Irreconcilable Love

Pride 2. Queerness and Grief

(Artwork by Francesco Clemente for the film, Great Expectations, 1998)

*

Set down the form of your marriage.

It was that same voice again, Her. The One from the waters of Hapuna Beach (see previous post). This time, She happened between 2:00-3:00am when I woke up and went to sit in the dark on my then-marital sofa. It was that liminal hour when cognition stops trying to take the lead, and you just get to be a wandering, praying body.

Wasn’t Her language curious? She didn’t say, set him down. Or, end this relationship. It was about the form of my and my then-spouse’s connection. As if marriage wasn’t the best-suited path for the Us of us. I have empathy for many of us who are shown so few options as we reach that certain stage of life, where we might experience strong enough sensual attraction plus a deepening bond with another, then feeling the right next step must be marriage. In this moment, I feel Mother Goddess gathering us in her arms saying, “Oh, my sweet children. If you only knew what is possible in the boundless field of relational love . . .”

This feels scary to say, but knowing what I know now, I might have chosen a different form for our deep companionship. We were certainly each other’s ride-or-dies as young adults. But in a spouse, he deserved someone free of the kinds of obstacles I unknowingly carried in my body, and more, the ways in which I carried them. By the end of our marriage, we knew we were family, kin. Maybe we were even more, a twinship forged in life-womb waters of pain, earnestness, secrecy and survivorship.

*

He chooses me.

They call them the silent killers—diabetes, high blood pressure, carbon monoxide poisoning. Vaginismus is the other. It’s not flesh-eating, immune-ravaging or measurable by chemistry of blood. It’s soul-eating. Vaginismus eats women’s souls and consumes the lives of their intimate partners. The vagina becomes only the introitus. Intrudess. Detritus. Silent intrusion upon coitus. The touchstone upon all the ways you are impossible as a woman.

He chooses me.

Vaginismus is only the Go square on a maze, a Monopoly board. Squares named Preempted Sensuality, Gagged Desire, Beat Yourself Inside While Smiling Outside. Squares that connect, squat into blocks of enduring property, interior neighborhoods, patterns—like overworking on behalf of others to fill the void living in your intimate body. All the arid compensations—therapist, listener, advocate, ally. And the love you get for it like sugar, enough to bump to your spiritual glucose when all you want is to be able to feel your humanity in the dark.

He chooses me.

Or suppose the squares were big rocks, boulder-blocks roped to your ankles; suppose you were drawn to water. Suppose you got used to being short of oxygen in the cold deep blue. Suppose you were blue but didn’t know it. Suppose there was a life above the surface posing as productive, constructive when you were also always at some level hearing the aqueous echoes, a cacophony of despair. Suppose only the whales knew where you really lived. Click click.

He chooses me.

He is a deep sea diver, and I am one part thrasher shark, the other part unnatural, freak, asylee from my own body, the word No, the word Can’t, a death that yet breathes.

He dives in. I follow. We trade signs known to deep divers*—

My thumb between my index and middle finger, a fist, I am stuck. Hugging my chest with my arms crossed over, I am cold.

Him, index and middle finger to his upheld palm: How much air do you have left?

Me: Line tangled, index and middle fingers crossed, hand making a figure eight.

Him, flattening his downturned palm, moving it slowly up and down: Take it easy, slow down.

His scissor fingers, though they should have been mine: I’m going to cut the line now, let’s free you.

Me, pointing to the side of my head, twirling my finger: I am dizzy.

I look for the courage to point my thumb up, my forefinger toward the exit: Let’s terminate the dive.

But he preempts my sign, both hands clasped together, Let’s hold on to each other.

(Art by Francesco Clemente)

Before I didn’t know I was queer, I didn’t know I suffered from vaginismus. Our poor young marriage endured too much. It was as if we were given this great love without a way to complete it, in a way and on a timeline we were taught we should. Truth was, we shared an otherwise beautiful intimate life, creative beyond measure. But neither of us deserved what we were each dealt. Our form of marriage in the end became an irreconcilable love.

We set down the form of our marriage. We even generated new vows for the form into which we were emerging, under a tree in Carmel, overlooking the beach where new young innocents were setting up rows of white chairs for their wedding.

Then we lost the form of kinship. This latter loss is what I can’t ever imagine not grieving. Life has its ways. He is well and I am here. We both inhabit new relationships that are, in turn, inhabited by new sacred stories. He has expressed his blessing for this post. Grace and grief hold hands.

My grief is subterranean. My earnestness in trying to physically and mentally be a straight wife was like putting myself in years of strange, low-grade conversion therapy.

And yet. My queerness was not the cause of the vaginismus. As I met people through my experiences of both treatment and performing about this, I learned this affects hetero and queer women. For gay men, there is version of this inability as well.

Inability? Or body wisdom?

As much as I have been awakening, I have also been recovering. Homophobia looks like what we can imagine, but mostly what we cannot, yet are asked to, for Life’s sake.

This is just one of countless stories of queer grief. Others involve unspeakable rejection, human cruelty and violence, or the inability to come through as oneself at all.

As we celebrate queer sexuality, pan-intimacies and gender liberation this Pride season, may our celebration also include gentle pause to receive how radical queer joy is, and how contextual, sharing a mutual lean with queer grief. May we learn to hold each other’s complex and tender body stories with compassion and an ever-deepening maturity.

Mostly, may we understand how much queer grief would be unnecessary in a world that loved the creative miracle of our erotic, biodiverse, life-longing bodies.

Let’s feel and share our humanity in the light,

Coke

*Thank you to fellow artist Lisette Lugo, who taught me about the sign language of scuba divers.