paramour

Walking down the street, walking dog Milo, in Montreal, last Monday, Shelley said "I feel all asunder."

"Asunder?" I repeated.

"Well, maybe not asunder."

"No."

"I was thinking akimbo, but that's not right either. I mean an a-word, but I don't know which one."

We didn't come up with an answer.

Walking down the street, in Ottawa, on Thursday, in front of Dundonald park, I thought "I feel all asunder." Because even though it's not the right word, it's the perfect word.

In the weeks leading up to Shelley and Steve's departure, I did not think about them leaving. We talked about the details of it, but I was very good at pretending it was happening to people who were not the backbone of my social life here.

I managed to do that until very late in the game. There were a few tears when we said goodbye in Montreal, and I kept it together for the car ride back. And most of the day. But I felt increasingly off my game for the rest of the week. Friday, our yoga day, I was a fucking wreck. Sitting at my computer randomly crying.

When I am off my game: I am teary, I am irritable. I say fuck a lot, generally in situations that don't call for it and normally would not provoke that reaction from me. I am oversensitive. To everything.

Like relationship stuff.

For me, in the first few months of a relationship, I can hardly believe the other person exists.

How can you be so amazing? You're *perfect*! It's not possible that you could have always been this amazing and lived two blocks away from me and not been in my life. You must not have existed before I met you! But wait, that must mean that when you're not with me, you don't exist! You must be a figment of my mind! Sad! Sad! But wait! Now you're here! It's the best present ever! That's right I remember! You're amazing! And you're looking at me like *I'm* amazing! And that makes me like you more! And it makes me want to put my hands in your pants! And my mouth on your stuff! Right now! All the time!

And it feels like that feeling will last forever. Forever, however, seems to last about about 4 months.

That high is just not sustainable. Not for me anyway, not for anyone I know or have talked to. It takes a lot of energy, a lot of time, and eventually, you come to realize that the person you have fallen in love with is either 1) someone you are not actually in love with, or have any business building a long-term thing with or 2) someone who is indeed incredible and someone with whom you should build a long-term thing, but is also not a figment of your imagination.

Both have upsides and downsides. In Scenario 1, it's better to realize at four months than four years that you're not suited to the person that you're fucking. Sad that it didn't work out yet again, and it doesn't feel good, but them's the breaks.

In Scenario 2, it's amazing that you have found someone who is actual and smart and funny and nice and hot in the sack and who makes you smile when you think of them. But now that you really like them, what if they leave you. What if they don't feel the same way? What if you like them more than they like you? What if, in 3 and a half years, you're on the phone to your friend, wailing "When do I get to matter?", and knowing that she's thinking, and rightly, "When you dump him."

You take a bet that you've learned from your mistakes and that this time you've fallen for someone to whom you do matter. That you've raised your standards and thus attracted someone who can meet them. But you can lose a bet. And that is a scary proposition.

My four month-iversary with Eric fell in the same week that Shelley left. It felt like karma. That's a lot of change to two very significant relationships.

In both cases, I don't have real fears that I will lose either of them. If I stop and do some three-part breath I can hear a calm sure voice saying "Yes, they're there."

Overtop of that, though, my lizard brain has been skittering about saying things like "He didn't email you right back, he's getting bored of you," and "You're going to lose her in Halifax, she'll be too busy," and blah blah blah. Skittering scared. In the end, my lizard brain was just coming up with new ways to voice that universal keen: "What if nobody loves me?"

Luckily, both Shelley and Eric are kind, lovely, loving people. I was able to say that I was scared to both of them and they both were very quick to reassure me and my asundered akimbo lizard brain that settling down is not the same as settling and not all change is bad and sometimes, when you make your bets smart, you win.

None of you will find it surprising that Eric is just as handsome without his beard as with. It will take a day or two to get used to it, but I must say that once this current bout of cold sores is over,* I think I will enjoy the naked face kissing very very much. Also not surprising.

He came over last night and we crawled into bed and I read The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip aloud. If you have not read that book, you probably should. It is a very good book.

*Again! I know.

From 15 to 18, I worked as a housekeeper at PV Home for the Aged. My hands were in and out of water hundreds of times a day.

I hated the feeling of rubber gloves. Not the flocking against my skin, but the feeling of the water pressing up against the rubber and pressing the glove unevenly into my hand. That feeling creeped me out so badly, I decided that having chapped, cracked and bleeding hands was a better alternative.

Like we do about too many things, I held onto that teenage decision well into adulthood. Until this past winter, when my hands moved towards chapped again. Rembering the cracks and blood, the lanolin and gloves to bed, I decided that I would treat rubber gloves like turnip.

Unlike my recent forays into turnip consumption, I completely reversed my opinion on wearing rubber gloves. They are great and I wear them every time I do the dishes.

**

Eric and I have had the luxury of time these past few weeks. He's been in between school and job, spending his days looking for work and relaxing. So I've just been able to call him up and say "Hey, wanna come over and take your pants off?" and like as not, he'd say yes.

That of course, had to end. I knew that, I'm sure, somewhere. But then tonight over dinner, after his first day at his new job, Eric said "This is really nice."

I smiled at him. Touched his arm with the back of my fingers. "Yeah. It is. Wait. Which part?"

"Just this moment. I just realized on the bus home from work that my days are going to be full. When will I do laundry? Grocery shop? How do people do this? When do they watch movies?"*

My stomach dropped a little. Since he found out he got the job (food services at a hospital), Eric's been saying that his summer's going to be over. I've been laughing, teasing him a little. Oops.

The silver lining? Every minute counts. The half-hour dinner between work and class becomes not just another half hour, but our half hour.

**

When my ex and I broke up, I made a few lists: Things I Want in a Partner; How I Want My Partner to Treat Me; Dealbreakers.

Beards and smoking were on that last list. Eric is a bearded smoker.

I knew both these things up front about him, and I have to admit they did give me pause. Considering that I've spent the past two years ducking sidewalk secondhand smoke and cursing the sidewalk smokers under my breath, I wasn't sure I would be able to date someone who I had seen smoking on the sidewalk. Even if that someone were a Very Very Cute Someone.

More importantly, would I be able to kiss someone bearded without thinking about kissing my father? Even if they were a Much Much Cuter Someone than my father.

Thankfully, Eric is a very very polite and respectful person (biggies on the first two lists), and has thus never smoked around me. I often forget that he actually is a smoker.

And the beard? I've come to love it. And I never think about kissing my father when I'm kissing Eric. Rest assured.

When I was first having a crush on Eric, I looked at the pictures on his myspace more than once, though I will not embarass myself by divulging how many times more. Most of the pictures on there were of him beardless. Because of the dealbreaker list, those are the ones I focussed on, even though his lips looked the nicest in the full-beard picture.

So when we met for coffee that first time and there was his beard, fully grown in and unignorable, for a few moments he looked strange to me: not bad, but a disconcerting combination of him-nothim. Not disappointing different, like someone's told you they're 6 foot and are actually 5'6". But yes, strange.

The strangeness wore off as we talked. I got to know him and and fell in love with him and the beard has been there all the way through.

When I revisted his myspace not so long ago, I had the same him-nothim feeling, this time when I looked at the beardless photos. They're lovely photos, and that person is very cute, but I didn't have the same cunt-clenching feeling of looking at the photos of My Boyfriend, Bearded Eric.

**

Before we ate dinner tonight, Eric sat at the table and told me about his day as I scaled the dish mountain that's been building over the last few days. It sounded like a good day. It's a job job, probably not going to be very satisfying, but not too rough either.

And then he said, "I have to shave my beard."
"Really? You're not allowed to have a beard?" I laughed. It seemed weird, even if he was dealing with food.
"Beardnet," was his only response.
"Jesus, that's not okay. So that's for tomorrow?"
"Yeah, I'm going to go home and shave it off after dinner."

The beard? Gone? But. But but but! My beard!

I took my hands out of the sink and turned around. "But! Gone!" Without thinking, I held my hands out and walked towards him.

The scary bright yellow gloves arrested my advance, but just for a moment. I laid my hands very gently on his beard.

*Of course, these were actually rhetorical questions.

Eric and I are both Algonquin students. He’s full-time in the Museum Studies program (which, from his description, is as edifying as library school). I’m part-time, taking computer courses. The first time we met in person was at the Observatory for a coffee. It was our first date, sort of.

Nearly every Monday since then, he would trek in to meet me at 4:30. No matter that I work 6 blocks from his house and we could easily have had coffee downtown. We both liked meeting there, being the old people in a room full of teenagers. I loved the days I could spot him before he spotted me and watch him for a moment - being himself to himself.

We chatted, read the Algonquin paper together, went over our days. We snuggled on the curved couches if we managed to score one, or cast longing looks over the very very wide square tables if we didn’t

I would watch the clock on my iPod, then he’d walk me through the Gonk maze to my class in the swank Tech building.

We had this chat along the way one Monday:

“So I guess we’re college sweethearts.”
“Indeed.” I took his hand. “Does that mean you’re going to pin me?”
“Yeah, to your bed.”
“Right answer.”

He looked down at his pants. At the watch pocket.

“Or how ‘bout this Weapons of Mass Seduction pin. I’ve got an extra one at home.”
“Oh, yeah, we should definitely have matching 1” band buttons.”

You might think that if you've organized a bike fixing party, and you're going to be getting greasy with two handsome men, and you write a blog, you just might think that you might remember to take a camera to document the occasion so you can write a big long blog post about how very nice and patient your friend Steve, who has tons of tools and stands and a bike-fixing manual and *gumption*, really is.

You might think that, but you would be silly. You would be bad and wrong.

Eric and I went over to Shelley and Steve's to fix our bikes on Sunday. Mine had been in my leaky lean-to over the damp and rainy fall and damp winter. I think Eric had left his in a puddle. We were in a state of rust.

But no longer! We used a little fluid-filled doohickey to clean the chain, I adjusted my brakes cables so my front brakes are no longer mushy, Steve trued my tire by playing with the spoke nipples. I also adjusted one of the rear brake pads so it doesn't scrape on the rim, which is probably bad for your bike and was really wearing on my nerves.

Eric tried to figure out what was going on with his front derailleur in order to fix it. He fixed it by removing it. Who needs so many gears?

My bike feels very cushy and complicated compared to Eric's. Notice the absence of fenders. Notice the very simple lines and the absence of shocks (though he does have some hidden in the handlebars). Compared to his, my bike feels overly engineered.

There is a story behind that bike that I cannot tell without sounding extraordinarily bitter. Let's just say that it is not the bike I would have chosen for myself.

We drank beer and I managed to get about twice as greasy and the boys and as mentioned above, Steve was kind and nice and lovely and very very helpful. In the absence of Steve fixing bikes, here is a picture of Steve's gorgeous new tattoo.

And here is my handsome man. His tattoo is hidden.

Nearly two years ago now, I rediscovered music. When things started getting bad - and I don’t mean just Not Working, but capital-B-A-D BAD – with my ex, I bought Plans by Death Cab for Cutie.

I’d stand in the middle of our living room and look up at the ceiling and listen to “Marching Bands of Manhattan” over and over again.

Sorrow drips into your heart through a pin hole
Just like a faucet that leaks and there is comfort in the sound
But while you debate half-empty or half-full
It slowly rises, your love is gonna drown

And I’d shake.

It’s not like I’d forgotten about music or anything. Quite the opposite. I’d been going to shows pretty consistently, and been living with musicians for nearly 3 years. Although I was surrounded by music, and happily so, it was a very passive engagement. Other people picked the songs, other people wrote the songs, other people practiced them. I might help out with lyrics or structure here and there, but mostly I just either paid attention or didn’t. I was not engaged.

But DCFC pulled me in again. I was ripe for engagement. I was feeling confused and sad and torn about what should we do and how can the yelling stop and what do I want here and now and what do I want in the future and I think maybe it is. Not. Drip. This. Drip. Life. Drip. Drip.

And I’d sing.

Last summer, I dove back into music wholeheartedly. I went to see shows by people I didn’t know. I bought CDs by bands I’d barely heard of. I faithfully listened to John in the Morning on kexp.org to find out about what was going on. I read music blogs obsessively. I discovered Wolf Parade.

Apologies for the Queen Mary is an excellent album, start to finish. There are great lyrics on it and crashing drums and wicked weird harmonies and I am a big fan of vintage organs. I became addicted, listening to it compulsively, kind of sick of it, but needing to hear it one more time. Just once more.

But far and away my favourite song was “I’ll Believe in Anything.” It first found its way into me when Wolf Parade played at Barrymore’s. That was a fucking great show. I kinda knew the album, and enjoyed the show altogether. Then that song came on and I shut my eyes and turned my face up to the lights and felt the vibrations coming up through my feet and entering my nervous system, zinging the song all around my body.

It became my anthem. I have probably listened to it a couple hundred times. There have been days where I just put it on repeat and hit play.

When I listened to it, when I remembered listening to it, when I sang it in the shower or under my breath it made me believe I could take the fire out from the wire and take away your shaky knees and made me feel like I was very brave for walking around with both legs and that I could find you to fight the scary day with me. That we might pull the tricks from our sleeves to find we’ll believe in anything, both together. That I would hold your face in my hands and tell you to look through me to a place far away from here, a safe place, with olive trees, where nobody knows you and nobody gives a damn either way. And it made me believe that someone might give me their blood and their bones and their voice and their ghost. Their eyes, to see sunshine, in the place far away from here.

And so I shut my eyes, and look to the light. And I sing. And I shake.

I know I said there would be no gushing about Eric. But goddamn. Goddamn.

This is the poster he had to make as a homework assignment. He made me a giant squid. With my name on it.

And that's hardly scratching the surface. He has done things for me that are so sweet I won't talk about them. I catalogue them and tuck them up inside me, taking care and treating them with the reverence they deserve.

Simmi and Shelley were over the other night and I was talking about Eric, as I am often doing these days, and Simmi said "Does he make you feel like a goddess?" I paused for a moment, and then said, "Yes, yes he does."

Shelley raised both her eyebrows at me. Goddess is not a word that appears in my regular vocabulary. I have been known to give people The Look for using that word to describe actual humans. But if you were to translate that question into my usual parlance, I would say "He makes me feel treasured. He makes me feel like a gift. He makes me feel like one hundred dollars, every time he looks at me."

I'm continually surprised by his creative and genuinely generous nature. He doesn't stint with his feelings. His quiet dry humour and quick wit. He is smart and interested in the world around him. He is playful without being childish. He has decided opinions about things, but is happy to be challenged on them. He will engage in a serious conversation about file-naming protocol.

He is the most thoughful person I have ever met. I am very very happy, occasionally overcome, that he has chosen to think about me.

I really did expect to be over my goddamn cold by now. Thing is, everyone, fucking everyone, that I know has a slightly different version of the same cold. So if I didn't get it from the bad air circulation at work, I got it from making out, and if I didn't get it from making out, I probably got it from sharing a cup or dishes with someone at some point. Or touching a grocery cart and then touching my face. According to my mother, grocery carts are dirtier than pay phones.

At any rate, my nose is raw, and if I lie down for more than a half hour, I can't breathe through my nose. My left sinus is so plugged, I can't even tell if it's dripping or not. You know where that puts me? In dangerous proximity to the Things That Cause Coldsores: mouth breathing, depressed immune system, bad sleeps. I feel disgusting.

The big upside of starting to date someone in February is that come summertime, my paramour isn't going to know what the fuck hit him. Because I will not be snuffly and sniffly, I won't be dripping snot, my skin won't be scaly, and my lips won't be constantly covered in blisters and/or scabs. It's a miracle he's still dating me, quite frankly.

Speaking of my paramour, I have made a blogging decision. I've never been particularly fond of the term "my paramour" as a code word for him. It's fine as a descriptor, and paramour is a great word, but really he's not actually my possession. The consistent use of a possessive pronoun attached to a word meant to represent him was making me a little uneasy.

I did think of "the paramour." But even though I'm in that stage of dating where I sometimes find it hard to believe that other people exist, I do recognize that the world contains other paramours. Nickname nixed due to a definite article.

But I haven't been able to come up with a good acronym either. I briefly thought of a whole bunch of different acronyms. But none of them fit.

What's left, you ask? In a radical move, I shall start referring to him by his real name.

Eric.

I figure that his friends who read this and my friends who read this already knew that "my paramour"="eric." And the rest of you, well, there are any number of Erics in Ottawa. He could be any one of them.

But lucky for me he's not. He is the Eric who participated in a day that ended up being radically different than planned.

Shelley, Steve, Mitch and I were supposed to meet our friends Jacquie and Chris at a cottage somewhere today. Shelley is an excellent planner, so I was just sort of going along for the ride and for the first while the trip was planned, I'd no idea where it really was, and only a vague idea of what it was going to be like once we got there. Thing is, with Shelley planning, you know you're going to get somewhere good. So I didn't worry. I just decided I would get in the car when it showed up and have fun. And it was supposed to show up at 2:15.

But the weather here was a little nutty, so no showing today.

Instead, the 2 hour date I had planned with Eric turned into a 9 hour date. It started with [fun] and ended with [fun] and we managed to fit some other [fun] in too. We ate lunch at 6 pm.

Tomorrow, the car is definitely showing up at 8:30 in the am and we're headed off to the cottage, which I now know is somewhere near Picton. I expect there will be good food eating, nice wine drinking, a good deal of laughter and maybe some snowshoeing.

Though I suppose that could turn out different than expected too. There just might be Guinness instead of wine.

On our first date, my paramour had a cold. I knew this going in, and had decided ahead of time that if he were as lovely at the end of the date as he seemed before the beginning, he'd have to be pretty damn sick and drippy for me not to kiss him at the end of the night.

Since he was only a little sick and also only sniffly, not drippy, we ended up making out on my couch. A ways into the smooching, he pulled back and sniffed. A look of horror spread over his face.

"But I'm sick! We shouldn't be kissing! You're going to get sick! I'll have made you sick! I don't want to make you sick!"

"'Sokay," I replied. "I'm a grown up. I know how germs work. And I decided I'd rather kiss you than not get sick."

Flattered, he blew his nose and we put our lips back together.

*

The last few weeks, two things have made blogging a little difficult.

Things are going really well with my lovely paramour. Neurons that used to be dedicated to dreaming up witty blog posts have gotten all tangled up with dreams of romantic pants removal and sharp beautiful cheekbones. So all the blog posts I've been dreaming up have been about how shocked I am that I've met someone who is reliable AND makes me excited in my pants. It's a new leaf, Chez Butch.

Things have not been going so well at work. During the CBC literary salon, I was quite emphatic about the fact that I don't blog about work. And normally I don't, because I have no idea if my co-workers read this. (And if you do read this, I'm fine if you pretend you don't.) Not that I would ever say anything bad about any of them, or about where I work. Because my co-workers, all of them, are really nice people. There's no back-biting, no in-fighting. My boss is super sweet and very good at his job.

But, and you knew there was a but coming, these past few weeks I have been working on a project that was making me want to gouge my eyeballs out. I feel okay writing about it because the four of us who've been working on it have been slumping around the office, looking forlorn and/or tight whenever the subject comes up.

It's a systems analysis project, trying to figure out how we're going to get our members signed up. I took one course on systems analysis in library school. For some reason, I decided that that made me qualified to head this project up.

So I lead us down the fucking garden path, going back asswards, and we get more and more tangled up in bullshit. We four had a very tense meeting yesterday, where everyone was very apparently frustrated and despondently quiet. I ended the meeting by saying, "I think I just need to go away and look at this from the start again. I think this is wrong."

I hit fever pitch yesterday afternoon, when I tore up the processes from the system I had spent three weeks building and stared at my computer screen. I tried not to stress about it last night, and only managed not to because, well, read the next section.

It broke this morning. I spent hours writing out new processes, then presented them to my team, who looked at me like I'd poured sweet cold springwater over their heads. One of them said "Oh, you're very smart." Not smart enough, sadly, to have saved us three weeks of burning anxiety, but at least our temperature is back down to normal.

*

My paramour came over for dinner last night. I made my usual (brown rice, baked tofu, roasted carrots and parsnips, kale), though I fancied up the kale to convince my paramour that it was truly a vegetable worth raving about.

He was convinced. And also kind of sick.

He started out a little sniffly. But by the time dinner was done, he was looking kinda peaked, like being upright was becoming a trial. I suggested the couch, where we sat for a few mintues before he admitted he would really rather be lying down.

So we moved to the bedroom. He crawled into my bed, heaving a sigh of relief, while I went and got my laundry and hung it up and told what were hopefully entertaining stories about my drying racks. Though really, how could a story about a drying rack be boring. I ask you.

I finished a few things and crawled into bed beside him. He was hot, and I don't mean just you're-making-me-want-to-put-my-stuff-on-your-stuff hot, but also wow-your-radiating-flesh-is-making-my-palms-blister hot.

We chatted and looked at each other and managed to still fool around some, which made him at least forget he felt shitty, and then went to sleep pretty early. During the night, I woke up to him stirring a bit. "You okay?" I asked. "Umm," he replied, "I think I might take you up on that advil offer." I laid my palm on his cheek. Blistering. Got out of bed and got him a glass of water and some medicine.

This morning, I woke up and turned to him. I smiled first, because I am still giddy at the fact that sometimes when I wake up, he is right there. But then I felt a small concerned frown lodge itself between my eyebrows.

"How are you feeling?" I moved closer to him. I put a hand on his cheek.

"Damp," he said. "The fever broke."

Cool as creek water. Still hot.