When I was seventeen, I had a habit of drinking until I blacked out. My parents had to intervene on several occasions once dealing with the police and once with an ambulance. Behind the scenes were usually two people: Ashley and Brian. While Ashley was my friend, or, what I thought at the time, my soulmate, Brian was a freshman with a massive propensity for getting in trouble. My friends hated him and seemed to do a better job of repelling him. Brian latched on to me, often playing pranks on me that I never laughed at and then trying to redeem himself in ways that were even worse. After getting gas one time, I returned to the car, grabbed a sip of water and immediately spit it out all over the wheel and and the dashboard. Brian had filled my water bottle with vodka procured from his father’s collection. His 9 year old brother was in the backseat and they were both cackling. Each time he pushed me too far, he would lure me back by either stealing more of his dad’s liquor or showering me with designer perfumes stolen from the local mall. I don’t know if rules exist because people like Brian don’t care about right and wrong or if people like Brian do things simply to break existing rules. This morning I saw him turning his car onto my street as I was driving to work. I knew it was going to be a bad day.
When I came out as a lesbian, I assumed things would get better. That the love life I had been lacking all along would finally fall into place now that I had declared its preferred form. I have always been a cynical person, but this was a narrative I had been duped into believing without question, just like I assumed my massive weight loss would mean I would suddenly be more valuable to the world. But really nothing has changed. The isolation continues to be my defining quality. I see happy people coupled off, giggling, discussing the hassle of joining bank accounts and some of those people are queer and some are fat. Whatever the reason I’m alone, those two qualities do not seem to be factors. Whatever quality it is that keeps me single year after year, I cannot pinpoint it, overcome it, come out about it. I endure it. I say the world’s not fair so why should I expect anything from it? But I don’t feel any better, I feel worse. Being alone for one’s whole life has its own set of stigma. One woman I met online demanded to know, why have you never been in a relationship? What was she missing? Maybe she knows now. Maybe that’s why we went from speaking all day through texts to not talking anymore after two dates. On dating sites, there’s a question asking would you ever date someone who’s never been in a relationship before? It is reliably one of the questions that me and the potential match differ on.
Some people go through bouts of loneliness but I have only ever known this state and this lonely single life is self-perpetuating beyond my control. It’s not a feeling I get between relationships or when my relationships start to feel inadequate. It is a lifestyle and no one, friend or professional, seems to be able to help me out of it. I have learned not be open about it to too many people, because many are quick to generate a list of things they believe are wrong with me. When other people perceive you as a failure, they find the qualities to confirm why you are a failure that fit their understanding of the universe. That way they can blame me for it and keep it away from themselves. Wear makeup, put yourself out there, dress more femininely, shave your legs, find god, speak in a more enthusiastic voice, think more positively, have you heard of the law of attraction? These are the forces that are hard enough to battle even when you are a success by at least some measures.
To say that I’m no longer present at work is a strong understatement. I fidget with glitter for five or six hours by the door while staring at racks of handmade paper, wondering why my coworkers don’t like talking to me, whether I’ll ever have a normal life, why people consistently misinterpret what I say when I feel like I can read people’s thoughts. Lately the fog has been worse. I arrive and keep my hands busy. By the end of my shift there is glitter everywhere and a bunch of cards I’ve torn up before anyone could see them. I can no longer stomach making sweet cards for the same four of five occasions. I actually don’t think I ever could.
Today I explained to a customer the different ways her daughter could make a book for a class report. Pointing to our simplest kit, she said like this one but easier. I tried to explain different methods and why they might be more challenging. After a while, and after we closed, she said that’s it? That is everything you have? I didn’t speak, I only smiled. My daughter made an incredible book from one of these. She followed a kit of instructions. I have a shelf of handmade books. A beautiful shelf and a testament to the intersection underemployed solitude, introversion and clinical depression. My daughter’s also a brilliant poet. It’s not enough to suck at my sales job, I have to agree with a rude woman that two of my passions that keep absolute despair at arms length have been mastered by an eight year old who talks to me with more authority than I talk to anyone.
A similar thing happened with the women looking create a recipe book. I showed them a book meant specifically for storing recipes, something I would never even assume existed and have no idea why anyone should expect us to carry. That’s it? A man asked for a birthday card specifically for daughters. I showed him the one we had on the wall. That’s it? That is very bad. He didn’t mean the card, he meant the selection. I smiled. There’s a CVS across the street but no one seems to know that.
Being lonely has effectively thrust me back into the closet. I don’t care to speak about my orientation as a hypothetical with people I barely know. That was something I struggled to do with the people I knew best, with people who had passed out on me and revealed intimate secrets of their own escapades for years. I leaned as close as I could to a friend on the steps of Union Square and asked how do you know if you like men or women, if you’ve never been with either? He thought about it. He talked in a clear conversational voice that I felt was indecently loud even surrounded by skateboarders and tourists and protesters and only a few blocks away from Stonewall. I leaned in and told him I felt uncomfortable, like other people might be listening. It was the first time I had ever talked about myself this way. I don’t blame them he laughed, it’s a really interesting topic.
The last woman I was with five years ago, didn’t get my solitude either. I just assumed you’d been with people before. I had no reasons for her. When I have no reasons, people just fill in their own. I’m sick of explaining to people that I wore make-up for many years. Brian had stolen me a very nice collection. I’ve had make-up artists do me up before a night on the town but I hated the way I looked. The people that think I look good in make-up have no concept of where the best me resides, but they don’t respect my self-awareness because I always seem to be at my worst self. I even had a respectable purse collection and I gave it to the woman I was with five years ago. I felt guilty for dumping her even though her bad habits for quickly becoming mine. She had confirmed my suspected feeling, I did like having sex with women.
If I withhold information, it’s because I don’t want to be mistaken for something I’m not just because I’ve never found a stable identity. I’ve seen more of the world than I’ll admit to most people. Unlike my coworkers who boast about their travels, those experiences are remarkable privileges to me, things that haven’t made me wiser or smarter or accomplished, just lucky. I can’t stand the conversation that follows from when I was in Barcelona…when I was in Barcelona, I was lonely and I ate tapas and admired its architecture but I avoided its crowds and I saw art but it also made me feel sad. When I was in the old city in fez, I felt lost in a new way, I felt like an intruder in a specific way, and I felt lonely in a familiar way. The smell of Greece was remarkably similar to the smell of my Greek friend’s family basement. In Scotland, I blushed every time I ordered food because the waiter’s accent was such a turn on.
Some people know that I have always dreaded the thought of my own wedding, the few people I know forced to interact while I perform an intimate yet archaic act built on compulsory heterosexuality. But I hope that one day I find someone I love, who loves me back, and is willing to try and spend the rest of her life connected to me. What nobody knows is that I hope she wants a wedding badly because I’ll gladly go through the motions and, unlike the grooms I encounter, I won’t act hassled or disinterested or stressed beyond belief. I’ll act excited and engaged and I’ll have opinions about what I prefer but I’ll let her make all the final decisions because its for her. I hope that we’ll choose the slightly textured pale pink invitations because they’re beautiful and I don’t care if they are informal and I don’t care if they are feminine. I want it to have my own wedding invitations to dote on so badly, I can’t even talk about that dream with other people. Clinging to the hope of finding someone means the recurring disappointment and fear that it hasn’t happened and that it never might.
I have heard that Brian is no longer gay. As much as I dislike him, I know that this means something in him has been defeated. His father, who had a constant cycle of foreign nanny girlfriends that were always a bit younger than I am now, couldn’t accept that his son is just that way. His nine year old brother, who had met several of Brian’s boyfriends, once asked him, why does dad hate gay people? For a kid obsessed with owning a Mercedes, it was an unexpectedly innocent moment. Brian couldn’t answer but he swore his brother to secrecy until he turned twenty-one. Brian liked driving his dad’s jaguar and the promise of a trust fund. I suspect he might be enjoying the house behind mine, a house his father bought years ago, even as I write this.
I have two dates coming up this week, neither of which seem very promising. One is with a married woman in an open relationship with two kids. I don’t see us picking out wedding invitations any time soon. Another is with a woman who looks nice, but I get the impression she is more interested in local sports than discussing micro-agressions, gay shame and the merits of introverts. The truth is, none of the people who are interested in the things I seem to like are responding to my thoughtful messages. The last two people I was supposed to go on dates with flaked out on me, never to follow up. Several people have started talking to me only to delete their profiles days later. I’m desperate for contact. I haven’t been on a date in months. I haven’t even kissed somebody, much less explored their body in five years, since that one woman. I am not as idle as other people seem to assume but I’m not ready to talk about how painful this all is with people I barely know. I don’t feel I’m even moving forward. Just retaining hope and being met with rejection and disappointment, friends who don’t know what to say and people that are less than friends feeling free to scrutinize. I just don’t know.
Bull Dyker 