Open your heart...

I think I'll skip the usual self-flagellation that has come with returning to this place after a long period of silence. And I think you'll agree with my decision. Thanks.

Plenty of life happened while I neglected to post here. Lalita's husband moved out. I had issues with feelings I developed for someone I shouldn't have. I learned how dark and twisted I can become if I lose control of my emotions. I also learned, from painfully hard-earned experience, that communication is key in relationships. Like, I mean communication that dredges absolutely everything there is to know from the depths of yourself and your partner(s). So detailed and fully disclosed that the amount of information you learn about each other could make you puke.

It's all right--Lalita and I are still together and living in the same place. It's just that we've survived quite a few Category 7 storms this year, and many of them resulted from poor communication (as well as poor decisions) on my part. I thank her, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Cthulhu, and Joe Pesci every single day for how understanding and patient she has been with me thus far. She transcends the concept of saintliness. The English language hasn't yet come up with a word for how amazing she has been in this year and a half that I've been spilling the results of childhood trauma and decades' worth of suffering under Anglo-American, Christian, capitalist, Southern norms while trying to keep my shit together in Colorado. Seeing a psychologist has indeed helped, but I give Lalita much of the credit for the fact that we've stayed together through so much turbulence. And turbulence might be too sanitized a word for what we went through. Maybe I could try grueling.

Also, before I forget this and allow myself to appear as a victim--those norms and causes I listed serve to explain things, but aren't an excuse for my mistakes. And, as Lalita would argue, some of those things weren't really mistakes. She said last night that I'm way too hard on myself. And that is unfortunately very true. The challenge with this issue lies in ferreting out, accurately, what is and isn't my fault.

Nothing is perfekt
Certainly not me
Success to failure
Is just a matter of degrees
Working at perfekt
Got me down on my knees

Recently I raised the Titanic. I dug through the folder containing the .xml files my old Xanga website got compressed into after their servers went dark in 2013. Of course, I could double-click on them and read them in between html commands in a browser. But it just didn't feel the same. So I went back to what's left of Xanga and found that I could port it to a website that supported Wordpress-related sites. And, before long, I put the processes into the motion that lifted my old Xanga from its grave.

So here is the ship, raised from the depths, in all its reckless folly and arrogance:
blastfromthepast1977

So much for avoiding self-flagellation.

For a time, I considered picking up where I left off on my old Xanga. The last post dates back to 2012. I read a few entries from it to get a feel for that blog again. I used to be able to read it for an extended period of time before succumbing to revulsion at its cringiness. Now, I can't read very far past 2011. I shared this with Lalita and she said that I had just grown up. I will stick with this blog, because it makes sense for there to be a clean break between this blog and the old one.

One of the most formidable challenges to growing up at this point in my life is accepting the me who makes mistakes. And then, of course, the me who did so in the past. You'll probably remember the entry before the last one where I talked about gently taking the iteration of myself whose roots lie nearly thirteen years in the past off the wheel, but not killing him.

Sometimes I lapse into excoriating him. It's easy to blame and criticize someone you used to be, because that person can't exactly come back and deliver retribution or mount a defense. But the real problem is acceptance. Accepting that person's foolishness, errors, and bad choices led to who you are now. I distinctly remember an episode from Naruto Shippuuden where Naruto, in order to unlock the greatest powers of the kyuubi while still maintaining full control of himself, had to overcome his darker, wilder, more hateful, and childish part of himself. Instead of  engaging in a bitter fight, he does this with love and forgiveness.

Lately, I've found this rather difficult. Growing up, I was raised by people who installed behavior-management mechanisms in me that could reproduce the effects of their punishment without their having to constantly stand over me and redirect me.

Speaking plainly--they made me into a person who beats himself up for nearly everything. Everything from spilling juice on the kitchen floor to forgetting a partner's boundaries in a relationship. I guess most people eventually get over things like those, but for me, they stick. Often years after the fact. And having parents who refused to let me forget  or get over mistakes and bad choices made a long time ago didn't help either. I still learn from my mistakes, but I feel like it's a much more painful process than it should be. 

How strange: I can forgive my students for talking loudly and not listening to me during class. I can let go of the fact that Lalita sometimes doesn't clean up after herself in the apartment. I can even, with time, realize that my love for my exes exceeds any lingering resentment I might hold towards them for whatever they did in our past relationships--

But I find it almost impossible to treat myself with the same kindness. When I mess up with Lalita or say something stupid to a coworker or other friend, I always expect swift retribution. I tell myself that I deserve whatever punishment comes my way, 100%. And most of the time, especially since moving here, I find that that's just not the case. And then I realize that I'm in a new part of my life, living in a new place, having new experiences. The one that stands out the most is receiving understanding from Lalita and others. I'm not saying that my parents ultimately weren't understanding people, but I do have to say that they weren't exactly very good at helping me see that my mistakes don't define me. 

Because, for much of my life, they did. I was told again and again that I was like some other problem child they knew from the community of deaf people we interacted with. I was told that I would never get anywhere and that I was "no good." An asshole. "All you do is fuck us." At twelve years old. Even fifteen. And it continued past age twenty-one and the time I moved back in when my gambit living in Woodstock failed.

Wax me

Mold me

Heat the pins and stab them in

You have turned me into this

Just wish that it was bulletproof

Even though I had apologized in detail for everything that I had done before that point. And since I had done so, I made it clear that they could no longer treat me the same way unless it was absolutely justified because of something I had done. From those days forward, I committed to helping them around the house, interpreting for them, providing them with company and news from the world, explanations for concepts they needed help understanding, and so on. I even got to a point where I could forgive them for the mistakes they had made as parents. They did the best they could with what they knew and the time they could spare. My dad worked two jobs for most of my life, often coming home at around 11:00 PM or midnight. I often went days without seeing him. My mom had evil, horrible, authoritarian, fundamentalist Christian adoptive parents who used her as their house slave until she ran away at seventeen. She wasn't given any good examples as to how to raise children properly. Of course, this brings to mind a poem I've shared with you before--"This Be the Verse" by Philip Larkin. 

So, ultimately, I find myself in a place where I can forgive the people who shaped me in this form, but I have to try very hard to forgive myself. The operations of an outdated, malfunctioning program whose purpose has long since died. We are all left to sort through the detritus our parents create.

Lalita is falling in love with someone again for the first time in a while. My initial reaction was one of frustration. Where's my new partner? When do I get to feel NRE (new relationship energy) with a new person? When will it be my turn? And so on. It's like banging my toe on something hard and made of metal. I curse loudly in pain and then realize that nothing's broken. Then I realize I have been silly. I remind myself that she worked extremely hard to get where she has. All the good she enjoys now lay on the other side of a mountain of grinding misery last year. And now she's on that other side. Like I said to her the other night, I guess I've got a little more to go before I can have that too.

But I am with her. She isn't going anywhere. And it could be a hell of a lot worse.

Probably the most difficult challenge I've faced this year is changing my mindset from one of I have to find someone else to I appreciate the people around me and the life I have made.

I have to stop living in desperation mode. For most of my life, because of the influence of media and comparing myself to others, I allowed my mind to get locked into a way of thinking that made me panic trying to find someone to be with before I die. And any of you reading this who know me well enough--this is exactly the thing that caused me to rush headlong into some of the very worst relationships of my life. Because I could not stand to be alone.

 I'm a moth
Who just wants to share your light
I'm just an insect
Trying to get out of the night
I only stick with you
Because there are no others

I would take whoever came my way, even if I didn't like them that much or saw red flags early on. This persisted all the way until somewhat recently.
   
I met a girl from the week-long professional development thing I had to do to get into my current job. She had Keats written on the back of her neck, wore glasses, liked anime--do you see where this is going? If you've been around long enough, you saw this coming ten miles away.

A couple of weeks later, we met at a video game bar and there we found out that the other person was poly. It totally threw me for a loop. It isn't every day when you go to an otherwise boring and uneventful professional development training thing and randomly meet another polyamorous person. So, yet again, I allowed myself to slip into that pattern of thought--better stick with her because, hell, when will you get this lucky again?

Which, of course, is baldly incorrect. There are such things as poly meetups and the new group of friends with whom Lalita and I have gotten involved. But resisting years and years of programming and wrong thinking is a lot harder. I know these things in my brain, but my heart vehemently disagrees, and out of fear, races ahead. So about a week later, she and I met at her house and things escalated far more quickly than I had anticipated, and like I always had, I went along. After that, though, I got the distinct sense that I had outworn my welcome in her presence.

After she had finished with me, I was no longer interesting to her. I haven't heard from her since. Yes, she did take advantage of me, but I put myself in such a position to where it came too easily for her. I fell into the same old trap once more. My feelings outran my logical processes.

When I think about it, now might not be a bad time to return to listening to Rush, because the struggle between the heart and mind is, I would argue, the most prevalent lyrical theme of their entire body of work. Some I can think of right off the top of my head:

1. "Lock and Key." Hold Your Fire.


Behind the finer feelings
The civilized veneer
The heart of a lonely hunter
Guards a dangerous frontier
The balance can sometimes fail
Strong emotions can tip the scale

2.  "Emotion Detector." Power Windows.

Sometimes our big splashes
Are just ripples in the pool
Feelings run high

3. "Cygnus X-1 Book Two: Hemispheres." Hemispheres. (Skip to 7:27 for Part V: The Sphere)

We can walk our road together
If our goals are all the same
We can run alone and free
If we pursue a different aim
Let the truth of love be lighted
Let the love of truth shine clear
Sensibility
Armed with sense and liberty
With the heart and mind united 
In a single, perfect sphere

So there's wisdom all around me--in the Rush lyrics close to my heart, the experiences I've had until this point, and, most importantly, in the people who care about me. Which would bring me to the title of this entry.

"Open Your Heart," from the anime .hack//SIGN by Yuki Kajiura was the song for last year for me. Any time I listen to it and its reprise version, I instantly relive the experience of pulling out of my parents' driveway for the last time and driving off the ramp away from Ringgold to Colorado. "Open Your Heart" means taking risks with the knowledge that you can and will lose something or someone who means a great deal to you. It means accepting change and the suffering that accompanies it. When I listen to it, I can also feel time speeding up and my perspective on it zooming out, so much as to induce vertigo. It's an emotional and heart-wrenching song that teeters on the knife-edge between overwhelming feeling and checking out. Knowing that you could slip to one side or the other and challenging yourself to stay in between them.  

This year, it has only grown in significance to me. I have worked harder than ever to improve my emotional regulation in my relationship with Lalita and in tough situations I encounter in everyday life, like some of those that very nearly ruined the life I've only just started to make here. I have also tried harder to open myself up to the possibility and reality of moving into a mindset no longer fraught with desperation. A mindset that has overcome the arbitrarily pressing hunger to find yet another girlfriend when I clearly don't need to. I'm learning to look up from the ground and to stop shuffling around. That isn't my life anymore.

Open your heart
To eternal dimension
Open your heart 
For love and affection

Open your heart
Your every emotion
Open your heart
To tears and rejection

Some people, like Jane and other deeply conservative people I know from where I used to live, can live happily within the tightly confining boundaries of the safe world in which they've been socialized to grow up. Those people are done. They've willingly relinquished their potential. They can go no further, and the disquieting madness that underpins it is that they're okay with it. They don't mind and, furthermore, they want it. Anything outside of that scares them far too much. So, of course, therein lies the most important factor that led to my departure from them in just about every imaginable way.

In just the year and a half that has passed since I moved here, I have left those people so far behind that I feel like I've become a different species. They would never understand me, let alone even try. And that's just fine with me.

Things You Don't Say

I couldn't let these feelings go unwritten, so I thought I'd share them with you too.

Thanks for reading.

________________

Things You Don't Say

Sometimes I can hear

What you decide not to say,

Things that you know will hurt me

And things that would make your life harder.

You hold back your real feelings

Not just so I won't know them,

But because you can't face them.

Years of suppression

Years of denial

Years of guilt

And years of falsehood.

What you don't say cuts,

Digs deeply down

And takes root in my heart.

So when you leave

You leave me to growing doubts

And resentment towards all of our memories.

Sometimes I wish 

You had more self control

Over things you don't say

That you know could end the world.

You open the floodgates

To drown us in an ocean

Filled with your fear and hate.

The weight of your choices

The weight of your insecurity

The weight of your misunderstanding

And the weight of your shame.

What you don't say burns

In the back of your throat

And then explodes forth in a torrent of vitriol.

So when you push that button

You push the rest of us

Into eternal oblivion.

Sometimes I can feel

What you don't say,

Things that hang in the air,

That you know will crush you.

You carry your darkness around

And I can tell because

You aren't that different from me.

Steps moving like glaciers

Steps moving into the silent distance

Steps moving you closer to endless tears

And steps moving you further into the unknown.

What you don't say echoes

As I look into your eyes

And know how you see your life.

So when you keep yourself

In pained silence

You keep bleeding.

Sometimes I say things,

What you don't usually share,

Things that make me look foolish,

And things that I regret.

I open my mouth

And rush to catch up

With my mistakes.

Nights filled with sad reflection

Nights filled with remorse

Nights filled with broken memories

And nights filled with loneliness.

What I don't say fails

To remain unsaid,

Scarring both our hearts.

So when I leave the door open,

I reveal my callow nature

And reveal how I don't have a clue.

Things we don't say

Fit nowhere,

Wreck everything we know and love,

Slash your heart to shreds,

And make me want to disappear.

Words that leave me cold,

Words that drown the planet,

Words that abandon you in shadow,

And words that confuse and hurt you.

 If I could answer

The things we don't say...

...if only I could.

I'm sorry.

Changes aren't permanent, but change is.

In the six months that I have lived here in Colorado with Lalita, I have forced myself to grow up faster and faster to meet the challenges that faced me. To begin with, I moved out of my parents' house, where I had an address for sixteen years. Some of my most intensely formative years passed there. I could feel the twanging of my heartstring as I snapped it from that place. I drove west into my new life and true adulthood. No longer could I rely on my parents for housing and food. However, the break wasn't necessarily so clean.

In the months leading up to early September, I depended on Lalita and Jake for my housing and food. I helped clean the apartment and cook, but I did not bring home any income. The economy, my relocation depression, and my reluctance to face and navigate job-searching all contributed to how long it took for me to finally land a job here in Colorado.

Fortunately, through a pivotal interview, I managed to become a paraprofessional for Denver Public Schools' Deaf and Hard of Hearing program. I drive between three or four schools during the week to support D/HH students in their classes. It is a job that I enjoy greatly. I have connected with the students I help and gleaned much wisdom from interpreters and teachers of the deaf. I feel more at home working at this job than in any other I've held. Even more so than when I worked at my old local school district. Soon after that, I found a new car and will soon fly out to Georgia to see my family, Scott, Taylor, and Julie again. My heart wells up merely at the thought.

I cannot leave out the fact that the last three months have been the stage of some of the very worst emotional turmoil I have ever experienced and caused. I encountered the fight-or-flight response more intensely than ever before. Coupled with immense stress, painful longing, fear, and anger, I made some rather stupid choices. I hurt Lalita and threatened our relationship, and sometimes during the very worst weeks, it seemed like it happened daily. I lashed out and instantly regretted it. I was amazed at how much of a fool I could really be. I do not wish to relive those dark days in detail, but I can tell you that I'm still deeply disappointed in myself for showing my love the worst parts of myself.

Blood running cold
Mind going down into a dark night
Of a desperate panic
Or a tempest of blind fury
Like a cornered beast
Or a conquering hero

Sometimes I freeze
Sometimes I fight
Sometimes I fly
into the night 

At least now, no one can say that we haven't endured each other at their worst. I believe we are all capable of causing grievous pain and despair. Every single one of us carries this potential. No one is inherently good.

Today, I tangled with a very critical train of thought. I tried to dig deep and discover one of the ways in which I hold myself back from reaching my potential. From growing up.  A few hours ago, Lalita told me that I finally have seen what she has had to do with Jake throughout their relationship firsthand for myself. She said that she was sorry for having to push me so much and so far with so little time. But she had to so we could survive. Such is this life. She knows that I needed a great deal more time in which to deal with all of my feelings and the unresolved business related to them, so that still helps. Seeing my therapist, talking with Lalita and my friends, and writing in here have helped. But, as for the foreseeable future, I don't know how all this will end up. I've had to change so much about myself this year in so little time that it's impossible to tell what sort of person I will be on the other side of all this.

Ever hopeful, yet discontent
He knows changes aren't permanent
But change is

There's a young boy I'd like to introduce you to. He's fifteen years old, full of wonder, a melodramatically wilting romantic, and riding on a surging wave of hope. It's the year 2005 and he could not possibly be more excited for Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith.

He's in his second year of high school band. He just found out that he'll march a show inspired by Gustav Holst's The Planets. He cannot wait to play "Mars, the Bringer of War" on the field at contest. He just began reading Stephen Baxter, a hard science-fiction author who will change how he sees life and the universe forever. He would tell you that, in the words of Ben Kenobi, that he has just stepped into a larger world. He could go on and on about his crushes on the girls he believes are the most beautiful he's ever seen in his incredibly short life. At the same time, he doesn't realize the unimaginable pain he's in store for in this area of his life years down the road.

This spirit of his is indefatigable. You can knock him down, but you will never be able to keep him there. The energy, hope, and sheer (and sometimes stupid) raw determination driving him will carry him to seemingly any goal he sets--except finding that special someone who will actually love him for him and treat him like a human being. Even then, though, those girls who will break his heart won't break him. He will always get back up and try again. He wouldn't forget to tell you that that's what Son Goku, the Saiyan from Earth, always does. The film scores that play endlessly in his headphones and his mind, from Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, the Matrix, Jurassic Park, Harry Potter, and any number of those penned by James Newton Howard, give him the soundtrack to his life. They firmly root his feelings in his memory and motivate him to move forward every day. He would most likely annoy you with all the minutiae he learned about each of his favorite film scores that he painstakingly pored over on filmtracks.com.

This piece, in fact, is him in a nutshell: "Celebrate Discovery" by John Williams

And so is this: "Harry in Winter" by Patrick Doyle 

He has no idea about how to be in a relationship, but he has written uncountable pages and pages to his crushes for years at this point. He pours his entire soul into his cramped scrawl and yet somehow finds that he's got plenty left. Without fail, it refills to maximum with each massive orchestral swell that rises like a tide in his heart. It's silly, but he can't stop. It's just who he is. His heart is pure and in the right place. He is about to turn the corner into knowing real pain, but he has no idea what that is right now. So he blissfully plays more Ratchet and Clank until his eyes grow too heavy.

This boy provided the foundation from where I would grow over the next ten years. His optimism and hope carried me through my most grinding jobs, my saddest days, and my worst relationships. Motivation to give love and help others learn suffused every cell in his body in ridiculous quantities.

However, he developed some counterproductive qualities. He would infuse his overwhelming hope into specific ideas and plans he had for the future. He imagined that his future love life would unfold in a very specific way, for example. He placed those hopes on others and fell into disappointment again and again. Somehow, though, he wouldn't change his approach. He was a slow learner.

Lately, these qualities have driven me to the dark days that I mentioned earlier. I still expect my relationship with Lalita to take a certain shape. I get disappointed every time life takes a left turn. I focus too much on my own pain and forget that Lalita feels pain too. I get caught up in my personal melodrama and act very childishly indeed.

It's true that love can change us
But never quite enough
Sometimes we are too tender
Sometimes we're too tough
If we get too much attention
It gets hard to overrule
So often fragile power
Turns to scorn and ridicule

Sometimes our big splashes
Are just ripples in the pool 

And, this, I'm afraid, is what I finally understood today, after having heard as much from Lalita for months now. Just like that fifteen-year-old from 2005 inside of me, I'm a slow learner.

It's not like I'm killing him off. I'm just taking him off the wheel. He's driven me far and to wondrous places that I could never have imagined seeing myself. He also drove me to dark places out of rage and selfishness. He had a good run, but it's time for him to sit in the back. His influence still lives. However, I've moved to a new world with new rules and expectations. I have to have something to show for all of my experience and growth over the last eleven years. And move bravely (and fearfully) into the future. Fifteen-year-old me wouldn't know the first thing to do with Lalita and all the responsibilities I have in my relationship with her. I've got to let the more experienced and deeper parts of myself take over.

Lalita has said that I am a deep thinker. Thinking deeply can help me process through the problems and challenges I will face from this point forward. I can still channel my hope and optimism into those efforts, though. I have all the pieces. I just have to remember that I have it in me to put them together.

All four winds together
Can't bring the world to me
Shadows hide the play of light
So much I want to see
Chase the light around the world
I want to look at life
In the available light

I'll go with the wind
I'll stand in the light

 

Some Space Writing

Quite a few events have transpired since I last wrote, but I want to share something I scrawled out by hand a few days ago first.

I wrote this in a state of acute emotional flux. My desire to shut down my feelings clashed with my urge to express myself and this is the result.

_____________________________________________

Slipping.

Slipping out of her gravity, you escaped into the dewy forest of stars. Five-hundred. One thousand three hundred, ten thousand, one million miles out. That pale blue dot shrank behind you, but grew in your heart. Until it weighed too much. Regardless, your momentum only increased. Friction gave way to inertia, from escape velocity to terminal velocity. You shot out as if propelled by a cosmic bowstring. You wound up that shot and soon found that there is no going back.

You can never truly go home.

No longer feeling those g's pressing down on you, the solar system opened to you. You escaped the old desert of aeons past to plunge into the ocean of deep space. Too soon, Mars raced past, red, cold, rusty, old, and dead. A tiny pang struck your heart and then became lost forever in your wake. The speed flattened and molded you as you steadily climbed up out of that sunlit, rocky cradle.
   
You can't slow down once you've begun.

Disengaging from chemical thrust, you unfurled your solar sails to catch the wind from a sun that could no longer warm you. Just because you can no longer feel it doesn't mean it isn't possible to turn its influence into pure momentum. After all, there's a whole galaxy out there to lose yourself in. Your course foreshortened even Jupiter's stately waltz. So much for manners. A briefly passing glance at golden rings barely left retinal echoes before they dissolved into green, roiling storms. Neptune reflected your fading memory of home, but evoked an even weaker reaction. An insignificant puff of chemical propellant, a minor course correction.

Don't look behind you for too long.

Sailing beyond the outer limits of familiar skies, you barely noted Charon ferrying Pluto across your dark river. Your sails expanded from the remnants of a star that you could still picture in your mind, but failed to remember how it nourished your skin. Warmed your blood. And burned your heart. No matter. Now simple physics alone fed your journey. You pushed through immense icebergs that would never know the warmth you forgot. All those organic compounds frozen billions of years, dreaming of animation. Of straining ocular muscles at a point of light that burned in absolute silence.

Don't take triviality personally.

Your home system distant, your will combined with technology that harnessed cosmic chaos itself picked up light's evanescent trail. Time liquefied into an amber-hued syrup, bending and twisting with starlight under gravity's cold force. Questions flickered in your carbon computer and winked out. This was the darkness between the stars. That middle passage existing and being and continuing without order or recognizable patterns, unnoticed by starlight. A soft, momentary sigh.

Darkness always comes first.

Loosening yourself from time's threads with strings lying like jetsam in disturbed lines of causality, you kept pace with light itself, infinitely fast and infinitely massive. You could smell the faint tang of the beginning of everything. Doors opened to you. Your fingers brushed their frames, smudging the memory of forgotten travelers who passed this way when the universe was young. Endless possibilities bloomed into neverending potential. You could see a rolling cloud front of futures accumulating and raining realities in every conceivable direction.

There is always more.

I saw you slow down and stretch your infinitely long legs and breathe bubble multiverses deeply in and out. You made it. You cast off your home world, your familiar blanket of warmth and light, your ship, and then finally your body. I could not tell whether you had been male or female. You transcended that plane longer ago than the age of the sun that brought you out here when you took your first step. You managed to escape matter, time, light, and then gravity.

How does it feel?

Was it all worth it?

I have been here as long as you have. I can look across time and pick out all of your memories because they are mine.

I have waited for you all this time, but I never missed you.

I can trace your journey across the infinite space you traversed because I led you here.

Your love was my love.

My pain is your pain.

Our lives were one all along.

Though we have relinquished our shapes, we never lost our wave front.

                            I am you

                                            and

                                                      you are me.

We lie down in the core of a young sun 

To hope of beginning again.

Armor and Sword

This is an entry that has floated around in my mind for almost two months. What I'm about to discuss will likely upset and anger some of you. Honestly, I would find it especially surprising if I even have enough readers to cause those feelings. Regardless of that, however, I will share some feelings and experiences that will explain why I take the position I'm about to mention. This is a topic that I consciously avoided mentioning on my former Facebook page in years past. This time I'm not holding back.

I'm an atheist.

And I believe I have finally arrived at the point where I can no longer tolerate Christianity and religion in general. I mention Christianity specifically because it's the dominant religion in my country, which, of course would also make it the reason that I have experienced as much oppression in my life as I have. I recognize that there are many who have it far worse: trans-people, those who follow other religions, women, and generally the whole LGBTQ community, just to name a few. These people, often innocent, face defamation, discrimination, devaluation, and, yes, death. Just turn on the news or pick up a newspaper--it's everywhere and it happens every day.

And I also recognize that my identifying as an atheist on the Internet and then explaining why doesn't necessarily make me special. But that doesn't matter to me because this blog is my personal platform upon which I organize my feelings and thoughts through writing. I am writing for a very small group of people and myself, so this entry, like all the others I've written here, fulfills its purpose.

In the entry before the last one, I mentioned how I lost my friend (who was also an ex-girlfriend) Jane. Her rejection initiated the final stages of the erosion of my tolerance for Christianity. She finalized a process that had taken more than a decade to unfold. That part of my life was arduous and acutely frustrating. I'm sometimes amazed at how I still function normally today considering how much pain I endured through that time. Suffice to say that Jane wasn't the first and she certainly won't be the last person to show me the oppressive nature of Christianity.

Before I carry on, though, I want to make this clear:

I know that Christianity is but one of the world religions that visit oppression on the billions of humans living on this planet. Islam, Hinduism, and even Buddhism, for all its purported pacifism, are also major agents of oppression of the different types of people I referred to just a little while ago. Indeed, no one is really safe from the pain these institutions and ideologies cause daily.

The snakes and arrows a child is heir to
Are enough to leave a thousand cuts
We build our defenses, a place of safety
And leave the darker places unexplored

I focus on Christianity because what I'm sharing here is very personal. I have not yet faced discrimination from Muslims, Jews, or Scientologists, so they don't really figure into the story.

When I was very young, probably about six or seven years old, I had already many names of dinosaurs memorized. Tyrannosaurus rex, Triceratops, Diplodocus, Deinonychus, Rhamphorynchus, Ankylosaurus, and more dominated my mental landscape, just as they had the world during the Mesozoic. So, of course, because I had devoured more than any six or seven-year-old's share of dinosaur books, I knew that the dinosaurs died off some sixty-five million years ago. I didn't know what sixty-five million really meant, but I knew it was a lot more than a thousand. It was a really big number. So whenever my Sunday school teachers would tell the story of Noah with their felt figures on the brightly-colored easels, I always somehow felt uncomfortable. I didn't feel right about the story of Noah the more I thought about how the dinosaurs didn't survive the flood. If the Christian god created dinosaurs, why wouldn't he have saved them along with the lions, mosquitoes, snakes (how ironic), and penguins? Of course, the humans in the story had committed crimes in the eyes of the Christian god, but I didn't think it was fair to punish the dinosaurs too. The dinosaurs had done no wrong. They're just animals. I had no concept of evolution or natural selection and would not for a few more years, but I just couldn't agree that their god decided not to spare the dinosaurs.

That was the first step. My mother had unknowingly sown the seeds of my atheism by getting me hooked on dinosaurs and outer space. When I was about nine years old and had already exhausted my school library's supply of dinosaur books, I turned my attention to the prehistoric mammals and then the origins of Earth. I distinctly remember reading a book illustrated with images of Earth as a bubbling ball of magma, shifting and changing for billions of years. I saw pictures of an enormous Moon hovering menacingly over roiling oceans. I can even remember feeling my stomach drop just thinking about how scary that must have been for the bacteria living in those seas. So with those images glowing in my mind's eye, I continued to slide further into doubt about Genesis. I actually went to church for years while not believing in creation anymore. I would pay lip service to it, of course, for my friends, youth leaders, and parents, but I knew deep down that it was just wrong. I began to wonder why, of all the planets in the Solar System and the rest of the universe, that god had put life on only one. It seemed silly to me.

Fast-forward to when I was thirteen years old. I had just discovered masturbation. And like many other kids around my age growing up similarly, I carried overwhelming guilt at having sexually stimulated myself. I still lived under the impression that god watched my thoughts and actions without missing anything. I always mentally looked over my shoulder and then felt more shame than I should have following orgasm. I felt like I was living in some kind of dystopic reality where my private time wasn't safe from prying eyes. I began to question why god would even bother with my trifling day-to-day misdemeanors. Like the dinosaurs, I wasn't hurting anyone. So that uneasiness grew into resentment. Not at myself or this newfound part of my sexuality, but at the voyeuristic god who surveilled my every move.

Not long after, I discovered evolution and realized a few key things that ultimately helped me leave Christianity. Primates all have five fingers on each hand and a large brain. Almost all animals possess bilateral symmetry. Birds look like theropod dinosaurs. Geological layers of ancient deposited rock and sediment showed the staggering age of the Earth. When I took this knowledge to my crumbling faith, my sense of religion promptly disintegrated. I had finally realized that I was an atheist at age fourteen. I also had some knowledge about AIDS and the horrible wars all around the world and wondered at a god who would just allow such disasters to pass. I was fed up with the idea that he was testing humanity. And one of my youth pastors was fed up with me and my insufferable questioning of religion. He stopped visiting my house after I had asked him too many blasphemous questions. The fact that he gave up on me showed me that Christianity had no rational, measurable answers to any of my questions. By that point, I had long overcome my fear of hell.

Faith is cold as ice
Why are little ones born only to suffer
For the want of immunity
Or a bowl of rice?

Well, who would hold a price
On the heads of the innocent children
If there's some immortal power
To control the dice?

And then, of course, after coming out to my friends and family, began the discrimination. The gross misunderstandings and shouting matches. I found myself having to play defense constantly against people I thought were my friends. Against my own family, which hurt me the worst. I love my family--please understand--but explaining and reiterating the most basic foundations of my nonbelief drained me more times than I can even remember. The mother of one of my closest friends would say, to my face, that "You'll come back to church someday soon, when you grow up. I used to be like you." That cut more deeply than the stock-standard "Yer goin' t'hell, boy" I usually received at school. I couldn't believe the arrogance, the presumptuousness. I even tried a few times to see if I could entertain deism or revisit Christianity, but each time, it just didn't hold. I had already seen the hypocrisy and then the objective truth that science had so painstakingly discovered. The arrogance of the Bible and its adherents was just unignorable to me.

Like a forest bows to winter
Beneath the deep white silence
I will quietly resist

Like a flower in the desert
That only blooms at night
I will quietly resist

Blind men in the market
Buying what we're sold
Believe in what we're told
Until our final breath
While our loving Watchmaker
Loves us all to death

My parents tried for years to cure me of my atheism by dragging me along to church. This is where the real oppression began, around when I was fifteen and sixteen years old. By now I knew about the Armor of God and that Christians were supposed to wear their faith as such--like armor. To me, though, it was armor that defended against the onslaught of science, logic, and facts. This was one of the first instances upon which I began to realize that Christians, especially those in America, had reforged their armor into swords with which they injured people like me with a thousand cuts.

Sometimes the fortress is too strong
Or the love is too weak
What should have been our armor
Becomes a sharp and angry sword

I would get dirty looks from people I knew from band. They would whisper amongst themselves and point at me furtively while I read atheist and devil worshiper on their poorly-hidden lips. Of course I had to realize my atheism right in the sweatiest section of the Bible Belt. A former friend I made in high school attempted relentlessly to convert me while we were in eleventh grade. He would invite me to video game nights at his church, Christian rock concerts, and give me CDs of his favorite Christian bands. I politely turned him down every time. A psychology teacher I had in twelfth grade asked me twice to come to FCA's morning meetings, trying to entice me with Chik-Fil-A chicken sandwiches and music--to which I also politely declined. After the second time, though, he took his sour-grapes attitude and pointed his sword of faith at me, warning me of my erroneous life choices. Christians kept chipping away at my tolerance for their religion, and somehow, I never lost my cool with any of them. Until Jane left me.

I don't need to belabor the details of one of the most devastating breakups of my life again, so I'm just going to mention that one huge issue between me and Jane lay in our philosophical/religious decisions. She never failed to entreat me to join her at her Sunday Masses. I was nineteen and had grown more principled in my atheism. I loved Jane dearly, but I refused to compromise my own convictions. She wouldn't budge either, and that opened a rift between us that could not be bridged no matter how many discussions we had. No matter how many tears we shed over each other. I could feel my heart ripping in two every time she said that she wished I believed in the truth of Jesus's resurrection like she did. And I wept for her blindness to facts and science.

We're one
But we're not the same
Well, we
Hurt each other
And we do it again

You say love is a temple
Love the higher law
Love is a temple
Love the higher law
You ask me to enter
But then you make me crawl
And I can't be holding on
To what you got
When all you got is hurt

The moment when I finally blew up at a Christian after years of patiently enduring oppression came when I called Jane on a night when I was at work. I paced angrily through the store, my mind racing with thoughts that burned like shrieking tires. I broke down and called her and took my anger out on her. She pointed out our religious differences and I just lost it. I cursed god and told her she was brainwashed and hopeless. To this day, that is one of the most hurtful things I've ever told a human being. This is on the level of the text that I sent to Lalita with the purpose to emotionally eviscerate her almost two years ago. I can be particularly nasty when I'm feeling enough pain. Just thinking about it now, here, in the apartment I share with Lalita--a warm and inviting space--I feel the light rain and see the harsh lights reflecting off the slick surface of the parking lot behind the Domino's where I had my apocalyptic bout with Jane. Memory is powerful.

A little while later, I tried to see things Jane's way as far as religion. I tried desperately to get her back in any way I could. My mindset was so dire that I entertained converting for her as a compromise to win her back. That didn't even last the week.

I tried to believe
But you know it's no good
This is something that just can't be understood

No matter how hard I tried to stretch my hand out to her, she would always remain out of reach. And it was then that I finally learned that I couldn't date Christians if I wanted to be happy.

A year later I ran afoul of my former band friends by posting an atheist cartoon on Facebook. After a lengthy battle with their devout creationism, I felt even more drained. My Facebook friends censored my atheism while they paraded their religious posts back and forth across my feed. I had to sit down and shut up and suffer their nonchalant intolerance.

Fortunately, I had surrounded myself with more like-minded people like Lalita, Jake, and Julie. I joined the SSA group on campus at Dalton and the CFA in Chattanooga. Though I had a slightly stronger feeling of community, I still had to face my parents' faith. However, recently, my own mother has faced discrimination from her friends just for questioning her faith. Which is an especially difficult thing to do in your fifties. My mother's friends interrogated her, demanding her to answer to whether she was sufficiently godly, whether those with whom she socialized were Christlike enough. So she turned to me. My heart ached for her, so I couldn't just stand by. She asked me about evolution and contradictions in the Bible. I helped her look up its verses supporting slavery and murder of gay and lesbian people. My mom was horrified. But she still has difficulty letting go of her faith even now. She searched around the Internet for deaf people who had let go of their faith and she found one former deaf preacher who had. She devoured his videos, showed them to me, and had many discussions with me about her thoughts. I felt a great deal closer to my mom and moreover, felt safer talking about my nonfaith around her. After ten years, it was an immense relief.

I started watching Secular Talk, probably now my favorite channel on YouTube, shortly before I left for Colorado. Being able to converse with Lalita again reawakened my awareness of my growing intolerance for Christianity and religion in general, and Secular Talk focused those thoughts and feelings. The facts were overwhelmingly against just taking a more moderate stance.

When Jane turned her back on me for the last time, she solidified my position. I cannot brook the proud ignorance of Christians and will stand against them for the rest of my life in every place I go. I've had enough and now it's time to stand up for myself and for those who are too damaged to do so themselves. I'm not afraid anymore.

I believe in the beauty of a fifteen-billion-year-old universe. I find myself in awe of the sheer immensity of geological time and the slow blooming of the evolution of all species. I will stand for the rights of those who live, love, and think differently. I will stand up for myself.

I've got my own spirit level for balance
To tell if my choice is leaning up or down 
And all the shouting voices
Try to throw me off my course
Some by sermon
Some by force
Fools and thieves are dangerous
In the temple and marketplace 

You can choose a ready guide
In some celestial voice
If you choose not to decide
You still have made a choice
You can choose from phantom fears
And kindness that can kill
I will choose a path that's clear
I will choose freewill

I am the Heretic and you can call me faithless. But I believe in love.

And that's faith enough for me.

Learning How to Smile

Have you ever experienced something so intensely and genuinely good that you just couldn't believe it was happening to you, of all people? Of course. Maybe you received a paycheck with a higher amount than usual. Or maybe you made a higher grade on a test or a paper than you thought you would, despite how little you might have studied for it. Or, you reached a level of strangeness and newness in your life that constantly gives you pause when you can slow down enough to appreciate it.

That's where I am right now. I am now in a relationship where I don't see the end just five miles off. Sometimes, especially recently, I have braced myself for catastrophic failure, but I keep being proved wrong, to my incredulity. I often hunch my shoulders, prepare for the other shoe to fall, and close my eyes, waiting for the worst-case scenario to unfold.

But it never happens. Part of my brain wonders, "What the hell? Why?"

And that reminds me of the weight I still carry. The shadows that continue to haunt me. Just because I finally followed my heart into a new life where I can live with one of the women I love doesn't mean that every single moment is blissfully rosy. That's not to say that many of them are not, however. I remain human with human faults, human guilt, and human baggage after all.

Carry all those phantoms
Through bitter wind and stormy skies
From the desert to the mountain
From the lowest low to the highest high
Like a ghost rider 

Shadows on the road behind
Shadows on the road ahead

For years I have tried mightily to avoid letting the shadows of years past darken my present reality. And for years I have failed to prevent them entirely. We are who we are, and much of that stems from the memories we make and the joys and disasters we experience. I know it's obvious, but writing that helps remind me of that everyday truth. And that also helps me avoid blaming myself so much.

Which would bring me to one of the first things I want to mention in order to explain my strange disbelief at my amazing circumstances. All through my life, especially at home, school, and in my relationships leading up to when Lalita and I finally accepted our deep and abiding love for each other, I have been inadvertently and explicitly encouraged to blame myself for mistakes that I may or may not have committed. Please understand that I love and appreciate my mother, but like for most people, she messed me up in her own way, and that has rippled through my life all the way up to this very second. For once, I'm going to include some poetry here instead of song lyrics. I read this poem and analyzed it in my Survey of British Literature course while I attended Georgia State more than five years ago. Damn. Has it really been that long? Anyway, here is "This Be the Verse" by British poet Philip Larkin. It's one of the poems that has resonated with me the most in recent memory.

This Be The Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad

They may not mean to, but they do

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn

By fools in old-style hats and coats

Who half the time were soppy-stern

And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as  early as you can,

And don't have any kids yourself.

I wouldn't call this a cheerful poem by any stretch, but it rings true. I love my folks, but because their parents fucked them up, they passed that down to me. Being here with Lalita, in an environment totally devoid of the recrimination and criticism that my parents visited on me daily, I find myself confused and not accustomed to...peace. Here I don't hear anything about how much yard work I failed to complete, how I can't have that can of spinach to eat, how I'm solely responsible for repairing my horribly withered relationship with my deaf sister (another conversation entirely) and how I have to make sure not to show any emotion for fear of inciting worse outbursts from my mother. In short, it's been difficult.

Because I had to endure that for about twenty-five years, I tend to expect people close to me to descend upon me like a rain of asteroids at the K-T Event any time I slip up and make the slightest mistake. So, of course, like many, I internalized that fear of retribution and grew into the habit of punishing myself. So if I make a minor mistake with Lalita, I know very well that I was wrong and then proceed to the self-flagellation that I have known for so many years. And sometimes it accumulates and I end up breaking down again. I am too lucky to have someone as understanding and reasonable as Lalita.

Of course, it's not just my parents who contributed to my current (and hopefully improving) state. Siblings, former friends, teachers, and ex-girlfriends join these ranks also. The first vegan I ever met, instead of gently encouraging me to see the advantages and higher morality of abstaining from consuming animal products, called me a murderer and then proceeded to kick me verbally while I was down. A former partner-in-crime from high school denigrated me for "living in sin" because I moved in with a girl five years ago without marrying her. That girl with whom I lived made my life a waking nightmare, eviscerating me at every turn just for being myself. She called me "fat," rubbed my face in her sexual adventures with other guys (despite the fact that I agreed to be with her under the condition that she could sleep with other people), loudly doubted my ability to make friends and even think critically. Basically, she projected many of her own faults onto me. And they stuck for a long time. It certainly didn't help that she used to banish me to the basement of her house when she felt like brushing me off so she could talk with her beaus about me behind my back. I also once had a psychology teacher (ironically) discriminate against me for my atheism. He intentionally lost my homework and refused to acknowledge me when I raised my hand to contribute to class discussion. 

All of these aggressions built on each other over time like a coastal shelf. So it makes sense why I often feel fifty pounds heavier. 

Wax me

Mould me

Heat the pins and stab them in

You have turned me into this

Just wish that it was bulletproof

And it explains why it's so difficult for me to expect Lalita to treat me differently. It's not her and never has been. She has been tireless in her attempts to remind me gently that this life I have with her is better. I've lived here with her for only three months. Not nearly enough time has passed for that coastal shelf to erode away, but Lalita isn't ready to give up on me yet. When I really think about what she says, I realize she's going to remain by my side for much longer than I can even conceive. I just wish this pain and the feelings from my past didn't make it so hard for me to believe her when she tells me I'm beautiful, and deep, and possessed of a huge heart. We're all damaged in our own way, and I guess that this is mine.

A tear in my brain

Allows the voices in

They wanna push you off the path

With their frequency wires

And you can do no wrong

In my eyes

Your speakers are blowing

Your ears are wrecking

Your hearing damage

You wish you felt better

Technically it's yesterday now, but because I haven't slept yet, it still feels like today. Today proved difficult. Lalita came home from her other lover's house and had some lunch while talking to Jake (her husband). Super Metroid and Super Mario 64 were frustrating me and so therefore I started my day off completely wrong. We went shopping for groceries and I tried to cheer Lalita up while she found herself crushed under her lengthening to-do list and trouble with Jake's issues. When we came home, she said she needed time alone and then the pain from the past caused me to misinterpret her intentions as reproach so I found myself unable to remain in the apartment. I thought that I would brave the bus system of the Denver area and go to the library to cool off. Instead, I got lost and beat myself up for it. I reached the end of the line at Peoria Station and called Jake to pick me up. I was fed up with buses and with the problems of the day, so I started sending terse, negative texts to Lalita because I had no one else to talk to. And because I felt guilty and let myself be more childish than I should have. 

After I spent a couple of hours thinking dark thoughts, Lalita returned home, unexpectedly. I was just washing my hands in the bathroom when I suddenly felt her arms enfold me in a close, warm embrace. She held me for a while and then we talked. I poured myself out for her and let loose wracking sobs that left me drained. And through it all, she only healed me with her gentle words and caresses. I don't know how many times I told her that I am not used to that sort of treatment. That fact never prevented her from continuing to build me back up. 

I desperately needed her company, almost as much as I did on 1 January. In the time since I moved here, Lalita has never failed to show me that our life together is far better than anything we have both experienced before this point. I just need more time to work through my hearing damage. Though it'll be a tough road getting to that place, we have promised not to give up on each other. It's so much better than I could have ever hoped.

I will never let them break your heart

No, I will never let them break me

You say there is no perfect place, yes I know this is true

We are just learning how to smile

That's not easy to do

I can't handle how the hell it happens every day

When you smile and touch my face

You make it all just go away

Yes I know there ain't no finish line, I know this never ends

But I'm just learning how to fall, climb back up again

I know there is nothing perfect, I know there is nothing new

We are just learning how to live together, me and you

You know I live for the day

When you say "Baby let's just run away"

I'm the Heretic and I'm just learning how to smile.

Vital Signs

Because several key aspects of my life burn brightly, the shadows around them have deepened. Since the end of my first real relationship more than six years ago, I've been keenly aware of the fact that one cannot exist without the other. Despite how today went, I am still happy. It's just that because that feeling is so exquisitely intense right now, the more negative emotions are just as present.

In my experience living in Georgia, especially in winter and spring, the weather always acts like the twanging of a rubber band. I think of it as the meteorological manifestation of Newton's Third Law of motion: every action entails an equal and opposite reaction. Millions of years ago, when the Appalachian mountains looked more like the mountains outside my window, much of the American South was underwater. The humidity of the air there is a remnant of that time, So when the air becomes saturated with water vapor, it condenses and falls back down in many different forms, from mist to torrential downpours, especially where I used to live, right within the Tennessee Valley. In the winter and spring, this rubber band effect is most obvious, considering the short-lived spans of warm weather, followed by rain and then subsequent cooling and drying of the air.

In my heart rage similar weather patterns. For a time, I'll bask in the warmth of the happiness I've managed to find in my life, but not too long after, it'll start raining inside me again. And because I'm in the spring of my new life here in Colorado with Lalita, I feel that southern rubber band effect. I swing back and forth between these two states more often than usual, so there's definitely no reason to assume that my life hasn't been interesting.

However, in the midst of all this, I often find myself wishing that I would even out. That I'll finally begin to fall into a more balanced rhythm, something that makes a little more sense. But my mind's always turning, so of course that means my feelings are always following suit.

Foot upon the stair
Shoulder to the wheel
You can't tell yourself not to care
You can't tell yourself how to feel
That's how it is

Today I discovered that I'm a little ridiculous: I want what I'll achieve in the future now, before I've even had a chance to work it all out: my interpreting job. A new place to live in which I'll be able to claim a few square feet of my own space. A new SSD for my derelict computer. Another car. Some new friends. That trip to Japan I always talk about with Lalita. To be okay with one of my former friends throwing me out of her life. To be okay with Lalita being in love with a man I don't know at all. To be okay living out here. And, ultimately, truly understanding and accepting the fact that my new life is beginning and all that entails.

I suppose I should explain some of these things I just mentioned.

An old friend and ex-girlfriend picked at an old scab from years ago recently, and then dumped salt and vinegar into the wound. To clarify, it's one person--this person was a friend, then an ex, and then a friend once again. I'll call her Jane.

Almost ten years ago, I met Jane while I was in my junior year in high school. She was an eighth-grade marcher, wide-eyed and having no clue about what she was doing. I saw myself as I used to be when she made painfully obvious mistakes on the field. After I'd heard my band teacher yelling at her, I'd had enough. I took it upon myself to help her and gently remind her of the things she was still learning. I began to see her as my little sister, someone I took care of and looked out for. I felt responsible for her success in band. After about a year, she and I became closer friends. She and I had A Jazz Band rehearsals after school together when I was a senior and she was a freshman. We would work on our part together, hammering out the phrases and solos so we would be ready for festival. Little did I know that she was harboring a major crush on me at the time.

Festival, the spring concert, and graduation slipped by and I soon found myself in my first semester at college. In December of that year, I went to Jane's Christmas concert. I stayed after the performance to wait for her. I had only just realized how much I actually missed her since I graduated. We hugged for longer than usual and then, for the first time, I saw her differently: my feelings for Jane had evolved to another level. We had been friends for almost three years and I found that I felt something approaching love for her. Of course, I was barely nineteen then and was incredibly far from even beginning to understand the nature of love. But my feelings, nonetheless, were still real. From that point, she and I grew closer and by mid-January in the next year, we began dating.

Dan dan kokoro hikareteku (Slowly you're capturing my heart)
Sono mabushii egao ni (By that brilliant smile)
Hatenai yami kara tobidasou hold my hand (Let's escape from this endless darkness, hold my hand)

We had no idea what we were doing. It's safe to say that we shared the same level of maturity and experience in romantic relationships regardless of our ages. She was only fifteen and I had been deprived of the experience I should have gotten in high school. No one wanted to date the bookish Star Wars nerd who listened to only classical music. To this day, I still hold that it's their loss.
Eventually, that lack manifested itself increasingly as our relationship failed to endure its death throes. The fact that she was a devout Christian and that I was a staunch atheist gouged the deepest rift between us. We went round and round endlessly as our worldviews clashed. She wished desperately to save my soul from burning in hell for the rest of eternity. I wished to break her free from the prison of her oppressive faith. After too many of these fights, it was obvious that we weren't going to end up together.

I don't have faith in faith
I don't believe in belief
You can call me faithless
I still cling to hope
And I believe in love
And that's faith enough for me

That was six years ago. Not too long after, I met Lalita for the first time, met someone new on OKCupid, moved in with that girl, experienced some of the very worst relationship-related pain of my life, and then moved back in with my parents. Back then I dug deeply into Radiohead. I trudged through the empty, charcoal-black wastelands of Kid A and found peace in the naturalistic solitude of the sounds on The King of Limbs.

 

However, two months before I moved back in with my parents, Jane sent me an email asking me if I wanted to start talking to her again. It had been more than a year since she and I parted ways and she missed me. Because I also missed her, I couldn't refuse her request. She and I shared the experiences we'd had in the time we spent apart, and through that, we became closer than ever before. I found that I had loved her more than when she and I were dating.

But I don't care

'Cause I love you baby, that's no lie

I love you more than I did when you were mine

The girl I was living with at that time would get so incensed when I talked to Jane. At this point, I cared very little for my girlfriend's feelings because our relationship was in such a protracted stage of free-fall. So every time Jane called, it was that much more gratifying. I was learning to stand my ground and that I could still love people I used to date. In fact, the seeds of my polyamorous nature took root during those days. Jane, like Lalita, became a close female friend I could confide in. And like Lalita, Jane saw me through the pain I would endure from that point. 

To get to the point, I'll push the rod on my time machine forward about three years. Susan had just left me and Jane was the only girl I could still talk to. I was still far too angry with Lalita to even consider reaching out to her. In the wake of the horrible events of 2014 and my recent breakup, Jane gave me four hours of her time with no reservations or complaints. I was so happy and relieved to still be reaping the benefits of my friendship with her. As always, Jane helped me focus on the important things in my life and to feel better about myself and my future. 

A few months passed and my life totally changed again. Lalita was back in my life again and we were free to love each other openly for the first time during our entire friendship. I could not wait to share the news with Jane. I told her that I had reached the highest level of happiness I had ever experienced and that I would be moving to Colorado to live with Lalita. I explained poly to her and all I got was the stock response: "I could never do that." The overwhelming wave of disappointment with her response totally displaced the excitement I had about sharing that news with her. Despite that, though, I asked her if she would be willing to spend about five minutes with me before I left Georgia. She gave me the impression that she would see me when the time came. During the week leading up to when I would pick Lalita up from the airport, Jane evaded any question I posed about the time we had planned to see each other. I was familiar with this behavior from her, but I didn't expect it to come crawling out of the past. I confronted her directly and then she took more than a whole day to tell me that she didn't want to see me. She went further, telling me that she likes the person she has become and that she was no longer the person I had known while she was in high school. We could no longer be as close as I wanted to be, according to her.

You could see me reaching

So why couldn't you meet me halfway?

You could see me bleeding

And you would not put pressure on the wound

I found that to be perfectly preposterous: we had been doing quite well as good friends since that time she had emailed me and she knew that I had changed and improved as a person in the years since. It was like none of that meant anything to her. It was like she didn't know me anymore, and furthermore didn't care to know me anymore. I should have known, because I had solely been responsible for maintaining our friendship through the years. Maybe the fact that I'm a polyamorous vegan atheist who was moving to Colorado made her recoil at the thought of remaining my friend. So there it was again: we still could not cross that old rift. I had honestly thought that we agreed to disagree, so her rejection hurts even more. And that rejection certainly did not help me endure the pain of leaving my family and friends in Georgia.

Despite having lost Jane again, I can still say that I gained from this experience. 

1. My real friends don't allow matters of religion and faith to interfere with our friendship.

2. Even if I lose friends because I stand up for my convictions, that makes me stronger.

3. My real friends accept me unconditionally, even if they disagree with me on some issues. Scott still believes in a god, but he loves me regardless. Lalita was my friend for years even though I wasn't vegan for most of that time.

4. I know how to be the better person when conflicts like the one I had with Jane arise. 

Though I'm still feeling the pain of Jane's rejection, something happened recently that provides a much-needed counterbalance:

Julie (whom I formerly referred to as Susan) is finally talking to me again.

Because I unblocked her from this blog, she was able to find it and read through the entries I wrote since we broke up. She emailed me and after four days we were talking again. I cannot describe the immense relief I felt when I heard that familiar smile through the phone that night. I finally had my friend back. Moreover, she apologized for the way our relationship ended. It still means the world to me, and as I told her in a conversation we had today, those words will carry me a very long way. We found that we love each other even more now that we've had time apart to think about everything that happened between us. I am deeply grateful for her friendship and even more so for her reaching out to me. I've been exceptionally lucky in the last six months: two women I love deeply are in my life again and I cannot express how much gratitude I feel right now. 

The measure of a life is a measure of love and respect

So hard to earn, so easily burned

All my life I've been workin' them angels

Overtime

Riding and driving and living 

So close to the edge

Workin' them angels

Overtime

As for coming to terms with the relationship Lalita has with her other partner, that's still very much in progress, and as I mentioned, it's one of those things I want now that are too difficult to achieve right this second. It sounds like a cop-out, but after thinking about what's really bothering me and then separating those issues out, I've found that it's okay to take a little longer to arrive at that point. She and I talked about it and she understands and is willing to support me through this. I know for a fact that the issues lie with me and not them. And that I need to have a number of things work out before I can even try again to resolve this issue. I need to have some kind of income again, to work out how I'll get my license to interpret for the deaf in Colorado, and then make some friends around here. No one can replace Scott, Andrew, or David, but I've got to try to become more involved. 

Leave out the fiction

The fact is this friction

Will only be worn by persistence

Leave out conditions

Courageous convictions 

Will drag the dream into existence

A tired mind become a shape-shifter

Everybody need a soft filter

Everybody need reverse polarity

Everybody got mixed feelings

About the function and the form

Everybody got to elevate from the norm

Which would bring me to the title of this entry, which is the seventh track on Rush's 1981 album, Moving Pictures: "Vital Signs." 

I've shown this song to Lalita and a few other friends and it's always for the purpose of illustrating human imperfections, especially those involving articulating feelings, sorting them out, and helping others understand where we're coming from. The norm in our society is to ignore people and their feelings, and how we elevate from it is to fight against those impulses. Like Lalita always says, we're in this together. That's why the first stanza of the song I shared on this entry means so much to me. Anything is possible as long as we trust ourselves and each other, leave out lies and conditions and just address the things that really bother us. I'll leave you with a passage from Dune by Frank Herbert that echoes the sentiments in "Vital Signs."

"Anything outside yourself, this you can see and apply your logic to it. But it's a human trait that when we encounter personal problems, these things most deeply personal are the most difficult to bring out for our logic to scan. We tend to flounder around, blaming everything but the actual, deep-seated thing that's really chewing on us."

--Jessica speaking to Thufir Hawat

I've been guilty of that. I believe that it's my responsibility to identify that and then deal with it. I have the strength for it. 

I'm the Heretic and I can learn to persist with anything but aiming low.