She isn’t negligent and self-involved, she works way too many jobs and hasn’t been sleeping. He isn’t irresponsible, his ex was an asshole who left him with a bunch of debt that wasn’t his and now he’s gallantly paying it off. In retrospect, after our own relationship with shinyperfectperson is over, we see they are exactly the person they said they were, but early on we made their shit seem like clay — which is to say, building material — rather than feces. They told us who they were. We’re the ones who decided to see potential instead.

Or, let me describe it another way: I was raised by a controlling father. I married a controlling man. Once I figured that out, I left him and stopped dating men. Therefore, I was golden, right? Except I started dating controlling women. I had a pattern and I couldn’t see the warning signs because I had a pattern. Familiar was comforting. It felt like home and so it would certainly keep me safe. No. They were telling me who they were. I just didn’t believe them. I wanted them to be better. And so I believed they were.

What I was saying, in Clit Test, is that eventually you learn desire isn’t enough. Sexual attraction is a major ingredient, but it isn’t the entire fucking brownie. People tell you who they are, and they tell you from the beginning. Listen to them.

The results of an abortion procedure look like a heavy menstrual flow. If you didn’t know that, take some time to research the facts of abortion. The Guttmacher Institute is supported by science and research rather than ideology. Start there.

I want you to consider something whenever you talk about abortion as murder. I want you to think about the doctors and nurses and support staff who come to work amid death threats to give women, men, and teens full reproductive healthcare. People who know that abstinence-only education leads to more pregnancies. That limiting access to birth control increases pregnancy and exposure to sexually transmitted diseases. People who know that women’s bodies are not chattel. You’re judging us, my friend. You’re judging women. You’ve drunk the Kool-Aid and you believe that women having sex is wrong. That we should pay for our choice to be sexually active with AIDS and a baby and then we’ll learn to love Jesus.

Is that what you’re saying? No. It isn’t, is it? You’re saying a good Christian family will give that baby a home and a life. Like the people who adopted Mary. Only that didn’t work out like the brochures. Morality is one of those words that’s sharp at both ends. And you would like me to believe, with your abortion feet and your bully tactics, that you know better than I do. That you will save me from my own depravity. Abortion is a legal medical procedure. Performed 3% of all services by Planned Parenthood. 3%. It may be a moral decision for the woman contemplating having one. But it may not. Either way, it’s up to her and has nothing to do with you.

You’ve drunk the Kool-Aid, and I remember what that was like. There wasn’t room in my head to consider that I was being sold these myths by men. Everyone marching outside the Planned Parenthood, shoving their doctored signs in the faces of my fellow citizens, was a man. They are in the business of shaming women, and they have enlisted you to help. There were dozens of abortion methods commonly used during the time of Christ, but the Bible never mentions abortion. Don’t you think that’s remarkable?

“What did you dream?”

“You were dead. You were dead and I was crying and crying.”

“I was dead?”

“I was at your grave. Crying and crying. And Mary too.”

“She was dead too?”

“No, she was crying and crying at your grave.”

“That must have been scary,” I say. “But I’m not dead. I’m right here with you.” There is a fleeting moment where I imagine their grief — the two of them at my grave — and love them for it. He is like this when he returns from trips. Afraid, suddenly, of my disappearance. Of my death. That he can go some place where I am not, and return to find that I am gone.

This is what stories are for, isn’t it? To soothe our disquiet. And so I ask him to tell me again about the aquarium. About the otters. What were they doing? What did he see? And then I am on the trip with him, and he is here with me, and we’re both alive. That is what stories are for. To bridge our experiences.

“They had a t-shirt in the gift shop,” he says, “Hairy Otter.”

“That’s clever.”

“Yeah, you’d have liked that one.”

“I do like it.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

Our nightmares are stories too, I suppose: some mutilated version of our particular fear told back to us unkindly. Insomnia has made me love sleep, even when it’s mean. The thing about stories is that we don’t enjoy every one. We don’t get them just for pleasure. But they are told to us so that we understand something about ourselves and the world. And each time we hear a story we know more and are braver. We recognize ourselves.

Good Night
- W.S. Merwin

Sleep softly my old love
my beauty in the dark
night is a dream we have
as you know as you know

night is a dream you know
an old love in the dark
around you as you go
without end as you know

in the night where you go
sleep softly my old love
without end in the dark
in the love that you know

I can only describe it as Beth Ditto. The quiet power in my head is Beth Ditto. Years ago I saw this documentary about the Mamas and the Papas where talking heads repeatedly asserted — almost defiantly — that Mama Cass was wicked sexy onstage. That her performances were mesmerizing. Of course, they were talking power, but we have no language to talk about powerful women without talking about their bodies. So they kept mentioning her weight.

And this is what they do with Beth Ditto. She’s so powerful that when you see her perform you are reminded of thunder. The trumpet of voice. The way the vocals come up through her body and then roar out of her. She is surge and wave and thunder. She is a sea storm. A tsunami. And instead, the chatter is about her size. Her queerness.

After the quiet fills my head, there is a strange reverberation and then a wave of power that almost makes me exclaim — something. Except there’s no language in my head. There’s only Beth Ditto. Standing there, barefoot, looking at me. And I have a terrible thrilling press within me, like birth, like euphoria. My own brain. I can feel my own brain. She lets go, and I’m entirely amplified.

“Four years.”

“Four —” my brain cramps.

“Years. Yeah.”

“Why?” I ask, and mean, would anyone stay. Why would anyone stay? “I mean, are they upset about it or have they agreed?”

“One is upset.”

That is a long time. Four months would be a long time. Frankly, four days is a long time. I know people get busy. Kids. Jobs. School. What else do we do? Recreation. Meals. Illness. Depression. Commutes. There are plenty of impediments that can get in the way. Like, not dating. Not dating can make a sex life trickier. But, if you’re with someone, how long are you willing to forgo sex before you call the relationship?

It gets particularly difficult if you had a huge amount of sex in the beginning of the relationship and then only the rarest sightings afterward. Our trip to Costa Rica sex. Or, that time the power went off sex.

Is it fair to say that sex falls in the Values column? I cannot be in a long-term relationship without an active and healthy sex life. Is that a value? Yes, I believe it is. And I believe that neglect of your sex life is like neglecting conversation or kisses hello. Or kisses in general. When was the last time you made out with your partner? I mean like hardcore teenagers in a car making out? You feed your belly and your brain with sustenance and stimuli. Why not the rest of you as well?

I can be an overly focused person. What color toenail polish is she wearing? When was the last time I brushed her hair? How long has it been since I wrote her a letter? There are steps toward and away from one another. Don’t count them. The count doesn’t matter. Do you want to cross to her, or don’t you?

“It’s better than sleep,” I tell my dog. “Nothing hurts anymore.” Over my head, the sun flits through the trees, and a train rolls through.

That horse whisperer dude said that horses are a reflection of their owners. This is true of all our animals. Kali is quick to joy, silly, mellow, willful, ridiculously sensitive and devoted. She’s also freaking the fuck out. Not pain, but confusion. I tell her the story about the time the skunk sprayed her right in the face and we all turned and ran and thought we were blind. It occurs to me halfway through, I could have thought of something more comforting. So I tell her about her parents. “Your dad’s name was Larry. Isn’t that crazy? A dog named Larry.”

We’re waiting on the vet, and hear him, finally. The whine of his engine. It’s a terrible arrival. And then she stands up, walks uncertainly to the door, goes right on through and falls in the snow and falls a couple of times getting back up, but her ears are alert and she’s no longer shaking.

I have this awful hopefulness all of the sudden. Oh. It’s OK after all. She’s OK. He is checking her and admiring her agility. Her hardiness. Don’t hope, I keep thinking. Don’t hope.

“I don’t think we’re there yet,” he says at last.

And we all look up at him. “Do you promise?” I say, like a child.

“You have a while,” he says. “Maybe more than that.”

Isn’t it strange? How tentative we are, my old dog stepping on her fawn legs, me watching from the doorway, with a kind of furious pride, like a new mother. Look at her go. Wild. Wild.

“A mixed race couple moved into my sister’s neighborhood and my sister’s having a hard time.”

“Why?” I ask.

She stammers. “Well, honey, it’s just the way she was raised.”

“You were raised with her. Are you having a hard time?”

“Well, no. But your granddad was in the navy, so we saw more of the world.”

“That’s not the way you’re raised then. That’s what comes after.”

She looks at me for a long time and then says, “She was raised in a different time.”

“So were you.”

“I’m a lot younger than she is.”

I won’t argue that gay is the new black. I don’t believe it. Civil rights are still the issue, but gay people have passed in all kinds of ways that black people couldn’t. At a party of granola girls in the Northwest, spot the lesbian is a game you’ll probably lose. We were hucked from the military, yes, but let’s be honest, we don’t have slavery in our past. We don’t represent a statistically improbable percentage of the prison population. Discrimination is nasty in all its forms, but that doesn’t mean its forms are synonymous.

In reply to the news that Washington had the votes to pass marriage equality yesterday, a woman commented that it was a disgrace. Here in god’s country. She went on to say that she had nothing against gays — why, her sister was a lesbian. And then I stopped reading. It’s just the same sad argument. It’s not hateful, it’s just what I believe. I don’t have anything against them per se but god says….

It’s just the way they were raised, right? Isn’t that the yawning story? No offense, nothing personal, it’s simply what I believe. No, brother. No. It’s what comes afterward. It’s the lie you let yourself go on believing to raise your heavy body up just a bit — just a fraction — and all it costs is your soul.

The guy who shouts at me, who hits me, can’t really speak for god, can he? None of these miserable men speaks for god. These men who have contempt for humanity and speak of the divine as though it were familiar to them. Who read a translation and call it scripture. Who burn the world to keep it pure. You can’t talk about god without talking about love. You just can’t. If god is wrath, that wrath is god’s, it isn’t yours. So who are you to talk about it? Why are you telling me what Paul said? Paul was just a dude. Like you’re just a dude, speaking from your prejudices.

Do you know what devout men look like? They look like Abraham. They fuck women who aren’t their wives, and pin their children for slaughter in the name of obedience. You can’t talk about god without talking about love. Or you aren’t talking about god. You’re talking about men. Jealous. Angry. Covetous. Righteous. Vengeful.

And we, your children, talk about shame. About frailty. About joy and forgiveness. We got the message. Do you see? Despite everything. We heard the actual message of redemption.

Finally we watched. It’s strange to find a movie that deals frankly with sex without losing the intimacy of sexual experience. To have hangups that don’t overshadow the characters. It’s so loud and overstimulating in the world. Everyone chattering and the fluorescent lights. Car horns. Sirens. Raised voices. What if relaxing, what if giving in, just makes us weak? Not vulnerable, but weak. Because they’re different, aren’t they? Not synonyms but points on a spectrum. You can hop off at vulnerable on the trip to weak.

I actually think that’s bullshit. Our frailty is redemptive. There isn’t often enough space to venture into the wild and yell our shit into the tree hollow. Most of us live in communities. Most of us spend much of our day in the company of other people. In the noise and the grime. The hubbub.

I love this movie, Shortbus. Mary describes it as sweet, but it’s something more than sweet. It’s the soft belly. The place where you process your humiliations. Whatever you have stored. Your private concerns. Those scabs no one else sees.

A critic of my second novel said, If they’d just talked to each other, they could have cleared the whole thing up. Um. Sure. If we communicated clearly, there would be no misunderstandings, and we’d all be happier. Simple. If we just stopped worrying about things, our lives would be more satisfying. If we let ourselves be loved, we’d be loved. Easy peasy.

Except we live imperfectly. We love in fractures. The light’s too bright. The traffic. The bills. The schedules. The meetings. The hurried meals. The neglect. The way we smooth ourselves over to glide with less resistance. As though that’s not where we’re finest. Struggling. Tripping. Fucking up two blocks from home.

I could describe the scene for you. Describe the girl, but the truth is, this line repeated for years. The first time a girl said it, and then kissed me, I was eight. We kissed all afternoon on her bed. It was the most strangely chaste interaction I’ve ever had with a girl. Much more chaste than the interactions I had with boys around the same time. And I wished it too. Wished I were a boy. Wished I never had to squeeze into tights for church, or have my hair curled.

By late elementary, the girls might not even realize I wasn’t. A certain group of them was convinced I was a boy. They’d swarm around me and flounce and write notes and be generally confusing. By the time I was in junior high, there’d be a best friend who treated me like a boy. Slept with me. Played with my hair. Talked about the lives we’d have together once we were grown. Kiss me. I wish you were a boy.

Is that what they wished? If I’d been a boy, they couldn’t have slept with me. Our minister fathers kept boys away from us, while we fucked about with girls. Some girls phase in and out. I was a safe place to test their curiosity. Only I wasn’t. The risks we took in that religiously rabid environment were colossal.

By the time I was thirteen, I didn’t wish it any longer. The girl would kiss me and a pilot light flared at my sternum. Inevitably she’d murmur, “I wish you were a boy,” and I’d slip my hand into her hair. She’d kiss me harder. It was like being a spy. Stealthy. Incognito. Dangerous. It went on like that for years.