Dearest Reader,
I feel I owe you an explanation. I especially feel I owe you an explanation if you’re not a paid subscriber, because much of what I share these days comes after the paywall (for access, upgrade here).
This explanation is twofold: First, you might have noticed that I go through “themes” in what I’m sharing. The last few instalments (including today’s) are tangled up in sexuality and gender. Before that came addiction. And anorexia. And aging. And love and relationships. Etc.
All are full of the past through the lens of now. All are raw, honest, mostly healing, sometimes painful.
The reason for hashing out this material (again!) and telling long-ago tales is simple: I need to have 60,000 words of it written and tidied by late February. I’m sharing sections here because those are the sections I’m working on.
The second part of this explanation has to do with what I’m sharing today.
If you’re a paid subscriber, you can skip this part because you already have access to the backstory. If you’re not, it means that I’m throwing you into part of a thing. You don’t have the full beginning. You don’t have the ending from last time. You’re landing in the middle.
Perhaps that’s plenty. Likely that’s plenty! But if you want a more complete, more logical rendering this week and in the weeks to come, you’ll need to sign up to get complete posts (or email me if the $2.50-5.00 a month is beyond your means; I’ll add you, no questions asked).
Still here? Thank you! I promise I won’t belabour these explanations every time. Just today.
In integrity & alchemy,
Dana
Picking up where last week left off…
Dumped by Karla, seated across from Phil at Lambda Café for what would be our Last Supper, I knew the answer. Thoughts lingering on her not him, I longed for the trembling, the giddy disbelief, even the shards of heartbreak.
Instead, I was numb, distracted, removed from feeling much of anything. Scraping at cold pasta and tracing my fork through thin sauce, I watched words drift through colourless conversation without me. I let them fill up space as expected while I slipped inward. A few weeks later, I knew it was time. When Phil and I last broke up, it was me leaving.
This overdue departure made space for Krista, my inaugural girlfriend. Krista was a friend of Karla’s—the first time I met her they were holding hands and I was jealous of her and her and that. Karla—never jealous, ever gracious—set us up. The evening of our first date, Krista arrived in a dark blue pea coat at the house where I rented a room in Dupont Circle—a very cool, very gay part of Washington, D.C.
The date went fine. We made it official. Physically, Krista fit.
In other ways, not so much.
CONTINUED for paid subscribers after the jump. First, a quote that I read in a brilliant, magical book last week. Take it as you will.
“When our ‘opinions’ start using today’s science to defend their personal prejudices, we are on troubled ground. Our souls on the other hand don’t have imperial prejudices; they know the histories because they are our history. Our souls have anciently lived out what our minds have an opinion about. Our souls don’t care about the ‘truth’ of our opinions. They want a mythological link-up with an everyday immersion into the magic of the natural, unpeopled wild that our ancestral Indigenous origins lived in forever. And in the wild landscape of our pasts, our souls still ride their horses of memory.”
—Martín Prechtel, The Mare and the Mouse: Stories of My Horses, Vol. 1