As I walk through the cobblestone streets of my late teen years, I remember walking these streets in the rain in 1995, trying so hard to shut it down. The wind blows and I hear only the quiet rustling of leaves in the old cemeteries. The streets are empty and the cold nips at my neck, like the ghosts of past lovers.
I remember 18 year old me trying to turn off her feelings; shut down her heart.

Skin on skin

Lover to lover.

Twenty five years later I feel the uneven surface of the cobblestone, hear the crunching of fall leaves under my boots, and ache with the sinking in my chest.

I know I will never be that cold.

You lied every time you said my feelings mattered.

Skin on skin.

Lover to lover.

You lied every time you looked in my eyes and kissed me deeply.

Skin on skin.

Lover to lover.

You lied every time you said you loved me.

Skin on skin.

Lover to lover.

Drops of rain hit my cheek and my chest throbs with pain. My breath is tight from grief and loss.

I think about the beauty of the history within each stone; each building; each structure. I think of all the broken hearted people who have walked these same streets; about the possibilities of spirits walking next to me, within me.

And 42 year old me forgives the me of 25 years ago for trying to shut it down. Because as much as this hurts, I am so grateful that I could never be that cruel to anyone else. I know my tender heart is what brings beauty to the world; brings kindness, silliness and softness to the day and night.

Skin on skin.

Lover to lover.

I remember waking up that Sunday morning last month. I don't know what changed. I didn't know what had changed, but I knew something huge had lifted.

I will not let you ruin me.

I remember that moment in 2013 when it did. I sat there at the tiny sushi place in the Castro.... she said "you really love her, don't you?" and I realized I did... and that I wanted her in my life so badly that I would do anything.... including slowly killing myself, destroying my heart, my soul, my self esteem, and my self worth.

and on that Sunday morning in Ohio, from the bed of #persephonevan, I realized that I would not let you ruin me.

I am worth so much more than you.

https://youtu.be/P6Xr67cTzwE

​

You may think I’m a pessimist, always living in the negative, but what you don’t see is that I believe in possibilities.

And always have.

When I was 8 I wrote President Reagan to tell him to throw away his key to the nuclear bomb. I saw peace as a possibility

When I was 15, 18, 23, 25, 28, 32, 35, 38, and 40, I fell in love. I saw all that we could be. I fell deeply, even though the 16 year old goth/ punk rocker in me sighs and scowls and says I have never actually been in love, including now.

I believe in ghosts.

I believe in an afterlife and a next life.

I believe in fairies and vampires and magic.

I believe in aliens and scientific depth.

I believe someone will love me one day, the way I love them. I believe I am worthy. I believe it will come.

But not with you.

i believe you are capable of honesty. I believe it is possible for you to be direct and real.

but not with me.

I believe in my possibilities.

I believe I have the whole world in front of me. Literally.

And I will not give up these possibilities for this. For this nothing. This pain.

I believed I was better than ghosting. But I also know that’s how this will end.

​Im sorry.

​



​

Sometimes it’s like this just to remind you that you are still alive... it’s like that time when my heart hurt more than any of the deaths or the loss.... blades calmed my heart, and my head spun.

But this just tells you that you aren’t empty. You can still love. You have a heart: she said.
​
and that’s what it’s like right now in this liminal space; betwixt and between.

Thirteen year old Cora never fucking existed.

So you are speaking to nothing.

A dream

A delusion

But really, 13 Year old Cora was always there. Waiting to bloom and come out as this beautiful, strong, vulnerable woman you see.

But you wouldn’t know that because you never asked. You ask all the questions I asked you to ask, the questions you think mean something...

but they don’t.

​Much like with my random stabbing in the dark questions because you refuse to be transparent with me; your questions are more about you and yourself than they are about me and who I am, where I come from, and what made me the Cora you pretend to give a shit about.

I missed you and I hadn’t even met you. Which reminds me I am in the liminal.

Communitas happens, he said.

I know this is supposed to be uncomfortable. I am fighting my natural reaction to just run, which is more possible now than ever. Fleeing his narcissism and her gaslighting, each step feels like becoming more and more myself. But still the sticky complications of the liminal surround me.



​
​

After brunch on that last August Saturday, I folded up my hope and stuffed it in my back pocket. It sat there. And days turned into weeks and then months and years.

It was silly really because I knew from December 16, 2016, yet I held on to that tiny hope despite the silence and emotional blackmail.

It shrank over the months after the third ghosting, like a dollar bill in the pockets of your favorite jeans.... Over and over through wash cycle after wash cycle, becoming dried up, crinkly and barely legible.

But still it held the same value: 1 dollar. One ounce of hope that you were my person.

And one day that tiny piece of hope disintegrated. It was too much (or too little). Too many wash cycles. Too many disappointments.

I'm not sure when that day came. I know I forgot that tiny hope was even there after hundreds of walks alone for hours, and distress-tolerance movie viewings every weekend.... But like a smoking habit, I felt comfort in the deep inhale and exhale of toxic energy. And then it was gone. I reached for it, leaving a bad date or after a shitty day at work, and realized it was gone.

The tiny hope was gone and I wasn't sure what to do with my hands. I held my dry elbows for a moment, feeling their flawed simplicity. And then I felt that deep sinking feeling in my chest.

And as that hope faded-- barely legible on the paper-- my heart beat grew stronger. Each night I could feel it about to burst as my hand reached for nothing. Holding my own hand under the weight of my down comforter; my heated mattress pad the only warmth.

I know you know that feeling. That feeling of deep loneliness and hopelessness. The one that makes you forget what Love feels like; what it feels like to have someone touch you; to have someone inside you in all the senses of the word.

I can remember it like a word on the tip of my tongue. And like a book I haven't yet finished, you filled my dreams while my subconscious tried to put you in some order; to figure out the end.

Until I remembered that crumpled up piece of hope and realized that Saturday was the end, scrolling across the screen with no sequel.

The. End.

And I reached for my new piece of hope, just as tiny and a bit frayed, but so full the potential of the next deep breath of fresh air.

I've long thought I wished we were strangers again.

What would it be like to meet you fresh, as 41 year old me? Would we even make it beyond the first date, or would you be like the dozens of dates that have slipped quietly from my memory in the early evening hours after a meh drink or 3 at the same bar we've both been to more times than we can count?

But now I realize that I am glad we are not strangers again, despite how little I feel I ever knew you. Because, in the end, I learned a lot.... not from you, but from the work I did over the years to get past you.

I would never know how to set boundaries and speak needs. I think I realized this the last time we had drinks on Haight. I tried to speak needs and you lashed out on me. I knew at that moment that I was done with you; that our time was over.

I would never know the importance of perception checking... I think I knew this fairly early with you, but it was cloaked in your jealous blaming, so it took me a minute to truly understand. It is not all about you.

I would never know the power of forgiveness, because you (not) working that ninth step makes me remember over and over how toxic resentment is.

So, now I walk in a world of strangers. Bullies remind me of that time when your soon to be best friend was so cruel to you, and all I wanted was to cover you in love, but didn't know how. No one seems to give a shit, and the weekends feel like drowning and hopelessness. Yet, I still know better than to have feelings for you or you or you or you... My heart healed and I know better than to try to attach to someone so narcissistic or cruel as you or you or you or you.

Instead, I just walk forward; trying to keep hope alive that one day someone will love me.... one day, my person will say "where have you been?" And in that moment, I will be grateful that we were not strangers again.

I have been waiting for you for what feels like a lifetime. When I think about my first thoughts of you, they feel like the thoughts of a child... sweet, innocent, but hopeful and tentative in their desire. I was so scared, but I hid that under my hard shell, so you never knew. And you were so scared, but you hid it behind silence and withholding, so I never knew. I wish I could tell the us of then just one thing:

Be brave.

We would burst into each other's lives with bold confidence, kissing sweetly and passionately every chance we got.

We would speak needs with gentle words, almost able to see the listening from the other.

We would dance in our bubble so sweetly that no one else would ever be a factor.

We would sing and laugh and dance and cry and breathe with daring.

Our love would be silly and full and the perfect amount.

We would know we were each other's person, just like we have, but this time, we wouldn't hesitate, because we would be brave.

There would be no need for pleading letters; longings on lonely Saturday nights; wishing I could text to say hi without being too stalkery; failed attempts at dating others or getting over it.

You would come to my apartment in Berkeley and easily break the force field of solitude I have built around myself, look at me with your adorable smile, and we would be together.

We would get out of our own ways and be brave.




https://youtu.be/kjRo_CHSdt0

and the only thing I can think is that I am going to die alone. Never experiencing a healthy happy relationship. And that I never was able to show you how I felt about you.

Once upon a time a less-than-stranger-less-than-friend friend described me as someone who lives perpetually with exclamation points hovering over her head. And for years I was that woman: excited; open; hopeful.

But two abusive lovers in a row really takes it out of a grrl.

It's funny-- not funny haha but funny interesting-- to think about how jealous you were of her; how much you hated her and how much you punished me for that... because in the end, you were both the exact fucking same. You both tried to contain me; repress me; get me to be less than I am. She did it by pretending I didn't exist. Distance and withholding were the outlines of her subtle but consistent abuse. It still surprises me when I meet one of her close friends who has never even heard my name... And you did it by yelling or storming out or locking yourself in the bathroom or ghosting.... Yours was the long con of constant monitoring of my actions and subtle if subconscious manipulation so I was afraid to go out or even have friends.

I promise I won't do it again....

At least she never fed me that bullshit Hallmark Channel line. At least she finally told me she couldn't connect. She couldn't love me. She could never really be in love with me... But still, you would lash out. And then, "I'm sorry. I won't do it again..." and even the even more sickening "You made me do this," because even though those weren't your exact words, you always danced around them claiming that I never stuck up for you or some other lie of a similar vein.

And after years of this, I have become what someone recently called me: a tight bud. Not a fabulous fucking flower but this wound up bud, afraid to let go and just open.

I want to remember what it was like to have exclamation points hovering over my head, before you and before her and her and her. I want to remember how I felt before I lived in this desert wasteland of panoptic queers. I want to let go of this image of our wedding, our marriage, our life together. I want to let all of your lies go-- that you won't do it again; that you love me- and just open. I want to open to the possibilities and to love. 

I want to be what I am on the inside and what I know I can be: A fabulous fucking flower.

2008 showed me who she was from the very start. There was the early sleep so I could conduct research on a cold and windy New Year's Day in South Philly. There was the attempted break-in at 1:30am and the ensuing restlessness. She made me feel like a stranger in a strange land: a stranger to my body, to my city, to my career. That was the worst year I could have ever done, yet still I did it.

2009 hid her true colors by inviting me out to the local gay bar-- something I had wanted for more than a decade. She said all the right things at all the right times for a very short, very amazing time period. She was full of the highest highs I had yet to know. She was so life changing in bringing me into the academy and giving me the kind of sex I couldn't even imagine before that.

But then she showed herself in 2010 with a moment that haunts my memory still. She ended with silly pictures before a play about death.... the most apropos beginning/ ending that no one could have written it.

2011 was a red flag that I accepted with a disgruntled sigh. She was ushered in at a club with her friends who hated me and who I hated. She was over quickly and with way more drama than necessary.

2012 happened outside the Lex with champagne bought moments before at the corner store.... enough said.

Coughing and wheezing ushered 2013 into the world; a subtle sign that grief and sadness would be the theme of the year. She started at El Rio.... involved a violation of boundaries.... and then ended with a walk home after a booty call. I should have known then what turmoil I faced, but even 3 days in when you stopped speaking to me, I refused to see it. Silence in Hawaii; Silence on my Birthday followed... yet I kept coming back for more of 2013...

2014 started again at El Rio and with some level of naive hope. What I didn't know then was that, again, the hope I felt was some other woman's fate. She would finally get that commitment and love I always longed for...

2015 continued the theme, this time with a stranger who would quickly marry. Want to get married? Date me and you are sure to marry, move in with, or get engaged within 1 year!

You brought me so much hope in 2016 even though I felt your jealously from the first seconds. I still don't understand why you caused problems when there were none. I still don't understand why you turned on me in all of the moments we should have been closest. But, that was what 2016 brought-- abuse in the form of a jealous lover who would lash out because I had friends or community or anything.... 2016 was such a mind fuck because she brought this being who was all and everything I wanted but this being who would lash out at me for no reason.... This person who didn't trust me like she knew me when I was an addict, despite the opposite.... 2016 drenched me in disappointment. I loved you so much but you didn't trust me so it was an effort in futility.

And so 2017 started alone. So. Alone. I slept in the Kiwi version of Tahoe while bros partied. I awoke in the new year and visited magical places alone. so. alone.... and so 2017 proceeded. Alone. Even you ghosted me. again.

And this is why I am terrified. 2018.... starting the same way..... starting alone and with tears.... I am not sure which is more pathetic: the fact that I started 2017 thinking of you.... or the fact that I started 2018 that way too. I feel like an idiot for still fantasizing about our wedding.... about our flash mob engagement, our wedding with your beautiful face looking at me when we say "I do" and our reception with a bouncy house.... and our honeymoon to Fiji and then our life together.... our beautiful life together.... I feel like an idiot thinking this would happen with you or anyone... I feel like an idiot for thinking that just because I feel like I am a pretty good person means anything.... like all that has happened in the last 10 years means anything. Like this is a cause and effect world. It's not.

so, 2018... what you got? because all I want is her.... still.... but I can't handle another 2016 or 2017....