| now is | once was | came from | heard tell |

12:47 p.m. - 2004-06-08

Of course I will never send this to her.

Dear Cute Dyke Co-worker:
You may be wondering why I've been avoiding you so conspicuously over the past few weeks. Your few friendly overtures have been sidestepped neatly with honest, if unintelligible, excuses. I realise you probably haven't noticed quite as much as I have, because usually the initiative for us to do anything together comes from me, rather than you. You are still quite convinced that hanging out with 'the mothership' of your girlfriend's friends means that you've hung out with all of us, even if I happen to not be there. That's okay. Whether or not you've actually noticed, I have been avoiding you. For a variety of reasons. Most of which you're fully aware of but will never admit, at least not in my presence.

Lets start with the most obvious and uncomfortable fact that I feel quite substantially more strongly for you than I should. This is awkward on all sorts of levels, isn't it? For starters we work together. Then, not only are you dating my friend/friendly acquaintance, she's the woman who (long before you came into the picture) did more to alienate me from my group of friends than you will ever believe of her. You were around when she fucked my girlfriend, lied about it, and blamed it on me, weren't you? But somehow you could rationalise that behaviour. It was all new and you were terribly excited about it all, I realise that. It's an exciting group of friends to marry straight into, and you've done just that. Congratulations.

So we have here: Jealousy, because you're dating someone else. Anger, because of all people you had to date her. And this other sort of frustration, where I can see how strongly infectious all of her opinions are to you. How little you have to think about the world when she's there to tell you exactly what analysis is going to be most comfortable. So that annoys me a lot, because I could get over you dating other people- I do still have extremely strong friendship feelings towards you. It's just that the person you're dating now defines you. You live with her. You dress like her. You talk like her. You let her do your make up, decide where and when you will go out, and who you will be hanging out with. All of her friends are your friends, and you have absolutely no friends independent of each other. Can you see how this makes it difficult for me to hang out with you when I've spent the past year of my life trying to distance myself from her extremely pervasive influence?

Here we're getting a bit beyond simple jealousy. I notice for instance that you're incredibly judgemental of me these days. Why is that? Why is it that you can suggest to me that my romantic and sexual history make me unqualified to offer advice to a close friend hurt by a severe break-up? Do you think that the relationships I've had and the decisions I've made make me some sort of emotional cripple? You laugh at me when I look like I may begin ending a relationship or dating another person. In what way does this amuse you? Is my sex life all romantic slapstick comedy to you because I make mistakes sometimes? Or because I have been known to break up with people just because I wasn't happy, rather than waiting till I was absolutely miserable? Is it the speed with which I seem to cycle through partners? Does the fact that my mistakes can be measured in months rather than years (like yours, perhaps) make me some site of hilarity to your safe, socially acceptable serial monogamist tendencies?

I realise that you're safely, monogamously in love with your live-in girlfriend and that she provides you with absolutely everything you need. That's really wonderful for you. I realise that a lot of the friends she's brought into your life (or was that me bringing them into your life?) are in their first big, long mid-twenties relationships, all secure and monogamous just like you. But I would hesitate to suggest that the different stage I am at in my life (I'm twenty one years old to your twenty eight) makes me the comedic relief in your happily settled life. What is so goddamn funny about the fact that I'm just living my life as it comes along? Last time I checked, there was no requirement of lesbianism in which I must have dated someone for a particular amount of time to qualify for my membership card. If you can find this clause in the contract, please forward it to me. I would love to hear it.

You once said to me that you would have more respect for me and the decisions I make if I could have stayed with Daddy for one full year. If I had hit that finish line, suddenly my life would have become respectable and there would be some hope for me in the neat world of relationship-based sexuality. Never mind if I wasn't terribly happy, or if I knew that dragging it out would turn a good thing bad. It's all about the time limits, is it? If I can just hit that mark…! Or would you rather I was nice and respectably single, with a few one night stands here and there but none of these abrupt, brief, passionate week-or-month long encounters I persist with? Is there a length of time I must be without a partner before I am allowed to have another? Is this why you sat there and laughed at me, mimicking a stop-watch counting down the seconds, when I told you about the bartender's re-emergence?

I'm not trying to be melodramatic here. I'm trying to negotiate a way for our friendship to work around the combined difficulties of your relationship, our different life stages, and your attitude to the ways that I live my life. If you find it impossible to hear about my sex life without finding me hilarious or offensive, I will stop talking about it to you. This will of course limit our closeness, but that's a price to be paid. If I am altogether too disruptive for you or my demands are too much, we can stop hanging out altogether. That would hurt, but is also an acceptable outcome. Ideally I would like for you to stop making a living practical joke out of me, because on top of everything else, it fucking hurts. And I think it's really mean. You're not a mean person, so don't act like it around me.
Kind regards,
pink.x.

- |+

[Phone Home] - 2005-02-22

[She hurts, even from here, she hurts.] - 2005-02-11

[Two weeks and counting] - 2005-01-31

[Dirty] - 2005-01-20

[Here Now] - 2005-01-18