Zk | 06-bone-town

It is Pentecost Sunday. It’s still a Solemnity, but after Holy Week and Lent, it lacks anywhere near to the same level of impact, so although the mass differs from a mass during Ordinary Time, it lacks the social impact of the other holidays.

I always find myself using it as the marker of slipping back into Ordinary Time. It works well for me to treat it as a very deliberate point. It is a relaxing of posture, perhaps. A time to switch from the tense contrition of lent and the jubilation of Eastertide into the, well, ordinary ritual and everyday faith.

Another interesting bit of news is that, as of last night, I appear to be taking the week after next off and heading up to Boise to visit Kay.

Like so much of late, the decision to do so seems to have sprung, fully formed, into my mind. Or perhaps our minds, as, when I mentioned the idea of coming up to visit, Kay responded readily and eagerly.¹ She mentioned that there is a percussion festival being held at UI that she would like to go to, and that she would welcome a concert buddy.

“Besides,” she said on PostFast. “It’s been ages since I’ve seen you.”

If I were in any other mindset, I think I would have taken this at face value, just as I’m sure I would have taken so many other things from our conversations over the last however long. Then again, if I were in any other mindset, I am not sure I would have suggested a visit.

I’m not, though, and I did, and now I am panicking on Pentecost. Was it some tongue of flame that descended upon me, caused those words to come tumbling out onto the screen, enter key hit far before I’d really allowed myself time to process the request? Was it some inspiration beyond myself, or something within myself? Perhaps my subconscious desires are acting out for me.

But now it’s set. I sent in a note to work and, assuming it is approved tomorrow morning, I will send out emails to my clients to inform them of my time away and my phone number to call in case of emergencies — and perhaps work can set up remote sessions if they would like — and then start considering what I will pack for a few days vacation.

I emailed Jeremy, and he replied quite quickly from, I assume, his phone:

Wow! Big step there. I was going to caution you about putting yourself in a situation where you would be pining away all the harder but a. You’re a big boy now and can certainly handle that, and b. It might actually do you good to be assertive about the things you want in life. Do you think you will talk to her about your feelings while out there?

J

I haven’t yet replied, as I am stuck on what to provide as an answer. The question itself made my stomach tie itself in knots. We, Kay and I, interact so smoothly over text that the thought of saying “Hey, I think I really like you” face to face makes my anxiety spike.

I mean, it also spikes when I think about telling her over PostFast, but certainly not as much.

So I guess I have yet to decide what to do about that, and instead of trying to figure that out right now (or all at once, as I keep telling myself), I’m focusing instead on what we’ll do. She says she’s found a few good inexpensive restaurants around the area, and, as I suspect that I am more comfortable financially than her, I will perhaps take her to a nicer one, maybe on the night of that concert. She’s also promised to cook at least once and says that she’s not bad at it.

There’s also the percussion festival, which, on the surface sounds fun, if loud. I like drums well enough, though I imagine it won’t simply be drum sets on a stage. Maybe we can fit in a hike or something?

Weirdly, though, the thing that I’m most interested in out of all the ideas that have crossed my mind is just sitting in the same room with her. Even if we’re just reading or relaxing on our phones or, as always, showing each other videos that we enjoy.

Less than just doing stuff with her, I’m more excited about simply being around her and existing together. That feels like a good ‘friend’ thing to do.

It also feels like a couples thing to do, but on introspection, I feel like this particular desire may be more bound up in friendship than limerence. It has been a very long time since I have just hung out in person with someone whose company I enjoy.

I have the bus ticket, I have a few room-rental options I am looking at.²

All I need is to make it until then.

I will not deny my excitement for this upcoming visit.

Neither, apparently, will my subconscious, for I have had not one but two dreams since our agreeing to visit, and given that it has only been three nights since then, this makes it a majority of my time spent thinking about her.

The first dream was much like the one I wrote about a few weeks back. I was at her senior recital, it was unspeakably beautiful, and then when I tried to help her up onto the stage, I was pushed away by the crowd, unable to call out to her.

In fact, it was so similar to the first dream that I nearly did not write about it here, but the very act of sitting down at the desk to write seems to have dredged up all of the subtle differences.

Yes, the music was breathtaking, but in an almost hypnotic way. The audience wasn’t simply listening to it, we were enchanted.

Yes, the applause was uproarious, but it was outsized, for though the audience was perhaps a few dozen people in that intimate auditorium, the sound of the applause was of hundreds, thousands of people.

And yes, the applause was well earned, but more than that, it sounded possessive, as though at the culmination of the concert, the audience wanted nothing more than to claim Kay for their own.

And finally, yes, I did move to help her up onto the stage, but the act was one of desperation, as though that was not simply to help her take a bow, but to rescue her from the grabbing hands that wished to take her.

I didn’t just fall away out of weakness, I was actively pushed away, I was an impediment on the audience’s way to claiming what was rightfully theirs.

As with any such dream, this all felt astoundingly normal. It was not a nightmare, at the time. It was just a dream in which all of those things — the enchanting music, the audience, the possessiveness — were simply an inherent part of the universe. They were a core truth. They couldn’t not have been present.

And yet, two days on, the anxiety of having Kay taken away from me (such as it were) clings to me like scent-block. I can feel it as an oily residue in my fur, between my pads.

The other dream is…I don’t know. I have only been up a few minutes, now, and I am still struggling to internalize it. The part of me that is able to interpret is not yet functioning, though I have my coffee already, but the part of me that desires interpretation has been online since I crawled out of bed. I do not know what the dream was, certainly not what it means, but I suppose the least I can do is write it down.

I dreamed that, during the visit, we were sitting down on a couch to watch a movie and that Kay surprised me with a kiss. The dream jumps from there to us in her bed, trying to…it is hazy. We were trying to make love, and it’s not that anything was wrong or necessarily preventing us, not in the dream’s universe, but my point of view kept rewinding back to the point where we had just lay down together. After a few of these “rewinds”, I found myself — not the me who was laying down, but the me who was dreaming, or perhaps observing the dream — getting frustrated with the repetition, and I started to change up my approach. What if I put my paw there this time, instead? What if I kissed first instead of touching? What if I lay on my back? What if I lay her on hers?

It was one of those fruitless dreams of struggling to find the correct way to engage with an idea. It was an erotic dream, but without the catharsis of orgasm.

I don’t know. I am just as sure that my feelings for Kay go far, far beyond sex as I am sure that I would not turn down sex, should the topic ever come up.

If I’m honest with myself, given my current struggles over even telling her that I have these feelings for her, I think the idea that I actively pursue sex at any point soon is not just inadvisable but outside the realm of possibility.

I just don’t yet know what it means.

It’s been a few hours, and I have decided that that dream was simply the process of anxiety over the trip combined with a spike in libido. In the other, yes, I could see the layers of meaning going on there, with the ideas of possession and being shut out, but when it comes to what amounted to a sex dream with little in the way of plot or inherent meaning, I don’t think there’s much one can draw from it.

It all feels a little silly, being anxious and horny. I’m in my 30s, for goodness sake.

I have packed all I think I will need. Laptop in case of emergency appointments, books, steno pads, toiletries. I have clothes enough for a week, including my blazer and slacks for when nicer clothing is required. Kay did not specify the dress code for the concerts, but better safe than sorry. Also, perhaps we can head out to a nicer place to eat one night.

Here are at least some of the things I’ve thought of as ideas for stuff to do, so that I can at least have them written down somewhere:

• Concert — Kay obviously already requested this.
• Movie? I don’t know what’s out at the moment.
• Nice dinner. Boise has to have a good place we can go.
• Hiking. This will probably depend on whether we can find some way to get to a trail when neither of us drive. The maps shows a small nature reserve that’s just on the edge of town. I imagine that will be fairly accessible.
• Bookstore. This may be more for me than her. I do not need any more books, but that will never stop me from browsing.

I think that this will at least give us a good number of options, and we can play the rest by ear. Even if we wind up doing what we do on the regular, just showing each other videos or watching movies together, only co-located rather than over the ‘net, I will be happy. I stand by what I wrote before, that just being together, even if that’s ‘being bored together’, is quite enough to look forward to on its own.

It’s weird, though. I find myself tiptoeing around these different ideas of what to do while I’m out there, thinking things like, “Is this a thing that just friends do? Is it weird for friends to suggest going to a nicer restaurant?” They are all lies. They are all protective actions. They are all me guarding my soft underbelly to keep from exposing my feelings to Kay. Of course friends go to nice restaurants together. Of course that’s a thing that friends do. And even beyond that, trying to hide the fact that I desire more than friendship, at least on some level, is doing neither of us any favors.

I am such a coward. Lord, give me the strength to be honest for once in my life. I know that the petty request of a petty coyote is far outside Your purview. What worth is an intercessionary prayer for something so trivial? I am responsible for my own growth, it’s my own failing here.

I never did decide whether or not I would be talking about my feelings with her while I’m out there, and I never did message Jeremy back.

I can tell I am just going to keep fretting around in circles if I focus any more on this. It is so easy to find some way to fractally manage expectations, to forever refine what goes into making a plan, to find ever more layers of meaning in an action, and I will (apparently) do that for hours on end, so I am going to set all of this aside and go for one last walk before bed in an attempt to wear myself out. The bus leaves early tomorrow.

Boise is much as I remember it. Sprawling, flat. The trip up I-84 is familiar enough to tug loose memories from when my parents would take me up every few months to see a specialist,³ only now there are far more billboards and what used to be strip malls have turned into tumbled collections of big-box stories, imposing, half-rendered amongst the landscape of scrub and crumbling roads.

I did not miss it, and it seems indifferent to my return.

Kay is still at work for a while yet⁴ and I cannot check into my rented room for another few hours, so I have camped out in a café in the neighborhood where I will be staying.

I cannot put my finger on what exactly feels so different about this place from Sawtooth. There is a different tension in those around me. The landscape is similar enough, but there are more buildings, and they are situated just a little too close together, compared to what I’m used to. There is more exhaust in the air.

But it’s still Idaho. We’re only a hundred and change miles up the road from Sawtooth. The water tastes the same. The temperature is the same. It’s all more of the same. Not just in the sense of the ongoing homogenization that is part of living in the west, but it really is no different than Sawtooth, other than it’s bigger and more expensive.

It was the bus ride, perhaps. It was that liminal seat, half-reclined. It was the window with scrub grass and cows and small farms blurring past. It was those two hours and the knowledge that I would be elsewhere that put me in the mind of differences.

I suspect that I will feel out of sorts for a little bit, yet, at least until I meet up with Kay.

After all, it could also just be lingering expectation.

I met up with Kay an hour or so after I checked in to my room — enough time for me to shower and change clothes. The sent of the bus still lingered in my nose, but that may have just been my imagination.

I wish I could say that it was some joyous reunion, but instead, it was just as though we had picked off from where we had been after our chat the night before. We said hi to each other without fanfare and simply walked to dinner. She had picked out some sandwich place that she said she frequented for lunch⁵ which was perfectly acceptable fare.

Afterwards, we walked around a nearby park. Perhaps by virtue of how well-tended it was, it was something of a shock to be dropped into green after all the drabness of the city and the brown of the landscape before that. I will not deny my pleasure briefly cutting through grass to walk beneath trees rather than just padding always along sidewalks.

We walked and we talked.

At first, it was awkward and somewhat stilted as we subconsciously renegotiated our interactions with each other in the embodied world. It is easy enough to chat or not when one is bound to a screen. Even voice-only communication is different when one can mute oneself, or only be heard when hitting a key on the keyboard.

The immediacy of interacting in person, however, brought with it all those scattered silences, filled pauses, and other dysfluencies. It also brought the universal problem of where to look. Do I look at my interlocutor? Do I look at the ground, the sky, the trees? Do I acknowledge those others we come across?

I am so terrible at this.

Eventually, though, we fell back into old patterns. Despite our daily conversations over text or voice, there was a surprising amount to catch up on once we both opened up again. Kay spoke about her time in her masters program, how it differed in structure from her undergrad, the ongoing struggles of finding others to perform her works. I talked about settling into my practice and how I was able to get my full license, about my patients (anonymously, of course), and about my own therapy.

Despite this catching-up, the conversation was all so quotidian. I can’t think of any other way to put it, but we just talked about “normal” things. What else could we talk about with each other?

I suppose we could talk about feelings, but walking through the park on the very first evening that I was there, looking forward to a week of time in close proximity, such as it were…well, it did not feel like the right time to bring any of that up.

I am unsure of how to process this first night just yet. The anxiety that I was feeling beforehand, as well as the slowly unwinding tension as we began to speak more freely seems to have taken much of the worries about my feelings for her off my mind, and I was simply focused at first on recalculating what level of masking⁶ was required around her, and later on the sheer mundanity of our catching up. I am left wondering what that means, if it means anything. Perhaps it is a habit thing — we fell back into our usual patterns — but more likely it means nothing. We’re friends, we talked like friends, and that’s it.

I did at least learn that she’s single, so there is that.

Kay has taken a few days off of work while I am out here, but we wound up intentionally leaving plans fairly loose.

I do not know her reason for doing so, but if I am honest, I left plans open ended because I was not sure what we are, or what our dynamic would look like until I arrived here. Are we just friends? Are we on to something more? Is it weird for friends to go out to a nice dinner? A movie ought to be fine, but should that influence the genre?

I wrote yesterday that we were friends, that we talked like friends, and that that was it because that might indeed be the dynamic of our relationship, I still must contend with these strange and awkwardly shaped feelings for her. I cannot say whether or not it would be weird for me to suggest a nice dinner for the both of us⁷ or going to see a romantic film because I cannot say whether or not this unavoidable set of emotions will make it so.

Either way, I have my list of suggestions and she has mentioned that she has a few ideas of her own, so I suspect that the open-ended nature of our plans won’t lead to excruciating boredom or anything like that.

Today went well enough, on that note. I slept in, knowing that she would do the same, and stopped by that same café once more for a leisurely coffee and pastry while I waited for her to text me that she was up and about. She gave me the address of her building and the door code to get in, as well as a coffee order, so I topped up my drink and picked up hers in order to head over. It was a pleasant enough walk, as the day had yet to heat up.

She greeted me at the door in a wrinkled tee and pair of shorts, smiled sheepishly at her unready state, and gestured me into her apartment.

It was a single rectangular room: bed in one corner, desk against the wall next to it, breakfast bar separating the kitchen from the rest of the space, not so far removed from a dorm room, minus the fact that she had her own bathroom and closet rather than being forced to share with others.

A rumpled bed, a messy desk.

And the almost overwhelming scent of her. I made it two steps into the room and my mind ceased to function. I might as well have grown talons and wings, for all I know, for all I could do was stand there, coffees in hand, and try and blink away memories and too-strong emotions. I remembered her scent as though a lingering thing, faded touches cheek to cheek within my dreams. I remembered it, but I did not remember its strength, it’s depth, it’s overwhelming her-ness. It was inescapable, unavoidable, permeating and so much more than any lingering dream could ever hope to encompass.

It’s a wonder I was able to hand her the correct coffee.

I must have had some strange look on my face, as part way through the sip of her mocha, she tilted her head and lowered her cup.

“Everything alright, Dee?”

I raced through the masking checklist, realized that my whiskers were bristled almost uncomfortably far, my ears were laid flat, I was blinking rapidly, and my tail was tip-tapping about anxiously. I immediately felt an overwhelming sense of guilt, which I did my best to hide behind what I hoped was a bashful expression. “Yeah, sorry,” I managed.

She frowned all the same and put down her coffee, padding over to the window to wind it open a short ways. “Sorry, maybe should’ve sprayed some block. I bet it stinks in here.”

“No!” I said, realized that sounded forceful, and added, “No, sorry. Just smells like you, is all, and I feel like I got punched in the face with memories from school.”

At that, she laughed, though she did leave the window open, a trimmer chattering beneath her window marring her scent with traces of exhaust. “Well, good ones, I hope. Still, I’m sorry it’s such a mess.”

“It’s fine, Kay, really. Just random memories–” Tell her, tell her, tell her, some part of my mind was urging. It had Jeremy’s voice. “–like going to concerts, or your senior recital.” Tell her! the voice shouted, pounded on the walls, clawed at my insides, all while half-truths spilled from my lips.

And then, the moment was past.

“Oh! Speaking of, there’s two nights of that percussion festival, but I figured we’d just hit up the one tomorrow.” She reacquired her coffee and crawled back onto the mussed-up covers of her bed, gesturing me toward her desk chair, the sole other piece of furniture in the studio. “The final night is always the best, because all the stressful master classes and such are over, and everyone is just playing like crazy and really feeling it. At least, that’s how it always is with me and festivals. The days are all filled with classes and the evenings are concerts, and the last one, you’re just riding on some weird music high. Uh…sorry.”

I had leaned back into the computer chair, which had creaked under my weight, and peeked over at some of the papers on her desk — impenetrable sheet music, for the most part. “Sorry? For what?”

“Just rambling, I guess.”

“Goodness, no, you’re fun when you ramble,” I laughed. “I guess I got kind of awkward there, sorry, didn’t mean to pry through your papers.”

She relaxed back against the wall and let her shoulders slump, holding the coffee in both hands now, tail relaxing from where it had curled around protectively. “Right, yeah. Sorry. I have some folks at work who very visibly lose interest.”

“I’m still interested, promise.” I smiled as disarmingly as I could and made an attempt to focus through the scent that still tickled its way through my mind.

“Well, thanks,” she said, smiling lopsidedly. “I feel kind of weird because, like…um. I mean this in a good way, but I kinda forgot how awkward you are, and remember that I’m awkward as hell too, and that I can just be my awkward-ass self around you ‘cause you’re always listening at a hundred percent or whatever, and if you’re uninterested you’ll just change the subject and…”

She trailed off and averted her eyes over to the kitchen, focusing on a wayward glass. All the last had come out in a rush of justifications, half-apologies, and self-deprecation.

“You’re fine, Kay. I’ve gotta be the world’s most awkward coyote, and if you’re the second most awkward, well, we just make a heck of a pair.”

She puffed out a breath and then took a long sip of her coffee. “Mm, right. I’m out of practice in being around someone as…I don’t know, genuine as you.”

It all tugged at my heartstrings, and I prayed for the bravery to reassure her. “You seem kind of jittery. Everything alright?”

“Yeah, I’m just jittery, I guess. Nervous.”

“Nervous about anything in particular?”

She squinted over at me, “You’ve gotten good at your therapist voice.”

I laughed.

“Nah, I don’t think so,” she continued. Another sip, and then, “I’m realizing how boring I am, and I’m anxious that I’ll bore the shit out of you while you’re here.”

“There’s no pressure on my end. We could watch videos online for a few days like we would do anyway and it’d still be a vacation for me.”

“I mean, I wouldn’t turn that down either.” She grinned. “I just don’t have anyone around here like you, so I just kind of do my own thing which is not much.”

The rest of the day went smoothly. I remember fairly little of it. We got food. We walked to the library and she showed me around. We walked around the campus. We picked up dinner and brought it back to her place where we watched videos as we might have done on any other night.

I remember very little of the specifics, other than the feelings of the day. The feeling of glowing over her words, someone as genuine as you and anyone around here like you sticking with me as thoroughly as her scent.