The echoes upstairs ...

So I've been playing serious catch up on my blog. Going back to May 26th, you'll now find entries marked with an "^" symbol. Those are entries that I'd written offline but never posted. As of today, I'm all caught up.

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Today at the market in the little beach town I'm in, I observed two women. They were about my age, dressed casually, and clearly friends. One pinged by gaydar. (Gaydar is like radar, only it detects orientation -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaydar.) It was stereotypical; I admit it. But I have some experience with these things, so I feel able to make the call. At least one of those girls is a lesbian.

I was immediately transported back a decade to past trips with my ex-girlfriend. She was married; I was married. But we were interested in each other, and although we hid it carefully in public, I am certain it was detectable by the observant. Just like I noticed today, while watching these women. It's in the way they moved around each other, with plenty of open space around them, yet they brushed against each other on purpose. They leaned their heads together to talk quietly together, even when the subject was purchasing a Coke. The second girl wore a wedding band. She could easily be straight, or pass for straight. Again, I know something about that, because I'm like that, too.

Sometimes it's a blessing, being able to move among the heteros without them realizing that I have a woman at home. This is especially true in light of stories like these: http://www.hatecrimesbill.org/jackson_tn/ If you read through this and into the comments below, you might find yourself shocked, appalled, nauseated. These are real people saying real things about another human being. Once again, my species does me so ... not ... proud. And these are supposedly "my" people, my fellow Southerners. Brilliant.

I flashed back in my own memory, remembering stolen moments on trips out out of town with my friend, my girlfriend, and I felt a pang of something so bitter, and so lost, I almost stumbled out of the store. The end of that treasured (but toxic) friendship came when I came out and ended my marriage to the man I was married to at the time. My friend would not watch me move on to love another woman, so she stopped being my friend. I lost 25 years of friendship in trying to be myself, in trying to own a life in the open, with a female partner who could be all mine.

Living a life of your own carries a heavy price at times.

As I walked back to my rental, I tried to shed tears for that loss. But I found I had few. My eyes hardly moistened; I've cried rivers over that lost friendship, that lost love, but I know it was better for me to have it pass from me. She was not what I imagined her to be. She did not make me a better person; we were both so imprisoned by our circumstances that our love actually poisoned us and the friendship itself. Ultimately I wonder if she was merely using me ... since in the end she couldn't even return to the friendship upon which we'd supposedly built two decades of shared history.

"So it goes," said Kurt Vonnegut. Indeed. So it goes.

And it goes well.