The Stars and the Cookie Jar

Last year at this time, my fiance took everything we had -- clothes, dishes, books, computers, the money on the dresser -- and while I was at work, he put it in a U-Haul and drove away. He left me with nothing, about to be homeless, in a large city to which I had come for two reasons: him, and my education.

It was not a good situation -- by that time, it was mostly pretense -- but it still hurt to have him suddenly gone. It hurt more to have to give away one of my cats, pack the remnant of my possessions, pay more than I could afford on our leasebroken apartment (we had signed the new lease only a month earlier) and try to find a place to go. Anywhere to go.

If I could speak to him, in hindsight, I would say "Act like a grownup the next time you're with a woman, dickwad."

There was yet more madness -- among other things, we both ended up in Alabama, working for the Company -- and the thought of him so near, not paying for what he had done, enjoying my DVD collection and my printer and my clothes, for hellsakes, tainted my first several months here. I wanted to knock on his door and stand there and say Give it back. But if I had done that, I have no idea whether I would have been talking about my things, or my self-perception, or my body before his use of it.

So I decided to see the whole thing -- the whole year and a half , in which time I missed my own college graduation, miscarried of two pregnancies, and worked sixty-hour weeks while ignoring my own bills to pay the rent -- as really expensive tuition in the school of experience. I think it cost me more than Brandeis would have if I'd paid four years full-freight.

I learned something really basic: don't lie to yourself when it's about love, and don't be who you can never be.

That had all sorts of attendant lessons, sort of a minor in psychosexual self-respect: if you, a lover of women, decide to sleep with a man, be very sure you love him. Also, make sure he can look you in the face when he is... with you. And don't lie down with him at all if you know damn well and loudly that you are with him because this is what the world and your orthodox family thinks is right, and reasonable, and suitable.

It will all fall down, and someone will be harmed.

So, yeah, I've changed. "Can't not," as someone said.