Portrait of a lady on fire

Like coming home, but to a feeling instead of a place

Central Pennsylvania in February is a moody Marlene Dietrich movie. Kansas before Oz. Gray sky, gray snow, even the air seems to be translucent gray, causing life to feel monochrome; visually and emotionally.

It sounds gray, too. The slish-slosh of car tires passing tiredly through gray slush drowning the road in front of my house is a lonely, winter sound, not the refreshing, happy splash of cars speeding giddily through summer rain puddles.

Jack and Louie peer studiously at the grayscale landscape through the front window, watching for signs of life like David Attenborough on a mission for Nat Geo.

Most mornings, Ernie, our elderly neighbor walking his even older dog across the street, is their best chance of foot traffic action and Louie loses his mind barking over the excitement of it all.

“Yes, Louie. There goes Ernie and Lily. Same thing, twice a day, every day.”

“Louie! Shush! It’s just Ernie.”

“SHUT THE FUCK UPPP LOUIE!”

After January could barely muster a few measly flakes, I awoke to a bonafide winter wonderland one February morning. Half a foot of fresh overnight snowfall coated the gray-brown landscape like powdered sugar mounded atop a beignet.

As someone who longs for year-round mild temperatures, these are the winter moments I live for; those one-off days where bright white snow transforms the landscape and you can’t help but long for a ski slope, a sledding hill, a snowshoe adventure through newly pristine woods. Anything to celebrate the white stuff before the brilliant canvas of snow becomes a depressing Jackson Pollock of mud, dog shit and piss.

Barring one backyard sledding adventure that did not last as long as it took to gear up the boys for the snow, we all spent the day lounging around inside, wrapped in an atmosphere of coffee, cocoa, popcorn, candles, video games and TV while occasionally peering out at the revived landscape.

Later, as Cory and I drove the kids the thirty minutes east to their other parents homes, the setting sun behind us lasered through storm hungover skies and illuminated dusky pink clouds floating in the cerulean blue ahead of us and it really did feel like emerging from Kansas black and white into the technicolor of Oz.

Tree branches bowing demurely under the weight of fresh snow glittered in the sepia sunset as if showing off sequined evening gowns. Pink puffs of cloud tinged with violet stretched heavily along the horizon.

“Would you look at this landscape,” I announced loudly, sounding every bit my nearly 47 years to the four kids riding quietly behind me in virtual worlds built of busy cities like Spotify, Discord, YouTube and who knows what else. “This is the most beautiful winter day you’ll see this year, I bet. Really look at it, you guys!”

Crickets.

“Look at all the colors of clouds, Charlie,” I tried again, hoping to lure my baby, my only child who can still mark his time on Earth with a single digit, into appreciating the raw beauty of nature. “Let’s think of some fun similes to describe them. How about… They look like fluffs of cotton candy from the fair?”

“You’re on your own, Mom,” he answered tiredly.

I wish I had taken a photo. It was ethereal, those Easter egg colors streaking across the sky like a Bob Ross masterpiece or something out of that old Robin Williams movie “What Dreams May Come.”

Actually, I’m glad the impulse to take a photo didn’t occur to me in the moment. It means I’ve retrained my brain away from the sweaty grip of Instagram Mind wherein every beautiful/interesting/fun/scary/sad/happy/boring moment is co-opted by the involuntary desire to capture it on photo or video for everyone else instead of deeply experiencing it on your own as it’s happening.

The brilliance of the beignet snow, cotton candy clouds and robin’s egg blue skies lives inside of me and nowhere else and I like how that feels.

Charlie would dig those metaphors, I bet.

*****

Fresh off my triumph of experiencing life without the Instagram impulse, I woke the next morning and celebrated 200 alcohol-free days with a selfie, convincing myself it was somehow meritorious and elevated from the usual dregs of Instagram showmanship because I only snapped the one photo of myself upon waking and would not allow myself to edit it.

It’s a game Rebecca and I used to play at the height of our texting flirtations: “First photo/only photo, no editing. SEND IT,” I would demand.

Her sleep-tousled hair and naked, guileless face appearing on my iPhone screen seconds later would make my chest ache and I would be genuinely shocked by a feeling of wanting to cry.

I felt ( feel) so deeply connected to her and protective of her on ancient, cellular, witchy levels. Those sweetly innocent photos taken just for me felt like a genuine, connective moment in a world filled with posed images, carefully curated to build narratives and brands and the endless scroll of the vapid, hyperbolic responses based not so much on the actual content as successful brand manipulation - “This is everything!” in response to an influencer’s photo of a leaf on a sidewalk or “I really needed this today” regarding a photo of a flower or “Wow. Just wow” over a basic landscape.

Rebecca’s shy but sexy photos revealing a face like lamplight on a dark night will always be lodged in my heart and mind in a manner not dissimilar to certain videos and photos of my long-gone toddler children, their tiny voices echoing across the years, eliciting a nostalgic melancholia when I watch them now and am moved to tears by the little people they once were, lost now to the unrelenting steamroller of time.

*****

One languid evening, amid the dog days of that desultory covid summer, she texted that she wanted to learn everything about me and listed things she wanted to know including how I washed my face at night. Did I pull my hair back into a ponytail or put it in a bun?

I’ll never forget it. Yet another shade of earnest sweetness in the vein of those makeup-less, unedited photos of herself upon waking up. Wondering about my evening routine before bed was another explosion of intimacy and sexiness unlike anything I’ve experienced with men. It’s the thing about women that makes my body ache with longing. We just know things. We see each other and we validate. Endlessly validate in deep, meaningful ways and in the end isn’t unconditional validation the deepest form of love?

I keep meaning to write about her. Rebecca. Our perfect yin-yang, masculine/feminine dynamic that still surprises me. I will love her until I die. I know this with certainty. She is a ride or die, brilliant, brave, unabashedly honest human who, like moths to a flame, people gravitate toward in person or on the internet.

Even she doesn’t truly get it, she just kind of Rebeccas her way through life, her adorable SoCal accent (she lives in ellllayy) belying one of the most naturally brilliant brains I have come across. She does not fully realize her intoxicating effect. Only someone like me, an introvert who is simultaneously and paradoxically starved for and terrified of female companionship, understands the kind of womanly power she effortlessly wields like Glinda the Good Witch.

She is Glinda, I am Dorothy.

Technicolor to my grayscale.

Here are girls like lions,
here are girls like howling wolves.
Here are girls with such big teeth!
Here are girls who’ll play tug o’ war
with your heart or your wishbone
Or your throat, oh.

Oh, here are girls
with cold bright eyes and claws
like dragons. Here are girls who
can’t breathe air, only fire.
Here are girls who carry kindness
And katanas in their rucksacks
because they never know which they’ll need.

How do you tame girls with wildfire limbs?
How do you hold down girls with hurricane hands?

Oh you can’t. Humble hungerer,
you’ve just got to help them rise.

-Sue Silvermarie

I have had a crush on her for as long as I can remember seeing her online although I initially wrote it off as a kind of platonic, performative “women crush Wednesday” notion that does not come close to the way I actually feel about her. She tells me she fell in love with me when she watched me shave off my long, blonde hair, years before we began talking in earnest.

And when we finally spoke? I was on fire for months. My body jolting in Pavlovian response each time my phone chirped an incoming Rebecca text.

What will she say next? What thought-provoking book passage screenshot awaits me? To what heights will she unwittingly guide my emotions?

Our relationship, albeit long-distance, was a first for both of us. While we had both experienced women in various capacities, neither she nor I had fallen in love in a manner that, in many ways, felt brand new. As if we were creating a new kind of relationship, making it up as we went along.

“This is a new feeling. I am shifting on a cellular level. I can feel my brain rewiring.”

“You are leading the way to an existence I didn’t think was possible. By being yourself – you have shown me the way.”

There was an audio clip of her making herself come that still makes my heart pound in recollection. Later, she texted a video and my brain short-circuited. Her phone was positioned so her face filled the entire screen, messy hair partially covering eyes that seared into my soul from two thousand miles away.

Thunderstruck, I couldn’t believe what I was watching. I’ve been on the receiving end of a dick pic or twenty in my time and none of them came close to affecting me the way this simple, sexy missive was earthquaking through my throbbing, weakened body.

Electrical pulses zinged my chest upon hearing her say my name. Throat tightening, I gripped my phone and could barely bring myself to watch as she finished.

“So I’m driving to work, I want to try to articulate something to you and I just don’t think I can,” I sobbed to her in a video sent through the Marco Polo app we used for much of our many daily communications.

Meeting Rebecca and understanding an entirely different experience of womanhood really was like Dorothy opening the front door of her crashlanded house and stepping into Oz. She exploded my perspective of womanhood, love and relationships in exquisitely gratifying ways. I didn't know what I was desperately missing until she showed up.

"You've always had the power my dear, you just had to learn it for yourself."

It is rare to be able to credit a human being for causing us to experience ourselves differently. But there is Before Rebecca and After Rebecca. She caused me to understand and experience womanhood and thus myself differently. Everything inside of me shifted in an entirely new direction, a new way of being. A womanly awakening that has astounded me on every level. I can’t believe I waited until my forties to realize that this was available to me. To all women.

“I just feel sad,” I told her over Marco Polo. “And I can’t articulate why and I’m trying to articulate why to myself…I just… I feel like the person that I was for my entire life was wrong…Like… I just was raised a certain way and then crammed into a box and that’s not even the person that I am. And like, I still don’t even feel like the person that I am but I maybe feel the closest I’ve ever been in my entire life to being the person that I really am… In large part due to talking to you. But I just feel sad that I’m 43 and it took a long time! And then I think of all the other people that maybe won’t ever be the people they really are… I’m making no sense… I’m about to pull into work.”

I cried as I reckoned with a lifetime of living half asleep, without women like her in my life, my mind an aperture widening to take in the panorama of possibility. THIS was here all along. Women are sharing this with each other and I wasn't in a place to fathom it. Until her.

I grieve over so many missed opportunities of companionship with women free of labels throughout my life as a result of a childhood steeped in religious patriarchy.

Mormonism is constructed around the reverential worship of specific men like Joseph Smith and men in general. Man is said to have been bestowed with special, spiritual power. The 'priesthood' is the eternal power and authority of god. A blank check for men to do whatever they want in the name of god. One can easily imagine the heady authoritarianism that ensues in Mormon homes and churches.

Only now, slowly discovering the enormous range of my sexuality as I near my fifties, I am testament to the long arm of the patriarchal, heteronormative law. Why can't we begin at a base level of no sexuality and let people explore their sexual character until they die? Why do we place limits around the possibilities of human connection? Genuine human connection is all that really matters but we have strangled it nearly to death with concepts like gender, sexuality and monogamy. Life is so much lovelier and infinitely more exciting when you explode constructs and see where and to whom the river carries you.

Like Pennsylvania in February, sexuality is infinite shades of gray and as fluid as water even though mainstream society apparently needs it carved in stone, commandment-style: on a scale of hetero to homo I'm such-and-such number for time and all eternity! The higher the hetero number, the warmer the societal embrace. Incidentally, I include asexuality on the spectrum. Often I feel my most sexual alone with my body. A raw, pure, non-performative sexuality that desires no one and belongs only to me.

"I am a composite of all the women I have loved. I am built and reconstituted from my memories of them: words and embraces exchanged, the smell of their hair and the soap smoothed into their skin. This sounds romantic, I know, and it is: my most intimate female relationships have always, at least in my perception, been romances of their own, untethered from my erotic life - until they weren't." - Rachel Vorona Cote, Too Much

Women thrill me. They are mysterious, complicated, strong, a deep well of intriguing, fiery emotion very often strategically and necessarily concealed from the general populous (men). Frequently, the men I am closest to in my life frustrate and exhaust me. My father, brothers, exes, friends' husbands, colleagues: in almost every relationship there is a kind of disconnect much like when the audio doesn't quite match the video on TV. The programming can be incredible, but it's always slightly out of sync, leading to a generally frustrating experience.

'I see you' the delicate necklace she sent me displays as it gently brushes against my collar bones. Unconditional validation. Recognition and safety mingled with desire, passion, lust and want but never need. A woman, a mother of young children or aging parents specifically but not necessarily, understands the heavy burden of need. Need is not romantic, it is obligation.

She instinctively understands this and our relationship continues to meander through our lives like a refreshing mountain river, sometimes slowing to a trickle, wildly overflowing across rocky cliffs at others. Thrilled to be swept up in the current, I’m just along for the ride and will go where the water takes me.

A quick note of gratitude for those who monetarily support A Broad View even though newsletters are now free. It means so much to me for so many reasons. If you’d like to subscribe and support my work but can’t afford the minimum $5 subscription Substack allows send me to offer, shoot me an email at despiertatemonica@gmail.com and it would be my absolute pleasure to hook you up with a discounted subscription. So glad you’re here! Thank you, thank you, thank you!