Mae

My problem is that I am long winded. Writing a short blog post is hard for me, and feels a bit unsatisfying. Because also my problem is that I like details. I live for details. I live through them. Details take a long time to write down.

Let's just say that this weekend, I managed not to get so drunk I had to lie down on my kitchen floor in the middle of a date. Let's say that I loved sharing a bag of popcorn with J. and giggling through Julie and Julia. Shall we say that I loved too a green-whipped ride along Scott Street one way and then the other, with Mars having risen higher between them. Let us dwell for a moment on the look of pleased surprise on D.Jack's face when I made myself an Unexpected Megan.

Let's say that I had a great time in Kingston at a wonderful brilliant art show. Let us add that I loved drinking beer outside as part of a faggot sidewalk party. Let us commend the homophobe Kingstoners who shouted that at us for their obviously perceptive nature.

To paraphrase -
Meghan: Do you think you have a thing for musicians?
Megan: I've dated about 3 non-musicians since I was 16.

Maybe too let's say that I tried very hard not to be a pill about my travelling arrangements, but that I only half succeeded. We'll say that I learned a few things about how I need to travel if I'm going to a place where the trains and buses run infrequently out of a station that is inexplicably way the fuck up Chebucto. Let us repeat these four words: Chill The Fuck Out.

Let us also ponder Mae's loveliness, the Mae who said "Okay, you should take the train because we probably won't leave for noon and then you'll be stressed and we'll be rushing. And this way you don't have to make small talk."

Finally, let us say that there are beautiful things, and here is a morning that is a string of them: waking up in a gigantor bed with your best friend, with the craziest bedhead after spending a muggy night tossing and turning. Being in a house with a perfect circle iron grate in the upstairs floor that you can press your eye against to spy on the main floor. Making coffee and eating breakfast with special-bought soy milk and more friendly friends and a nice dog and a cat you buried your face in deliciously even though doing so made you sneeze three times. And let us say that the coffee was good coffee and that the windows were opened onto the densely-leaved backyard.

And we will say that string is sparkling.

++Promdemonium 2009++

I never hit my stride last night.

Oh sure, I mean I was on the arm of the hottest thing ever seen in a velvet blazer. With our matching but not matchy-matchy green outfits. Wearing the prettiest corsage I've ever gotten on my wrist.

Oh sure, I got to kiss a girl in tight white jeans and a ruffled shirt, a girl who had never kissed a girl before. And okay, another kiss from someone who had a kiss-pass from her gal and wasn't afraid to use it.

But my game was lost from the start and I never really found it.

Though I must say I didn't really think about where it might have gone when I had my thumb hooked through my date's belt loop while we slowdanced.

Still. I felt like I spent a lot of the night overheated and chafed by my enormous dress, dancing to one bad 80s song after another until the nostalgia wore off. One of those nights where I couldn't think of what to say, and my voice hurt from talking over the music within a couple of songs. Mostly because I didn't want it to be saying anything.

Still. I was there with a posse of my friends, and we were Done Up. There were bow-ties and leather ties and ruffled shirts and polka dots and crinolines as far as the eye could see and the 2 would take us (which is the Rideau Centre now, FYI). We met lots more of other friends there.

But it wasn't our crowd, not the way I'm used to. If I wasn't with my people, I felt adrift in a sea of faces I didn't even recognize.

++Prom 1993++

My giant dress of last night is the same dress I wore to my actual prom in 1993. That is me on the back deck of my parents' house.

Funny, because last night the dress was pretty par for the course, whereas in 1993 it was an affront to good prom-goers everywhere.

Funny also because I took last night's prom more seriously than I took my actual prom. For my actual prom, I went with a friend, someone I hardly knew and hadn't ever really liked very much, though he turned out to be a really nice guy.

I was actually seeing someone, had just started dating him, but he was 27, and there was no fucking way in hell I was going to bring him to my stupid prom, the stupid prom I was only going to because my bandmates were going and I knew we'd all have fun together. And, well, okay. I really did want to go to my prom. Even if I thought it was a stupid tradition, and was mad that the prom committee was only selling tickets for couples, I still didn't want to miss out.

When I asked Mike P. - a close friend of the bassist in my band - if he would be my date, he nodded a cool yes. I went to Kensington and bought this dress for $12, the docs for $100 something. Mike found a tuxedo jacket with tails in some other thrift store and wore it over black pants and a black t-shirt. I think we slow danced together awkwardly once or twice, standing far apart and making desultory conversation.

Before that though. The night of, I got all dressed up. I'd dyed my hair the night before, so I slapped on some frosted make-up, hiked up my mom's decade-old electric blue exercise tights and me and my dress piled into my decade old Buick Skylark and picked Mike up.

The dance was in a tent; I think there was maybe dinner. But maybe not. I don't really remember much of the night. Not because of drinking, just time.

I do remember coming home the next night, after having stayed up most of the night at the afterparty, which I believe was in T.'s big backyard around the fire pit, drinking, smoking, doing drugs and making out with my decade older boyfriend. Worn out and in desperate need of some sleep.

And immediately perked up by my sister's story.

Cindy V. was getting gas at the station where my sister worked. Cindy forked some cash over to Amy, and said "Your sister ruined prom."

"Pardon?"

"Your sister. Ruined prom."

Maybe it was the blue hair and giant green dress. Maybe it was the mosh pit I started during the fast part of Stairway to Heaven. No matter. To this day, I am inordinately proud of the fact that I ruined someone's prom.

It involved two things of note.

+One+

Really, this isn't my thing of note, but I was there, and I was incredibly proud. Greg's launch was a smashing success. There were probably about 35 or 40 grown-ups there, and if you've ever been in Collected Works, you know that 20 chairs put out is 20 people crammed in. The rest of us spilled out into the rest of the store, clustering mainly around the two arches into the back room.

It wasn't a traditional reading. Greg mostly talked about John Ward and his significance both 400 years ago and today, and interspersed it with a few selections from the book. I think it's a testament to the writing that if I closed my eyes I couldn't tell when he went back from reading to speaking. Other people must have agreed, because Collected Works sold all their copies.

Hooray!

And, from all reports, the cookies were delish.

+Two+

After I had gotten home, run to yoga, run back and hoovered some dinner, I hied myself off to Mae's.

She showed me the treasures she troved at the Great Glebe Garage Sale and the Stittsville Flea Market; we drank lavender tea; we sat on the back porch; we commiserated; we agreed that we were both fabulous; we agreed we would continue to be fabulous, sometimes in the same space, but not Together; we cursed bad timing; we agreed we were not yet dead. I talked for too long about tropical fish; I apologized. She said nonsense; poured more tea. And then it was time for bed.

We hugged goodbye, a little tighter than we'd hugged hello.

"Take care of yourself," she said.
"You too, sweetie," I replied, using an endearment I never did while we were dating.

Then a run up Nanny Goat Hill, in the dark, on the clangy metal stairs, under the smell of lilacs turning brown.

You may have noticed a certain silence here around a certain Marathon Date with a certain Smokin Hot Mae. We ate good food, we lounged in bed, we read papers, we napped, we engaged in some Hot Damn Pants Removal. We went to a barbeque, glaze-eyed and yawning from all the day’s hard work; left early. We walked home with our arms wrapped around each other, I dropped her off at her house and walked up the stairs to mine.

I was exhausted. In my brain and heart. But doing okay.

Until I went to bed. I picked up my book, thumbed to the right page, and started bawling. I turned the light off. I kept bawling. I curled up, wishing I could fall asleep and wake up and not feel like my organs, vital and vestigial, were hovering on precarious stilts over a large body of salty water.

++

It was a hard decision to make, but I emailed her the next day. Told her I freaked out, told her I couldn’t date anyone.

I know, I know. Email? Not classy. Not my best move. Though I like to think that I’m good enough with manners of the heart, that I am in the Advanced Class, and thus know when it is appropriate to break rules that have been put in place for a very good reason.

Mostly, it turned out okay because Mae is a nice person, and moreover, she was feeling the same way. Had felt, even. Her Sunday night was tired and melancholy too.

This is why dating sucks. Because you meet someone you like, and you go out with them. And that’s nice, so you do it again. And they’re a really good kisser. So you do it again. And then it turns out that they embody all those things you said you wanted. So you keep on doing it.

And then one day your heart folds in folds in folds in on itself, into a pinprick black hole and you’re hurting numb all over. And you just can’t do it again and it just totally fucking sucks.

You know what is a very nice thing?

I will tell you.

A very nice thing is to have emailed the person with whom you are currently involved in intermittent, but very fun, pants removal, and to have told them that your visit with your family was stressful and it was very difficult to leave your grandmother not knowing if you would see her again, and then to open up your door and find a bouquet of lilacs on the step.

I think these will be a very lovely addition to the Marathon Date.

Smokin Hot Mae and I have had one of the oddest starts to dating I think I've had. I asked her out for a coffee, which turned into a beer, which turned into two, which turned into a tipsy walk home through the snow. So I asked her on a date date. The soonest we could schedule it was two weeks after. It was a smashing good time, so we decided we'd like another. In 10 days. It ended in a torn skirt and was very much fun. We decided we should do that again, though perhaps leaving out the ripped seams. We only went 7 days, that time.

This weekend, we're going to make up for it. Our next date, 10 days after our last date, goes from 6:30 pm on Saturday to sometime in the evening on Sunday.

We're making up for lost time, seems like.

I can't quite say how I feel about these gaps. I find them frustrating, for sure. That's a lot of time in between the kisses of someone whose kisses you quite thoroughly enjoy. And email, I do love email, to which anyone who has any kind of a relationship with me can attest, but, well, it's just not as easy to get to know someone that way as it is in person.

But I am enjoying that I want to see her again, and that the longer the gap, the more frustrated I become. It'll simmer down for a while, but I'll get an email, or see a picture and think, fuck, how many days?

It's all I can handle, as well. I can feel my heart struggling to come back alive, a thick ka-chunk as a bout of adrenaline shoots through its twisted veins and arteries and it lands hard in the bottom of my ribcage. The slow stretch and snap of a romantic feeling winding through.

That sounds dour and hopeless, but I don't mean it that way. I find it encouraging. I'm surprised I even have these jolts of actual feeling for someone else.

Whatever organ let me believe in Fate and True Love and The One is dead, starved of oxygen at a key point, perhaps. Maybe it'll grow back. Maybe it won't.

I'm not sure that's a bad thing. Because if what I get out of it is a day of backgammon and the newspaper in bed with a hot girl who is solid and thoughtful, funny, smart, creative, community-minded, warm through her core and a fucking great kisser, the kind of girl who will leave lilacs on my doorstep and offer me tea and hugs at just the right time, then I think that organ may have been vestigial.