New Year’s Bliss

Content note: This post contains sexual content.

—02.26.2001—

By January 2001 I had been spending time with Beth again, who you may recall was the ex-girlfriend I’d been kissing five minutes before my taxi left for the airport back at the beginning of my trip to St. Agnes in the fall of 1999. We were trying to build our friendship back up. I invited her out for New Year’s Eve and we had an amazing time. It was the best New Year’s ever, better even than last year’s on the island, if that’s possible. It started at Ian and Erika’s place. They’ve got a loft in the old Sears building on Cesar Chavez. It’s basically a big box with one little box inside of it. The little box houses the bathroom and a spare room. Its roof forms a mezzanine that’s their bedroom. Everything else is open plan, the dining room, living room, kitchen. Actually, scratch that. They proudly showed me some walls that they had recently built around the kitchen—no ceiling, just walls. Their place looks great. They had also recently ordered an Italian couch, wide enough for seven. Grey, modern, smooth, I couldn’t stop rubbing it—it felt that nice.

Beth looked so beautiful. I can’t remember exactly... Yes, I can: glittery makeup, a white, translucent shirt with a slightly more opaque, strappy tank top underneath. When the light was right I could make out her breasts under the layers of fabric. She was such a charmer, engaging everyone in conversation, laughing. My friends all said to her, “So good to see you again.”

At some point before midnight, by which time we had all moved on to a party in Potrero Hill, Beth and I found ourselves in the pantry of the apartment. Two half-length Chinese curtains stood in for a door effectively making us visible only from the waists down. She was leaning against the wall and I held her in my arms, tentatively, my hand perhaps resting on her hip. Only one month earlier when I asked her if she might be open to spending any time with me, she gave me an abrupt “No.”

I said something like, “It’s really nice to see you again.” After a few moments and some shy smiles, a dormant year’s worth of want began to melt in the heat and drinks and I found myself kissing her. Time collapsed. It was all new, yet it was a pleasure I knew so well, like the sudden rush of joy finding a favorite thing thought forever lost. We kissed and kissed and kissed, not believing our luck. Just then my friend Stuart’s head appeared at the bottom edge of the curtain. “Well I never... I thought that was you two!”

Forty-five minutes later we were at another party in an absolutely gorgeous, old house built as officer’s quarters at Fort Mason. It stood on a beautiful, grassy, tree-lined slope overlooking the city and bay. It was a crisp, cold night. I held Beth’s hand in mine as the group of us filed through the door, into the bright warmth, thumping and overflowing with people. We stood around and chatted but then wandered upstairs like a couple of high school kids. In a very small room with a door that didn’t lock I held her against the wall and kissed her, pulling up her little top so that I could watch the moonlight fall, cool and white, across her bare breasts. I tried consciously to slow down time so that I could take it all in: the thin, half-hearted mattress on the floor, the moonlight, the voices in the hall, kisses, smiles, my mouth tugging at the tip of her breast, my lips across the smooth skin of her stomach. She was so beautiful. I floated in a sea of bliss.

For the rest of the month we toyed with domestic enchantment. We shopped at Trader Joe’s. We looked at sailboats. (I’d taken a well-paying job as a creative director and was contemplating a purchase.) One Sunday we went to IKEA and then back to my place where we spent the afternoon assembling flat-pack furniture. I spent the weekend with her while she was house sitting. We had sex on the couch in the living room. I kissed her in the kitchen as tears rolled down my cheek, for she was a memory made real.

Still, we say to each other, “We’re not seeing each other, right?”

“No,” we say.

“So you can see other people if you want,” she says.

“I wouldn’t want to see someone else while I’m seeing you, even though I’m not really seeing you,” I say.

“It’s really ok,” she says.

One rainy day in late January, during a rolling black-out, I played hooky with Rebecca, a girl whom I’ve gotten to know at work. The power goes out. We light candles and then we head across the Bay to that playground of domestic enchantment, IKEA.

A few days later Beth calls me at work and asks innocently, “What are you doing tonight?”

“Going out for a drink with a friend,” I say, which she correctly interprets is code for “I’m going out with a girl I’m interested in and am trying to spare you the burden of that knowledge.” Beth loses it and everything we’ve so tentatively rebuilt collapses.

My friend Jessica says to me, “Don’t you know that when a girl tells you, ‘It’s OK for you to see other people,’ she never means it?”

—08.07.2023—

In my early 30s, at the time I was writing this journal, I tried balancing the experiences of being in relationship and being free and independent. I was not successful. I was a bull in a china shop. My connection with Mira, who I loved, I pushed off the shelf. My connection with Beth, who I also loved, I knocked over as I turned towards another. I regret all of the ways I contributed to instability and emotional upset in the lives of the women I was close to. I didn’t have the emotional maturity, the communication skills, the integrity to be open, loving, and transparent, to balance. I didn’t even know what this balance was called. I didn’t know it was a practice, a way of being, that had a name. It was called polyamory and I didn’t know it was a thing.