Coming Into My Own

We are getting ready for the high holy days up here where the sun never sets. Literally. It is the first day that the sun won’t set because my polar bear lover and I moved up to the top of the world to be closer to his family. On a day like this, that feels like a really smart move on our part. And by a day “like this” I mean every day.

But then I look over at the polar bear that stole my heart before informing me that he was taking it up to a place that doesn’t have active postal service. He doesn’t seem his usual chipper self. In fact, he looks a little too much like me—this being the expression experts would label annoyed. I make a note to work on this in the future. It is not an appealing facial contortion. I imagine that if I wear it too many days in a row I could lose the only man I have ever tricked into loving me back.

Fortunately, this is not that day. Today I choose to be a bitch (this is what experts should label as edgy or clever, but never will get ballsy enough to do so). “Do we need to take a bathroom break,” I laugh. “You look like you are full of shit.”

This isn’t accurate, but I have been waiting to try-out that line. I guess it’s a fail. Sherman ignores this, and sits at the edge of our bed, looking forlorn.

“Scott, what do you say when someone tells you your life is meaningless?” he finally asks. To be honest, I am kind of an expert on this question. People have been asking me this question since I was eleven and challenged Tonya Harding’s guilt in the Nancy Kerrigan attack. Since then I have heard it from my guidance counsellor, both parents, strangers on the street and my parole officer—and that was just last week.

“Sherman, no one has the right to tell you how to live your life,” I smile, realizing this is one of the rare moments in our life together where I get to feel more in the know than my, normally, self-assured lover. I am so often the one that seems out of sorts with this world that it’s nice to be the one with the fortune cookie answers for a change. “They have their own lives to lead. Yours is the only one you get. Well, unless you’re Buddhist.”

I can’t imagine having to deal with this all the time though. Talk about pressure: I don’t know how Sherman does it. He is always helping me through the hard stuff. I love him for that.

“Do you really believe that?” Sherman asks with that needing hopefulness I so often see in the mirror of my own reflection. It’s something I have never heard from him before. He’s usually so confident; so self-assured. It should be troubling, I suppose, to realize your rock is as vulnerable as you are. The way learning your parents are only human can throw-off a child’s access. I kind of dodged a bullet there. My father is a drag queen and my mother collects pictures of Keanu Reeves. The cracks were kind of apparent.

Besides, that’s the thing about religion. It’s this anomalous piece within each of us: A piece that severs itself from the rest of us; and, far too often, from each other. This very thing we think builds bridges, is so often, the thing that keeps us apart. I kind of like that this troubles Sherman too.

“Buddhism?” I laugh, trying to lighten the mood. “Hells no. I’m a Jain. You know that, Sherry Bear.”

I had been waiting for the perfect opportunity to test-drive this new nickname for Sherman. I suspect by the expression on his face that I should have waited a little longer—story of my life really—but I do know what he really means and I’m not going to make him repeat himself. Not here, where the cold and the snow and the wind make it so hard to warm up to these moments of genuine vulnerability to begin with. It’s easy to brush-off syrupy melodrama here, but this kind of honesty is rare for us.

 I roll over Sherman’s big bear belly, while realizing that it probably requires several takes for the graceful people in movies to pull this kind of maneuver off. Neither being Grace Kelly, nor having an Alfred Hitchcock, I fumble poorly.

“But I really don’t think that matters Sherman,” I say, as I wrestle myself off of the floor and back onto the bed, ever so seductively locking eyes with him. I recall some yoga instructor I took three lessons from in a heroine-park once telling me that this is the way you access someone else’s soul. “Where you see god; What he, or she, or it, or its vacuum, looks like, or feels like. None of it matters, Sherman.”

“Are you drunk Scott?” Sherman asks, quizzically. “You know this is a dry community.”

Being a lunatic, I have gotten much more graceful at ignoring such comments than I am at foreplay.

“Sherman,” I giggle. The giggle I got from Marilyn Monroe. She may have also done heroine, but I trust her more than that Yogi in the park. I smile, caressing his furry back and nuzzling up to his ear as though I am about to whisper some deep secret we can’t let the wolverines outside in on. “I’m serious. And yes, I do believe that. You only get one chance at this life. Don’t ever let anyone else’s ideas of what’s right, or wrong, guide you. No one else will ever have walked your truth—they can’t know your story, not fully. Don’t let them determine how you live it.”

“You’re a lunatic,” Sherman sighs. It’s a dance this thing of truths and sharing. Deciding how vulnerable to make yourself, even to those you love the most. It is tough, even for the few who ever muster the courage to try it. “Thanks.”

I guess this is how Sherman deals with the pressure of taking care of me. When you get it right—or, right enough—it feels like a super power. Feeling like you made a difference for someone you love: that’s magic.

“How do you deal with it—with the abuse?” Sherman asks, interrupting my inner-monologue.

“I guess…” I start, trying to come up with that trite response that makes for a really good four second sound-bite.

“Don’t do that,” Sherman protests, cutting me off. “Tell me something real. You really take a lot of abuse from people. It’s one of the things—maybe one of the only things—you do really well. Well, that and make cupcakes. Delicious, I might add.”

Sherman’s right. I make a mean chocolate-swirl. The secret is to under-cooking them ever so slightly to ensure they stay moist. I think about this for a minute. He’s also right about my checkered past. I worked in a homeless shelter where I let women call me a cunt and a faggot without ever contesting them. Then we came up north, where I work with some fairly angry Alaskan youth who call me a white dictator and an idiot from the south while they domineered our their classroom, to which I do nothing other than nod my head in acknowledgment and ask if they are done so we can move on (and back into the real world). Then there is my family—that is a game of Survivor, minus the million dollar prize, I might add. Realizing these are the instances he is referring too, I respond honestly.

“Oh, those cases,” I smile. “Sherman, I don’t take those cases personally.”

“What do you mean?” Sherman asks, aghast. “They attack you. They vilify you.”

“No,” I sigh in love, knowing how protective this big bear is of me; how he would do anything to protect me. All things being considered, I have been lucky in this life; but, I have never known this kind of love before. “Not really.”

I put my head against his chest, positioning my ear against his heart. I align our breathing before I continue. “None of those people ever really attack me.”

“What are you talking about? They attacked you every single day,” Sherman protests, emphasizing the words as though the effort will bring me up-to-speed. He feels so out of sync with the rationalization coming out of my mouth.

“It’s true. I received the abuse, but they don’t really aim at me—not ever,” I continue, breathing deeply to match his cadence. “They weren’t attacking me. They weren’t aiming it at Scott or being gay or Jain or short or slightly fat. It had nothing to do with you or me or my lack-luster skills as an art instructor. It had nothing to do with me or my religion or my sexual orientation or my skin tone. If I were Sydney Crosby they would act the same way.

“They were angry at a world that silenced them and stripped them of their dignity; disempowering them. They were angry at everything that was external and oppressive to them—at ever body who was outside of their experiences of oppression. I got caught in the cross-fire as something—someone—that was an easy target and a representative of that world that had hurt them so irretrievably. I got that. I always got that when I worked with those women and kids. They needed to release that rage. I love myself and I am proud of my life, and so letting them release that anger didn’t ever have to change me. It didn’t hurt my heart the way real abuse—the stuff that targets a person and victimizes them does. Besides, they were really clever and manipulative and I could respect that.”

“But what about your family?” Sherman asks, smiling. He gets it now. He gets a piece of me that he didn’t before. He cares enough to try. That’s the mountains we’ve talked about before.

“Sherman,” I giggle. “They spend their free time watching reruns of Boston Legal and Will and Grace. Why, on earth, would I care what they think? They’ll never really know me. They’ll never really try. Not the way you do.”

“Fair enough,” Sherman smiles. That’s when he kisses me. Yeah, this is a pretty good life I live up here in the tundra. Plus, at least his family watches the news.