckenridge, left my daughter with my aunt and skied out into the woods alone.

And. . . A___ was there.  Just ahead of me on the snowy trail, just after the moment she grinned at me and glided away.  I slid silently through the forest, fast now with good gear and instruction, and still could not catch her.  Each curve, I craned my neck to see her, I tried to hear the slice of her skis on the snow, but I was still too slow.

Sunlight shimmered and scattered through the tree branches, and the mountains were purple against the azure blue sky.  I dug my poles into the snow and pushed hard so I skimmed down a hill, the wind against my face.  And then I found myself in a meadow, in full sunshine, and for just a moment I felt her in me, breathing my breath, hammering my heart.

Then I was alone again.

I don't want the ordinary.  I don't want the drink that leads to dinner that leads to something else.  Not right now.  I still dwell in an in-between world, and sometimes -- ah! -- I see her there.

Sorry, ccny678 and lovincolorado, Wink44 and T4123.  I'm still taken.

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.