In which I tell you about my recent TOTALLY ACCIDENTAL hard left.

While I don’t have a 5-year plan [I’m sure my toilet training was as flawed as anyone’s, but I have managed to avoid being completely anal], I do have a half-assed 2-year plan. Half-assed because it involves nothing more epic than getting out of debt and maybe becoming a flight attendant for cheap airfare – it’s not like it’s the most coherent 2-year Plan ever, I admit – but it did pretty much involve me being totally. fucking. single.

For at least a couple more years.

Not that I was planning to be celibate or anything, but after the marriage I have just had it with the entire concept of coupledom. The idea that it could ever be even remotely attractive to get into a situation in which another human being could have any reason to feel like it might be okay to just to call me and ask what I’m doing, let alone possibly have even mild expectations of any kind whatsoever regarding my time, inclination, affection, or fealty… well, it just made me freakin’ gag.

I’d decided that the trade-off wasn’t worth it. I’d rather be alone and give up the benefits – hah! cuddling? nagging? someone to take out the garbage? – of ‘being with’ someone in order to maintain the things I require: freedom, privacy, and total fucking autonomy… because I’m more than willing to get my own needs met but I’ll kill myself trying to meet someone else’s when they don’t mesh with what I have to give. Sure, such a situation means you gotta do everything yourself and you miss out on a few nice things, but those nice things aren’t nice enough to make it worth it. I play well alone, so fuck letting anyone think they deserve any part of me I don’t wanna give for free.

Because, you see, the truth is that I? Am an idiot. The Ex never asked me to quit gigging or doing shows or going to satsang, but I did. At first because I simply chose him above all else, and later because it seemed to make him sad if I was away all the time and I felt like I’d committed to taking him into account, but the end result was that I starved and became a creature that neither of us liked to be around… Of course there’s more to it than that – don’t even get me started on the fucking laundry baskets – but the point is that regardless of how it ended up that way, I put another’s needs first and suffered hideous consequences… and decided therefore to NOT DO IT AGAIN. At least not for a long while.

Yeah. Um.

Well, shit.

It seems I’ve met the male version of me. Dude talks as fast as I do, thinks as fast as I do, does pretty much the same thing for a living that I do, cracks me up, gets my jokes, likes the movies I like, makes perfect cocktails, swears like a longshoreman, makes love like a raunchy angel, and manages to be gender-balanced in a mirror of the way I like to think that I myself am: he’s butch without being a neanderthal and nurturing without being creepily sackless. In short, heart and groin and brain seem to all be functioning in tandem. Holy shit.

The conversations we’ve been having to a one possess for me a certain otherworldly quality, because he is pretty much always in the midst of saying something I’ve never heard an actual man say before. It’s like every imaginary guy I’ve ever controlled in my head has accidentally escaped into the real world and turned into a single person while still following the script I use in my fantasy life. It’s freaky, and not just in its own right but because of the timing, too: I keep telling him he’s a bitch for being early (“I was going to be jaded for another two years”), and he tells me to fuck off because I’m late (and since he’s 3 years older I do have to give him that one).

It makes me snot up when he says shit like, “You’re hungry? I’ll go make you some food,” and he, like me, has had such stellar taste in the past he’d never even had a decent back rub until a few days ago. We’re like rescues, cowering and abjectly grateful for even the most basic kindnesses. We’re dorking out on merely being nice to each other and if I wasn’t one of us I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near us with the way we’re lettin’ our dork flags fly. And I feel… (five points to whomever nails the lyrical reference in this sentence) like someone owes me, after the shamefully basic shit I didn’t get (I have never understood why people treat their lovers worse than they do strangers), and an offer to simply do something nice for me makes my brain stall out for 12 seconds.

So, yeah. Okay. Perhaps, on reflection, it isn’t the institution of couplehood itself so much as my inability to choose well, or maybe its just an issue of simple timing, but I find myself gacked out because I DIDN’T WANT TO DO THIS YET but it’s so easy when you’re not forcing a square peg into a round hole: I have never once edited a single thing that’s come out of my mouth with this man, NOT ONCE. And considering how fast we talk we’ve already covered three months’ worth of material and I have yet to self-edit. Humor, God, sex, past damage, personal growth, responsibility, pet peeves, embarrassing truths, secret aches: not a single thing even made him blink let alone slide off into an other topic because he simply didn’t grok what the fuck I was saying.

Long story short is that I feel feakin’ fantastic, and if I felt any less so I’d probably be freakin’ the fuck out.

And the hand-shaped bruise on my hip is pretty hawt, too. Heh.