As I was figuring out my own sexuality, I realized that the gender of my significant other was just not that important. However, something else was important instead -- something about me that seemed to make me different from everyone else I knew; that made me different even from everyone in every TV show or popular culture representation I could find. It seemed that no one on the planet was like me, because the thing that I wanted was ... to be naked.
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I have been to a couple of nudist resorts, but I did not feel that I fit in there. It may be hypocritical of me, but I don't particularly want to see other people naked. I'm fine with other women more-or-less my age, but I'm not into the "family nudism" experience with kids, old people and middle-aged dudes with pot bellies hanging out over their dongs. So, I am content to "practice" my nudism amongst a small circle of friends, and most of the time I am just doing it alone -- just me and Nature.
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I liked Scott a lot. We had fun together, but ... I wasn't in love with him. Worse, I knew I was simply never going to fall in love with him, and I count among my collected sins allowing him to believe that I might.
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I started playing on a softball team where I met Bea and Dee, a forty-something, leather-wearing dyke couple. They had genteel-sounding Southern accents, but cussed like sailors and seemed able to answer any question with a quaint idiom into which they had inserted swear words. If a movie or recipe turned out less impressive than expected, one of them would say, "Well, that didn't blow my fuckin' dress up." I giggled the first time I heard that one because I was pretty sure neither of them had worn a dress since sixth grade. Bea read my mind and added, "That being a fuckin' metaphor."
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My new butch friends enjoyed listening to my girly-girl stories of not-quite romance, but I got their full attention when I started talking about nudity. Relishing having just the right audience, I related in lavish detail my lifelong compulsion to be naked. I was totally blowing their dresses up.
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We were flirting in the kitchen, and a party was going on around us. Jaye was dressed in a vintage man's suit with a necktie and matching silk handkerchief. I was naked.
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After the tenth kiss, I pushed her away, and she dashed to her car, holding her hat on with one hand as her wingtips splashed in the puddles of the broken sidewalk. I stood unmoving and watched her go, my hands on my hips, rain washing over me and my hair flying in the wind. Her headlights lit me up as if I were on stage, changing the raindrops into white streaks as she backed out and turned away, taking the light with her.
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Psychologists say that we seek mates who are similar in some way to our parents. But for me and Mona, that formative influence seems to have been each other. Jack (the man I am with nowadays) is like Mona in that he is confident and unflappable, always knowing what to do in any situation. If there is ever a zombie apocalypse or some breakdown in society, these are two people you would want in your tribe.
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Some of their movie references are well-known lines like "you're gonna need a bigger boat," or "plastics," or "you should have seen the ocean in those days." Even I get those, but Jack and Mona will quote from more obscure movies, and the other one will chuckle knowingly in their elite club of People Who Got That One.
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I couldn't see her face until Andrea called out the name "Mona" and the girl turned to face us, her radiantly orange-red hair swirling gracefully with the movement as if she were an Irish supermodel in a shampoo commercial filmed in Technicolor on a windy day by Wes Anderson.
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As we sat there talking, I told myself not to rush it and not to open my heart until I had at least asked my True Love screening questions. Yet I was already falling in love with her eyes, and in them, I imagined us living together in a little house with a white picket fence, waking up together on Saturday mornings to the skitter of dog toenails on the hardwood floor.
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Normally, those questions would get asked and answered in restaurants and coffeehouses, but with Mona, things happened so quickly I had to conduct the job interview in bed during the rest between orgasms.
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For most of my life, I blamed myself for my mental health issues before finally learning I had an actual chemical imbalance that can be moderated just by taking the right pill every day. A hundred years ago, I'd be the crazy aunt they keep locked in the attic. I am still a crazy aunt, of course, but I am a free-range crazy aunt who hardly ever has to get locked up.
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The Realtor said we could buy however much of the total property we wanted, and Mona and I stepped aside to discuss it. As a potential buyer still negotiating, Mona probably hoped we could feign minimal interest to help get a lower price. But even though the Realtor could not hear our conversation, I have no poker face and probably looked like a girl being proposed to on the Jumbotron at the Super Bowl.
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I wanted to be considered sexy as well as adorable. But not sexy in a way that gives you (a mere mortal) any meaningful aspiration of ever actually having sex with me, for I am, after all, a goddess -- but you think there is a chance, just a chance, that perhaps through your self-deprecating rakish charm that I might deign to choose you on a whim, undeserving though you are . . . and so you have hope.
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I walked right up to him and kissed him. And it wasn't some ambiguous kiss that could mean different things. I grabbed him by the head and gave him a magnificent, purposeful kiss -- the kind of kiss meant to be written about in a diary and remembered in old age.
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We kept the food pantry open an extra 15 minutes so we wouldn't have to turn anyone away, and when we finally shut the doors, the shelves were almost bare, and it was like closing time at the Bailey Building & Loan after the run on the banks.
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My dogs curl up nearby, heaving sighs. They want to be outside on such a beautiful day, but they know I am sick, so they stand guard. And I don't want them to. I want them to go away so I don't have to see them and feel the burden of their devotion.
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Mona comes home to a dark, quiet house and no dinner. And I am barely capable of flushing the toilet after I pee. I am ashamed to look at her, humiliated to be seen by her. . . . I write her a letter suggesting that my mother could take care of me so that Mona could be free to find someone better, and that she could go ahead and do so because we are not legally married anyways. She rips up the letter, yelling angrily at me, her cheeks wet, and she flushes the bits of paper down the toilet. I watch her and feel sad, but I can't cry.
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Mona is asleep on the couch, and I move quietly like a ghost in the kitchen making a bowl of cereal. I consider slicing a banana into it, but decide that is overly ambitious. I carry my bowl outside, squinting in the autumn sunshine and feeling the heat of the sun on my skin. I sit cross-legged on the cool, wet grass, and I eat as leaves fall around me. I am suddenly famished, and every bite is an individual experience. And then it is all gone but the milk, and I drink it like from a cup, wanting it all. And just when I am finished, bringing the bowl away from my lips, a small red leaf twirls from the sky and lands in the bowl. And this seems to me a sign from God, and my eyes open as if layers of crust have just fallen from them -- and there is the world, right in front of me.
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The Roommates' preferred abusable substance was alcohol, but now and then they would fire up a ceramic water pipe that was shaped like a topless, tattooed biker-dyke straddling a hog-style Harley. The bowl where the pot went was in her crotch, and you'd suck in the smoke through the exhaust pipe. The Roommates named her "Debbie."
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Suddenly, in my mind, this was the absolute perfect thing to do -- drive to Nik's house naked in the middle of the night. My purse was right there, but instead of taking it (with my wallet inside), I just reached in and grabbed my keys. I was determined to take nothing with me -- no money, no shoes and absolutely no backup clothing. I stepped out of my room, quietly closed the door, and slipped silently down the hallway, down the stairs, and out the back door. The sky was overcast, and rain was in the forecast, but I did not care. I got in the old convertible whose broken top would no longer go up, and quietly drove away.
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Because they were already below my hips, I expected the panties to slide down as I walked towards the kitchen, but they were brand new, and the elastic was still enthusiastic to perform its purpose. Alone in the kitchen, I made myself a stiff vodka tonic and stretched out the waistband to loosen it up. I took practice steps back and forth in the kitchen while sipping my drink to see if the panties would fall, but they wouldn't. I yanked at them and stretched until I felt fabric tearing a little.
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As promised, my face was not shown in any of the photographs -- because all of them were ultra close-ups showing my intimate orifices in more high-resolution detail than I had ever even seen before. Jaye playfully zoomed in on one of the shots until my pink anus filled the screen. "Jesus Christ!" I exclaimed, picking perhaps the least appropriate moment to call Divine attention to myself.
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She gave me another smack, and that one stung a tiny bit, but I played it up. As I turned around to face her again, I rubbed my butt and pretended I didn't notice everyone was now watching. "That was only a four?"
Jaye took a sip of her scotch. "Yes, Molly, on the official one-to-ten spanking scale used in the Olympics, that was a four."
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Fueled by weed brownies and half a bottle of champagne mixed with rainwater, we jumped up and danced whenever the sun peeked out and made the raindrops glitter. I was hoping we would get a rainbow as a reward, but then the clouds closed for good, and the rain came down in earnest. Less hardy souls would have run for the house by this point, but Molly and I are not sissies, so we rode it out like sailors in a storm.
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When I woke, a couple hours later, I had that weird feeling when you don't quite know who you are and what's real. I knew it was Jack's place, but for a few seconds, I thought I lived there with him. Although it had been years since we'd routinely shared a bed, my brain remembered the familiarity of that and presented it to me as if it were my current reality. I was trying to remember what time he'd be home when my brain finally caught up with its various whirring and clicking processes and informed me that no, I did not live here.
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Jayne called out "WAIT!" a little too loud and spilled her drink as she leaped up from the table and ran to where Margot had paused in the middle of the restaurant. Margot turned to face her, and now everyone in the restaurant was watching.
I could not hear what was being said, but I could see Margot's face, and I promised the God I didn't believe in that I would be a better person or sacrifice a goat or whatever if He would just please-oh-please allow this one nice thing to happen.
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After Mona and I bought this property. Jayne and Margot fell in love with the old house down by the road and have done a great job fixing it up.
Which reminds me . . . I still owe God a goat.
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We cannot know if a God exists, and we cannot know if there is an Afterlife. But we DO know that we exist right now. Whether from God or from chance evolution, here we are. We have consciousness, and we have bodies to carry around our consciousness. We don't know how long our lives will be, but we have them right now during this present moment. That is all we have and all we know.
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The Earth Goddess of my theology is not all-powerful. She can't prevent me from getting cancer or protect my house from a tornado or help me find my car keys. One might ask what good is a God that can't do those things, but I'd rather believe in a God who can't than a God who won't.
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I still didn't know what mania was, but I had it. It feels good being manic -- loads more fun than depression. But at least with depression, you stay in bed and don't get in trouble. You can get in lots of trouble while manic.
On one particular night, I was driving crazy-fast down a curvy country road in a convertible, my hair flying with the wind. I was convinced I was in total control, and I was doing pretty good too . . . until I hit that tree.
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At dawn, I was still walking down that same road. I wasn't bleeding anymore but it was crusted on my skin and streaked down my white blouse. There were no thoughts in my head. My mind was closed for business and only operating enough brain cells to keep my body upright and my feet moving. A sheriff's cruiser gently came up alongside me in the other lane, and the deputy asked me if I was okay. I looked at him and whispered, "No," very quietly because I did not want the corn to hear.
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He was a philosophy major (because, he said, "that's where the big money is"), and I was a "born Catholic" who no longer believed the words I sang in church, yet who still went to mass and still took the Eucharist, and damned right I could tell you why. Our conversations blew our mutual minds, as if we were the first people discovering these profound ideas. I remember I kept asking him, "Does the world KNOW this??"
Of course, the weed helped.
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I didn't mind touching him down there -- it was fun feeling it grow -- but I didn't want my face in the vicinity when that thing went off. I tried it a couple times, and didn't like it -- another clue -- but the actual screwing part was wonderful because we were similarly passionate yet not in a hurry, and we would lose ourselves in that long slow rhythmic experience. If I had entirely disliked sex with a male, then I probably would have figured things out earlier -- or if the man I was with wasn't someone I loved.
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We stayed a week in Key West, but then had to start for home. Although we took a leisurely pace, we both knew that we were nearing the end of our time together. I loved him, but I knew my brain just wasn't wired to be with a guy long-term -- not even a guy so great as Jack. This little moment in our lives was like a rainbow that I would stand in the rain to watch as long as it was there for me. But then it would be gone.
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