Less Than 20 Minutes to Ask a Question It'll Probably Take a Lifetime To Answer

At what point should one know to trust someone? At what point is it okay for trust to stop? Is trust simply a feeling? Does it occur inside like excitement and fear?

Let me be less global, and a little more specific. If I have, say, a new girlfriend, and she doesn't necessarily seem to have really ever been that sad before, can I trust her with my own sadness? I guess, y'know, it would depend on her, but can hard and fast lines be drawn somewhere? I guess I'm even asking another question and calling it trust. Can she understand? Can I trust her to? Can I trust her to react the way I need her to, or at least to not react the way I need her not to? Is it even fair to ask for that understanding from her?

And can I understand her? If our issues and problems and ideas are (at least seeming to be) so different, can there be a common level bond?

I really like her. I have feelings for this woman and enjoy her company and, ahem, there's some other really great stuff, but what about the deep, down inside stuff? Because, y'know, I have a lot of it. I just do. I have a lot of pain. I've lost friends because I'm just too much to handle. And I'm not mad. With one friend in particular, I'm not mad she left: I'm jealous that she had the option to, and still wish I could apologize for dragging her into it.

Maybe that sounds self-depricating, but it's like the way it works with secrets. If I tell someone a secret, it's not mine anymore. It's simply not. It doesn't mean the people that tell it are bad people, it's just reality. People have their own ish and their own ties and their own reactions and if they're married or have a best friend or simply make a mistake, that secret is no longer in my control. And that's just the way it works. So, when I was having a particularly rough time and ran only to one person for help--partly because I was too scared to trust anyone else with any of it--and she got tired and had to go, well, I get that. It wasn't a reciprocal relationship. So, my question today is, if she doesn't have similar problems, can it be reciprocal? If it's not, is that okay? Does there need to be this trust? I do sleep with her. She hasn't really been brought in to the full scale of my emotions when I wake up terrified from a bad dream or nightmare, but if this continues, she will be. I'll start to need her to be. I lay awake next to her the other night clearly not capable of talking to her about it, because my bad dreams and nightmares aren't some monster, they aren't scenes from horror movies...they're scenes from my horrible past. I have to trust someone before I talk about my past, and I have to really trust someone before I show them the pain caused by my subconscious interpretations of it.

It's like the optimism/pessimism thing I wrote: pessimism works for her because things always seem to turn out better than she planned; pessimism doesn't work for me because things always seem to turn out worse than I had planned, so I might as well try to enjoy the positivity while I have it.

I don't know. I'm not feeling that emotional, just pensive. Where and how does trust occur? Can it really with me and her? The tidbits I've given her haven't necessarily been understood. Maybe that doesn't matter. Maybe it's her desire to understand that matters and I can teach her. If she has that desire, and I'm too tired to even attempt teaching, is that wrong of me?

In my head I just return to the locks example and I don't know if it makes sense or not, but it's just where I keep going back.

Can I trust? How do I trust? What does trust look like in practical application? Can there be trust without understanding? Can there be understanding without trust? Can there be a (good/happy/successful/meaningful/etc) relationship without trust and/or understanding?

How do I just be myself?

Snippets, or Nothing At All

I was on my fourth cup and not really sure what I was writing anymore, but had I not written it all down, in some sense, somehow, even if it was coded in the dinner table story, I couldn't have told her about it earlier, and it was nice to tell her about it, and get it out, and have her be proud of me for it.

The same thing is happening, kinda, okay, some of the same things are KINDA happening, but they're different somehow so I don't mind. She left me out, but I'm not a secret. They don't know, but not because she doesn't want to tell them. I really don't think I'm justifying anything, I'm just going back on what I said because we all change and I'm in a new place now. I think it means that I've grown, because I can see a difference. Maybe I should be more frightened. Maybe I shouldn't. In practice it feels entirely different and new, but in re-telling it, it feels the same. It's not. Is it? It can't be. It's different because the intent is different. I'd say it's different because I don't care, but I didn't care back then either. I did, but only without knowing it. So did I? If I did care now, would I know it? Am I making a big deal out of nothing?

Maybe it's not that it's the same. Maybe it's totally different, but I feel funny because it reminds me of before. And that, that did not feel good. I go back to some thing I wrote that I've read over and over and over and I'm sure hardly shared even though I liked it enough to read it more than once or twice, and it said, I was her dirty, little secret, only not even a secret, just dirty and little. It has to be real for it to be a secret, and that didn't feel real, it felt like my feelings were real and everything and my entire life, but that was just a constant threat of destruction of life as I knew it. And life was destroyed.

I had a sad day yesterday. The impromptu BBQ helped, and going to bed early--even though I couldn't sleep due to itching (weird, my whole body just f'ing itched, it was a first)--but it was still a sad day. I sat on the shower floor trying to understand how to let someone new in. And if I even should. Or on what time frame.

With people who care about me, my pain hurts them. With people who are capable of empathy, my sadness also makes them sad. So with this latest ex, she didn't really know how to care about anyone other than herself, she didn't empathize with me, so it sucked, but then I could talk about my pain and sadness. I could talk about it because it wouldn't make her look at me any differently. I don't want to be _________ that girl. Whatever that girl happens to be, I don't want to be her. And I never was with Jessa. I was only ever what she needed me to be. And it was easy. This time around, I'm expected to and even wanted to be: me.

Fuck.

Sitting on a parking curb, head in hands, rocking--and I think she saw

My favorite thing so far today was going to postsecret.blogspot.com and seeing all the pictures of broken bedroom doors from where abusive mothers tried to beat their way in. I don't even check it regularly anymore and only looked at the Mother's Day secrets the way the rest of the world looks at bloody car accidents. Some time ago I stopped feeling close to people and started to feel annoyed. This time I felt less lonely.

(Don't think you know me because I wrote that sentence. I'm not that easy to figure out. I mean, are you?)

I'm scared that I'm going to fuck up this new relationship not because she's shitty, but because of me. That's new.

Is it weird that one of my favorite parts of my time with her this weekend was when she invited me over and she was on the phone with her dad and I just lay on the floor quietly with her thigh as my pillow, dancing my fingertips absentmindedly up and down her calf as I stared at the moving painting the sun and leafy shadows made on the wall above us?
...
Y'know what I hate? Getting out of something and then realizing just how much it sucked and that I didn't really have a clue while I was in it. Is that how all relationships are? Or just all of mine? Do they all get really bad at the end and when it's finally over all friends sigh and admit It Was About Time? No? Still just me? Awesome. (And cool how I put "at the end" when we all know it wasn't just at the end, it was just that I couldn't stand the shit for a second longer...)
...
Now I'm spending time with a woman who actually wants to get to know me and makes my stomach feel like a jellyfish, pulsating in and out, in and out with the way she asks all the right questions but I've forgotten how to give the right answers.

I Dreamt of Love; It was Worse than the Nightmares, Because I Woke Up to Reality

I was in a dance outside at a park, under a shelter. It wasn't burlesque or drag, just choreographed dancing, and we hadn't practiced as much as we should have. Bex was standing next to me, with our leader to her left. I still had water in my hand when the show started, and didn't want to mess up the steps by putting it down, so I just held it through the first number. There were so many chairs set up, taking up all the space in the Shelter, and then we were on the far side, gravel for our stage. Once the first dance was underway, I started looking through the audience. Mom was there, on the left and trying to signal something to me about how I was fucking up. And one of Jessa's friends that I really liked--though was so threatened by at first--that I haven't seen or talked to since the break up. Then, I saw Dad. He wasn't sitting with Mom. He was sitting on the other side of the aisle with the PFLAG parents. Not the PFLAG parents of my dream, but the actual Columbia I-know-them-because-I'm-a-part-of-this-community PFLAG parents, Linda and Clayton. He was wearing a shirt, that looked like the shirts we sold at Pro-Choice/Pro-Fashion last Summer, except it just had a small drawing of a woman's face on the front, and it said, "you're beautiful." He smiled at me the whole time. I got so excited. He wasn't sitting with Mom. I thought maybe they weren't together anymore and just didn't tell me, because they don't tell me anything. I thought he bought the shirt to support me. I thought he was at the show because he was proud.

E's mom was here for the Burly-Q show, and she bought a Burly-Q shirt. Sam's mom came to Pride Prom Roller Disco and pretended Patrick was the gay son she never had. Graduation with friend's parents on Saturday. Mother's Day on Sunday.

I put a period at the end. It doesn't mean it's a sentence. Or even a complete thought.

Over delivery pizza on her living room rug, she said that she'd had a discussion--sex doesn't lead to love.

Later, in her bed, itchy blanket thrown off to reveal soft, polka-dotted sheets, I stopped caring about how good her orgasm would be, and started caring about feeling her everywhere.

Maybe that's what she meant. Maybe love can be felt during sex (not that I felt love for her then and there, or have yet, or will ever), but it's not the sex that leads to it. In fact, it seems the sex dissapears, to make room for... I was starting to be convinced there wasn't anything, because the old bed-mates didn't believe, and so desperately wanted me to be with them(/her specifically) in disbelief, and I just wanted to be happy ...the sex dissapears, to make room for something better.

I laugh with her. We laugh.

I don't have to be smiling at every moment. I didn't know it was forced until she looked at me. My face between her palms, bodies resting together, the light of night in her bedroom, she looked not at my face and the feelings portrayed there.