On Love: I’ll wait for great
I’m learning to be patient. It was never a strength.
My first kiss wasn’t great.
I sat on a stone step in the park near my house and someone three years my senior who I’d met as many hours earlier went for the French kiss. I was maybe 12 or 13 and didn’t even know what he was doing. I never saw him again after that day.
It took a while before I wasn’t unnerved by the memory of it. And never felt the same in that park again. Even with a different person on a bench nearby years later.
The next time I rushed may or may not have been in a pool at my friend’s house the summer between my sophomore and Junior year of high school. Some townie kid I had a crush on for a while serendipitously showed up and as the night wore on and we grew progressively more drunk, each couple took a corner of the swimming pool. The music blared and the concrete edge of the pool dug into my back as body parts unknown moved against me underwater. He was cute but also not a great kisser. For the rest of that summer my friends and I referred to it as Four Corners Night.
In my college dorm room, the movie had barely begun before the guy from my computer basics class rolled onto me. I was bored. He left and never spoke to me again. I hardly cared.
A nice Christian dude was unsuccessful in getting me to befriend Jesus or make him my boyfriend. Not Jesus, I mean.
There was also a nerdy know-it-all.
And several others.
Trying once more, I hurriedly seduced a super cute Fine Arts major. He was two years younger than me and when his fondling felt rather like fumbling, I sighed out loud. Not the good kind. Maybe too loudly.
Before his car left the parking lot, I rolled over and texted the girl I’d met weeks earlier, the one I couldn’t stop thinking about. We were camp counselors and our mutual attraction felt both forbidden and familiar at once.
She ended up being my first love, the “One”. Fast and furious, it was the kind of crash course in infatuation that took me eight years to get over when our tug of war finally ended. Those deeply dramatic few years revealed just how little I understood myself or how the rules of real relationship worked.
Late bloomers like me learn a lot at once.
For many days and nights I felt convinced I’d never stop aching for her smell or the sound of her voice near my ear. The detox from lost love is agony. I was certain I would never feel again in a way so great.
I was right.
Of the many relationships and escapades (of which there have been very few) I’ve experienced, none have touched the depth of emotion that rose to my awareness and permeated my body like when I fell the first time. I’ve since conquered and courted regal pillow princesses and made mediocre memories with many men and women. Many good but none of them great.
The one from the summer I turned 21. Sweet and gentle but battling his own depression like a bitter enemy, we parted ways when his low self-esteem triumphed over his best intentions. When I came out to him about the girl years later, he got up from the table and walked away from me never to be heard from again. Some folks just can’t comprehend fluid sexuality. Especially when mine triggered theirs.
Like the guy I met at a woodsy bonfire who I’d confuse if he saw me now. The mirror image might be disconcerting. Or he might want to jump me. There was that way about him.
Like the gal who followed me around my job until she worked up the nerve to approach the desk and ask for my number. Or maybe I asked for hers.
Like the one who picked me from a bunch but I missed all the warning signs of a woman, beautiful but bruised, too new to recovery and without much there of herself let alone for me.
But we tried for a while before she bailed, leaving me with a question about my own identity that actualized years later. She clearly saw my trans* self before I could.
But eventually I did because queerness is next to godliness. The lack of rules or boxes or limits or norms feels like freedom despite the crushing stigma that surrounds us all from every heteronormative angle.
And some just succumb.
Like the one who never chose me but spent years pretending until it fatigued us both. Fences are meant to keep out cows, they have no place between people and become unbearably uncomfortable as a resting place after a period of time. Ten years was too many for me.
When I finally left, I promised myself a good long break to discern just when I had decided to surrender my self-respect so carelessly. Rushing in for reasons that felt right at the time.
Never again, I said, will I settle for something similarly not great.
After the initial ache of sitting in the shame of so many poor choices, in came a loneliness. It was graceful, not brutal like years before. Not looming like the presence of bitter betrayal.
Instead, this loneliness visited me in moments but never stayed long. Just enough time for me to see the misdirection of my path. The pitfalls and problems that repeated until I saw myself more clearly. All around me people seemed to fall easily into and out of love but it kept eluding me. My aim was off. My targets misaligned. Just more of the same, I said.
Eventually I stopped. Staying single for longer than I ever had solved the problem of my pattern.
Sitting. Waiting. Watching for great.
Now, several years of solitude offers me a silence so sweet I cling to it, savoring it like the last light in summer. Single-hood is the seat from which I see the antics of so many adults, myself once among them, acting like lovers but appearing more like needy children, hiding out among power dynamics and repressed desires for the sake of avoiding loneliness in its many forms. The many puzzles manufactured for their partners to solve. Corners cut in communication. The persuasive pretense of playing house.
“You guys looked so happy,” says a friend.
“Appearances deceive,” I reply.
So many marriages and partnerships made possible by the power of turning a blind eye to what is least convenient to believe. In oneself or another. People pretending merely to appear normal. There’s no such thing, no greater lie, I want to tell them.
I sit, bewildered as to why I chased a similar existence. Sitting in the presence of others who saw in me nothing precious or spectacular. Pursuing something so vapid, nay basic, for the sake of fitting in among the masses.
Sacrificing my own self-loathing yields the revelation of what awaits. More years of generous growth in delicious solitude or fulfillment in a relationship with a partner of equal weight and measure.
Because many but not all people sit in silent resignation of their choices. Precious few I’ve known have found a soulmate and satisfying union by surrendering control, starving pride and swimming in the deep water of vulnerability.
Potential is budding with a person I know. Someone who bears witness to this soul in human form that sees the equal miracle of her existence. As we find patience with our respective processes, weeding out the parts of our personalities that prevent our greatness, our free expression is mutual respect and admiration.
The words matter when they come from her. She meters them out in meaningful ration.
If love comes not with her, then it may with another, in whatever shape or form. Or never at all.
I’m in no rush. Time and picky patience have become my friends.
Sitting in the comfort of my own company, I wait for great.
