Greetings From Janeland

by Candace Walsh

  I wait for Laura outside of Aux Vivres, a popular vegan joint near my apartment. I’m not sure what to do with my hands. I cross and uncross my arms. I try leaning against the wall of the restaurant, but it feels too forced. I resort to taking my phone out of my pocket and scanning old e-mail messages, just to have something to do.

  Finally, I see Laura walking towards me. I recognize her immediately; she looks just like her pictures. She’s wearing a pink-and-purple striped tube top, cut-off denim shorts over black fishnet stockings, and scruffy combat boots. Her hair is long, straight, and algae green.

  We smile at each other. I give her an awkward wave and tell her it’s really nice to meet her in person. “Do you do hugs?” she asks me. I nod, and she pulls me close.

  The hug is brief and businesslike. “Should we go inside?” she says. I nod again. So far so good.

  They seat us in the center of the room. Servers swerve around us, carrying trays piled high with rice bowls, chickpea wraps, and carob-date shakes. She tells me she’s studying to become a librarian. She rests her arm on the table and shows me the tattoo on her inner arm: a stack of thick books, each one with a different colored cover. She’s always loved writing, and she started self-publishing her poems in photocopied chap-books when she was eleven. She sold them to her parents, her teachers, her friends at school. I tell her about my history classes and about the book I’m reading (Zoe Whittall’s Holding Still for as Long as Possible). I tell her about my cat, who hisses every time anyone but me comes near her. And I tell her that this is my first date in a very long while. Soon the space between us feels calm and loose. We’re making eye contact across the table. I forget about my flirting technique. I’m not smirking, not looking away.

  We both order the BLT sandwich, made with smoked coconut flakes instead of bacon, and vegan mayonnaise. “I like your hair,” she says. “I’ve been thinking about cutting mine.”

  “Thanks. I just felt like a change. But yours is awesome. I love the color.”

  She shrugs. “It’s always a different color. I can’t even remember what color it is naturally anymore.”

  “When did you first start dyeing it?”

  “Oh, ages ago. Probably when I first started dating my boyfriend. He always hated it when I dyed my hair, so that made me want to do it more.”

  “You have a boyfriend?”

  “Ex-boyfriend,” Laura corrected herself. “We just broke up.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.

  “I’m not. It should have happened a long time ago.”

  “So why did it end now?”

  Laura looked at me and smirked. “I was totally in love with my best friend for a long time, but I was in denial about it. I don’t know what happened—one day I just couldn’t shrug it off anymore. So I told him. I don’t know what I was expecting.”

  “How did he take it?”

  “He was kind of into it, actually. I think he wanted us to have a threesome or something. And that just felt really gross to me. And then I realized I actually just wanted to sleep with my friend. I didn’t want him to have anything to do with it.” She laughed. She had a great laugh—big and loud and not at all self-conscious. It made me laugh too.

  “So why aren’t you with your friend tonight?” I ask.

  Laura shook her head. “No dice.”

  “She wasn’t into it?”

  “Not even in the slightest.”

  “Lucky me,” I say.

  We look at each other. I smile. I can feel a new quality taking shape inside me: something bold and strong and confident. Laura’s blushing. She looks at me like she’s seeing me for the first time. It’s that look you get when your own capacity for desire surprises you. I remember the feeling.

  III.

  “You keep talking about the ways you’d like to grow and change,” my therapist says. “But what if the person you are now is actually enough, just as you are? How would that feel?” She is leaning back in her leather chair, a red shawl wrapped around her shoulders. I feel that familiar quiver in the base of my throat, that painful, low thrum.

  I shake my head. “I don’t know what that means,” I tell her. It hurts when I talk. My throat feels hot and tight.

  “I see some emotion there,” she tells me.

  Screw you, I think. No you don’t. I can feel the tears in the corner of my eyes. I nod. “Typical overachiever,” I say. I think I’ve kept my voice mostly steady, in control.

  “How would it be to allow yourself to feel that emotion?” she asks me. When she’s slipping into her therapist mode, her voice gets low and smooth as her scarf. It seems cliché, but it works, too. I nod, resigned. I close my eyes. The Feeling wells up. It’s right in the center of my chest. It’s building, the edges crackling with energy. The tears come.

  “When you think about being enough, what happens?” she asks me. “Picture it.”

  My eyes are closed. I picture it. I see a figure letting its arms down, and I feel lightness release. “I picture arms coming down, releasing. And I see this golden-yellow color,” I tell her. “But I don’t trust it.”

  She nods. “Of course you don’t trust it,” she says. “It’s unfamiliar.”

  I breathe in deep, then exhale. My shoulders move down. “Yeah,” I say. “I don’t know what it would mean, or what it would change.”

  “That makes sense,” she says. “You don’t know if it’s a friend. But I wonder, how would it feel to invite that yellow color a little bit closer?”

  The hour goes by so quickly. When I walk outside it’s noon, and the sun is bright and hot. It’s been a warm, dry summer in Vancouver. I moved out west two years ago for grad school, after I decided that I wanted to become a social worker.

  Leaving the session feels disorienting—I still feel like there’s a small tight ball in the center of my chest. I walk along Broadway for two blocks in the wrong direction before I notice and retrace my steps. When I finally get to Heartwood Cafe, nestled next to a Starbucks at Broadway and Kingsway, the tightness in my chest is gone but my stomach is churning.

  Heartwood Cafe is huge, with bright walls covered in artwork. The featured artists rotate regularly. This month, there are framed black-and-white photographs of people who identify as butch. I do a quick scan of the space, taking in two staff members chatting behind the counter, a busy room echoing with a friendly buzz of voices, a toddler playing with a toy kitchenette in the corner.

  I see Carmen by the window. I recognize her from her Facebook profile, although we’ve never met. She’s tall and thin with short, curly hair. She’s sitting alone at a large table, drinking coffee, and looking at her phone. Her nails, curved around the white mug, are long and painted. I hesitate at the entrance of Heartwood.

  She looks up and sees me. Smiles and waves. I approach. Introductions. She compliments my necklace—a strand of moonstone, with a black tourmaline pendant in the center. The moonstone is for dreaming; the tourmaline is for protection. I sit down and order coffee with sugar and cream.

  We talk about astrology. Carmen is a Virgo, though she isn’t sure how much she believes in that. She loves cats, but she doesn’t have one of her own. She works in human resources; she’s also a painter. She talks quickly, smiles often. The knot in my stomach starts to relax.

  Soon the others start to arrive. Amber is wearing a bright-patterned dress and purple lipstick. Eva has an infectious smile and knees scuffed from roller derby. Rae, with the blue hair, is coming straight from a pottery class and has grey streaks all over her forearms. We introduce ourselves. We name our connections—the way we each came to find out about mixie brunch. It’s a new tradition—a monthly brunch meetup for queers who identify as mixed race.

  “I’m so glad this exists,” Eva says, as she pulls her sweater over her head and drapes it on the back of her chair. “This city is so white, it’s ridiculous.”

  We go around the table, naming our own and our ancestors’ stories of migration. We talk about colonialism, diaspor
a, and our complicity as settlers on stolen Coast Salish land. Some of us have a white parent and some of us don’t. Some of us identify as femme and some of us don’t. Some of us are cis and some of us aren’t. All of us are queer, and we are many other things, too: parents, survivors, artists.

  We order eggs and toast and coffee, and we take our time. We talk about dismantling white supremacy; moisturizing dark, curly hair; combating anti-blackness; the best sushi places. We share perspectives around transformative justice responses to sexual assault, debrief Eva’s frustrating experiences at work, and laugh at Rae’s stories about their disastrous Tinder dates. We hold a lot back from each other, too. We’re shy. We swap glances then look away. We are all hurting in our own ways. We have all loved before, and we’ve been left all the worse and all the better for it.

  “It feels amazing to be sitting here together,” Carmen says. There are nods around the table. It’s true; I can feel our collective energy as we share a meal, beautifully queer in our brown and black skin. I watch their faces: listening, laughing, sipping coffee. I feel recognition flicker through me. This is what I have been looking for. I feel steady. I feel seen.

  I sit back for a moment, listening as Carmen and Amber banter back and forth about the process of going scent-free. Just for a moment, I let myself picture that golden-yellow color close around me. I take a breath, imagining flecks of gold traveling down into my lungs and nestling deep into my belly. While I can still feel the knot in my stomach, when I exhale, I can feel it loosen. Just for a moment I think, maybe this is enough. And then the moment passes. Eva stretches, her crop top riding up her ribcage. I cradle my coffee mug between both hands, enjoying the warmth.

  Kama Sutra

  BY KRISTA FRETWELL

  THERE IS NO INSTRUCTION MANUAL FOR WHAT WE DO.

  I recently changed the wax seal under our bathroom toilet, wrench in hand, down on my knees, cheek-by-jowl with my lover’s ex-husband. I live in the house where he and my partner were once married. The bedroom they shared, the bed where she and I now sleep, is a few feet over from where we were sloshing water out of the toilet tank, trying to get it repositioned over a drain hole in the floor. My partner’s ex-husband is our landlord now, and he is a friend.

  There is no road map for how to get from there to here.

  Here’s the thing about repression—it usually isn’t conscious. Typically, the thing that we can’t admit, or don’t want to know, or can’t allow to be true about ourselves, gets subverted and buried before it ever fully enters into our awareness. It is a kind of willful ignorance, symptomatic of our judging minds. I accept responsibility for not being aware that I was in deep danger of falling in love with a woman—with someone else’s wife. We were only planning to go out for tea. When I told my husband that something was happening and I wanted permission to see what it was, what I didn’t know that I meant was I had just fallen in love with someone and was wondering if he would mind if I poured gasoline all over the fire.

  If there is a thread that weaves all of this together, it is flying by the seat of our pants.

  We were in love before we even knew what had hit us. There was no time to research; it never occurred to us to read about what we were supposed to do next. What came next, came next. naturally. First, her hand touched my hand, and there was a power surge all the way into the next county. We both knew that something terrible and wonderful had happened. Once we kissed, it was enough to know that it would never be enough. We were unwittingly, yet willingly, in a state of foreplay that lasted for weeks; between stolen meetings of our hearts in school rooms and libraries and sad kitchens, where we had been so lonely without each other just a few weeks before. Neither of us had ever been with another woman. When we finally gave ourselves over completely to each other, I felt like a fish that had been thrown back into water. We didn’t need anyone to show us what to do.

  If there are directions for how this is done, we are making them up as we go.

  Did you know that sexual positions make up only a small portion of the Kama Sutra? The rest of it consists of aphorisms on the art of living a pleasurable, yet virtuous, life. I have always thought that my sexual awakening was merely a microcosm of awakening to life itself. Denial, for me, meant living my life with one arm tied behind my back. I have come to realize that the more at home I am in my own body, the more at home I am in the world. I feel how, when my lover and I are together sexually—giving and receiving, ebbing and flowing, responding to each other’s subtle or urgent gestures, trading power, exchanging energy—we are simply practicing for everything else that we do together every day. Much in the same way that, when children play, they are doing the deep work that prepares them for how they will grow—we just have to get out of their way. We have to get out of our own way.

  I wanted to live a life of integrity, so I recollected all the missing pieces of myself.

  Listening to your heart and following your desire will not always bring pleasure. Nothing could have prepared me for breaking my best friend’s heart. It brought me no pleasure to watch him kick an anguished hole into our bedroom door, or to hold him like he was a wounded animal while he railed and howled against impending loss. Nothing could have steadied me for my own grief—for the rivers upon oceans of tears, seemingly without end—still streaming now as I write this. Nothing could have trained me to stand and listen while my lover’s husband yelled that I was ruining his life, as we were unpacking our trunks at the school picnic. No one taught me how to know—even in the midst of this storm, when everyone I loved and everything I’d ever learned was telling me I was wrong—that I was right. No one had ever shown me how to trust myself, so I learned it the hard way—by doing it.

  Here’s an aphorism: No one else can instruct you how to be your one and only wise and true self.

  The man that I married is one of the most beautiful souls I have ever known. After months of wrestling with the question of what to do about our marriage—both of us worn thin from the anxiety and grief—we finally decided to divorce. He wanted to stay married, but only if things could go back to the way that they were—me, not gay—which they couldn’t. So, he told me that he wanted to let me go like water: soft and gentle, not clinging, but flowing in the direction of gravity. We bought new rings, which we now wear on our right hands, as a sign of our continued commitment to each other in love, friendship, and parenting our children. We went to our favorite spot, on a flat, gray rock overlooking the river, and exchanged our love stories for each other. Then we stripped ourselves naked, held hands, and plunged into the cold, dark water, together as one for the last time.

  Love is a river that never ends. It cuts deep into the soft earth of us, forging new channels as it flows.

  Grief, like love, lives in the body. It is a mysterious, amorphous entity that does not observe the laws of time and space, or obey our wishes to be rid of it. Grief for the loss of my best friend—my partner in marriage for fifteen years—took me to my knees. There were moments that I literally could not stand. A simple walk in the woods to clear my head would bring me back around to my flayed-open heart; I’d find myself face down in the dirt, sobbing, my body leaden with sadness, unable to take another step.

  Love is a choice. Love is not a choice. Our loving hearts are infinitely more rich and complex than what we conceive of when we say “choose.”

  A few days ago, my seventy-one-year-old mother quietly pulled up a chair across the kitchen table from where I was sitting, her gentle face quivering in an attempt to choke back tears. “I am sorry that I didn’t know what you were going through when you were younger, and that I didn’t help you,” she said. My mother has always been an example for me of parental humility. When I was a child, she came to me like this when her conscience was haunting her about something, and would confess that she was sorry for speaking harshly or for making a mistake in judgment. My parents did the best that they could with what they had—both of them were raised, and together brought up their children, in co
nservative Christian churches that abhorred homosexuality. When I came out to my parents six years ago, they gave me a gift that continues to unfold for all of us—they showed up. They set aside their fear—for me, and for my husband and our children, whom they love—they put down the rule book and they accepted, and above all trusted, me. The best that they could do got even better, because they found the courage to love from the very ground of not knowing.

  The only sanctification that I ever needed was this: love’s kiss.

  It hasn’t been a straight or easy path. When romantic relationships fall apart there is anger and hurt and jealousy—even rage. For us, what began as utter devastation has taken years and a deliberate vision to sort through—with patience, humility, cooperation, generosity, the courage to show up for each other no matter how painful or difficult—added together with the incredibly good fortune that we all genuinely enjoy and respect one another as human beings. We didn’t quit our marriages for lack of fondness. These days, we all look out for one another. My partner, our children, and their fathers—we share holidays and birthdays, swap cars, lend tools or a helping hand. We’ve hiked and skied and run 5K races together. Our children know that they are loved and supported by adults who care about each other and want what is best for everyone. When my father was gravely ill in the hospital last year, my partner’s ex-husband sent him flowers. Last spring, my partner, my ex-husband, and I climbed to the eight-thousand-foot summit of Mt. St. Helens alongside our twelve-year-old daughter. These are our triumphs. These are our blessings. It is becoming increasingly difficult to tell them apart.