COLLECTIVE RAGE
My first relationship with a woman was a gorgeous disaster. Maybe I fell for D during the drunk dial calls in which she’d say things like, “I’m lying on the sidewalk thinking of you”. Maybe it was the day she showed up at my door with a wall-size painting she’d pulled out of the trash. Or maybe the nights when we played Gregory Douglass’ song North Star on loop while we inched closer and closer on my narrow dorm mattress. We were trapped in a state of all-consuming, unrequited longing. It should have been a match made in messy undergrad heaven. Instead, we broke up before we even got started.
Rule number one of a breakup is generally “move on”. In this case, we became good friends. (If that’s the most lesbionic sentence you’ve read today, don’t worry, it’s the most lesbionic one I’ve written.) But the Why of our breakup has stayed with me as the symptom of a larger, endemic problem: we didn’t have the language to understand ourselves as a couple, and so we couldn’t exist.