Every Day is Marne Gras

7 May 2006

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MARNE!

“So there you have it. My six week adventure in a nutshell. Just as I’m sure you found, there is no good way to sum it up, without getting sappy and such but I’m glad that I have this journal to give to you because maybe it’ll help explain things better than I can myself. And I think out of all the people I know you are the one who will understand what I have written here and you are the one who I want most to understand it. That’s more than I want anything else, just to be understood by you and to share this part of me with you as the only one on shore who might get what it all meant for me. I know its a lot to ask for you to keep me in your heart and your life but nothing would make me happier. So whatever I can do to help you have a happy birthday, you got it. I love you.”

That is the last entry in the journal I received as a gift from my first ex-girlfriend for my birthday two years ago. She wrote it for me while she lived on a sailboat in the middle of the pacific ocean without any outside communication for six weeks. After dating for a year and a half we broke up the day before she got on the boat, but she promised to write anyway, and she delivered on her promise. I was looking for a copy of my birth certificate in my drawer of papers I never look at but occasionally need and can never find at the appropriate moment this week when I found it. It is full of sentiments like that and descriptions of things that were much more exciting than the small town in Ohio I was living in at the time.

***

We met in two places at the same time: Politics 105: American Government, a lecture class during which I watched her fall asleep at her desk instead of paying attention most mornings, and Kinsey 1-5, the (I can’t even write this with a straight face) bisexual student group during my first semester at Oberlin. Alfred Kinsey was a sex researcher who proposed the Kinsey scale, a measure from 0-6 indicating that a few folks were heterosexual in thoughts, deeds, and feelings– zeroes, and a few folks were entirely homosexual– sixes, and most others were in the middle, hence the name Kinsey 1-5. Yes, this is what bored queer kids in Ohio do for fun; invent clubs with no agendas and esoteric names.

The Kinsey 1-5 folks were all relative latebloomers; we were the kids who didn’t figure it out until college, the first generation for whom coming out in college meant you were a latebloomer (who knew?). We were confused and proud and we were very concerned and loud about that and we really, really liked things with rainbows on them and queerly-themed puns. We met on Tuesday nights at 10 in order to devote time to thinking up new gay puns, discuss relevant bisexual issues (1. being confused and proud and maybe not confused 2. clea duvall and angelina jolie) and nurse our first crushes (all on other members of the group) with cookies and sometimes beer.

Eventually the group’s numbers stopped fluctuating and dwindled down to a dozen or so bisexual die-hards and I finally noticed Sarah. Each week she would arrive fifteen minutes late, sweating profusely and preemptively apologizing for her lateness, still wearing her bike helmet. She was 21, a junior, and just coming out. Because of my aforementioned love of comparing my own problems to others to make myself feel better, when I saw her I would often think ‘now here is someone who has even less of a clue than I do’ when she showed up at bi club meetings. This was helpful for me, considering I spent my semester at college cluelessly struggling to find the mailroom, and attempting to do things like join the bowling team.

I stuck with the bi group (and the politics class), and bit by bit Sarah and I became friendly. In our politics tutorial I would make inarticulate points with lots of hand gestures, the rest of the group would ignore me, and Sarah would try to decipher my poorly argued thoughts. In our Kinsey group, Sarah talked about growing ever-closer to coming out to her parents and I shared with the group whatever I could drum up about biphobia or whatever I had decided to feel petulant and angry about that week. We were good for each other, and we were dedicated to being good, intentional friends (whatever that meant). When school let out for the summer we wrote silly handwritten letters back and forth, the friendly kind with doodles and jokes. During that summer I stayed around Oberlin and had my first (first!) lady fling (another day, another blog) and it was Sarah that I gushed to about it over the phone.

By the time fall semester rolled back around, Kinsey 1-5 had been disbanded (everyone had gotten laid and needed to get back to being whole people and doing their homework), but Sarah and I had become a pair. I had two best friends; the other was another girl named Sarah, a trombonist now living in South Africa.  Because I cannot have more than one friend at a time that I have not slept with, it seemed like a very, very good idea at the time to sleep with bike helmet Sarah.

At the end of October on a rainy night when Sarah didn’t want to walk home from my dorm in the rain, I impulsively blurted out what I later realized was the very first pick-up line I had ever uttered: “You’re welcome to stay if you like…” Proper. Enigmatic. Rico. Rico Suave.

She agreed and we spent the first of many nights together in my twin XL dorm bed in the (wait for it) women’s collective. Neither one of us actually slept, but we didn’t screw, either. We didn’t even spoon; we gave each other those I’m closing my eyes like I’m asleep but I’m not half impotent back rubs, daringly grazing each other’s belly buttons (”Am I being super friendly and close to you? Am I working my way down your pants? I don’t know; I’m asleep!”). By the time things got potentially confusing, we couldn’t ignore the truth any longer– it was light out. We were awake. We knew exactly what we were doing.

With the sunrise we finally rolled over to our respective sides of the twin and slept for a few hours. When we finally did get out of bed, there was no mention of our especially touchy sleepover. We both seemed to think we had taken our friendship to that ‘next level’– friends who spooned! We were determined to not feel awkward.

A week later, the exact scenario played out again. It was a little less rainy, a little earlier in the evening, with a little less “Are you sure you don’t mind if I stay over?” We crawled under my blanket, eagerly molding into our ‘friendly’ spoons, and after several hours the same mindless petting (literally; I couldn’t even manage a proper massage) had gotten, well, one might say heavy. One of my hands brushed the underside of one her breasts and we both stopped, like we had just been caught by the secret “you’re about to have sex with your best friend” police. I heard her catch her breath.

I sat upright in bed, reached over, and turned on my bedside lamp.

“What are we DOING?” I half demanded, half asked.

We processed like good little homos for a minute, which ended with me lighting a small red candle, turning off my desk lamp, and taking off her shirt.

“Why do all lesbians in movies always giggle when they’re done doing it?” I asked while giggling myself.

“I don’t know, but it’s bullshit”, said Sarah, laughing. “I am totally not giggling.

The next morning I had a rugby game. She walked me to my carpool at 7am. As we meandered across the center of campus in the early morning fog that we never saw because we tried very hard to never, ever be awake this early, we both swore to each other that we weren’t going to date, that we were just desperate, and no one was going to find out about our recently cashed in benefits. When we reached the street corner where we would part ways for the day, I asked her to please kiss me just one more time. Please make this last a little longer; no one will see, I thought/asked. She bent over the handlebars of the bike between us and we kissed a long ‘this is so not over’ kind of kiss. We pulled away again, and I looked around over both shoulders to see if anyone was watching, late for my carpool, and instead of saying goodbye I said “Please, just one more?”

***

It is 7:30 at night. Because I have the work boundaries of the overeager twenty-something that I sometimes pretend to not be, I am standing in the state of the art, energy-slut of a greenhouse that I am always standing in at this time of night watering tomato seedlings with my cell phone cradled between my right shoulder and ear. I am attempting to simultaneously fit the watering wand down low under the leaves of these gargantuan freak of nature (but organic!) tomato plants and play catchup with my ex when she picks up the phone on the last ring before her voicemail gets it, but she’s busy. It is three hours later in New York, but she is just sitting down to dinner. I say I’ll call back, and I will, eventually. This is week three or four of phone tag.

The water shoots out of the watering wand into the forest of tomatoes and I stick my back phone in my vest pocket so it won’t get wet. I think about disembowling the 1700 tomatoes I am growing in order to participate in normal human activities like eating dinner with other people and call other other people when they’re not eating their dinner.

Sarah and I finally speak for the first time in a month a few days later and we talk about jobs and girls and cities and friends and she sounds happy and I am happy for her and I feel close to my friend.

I used to say she knew me better than anyone else ever knew me, and sometimes I still tell people that, when I’m bragging about my one functional ex relationship (hey there all you crazy exes who read this and don’t call me! don’t you love the internet? don’t worry; you’re next.), even though for the past year we’ve played half-hearted phone tag and when we do talk, we’ve forgotten what we have and haven’t shared with each other.

It doesn’t feel like we ever dated, which is different from feeling friendly or at peace with our relationship. It doesn’t feel like I ever stood in the fog in the early morning begging this woman to just kiss me again. I can’t remember what that felt like, how I must have obsessed about during the entire rugby match. When we talk on the phone, she feels like another old friend from college. There are no whiplash flasbacks to us having sex or impressing each other with unannounced gifts or whatever it is we did for one another during that time. I have my own journal entries and the whole ship log she kept for me, but it’s like reading some other generic strung-out teenager’s rantings, not my own. I can’t even remember what she looks like naked. Maybe the problem is with my long term memory, but really now. Who were we?

I’ve been single for awhile (a valiant effort to curb my serial dating habit), which makes me cynical and bitter and gives me too much time to do things like contemplate my failed relationships, but all evidence points to the fact that Sarah and I shared our lives together for a little while, and we happily gave up our individual sovereignty to include the other in our lives. I’m beginning to think that this is the only reason why people date, because they are not actually whole without someone else messing with their shit or futzing with their underwear drawer. This all screams “unhealthy! bad wrong no stop don’t!” and I spend most of my waking hours developing strategies to stave off codependency and it is probably why I can clearly remember how i t felt to be called ‘barney marne’ in the first grade but I can’t relive any of the time I spent with my first gf.

I am befuddled (yes, befuddled) by the fact that I can’t come up with any other reasons why other people seek out and stay in relationships, because I can’t imagine any other reason working for a very long time (a brief list of the other reasons I have been in other relationships, all of which have been significantly shorter: you’re hot. you make me feel smarter. you need to get laid. i need to get laid. you laugh at my jokes. people think we’d be good together. why not?). The only other reason I can come up with is being scared of being alone and dying alone, but once you get past the whole one day I’m turning into grass thing, all you’re left with is that feeling of wishing someone else was watching out for you. How do people make monogamy work and still feel like an individual in the long term?

It is evenings like this when I feel all of my years old and not a one more.