She kept me warm…

Periodically I let my mind wander and when it does, it finds its way back to that girl. The one who made me believe in so many contradictory things. She led me to think that I was alone in loving her, yet she was instrumental in helping me to overcome my loneliness. I love her still and when I think back to the way she looked at me and touched me and stole kisses from me I can’t help but praise god for sending her to me.

It’s been 16 years since we fell in love and I say “we” because I know that I was not alone. It’s impossible that I managed to dream up an unmistakeable feeling, a passion, an idealism that love can conquer all even when it’s the “wrong kind of love”.

She moved me. She really moved me. I told her things that I’d never told anyone before and she took them in stride. She understood me and let me be who I was, even though it was far from perfect.

She fell asleep on me and laughed it off. I let her; in fact I laughed it off with her. We laughed together and I can’t help but wonder if she is laughing with her husband now, though I doubt she is.

She keeps popping up

I dreamt about her again last night – I was so excited to see her. It was as if no time had passed and our union was blessed by her family and the rest of the world. Her sister presented her to me like a gift knowing that it would make my life feel whole. And it did, in that moment, within that dream. We embraced and couldn’t fathom letting go, I remember how my body enveloped my smile and radiated it infecting everyone around me. Her smile meant so much to me, she didn’t need to speak, just touch, just smile. I miss her and always wonder what if…

The Story of The Sin Sisters

She inspired me to be better and to do better. She loved me with everything she had and when she realised that, she took it all away without consulting me. After all, how could she love me as much as she loved her faith? Her position? Her station in life? I’ve had love from many people, but her love was different because it challenged God. It said to Him, “this is worth fighting for.” At least in the beginning that’s what it shouted. As time grew, it was silenced by the church, by her family and by what was expected of her. I loved hr so much and I know she loved me too.

It began with a shy smile, a handshake and an unspoken estimation. She sized me up and subconsciously I guess I did the same. I saw blue eyes and a crooked smile. her hair was long and swept back messily almost begging me to fix it behind her ear. the unmistakeable accent of an American on Australian soil she epitomised a fantasy: she was exotic to me, and cute, and off limits. I fell for her in an instant and felt my palms (the palms of a girl with enough dating and fucking experience) get sweaty and my heart bounced around in my chest like a nerd at a disco. I had no rhythm and I had no answer for the question of “could she ever like me that way?”

It’s funny how immediate my feelings leapt out of my heart, I had only heard a few simple, generic sentences come out of her beautiful mouth, yet there I was ready to declare my major in “loving you 101.” Her sister was with her – she was actually even cuter, but she wasn’t the one I couldn’t look at. I had no trouble making eye contact and conversation with her. She was fun and vibrant. it was the other one, however, who blew my mind back into the days of social awkwardness around pretty girls. I began calling them the “Sin Sisters” because they made me want to sin.

It began quite innocently, at least I pretended it was innocent. I was in a living situation that had become stressful for all involved, so I stayed away from my share house as much as I could. I began interrupting and my interruptions become common place; daily fixations on “the work” – she was a mormon missionary after all, in the service of her Heavenly Father at the beckoning of the living prophet. Secretly my fixation was on her (perhaps not so secret as I’m quite certain that others had their suspicions about us). I was 25 and she was 22. I had experience with men and women while her experience was limited to the 3 men of the church – the father, son and holy ghost.

Like a bad porno our story developed from acquaintance to friend, to confidant and eventually it scratched the surface of lover. Ours was a love story that had no chance of beginning or being. It only had a long ending, which was the sum of all it’s parts. To us, however, it was unmistakably real. I know that because all those years after it failed, she still couldn’t look me in the eye. she couldn’t tell me about her children or her husband without giving away that she was not happy. I knew how happy looked on her and it was an emotion that I had dressed her up in time and time again. She knew that I knew and she couldn’t fake it anymore than I could fake a love of men and all things heterosexual.

Even now sitting alone in a bar thousands of kilometres away from my wife, I’m unable to forget how she touched me or kissed me. I know “real” and she was it. She held my hand the entirety of our last day together in Australia. She cried as she embraced me. She promised she would wait for me to come to her. She kissed my cheek as they all watched – the church, my family, her God. She told me she loved me and the whole way home she cried into a tape recorder as she continued to declare her love for me pausing only long enough to touch the teardrop around her neck that I had given her. A keepsake of me, of how I cried for her, of what my life would be like once she had left – lonely solitude and full of sadness. Even knowing she was waiting wasn’t promise enough since I knew it was soon to wash away.

Her family would take care of that. her faith would too, and her church would condemn her love for me. Her truth was not me anymore, it was the lies of her faith. Her mother had pre-warned her about people like me and she was right to do it. People like me fell in love with people like her – those who are open and receptive of love in it’s purest form. Born out of honesty.

I loved her unconditionally and without bias. Everything about her I adored. Even the quirky and strange things that I couldn’t understand, like how she ate cereal with water. I love her enough to chastise her when she needed it. To reprimand her when no one else would for her own good and peace of mind. I praised her when she didn’t think she was worthy of it. I held her when she cried, when she was overwhelmed and I let her shine the rest of the time. I never held her back, I just held her up.

But none of it was enough as she forgave my debt to her and returned to the church, asking for forgiveness and moving forward into a life of matrimonial bullshit with a man that doesn’t know her like I do.

Economics is kicking my ass

I’ve decided to have yet another crack at studying. I started the Uni kick back when I was about 22 with a course in Criminal justice and criminology. While that was pretty fun for a while, I stepped back from it and decided it wasn’t really what I wanted to do. A few years later I got bitten by the bug again and started studying psychology; nah. Sociology? Nah. Literature? Nope. Religion? Nup. Oh my gosh, where the heck was it going to end? I couldn’t find my niche, nor any interest at all in anything I was studying. Then I got more involved in the disability work that I’d fallen into many years prior while overseas and decided that perhaps Community Services was where my heart was at. Again I was wrong. So now, currently, on this day, I am studying Business. Blah. But you know what? This is the longest span of interest I have shown in my decidedly lousy attempt at gaining a greater education. In reality, however, some of it totally sucks. Like economics. I will admit that while embarking on my secondary education, I did lean somewhat toward the artsy fartsy subjects rather than the “smart” ones, but I’m not stoopid by any account. However economics is kicking my ass. Big Time. I feel so un-intelligent when I sit down and attempt to do my readings.

Today I was procrastinating getting into it (I took Thursday, Saturday and Sunday off from study to hang out with my wife as we never get time together since I started this studying trip – we went shopping for christmas junk. It was great) but finally sat down in front of the computer with every good intention of getting it done (I was on week 2 when I’m supposed to almost be finished week 3 and starting on my assessment). I started with the easy stuff – catching up on discussion board posts and the like; that’s pretty easy, no stress, right? Wrong.

“15 Being the ticket price, 25 Being the vertical intercept, The slope of the line is -1.25.

To figure out the answer here, we need to do some linear algebra. We’ll start by carrying the 25 over the = sign, turning it into -25. We then add the +15 to -25.

–>  -25+15=-1.25Q

–>   -10=-1.25Q

Now we have to find Q. To do so, we divide the -10 by the -1.25.

–> -10/-1.25 = 8

Our final answer is Q = 8

Now, since the graph explicitly says that the attendance is in thousands, that 8 would be 8000 attendance.

If you’re wondering how we got the slope of the line:

Slope = Vertical change/Horizontal change

Slope = -5/4

Slope = -1.25

And the vertical intercept is obviously 25, as this is the point at which the line meets the vertical axis.”

I particularly loved the bit where she said  “And the vertical intercept is obviously 25…”     WTF? OBVIOUSLY I must be stoopid, coz I had NO CLUE what she was saying at all. (No doubt, the one person ever who is going to read this will be an economist and will be shaking their head thinking, “duh, can’t get much more obvious than that, ya dumbass!” And to you, dear economist, I say bugger off). Wow, I thought to myself, maybe I need to drop this unit? As much as I don’t want to be a quitter (anymore), I was completely unable to see how I could possibly pass this dreadful unit. Persevering past the stupid discussion board, I turned my attention to the online quiz that I was supposed to do last week. As a joke I opened it and started it (one guy on the board said that he got a 12/25 and needed to study harder. I wanted to see how far behind him I was) without any hope or expectation. Turns out I’m a little ahead of number 12 guy as I managed a 20. HOW THE BLOODY HELL DID I MANAGE TO SCORE A 20/25 ON MY FIRST ATTEMPT AT A QUIZ FOR A SUBJECT THAT I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO UNDERSTANDING OF? I don’t know, but I’ll take it…

The Sin Sisters

So I was pretty rowdy and out of control when I left home  – the last two years I lived at home my mother regularly offered to pack my bags for me, finally I packed them myself after yet another argument and a few weeks later unpacked them in my new little shitty apartment. I was 17 and moved into a place with my boyfriend at the time. We both worked and played like adults right down to the parties that our underage-live-at-home-friends frequented. After about 6 months of living together and playing house, we split up (probably because we both had wandering eyes for the same girl?), but that was ok because I had a large pool of friends who were interested in living with me. Fast forward through new roommates, new apartments, more parties, hand jobs under blankets in a room full of people watching movies and STD outbreaks (not me, my roommates who liked the army boys that lived nearby) and I found myself  being honest about my sexuality. I had finally kissed a girl and, yes, I liked it. In fact we both did, but she preferred sausage to taco, so we just stayed friends (and made out A LOT).

At 21 I had been out on the scene for a couple of years with my very own fag, Tony. He and I had so much fun together, however he had found his Prince Charming and was less accessible, so I made my own fun. As a result, I met some crazy lesbians and even moved in with one for a while until she threatened me. Whole ‘nother story… Anyway, one relationship led to another and I was meeting some awesome (and some not so awesome) women. By 24 I was struggling with a little drug habit that I’d picked up as a result of a painful breakup and was an alcoholic. Shit was bad and I didn’t see a lot of hope for a long and prosperous life. That’s when I met the missionaries. They swooped into my life in a naive whirlwind of love and acceptance (I literally had to spell it out to them that my girlfriend was my GIRLFRIEND – “ohhhh”)

I met with them for weeks and slowly my bad habits fell by the wayside, one by one, cold turkey. My girlfriend asked me if I was choosing God over her and I said yes. Our almost 3 year relationship was over, but I was happier than I’d been in such a long time. I felt alive and wonderful and accepted – I described it as if someone had reached into my chest and switched the light on. I was saved!

Because my girl and I had split up, we had to move out, living together just was not working out – duh. I moved to another suburb which meant that the sister missionaries who were meeting with me could no longer see me because they “worked” in areas and I was moving out of their area. I was devastated because I’d grown so attached to them, but was not going to stunt my growth in the church and advancement to baptism, so accepted that I was going to get new missionaries. Whomever replaced my sisters was not going to be the same, I knew that, but I was prepared to deal with the sisters that ended up coming my way, no matter who they were.

I was not adequately prepared, afterall. During my ‘conversion’, my sister missionaries were frumpy, wholesome and a little on the nerdy side – that worked for me, honestly, it did. In this next phase of my ‘conversion’ I was stuck with a real life sister companionship (the older sister, all of 22, was a full-time missionary from Utah and her little sister, 19 years of age, was travelling and got permission to serve as a mini-missionary with her real life sister) and they were far from frumpy. I secretly called them “The Sin Sisters” because when I saw them, all I wanted to do was sin!

 

Both had blue eyes and were gorgeous with big white smiles and olive skin. One had long, straight brown hair and the other had long, curly, sandy-blonde hair. And they sang like angels, too. I spent so much time with them and broke a lot of rules. Even though I harboured naughty thoughts about my missionaries, I still managed to be baptised into the mormon church, where I continued to harbour naughty thoughts.

“Look at what you made me do”

When I was about four, both my parents worked and my brother, who was a year or so older than me, had started school so I got to go to the neighbour’s house every day. I wasn’t the only kid who ended up there and for the most part it was pretty enjoyable because “Pat” (I’m going to use this as an assumed name for the woman who looked after us) had a cake decorating business on the side. Not a clever move putting 4 year olds in the same room as recently decorated cakes for a nap – we always thought that we were pretty careful when we stole decorations from the cakes, but looking back I’m quite sure that they looked somewhat mangled by the end of each “nap”.

Pat was a mother herself of a couple of kids – a girl and a boy. My memory of the girl is quite hazy, but I definitely remember the boy (I’m going to call him “Chris”). Chris was about 16 and for some reason, he used to hang around quite a bit at the house; thinking back I don’t know why he wasn’t in school at that time, or maybe he was and I’ve just managed to remember the only times that he wasn’t? Who knows. Anyway, Chris turned out to be a pervert. During the days that he was home he was able to get different kids to spend time alone with him and this seemed to be something pretty special, sort of cool. Little did I know.

“Look what you made me do,” I remember him saying to me. It took me a long time to figure out that Chris’s phrase didn’t mean what I had thought it meant when I was a four year old little girl. The words made me feel guilty as if I’d done something terribly wrong. As a child, I didn’t know that phrase was his way of gloating; that he was proud of how a four year old child was able to satisfy his carnal desires. “Look what you made me do” eventually stopped being a reprimand and became a mantra of his power over me.

Being a child I tended to rabbit on a bit and one day I mentioned my “special time” with Chris to my parents, much to their surprise (their reaction was pretty intense). I remember my father bolted out the back door and jumped the fence to Pat’s house yelling for Chris to show his face. Needless to say Chris bolted up the street and as far away from my (very fit and muscular at that time) father. (Perhaps this shows that he was in fact an educated boy and was smart enough to know that he was in for an ass-kicking and so it was time to run as fast and far as possible?) Anyway, my dad had words with his parents but I’m not really sure of the whole outcome. I do know that I was not allowed to go back there; I knew that something big and terrible had gone down and I had a feeling that it was my fault. My parents never spoke of it again, even to this day. Sometimes I wonder if I just dreamed it all up, but the memories are too vivid – right down to the green shorts I remember pulling back up.

“Look what you made me do” is a phrase that has stuck in my head for 34 years and one that makes me sick. Yet I still can’t help but wonder where that bastard is now.