Two girlfriends

Sometimes it is strange having two girlfriends.

I mean, it's not like I spend a lot of time thinking about it, most days. Most days I go placidly about my business: doing work for the professional association I've joined (now that I am unemployed and maybe retired), exercising or eating right (I was better about that last year, but I'll improve again tomorrow ... or, well, any day now), writing blog posts for my professional blog (under my own name) or for this one here, squandering hours reading bullshit I find on the Internet ... you know, all that sort of thing.

And of course it's easier for me to ignore the situation because neither of them lives nearby. Hell, neither of them lives in the same state.

But once in a while I look at the calendar:

• Last December, Marie visited me here. [No posts to link. Sorry.]
• Then in February, I visited Marie at her place.
• In May, Debbie visited me here.
• Two weeks ago, I visited Debbie at her house. Also at that time, she invited me to join her for a cross-country road-trip in August.
• Next week I'll visit Marie again at her summer vacation home.
• Then there's August, in case I accept Debbie's invitation.

What's going on?

In theory, it's easy. Marie is my girlfriend (meaning that we fuck). Debbie and I are just-good-friends (meaning that we don't). Easy, right?

Except that the just-good-friendship between me and Debbie has been acquiring ever more romantic overtones for a while now. [Do I really have to give references? OK, try here, here, here, and here as examples.] I make a point of telling Marie every time I visit Debbie and everything we do; but it's clear that Marie feels a little in awe of Debbie and therefore a little threatened by her, no matter how many assurances I give her.

Where am I in all of this? What do I actually want?

I want both of them, of course. Or, more exactly, I want both of them to love, and neither of them to live with. There are plenty of reasons that I wouldn't want to submerge myself in a union with either of them. (A single example for each: with Debbie I couldn't drink, or nowhere near as much as I do today; with Marie I'd be constantly managing her anger over politics. There are surely other reasons as well, for each of them.)

Is that an option? Can I have what I want (i.e., have them both), clearly and above boards? Probably not. I haven't discussed it with either one, but the whole weight of our cultural expectations is against it.

It's late at night. I'm tired and drunk. I don't know how to wrap this up. Suffice it to say that the situation is a little confusing just now.

           

Kissing on the edge in Debbie's new house

You remember a couple weeks ago, when I posted a brief note about why we travel? I was writing that from Debbie's new house, the one I told you about here. I was there for a week-long visit, after first traveling to my first-ever college reunion (my 40th).

There's plenty to talk about in the story of my travel there, and the tourist-like things we did during the week. But those are the boring things, the things I tell my family. And Marie. You don't care about any of that stuff.

The emotional side, though, was interesting. And maybe it got awfully close to the edge.

The way the house is laid out, Debbie has a little two-room apartment with its own kitchen and bathroom; then Mattie and her husband (and their two kids) have the rest of the house. For a number of perfectly sensible reasons (having to do with possible COVID-infection), Debbie and I isolated in her apartment when we weren't going out. She slept in her bedroom and I slept on the sofa bed in her living room. So far, so good.

Every night, after I had brushed my teeth and just before I tucked myself into the sofa bed, I exited the bathroom through her bedroom (the only access) and came over to say "Good night." Every night, we kissed gently on the lips—a closed-mouth kiss, if you want to call it that, but slow and sweet and delicate. And then we would hug and say "Good night." The very first night, after I had slogged through a lot of travel and other trouble, I told her, "You know I love you." She smiled and said "I love you too."

One night there was a full moon. We went outside and walked down the lane a ways to look at it through the trees. We stood right next to each other, and I draped my arm around her waist—finally, again, after all these years! (But I was careful not to do anything like that again during the whole visit.) This is the text message she later sent to a sangha-friend of hers, that she copied me on:

We just went outside to see the strawberry moon and were treated to a magical MidWest performance by Mother Earth!!! Oh my gosh!  Fireflies all across the prairie grass meadows and up into the trees...  bullfrogs singing... the wind blowing through the rustling leaves of the trees,  flashes of lightning in the distance... Wildlife sounds hidden among the bushes and trees... and the strawberry moon just above the horizon!  It was magnificent!

At the end of the week she dropped me off at the airport. After I'd pulled my luggage out of her car, we kissed again, just like we had done every night except this time we kissed twice. She said something about needing to be careful, and I replied, "I'm being good." She said, "Maybe, but I think we are right up against the line," and I answered, "And now I'm getting on an airplane."

As we drove to the airport she had invited me obliquely to come visit again in late August, and maybe join her for a road trip across the country. (So I don't think I'm the only one who is pushing the boundaries here! See also our plans for hiking the West Highland Way.) A few days later she emailed me some more details. I emailed back some thoughts about it, but then added that I had been thinking about her parting words. I didn't have any conclusions yet, but they had been on my mind. Her reply was:

I appreciate your reflections on my remarks as we said goodbye at the airport.  Those sweet, tender kisses were lovely.  I just imagined that if Marie were to see us kissing like that or were aware of how close we become when we spend time together, that she would feel sad and uncomfortable and it would be hurtful to her.  I don't want that.  It would be good to talk about it and I appreciate that you are open to do that.

Wherever we are, we are balancing on a very fine line.

         

Pretending to be better or worse

Sometime during the first couple of years of this blog, I remember reading a post by some other blogger who belonged to the same little community, where we all read and commented on each other's blogs. He wrote (or maybe it was "she," I forget), "It seems like some of the bloggers that I read are pretending online to be better people than they are in real life. And then it seems like there are others who actively pretend to be worse than they are in real life!"

I've always wondered if I belonged in either list. Maybe not, of course. It might be pure self-centeredness for me ever to imagine that I did. But if I were on one of the lists, which one?

I hope that other blogger had me slated for the second list. Because I know that I spend a lot of time in this blog talking about my weaknesses and failures. And yet, despite that, my neighbors are still wonderfully kind and I still have a couple of friends who think well of me—Debbie and Marie, for sure, but probably others too if I set my mind to it.

Why do I focus on my weaknesses and failures? Those are the things I need to process, if I am to live with them. Those are the things I have to learn from, if I am ever to improve. And those are the things that I don't discuss with other people, so I have to discuss them anonymously with you. I'd have a lot of trouble discussing these things viva voce in real life, so I have to talk about them somewhere. And this is the place.

Or maybe it's all just punishment for my sins, like I discuss here. That's always a possibility.

      

Why do we travel, 3

I've asked this question twice before, here and here. Can you stand once more? This will be brief.

The School of Life just published an article suggesting that travel is a form of therapy ... but advising, therefore, that we choose destinations that suit the kind of therapy we need. If you are looking for a quick affair away from home, they recommend the Netherlands (assuming, to be sure, that the Netherlands are not "home" for you). If you need to regain a sense of larger perspective, they recommend Detroit. It's an intriguing suggestion, and I rather like it.

Now if only I knew what kind of therapy I really need, and which destination could provide it. Suggestions are welcome.

       

       

Can I sit at the cool kids' table now?

The last five days I've had a low fever, exhaustion, and intermittent diarrhea; today appears to be the first day without the fever or the diarrhea, but I still feel weak and easily worn out. I also have a cough, although that's hardly unusual for me. I have not done any testing yet, to identify what I came down with. And I have not had any trouble breathing (unless you count the cough), nor have I lost my sense of taste. Nonetheless I strongly suspect that it's a variant of COVID-19. So does that mean I can eat lunch with the cool kids now?

Here's the timeline, as well as I can reconstruct it.

The weekend before last, I drove out to visit my Mom. We talked a lot, sat up late, finished off a bottle of wine between us ... that sort of thing. She's been living alone for almost seven years now, and we talked about whether it would be better for her to have someone else living there with her. No immediate commitments, but we both agreed that this is something I could probably do for her, especially if she felt her only other alternative were to move into a care facility. She demurred at first, because caring for my Dad in his last years was so hard for her and she wouldn't want to impose; but I explained that I've already spent years looking after Wife through her various illnesses, so it wouldn't exactly be something new.

Sunday we drove into the Big City to go to a concert at the Philharmonic. And Monday I came home.

Wednesday morning I felt really tired, and my head didn't feel quite right. At first I assumed that maybe I'd had too much to drink the night before, and tried to perk myself up with coffee. Then I took a long nap. When I got up again my head still felt bad, so I took a couple of Tylenol; only after that did I realize that I also felt feverish. I went to bed early that night and slept 13 hours ... except that every time I rolled over I had to get up to pee, even though there was hardly anything coming out. 

Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday ... I began slowly to feel a little better, but still felt feverish (even when my temperature read normal). Today is the first day I haven't really felt feverish, and I actually got myself organized to go out and do my laundry. (High time, too, I might add!) But even that little ambition left me huffing and puffing by the end.

Why do I think it's COVID-19?

On Wednesday, the first day that I felt any symptoms, I exchanged text messages with my mother. She was just then starting to feel rotten as well, in just about the same ways. She too went to bed early. The symptoms and timing matched mine so exactly that it is very likely we have the same thing and got it at the same time. That means in turn that it is unlikely one of us infected the other; probably we both got whatever-it-is at the Philharmonic. 

But the next day (Thursday) she had a regularly-scheduled doctor's appointment for a routine physical. While she was there, he tested her for COVID. And yesterday she texted me that her test came back positive.

So if we probably have the same thing, and if she now tests positive for COVID-19, probably that's what I've got too. It must be a fairly mild case, since I haven't had any of the distinctive COVID-symptoms (like loss of taste). But that would be consistent with my continuing to feel so weak.

Maybe I should go get tested, huh?