Not caroling

It isn't all the time. I can anticipate what might set me off, but these antecedents do not reliably. Walking away from me when I am speaking to you, especially when I am confiding something that makes me happy, is a sure way to trigger it. Otherwise, it depends on how my head is and how important I consider you. Amber can trigger my rejection-sensitive dysphoria with a sharp word if my chemicals are already out of whack. At this point, I must control the static in my head before it makes me miserable. My students are incapable of doing it because, beyond a handful, I attach no importance to how they feel about me. The rest of the world falls between those poles.

Last night, Amber was listening to a guided meditation. Leonard popped into my head, and I started getting teary, then full-on sobbing. The crux was that she is one of the few with whom I feel emotional intimacy; she is among those who are deeper friends. I don't talk about Serious Issues most or feel understood, but she always made me feel I was not alone.

Amber said she was glad someone was getting something out of her meditation app.

This meditation did not ask or suggest anything that would trigger this, instead talking of smiling hips. My fitness tracker has a guided meditation option when I click on the phone app. I did it a few times, but it made me melancholy. I am given to forming stories around innocuous things -- a benefit to my writing and a bane regarding my mental health. As it spoke, I could only imagine sitting on a porch with some caretaker. She soothes me with these whispery words as we look at the slight breeze through the tall grass of the yard. She knows I am going to leave the world soon. The idea fills her with grief, but one tempered by having done this a dozen times before and knowing she will do it she cannot imagine how many more times.

It does not make it easy to relax into the session when all I can think about is dying.

This meditation -- or the thoughts my mind conjured in ignoring it so I could sleep -- overwhelmed me with how few people love me in the way I need and how impossible I would find it to open up to most who say they love me. I could not bear their judgment once the words were out of me. I could not stand to open myself and be rejected.

I cannot say how Leonard and I have lasted over a decade. I have always opened up to her. Short of Amber, Leonard has always known me in a way I could not give to others. I love Daniel, but our monthly calls predictably waned. I eventually opened up to him a little in these, but I could not do it entirely. In a sense, it is because I fear losing what little I have with him. My pain and anxiety are always burdens to the other person

I fear this with Leonard too. Most of our communication is sending memes, mainly about gender and sexuality. I know her chaotic sense of humor, transgressive but compassionate. I know how much the world hurts us, which is why we love one another. We recognize in the other the same otherness in different proportions.

And I love her because I love her, because it is the simplest thing. In the year when we didn't speak, I still loved her, which I do not think would be possible with anyone else. I love her not as someone who once shared my bed but in the way of companions. I have not hugged her in years -- I have not touched her for most of the time I have loved her -- but I feel her keenly. If we lived closer, I cannot imagine we would be less than bosom buddies.

A few years ago, Amber and I were forming a close friendship with a couple, written about here but nameless in this entry for reasons of tact. They ghosted us. I will never know why. It wasn't that I loved them, but I liked them more than I had anyone in a while and recognized congruence. They did not conform to gender norms. They thought more deeply about things. They were geeky and fond. But they stopped communicating, and I let it happen. What was I otherwise to do? Press them? Demand answers? I liked them enough (I still like them enough) to let them go without making much of an issue about it beyond this lingering sadness.

What disappoints me about the couple is not so much that we did not end up friends any longer but that I thought I had found people who understood me. If they could so quickly excise Amber and me, I was wrong. That aches. That's the price of opening yourself up. Sometimes, the other person isn't interested in what they learn.

I had a dream where I spoke to someone who was once a best friend and then left my life overnight. He packed up and moved to a distant state without telling anyone. It was not hard to sense his father's reluctance when I asked if there was a forwarding address. Leaving the state, he must have clarified that it was a clean break. I would be no exception to this.

In the dream, I told him how it was easy to go from a lover to a friend. The transition makes sense to me, as I have affected it a few times -- with Leonard most prominently. Friends to strangers baffles me, especially since it happens because one party decides to do it without informing the other. In the romantic world, someone who dumps their partner by cutting off all contact is seen as a bastard at best. It isn't done. But you don't break up with friends. You just stop having them. It isn't the gradual drop in temperature but the precipitous freeze. I understand fading, two people mutually letting the relationship drift without anything like malice. Life gets in the way. It is not the abrupt cessation of communication (aside from social media, which is almost worse, a contact I cannot cut off to spare myself without seeming like I am calling sour grapes on the whole thing).

Amber and I go wassailing at Rose Hill Farms. I knew how it looked on TV, going house to house singing, but that is caroling. Wassailing has a more Pagan flavor, something even the invitation admitted to.

The farm is up the street from us. If motivated, I could walk there in twenty minutes. Amber and I were last here when she wanted to pick fresh cherries to dehydrate, which did seem to be a waste of freshly picked cherries. Grocery store ones would wither just as well for a third of the price, but she wanted the experience. Who could fault her?

The summation is that we stand near a bonfire -- something at which I have shown an aptitude -- and put bread on trees. It seems I am saying this wrong or misstating for humorous effect, but no. That was the plan. Bread the trees. There is a song, a little speech, and torches, but most of it is walking up a small hill and sticking bread on branches.

I expected to go farther afield -- like literally into the field -- but we decorated only a few bare branches before deciding we'd done enough.

The bitter cold does strange things. After bending a twig to give it a slice of Wonderbread, I look to Amber and say that the whole endeavor is doomed, that this branch will never produce fruit.

"Why?"

"Because it is in bread," I fall to the ground in emphasis at my terrible pun. Amber assures me that a woman looking on enjoyed my joke. This may preclude that Amber herself did.

As I exercise my photographic privilege, I see people I wish I knew, jovially bearded men and a woman with eyes so striking I want to study her face to see if she is wearing contact. I do not believe these people live in my town. I do not know from where they were imported, but they are hipper than I have seen in my town of cows and college students.

Amber wouldn't care either way. She is not here with any vague notion of meeting a friend. Until I was around the fire, I could not say the idea occurred to me. Most of the people I see in any given month are not my type of people, but some of the wassailers cursorily have the potential.

If I could find the right person, perhaps someone here could understand me. There does not seem to be a smooth way of doing this. Others may not share my hunger for additional company. There is not an easy way to suss out those who might be looking for friends, for game nights and dinner parties, for long talks. Suffice it to say, most who may be looking are not advertising this fact in their daily interactions. It doesn't give me a ton to go on when it comes to deciding if these people could be companionable in a more ideal world where I have a reason to talk to them. I am not confident that uttering, "So, that wassailing... am I right? Bread. Trees. Fire. Crazy," would get me anywhere.

My charms are not subtle, but they are not visible to strangers. What will they see in me that will alert them that they would love to get to know me?

Amber suggests it would be easier if people could believe they had a chance to sleep with me. I met a few people from the internet who seemed to mistake my explicit "I am not looking for someone who hopes to have sex with me" for a firm "I am looking for you to have sex with me but am being coy." When I affirmed again that I was married and monogamous, that was the end of the potential friendship.

I assure Amber I did not want to keep the friendship of someone who wouldn't believe I only wanted friendship. I miss the opportunity of knowing one of them, but I overall do not mark as a loss something I never had.

I choose strangers at the wassailing and try them out in my mind, how we would be as friends. I can only pick out details that might make sense, but primarily among these, they heard "Stand in freezing January weather and sing while putting bread on trees" and thought, "Yes, this is how I shall spend my Sunday." I am mentally unstable at times, but doing this is downright crazy. I can admire kindred madness.

We visit the cidery a little up another hill. I am impressed it even exists. I roughly knew there was such a place, but I pictured it as little more than a wine shop. But, no, this is a bar and eatery, given a pop-up restaurant in front of one of the windows, making expensive grilled cheese and cassoulet.

This would be where I would meet new people, but it riles Amber's sensory issues, and we only walk through.

I could do with having friends who would go to such a place. I am even willing to be the sort of friend who would bring someone here, though they will be the ones drinking. I would have no taste for it beyond sips, even if it were not medically contraindicated.

I am both eager for companionship and selective. Not just anyone would do. Most people won't, but I end up with this keloid of wanting over which I rub my thumb watching other people form friend groups without struggle. I could not indulge in things that would make this easy.

Most of the people in the cidery do not seem lonely. Of course, kissing the top of Amber's hat and teasing her, I am not lonely either. I am open and aware that I want a sort of intimacy that is absent in my life, the foundations of companionate love.

The night before, Kristina had come over. Bless her, she asked about the dancing game that has been a good portion of my physical fitness of late, which I stopped only to make Amber and her a dinner of fried rice and ginger garlic chicken -- which impressed Kristina more than it should have. We watched the end of Knives Out, which we had started a month ago, and the entirety of Glass Onion. Kristina adroitly spotted clues I missed during the first watching.

I need days like that one. I don't see why they cannot be more frequent, and given that she praises my cooking, she is welcome to come over whenever she wishes.

Though I love Kristina, she is Amber's. I thrill at conversation and play with her, but I cannot open up to her as I can with Leonard. We talk, but here is a boundary with her I cannot cross. We do not often speak, which may be more my fault.

I want more in my life, and I don't think this is greedy per se. I want to give this intimacy in return. I might like that more, someone trusting me enough to tell me what is going on in their life and appreciating that I will hold these secrets tenderly in my hands. I know Kristina's stories, her life. I know twisted paths in her history. I wish I could edit her past to give her the future she deserves, but I cannot.

Perhaps I don't know what I am asking, except that I want more. Seeing Kristina, playing with her and cooking for her eased it, but the desire is there, ready to flare when I am around a fire with people who catch my eye but finding the social chasm between us insurmountable.

It was easier when I was younger and had infidelity in my heart. I cannot imagine wanting anyone aside from Amber. Leonard broke me of my wandering eye. I have been utterly devout to Amber without effort. However, when I flirted, when people sensed the flirtation might be more than a joke -- even when neither of us called me on it -- it was easier to find something that passed for intimacy. I wonder, on reflection, if it was only an imitation. I felt intimate with some people, though ones who, for their own reasons, ended the intensity of that friendship. I cannot say I do not resent it (mostly because I do resent it), but I do not fight that. Anyone who would want me to fight them to remain in their graces is not a person who understands me or would be healthy.

I am not singing a song with an original refrain, but I can't seem to avoid remixing it and playing covers of my worst work.

last watched: Alice in Borderland
reading: Golden Dawn