Chapter 2: Felicity

Chapter 2

Felicity

Once in a while you meet a woman that challenges you to be something better than you thought you could ever be. She is the friend that is closer than you ever thought you could be to a person. She is the friend who holds you and cares for you and is crazy in her own right. She is a whirlwind and a force to be reckoned with. She is not the woman that stays in your life forever. Friends like these are amazing and are here for merely a season. Just as you thought you had learned to ride the insane winds and reign in her amazing love you get slashed by it and you run. You run because you are human. You run because the thought of having her back and losing her again is just too painful. Regardless, the whirlwind of Felicity changed my life. She had this way of making me feel entirely and completely loved.

I met Felicity just a few days after I returned from my second trip to Thailand and shortly after my new commitment to stay away from men had begun. I needed a friend to fill the void that not hanging out with men had created and she seemed to fit it very nicely. Felicity was British and she knew how to laugh and often snorted when a good loud laugh came out. She had this shocking sense of humor that made me feel comfortable—all of a sudden, the pain of my past could become humorous fodder for my present. “Quitting men” for a year was probably the hardest thing I had done clean—the thing that gave me validation and made me feel pretty was gone. But it didn’t matter. I had Felicity.

Felicity did things for me on an emotional level that no one had ever done for me. We prayed together, and this was something I loved more than anything. We believed in different Gods, or maybe it was the same God but we had different concepts of that God. Either way, I often prayed to the Heavenly Father and she routinely prayed to the Divine Mother. We communed with God together in the most random of places: we prayed in her car, in her apartment, in my dorm room, over the phone and in various public places. God was ours and, when we prayed together, it was as if God became tangible. God was tangible. I had never experienced that with another person before. She showed me new forms of worship. (At this point in my life, worship and church were my jam and I felt like I had found everything that I needed in order to connect with God.)

But, on Felicity’s birthday, we went to Kirtan. Kirtan is hard for me to describe but this particular one was an Americanized Hindu worship service that focused on meditation through musical chanting. For me, it was life changing. I’m not and never have been particularly good at harmonizing. I can pick out a melody and sing it well but the harmony? Never. Sitting in that service next to Felicity meditating and singing was the first time I felt the harmony in the music. I didn’t hear it, I felt it and it moved me and then I sang it. I grew with it. In those moments, the people around me felt a million miles away and a part of me at the same time. Felicity being there only increased the intensity. I was not afraid of what she thought of me… I already knew.

We sang together outside of kirtan as well. Felicity had this soulful voice that was deep and tenor and matched my soprano-alto perfectly. We would sing along to songs in the car and work on harmonies. Once, we even sang for the chapel service at my college. I had no fear of bringing her into my inner circle of people there—she swayed them over with her hilarious way and eased them with the calm assertion that the Divine Mother was present. You could feel Her presence when Felicity sang and it filled my spirit on more than one occasion.

With all of these new experiences, I realized I’d been looking for that connection for a lifetime. The connection was simple. It was emotional intimacy. I’d never experienced to this level before. And I had been looking for it in a man all that time—the moment I stopped looking, I found it in a woman instead.

She even showed me physical affection. For me, this was new. Physical affection always equaled some sort of sexual interaction that I neither wanted nor needed. But with Felicity, as always, it was different. I was in desperate need of someone to hold me, who didn’t want more than to love the little girl within. Felicity did that. After many late nights in Philadelphia, we’d go to Felicity’s apartment and she would hold me and we’d fall asleep together. There was nothing sexual about it. There was nothing about it that caused turmoil or stress or fear. I was loved, prayed for, taken care of and I laughed more in that six months than I have laughed in my entire life. If Felicity was there everything, would be alright and I knew she felt the same. The world could fuck itself—we could take on the world.

And then something began to change. I realized that I often stated things as “we” and all the things I thought I wanted in a man I had found in her. For the first time (off drugs and sober) I was attracted to a woman. I was attracted to her. I kept it to myself for a long time. I didn’t want her to know. I didn’t want to ruin it all. But there it was. I loved her and started becoming sexually attracted to her. At 26 years old, it was a very strange sensation. What was I supposed to do with it? I could barely accept that it was there and I was too afraid to act on it or say anything. I told a few friends but mostly as a joke… like it wasn’t real or I was just being my crazy self. It was very real though. So what do I do when something real hits me and I don’t know how to handle the emotion? I run, but we’ll get to that.

Felicity, at some point, had told me that she had had feelings for me of that nature as well. But, instead of telling her that I had them too, I told her it was ok and it was no big deal and we let it go. I just couldn’t tell her. I wasn’t ready and I began to question who I was. What I gay? Bisexual? Or was I just a human open to the beauty of a person regardless of gender? I was rarely turned on by a woman and men turned me on all the time so why Felicity? Why then? Was I mistaking loving action and comfort and distorting it into something twisted and broken?

I didn’t know and I just couldn’t tell her. And there were a thousand times that I wanted too. There were a thousand times I wanted to snuggle and turn around and just kiss her and love her the way I ached too. But, be it my conservative upbringing or fear of what my parents would think or fear… I couldn’t bring myself to be honest about my own emotions. I feared what would be and what I would think of myself. I let fear win.

It was shortly after this realization that I started looking to date again. I had decided that six months was long enough (as opposed to the year I had intended) to go without a relationship. In hindsight, I realize now that I was looking to find something to take away those feelings but, in that present, I just felt lonely and that six months was a long time. Because of my suppressed feelings for Felicity I was aching for someone to just sweep me off my feet that was socially acceptable in all my circles. Despite the fact that I was a liberal and was all about equality, I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that I might be the gay or bisexual person that I had so adamantly stood up for at times. It was the first time in my entire life that I realized who I was and could be on a very deeply emotionally intimate level with myself. And yet, even now I can no more define myself than I could in that moment.

Several weeks later, I met this guy named Jimmy. Jimmy was, in short, an asshole who had a lot of confidence and was hot. The ultimate trifecta of things I was attracted to.

Jimmy and I had a whirlwind romance (though I never had sex with him… which is something I’m still super proud of myself for) and within a few weeks I began feeling like I loved him on many levels. I doubt the realness of that “love” but it was real to me in those moments—I wanted someone besides Felicity to love me. I wanted someone, anyone, to love me or to feel loved like I did with Felicity so that those feelings could be displaced. I didn’t realize any of this at the time but that was my process. In short, my swift feelings scared the hell out of Jimmy. He bolted.

My world, when he bolted, fell apart. The feelings I had for Jimmy were real to me, no matter how forced; after not being touched by a man in six months, having him all wrapped up in my psyche meant that when he bolted, I fell apart. He was my hope that I wasn’t “turning gay” or whatever you want to call it. I just wanted him to love me long enough to have something, ANYTHING, with a man again. But he didn’t. Thank God he ran. But like any man who runs too quickly he ran back (for about two seconds) and in that moment when he came back I considered going back to him and maybe trying again.

So what does a woman do when she isn’t sure what to do? She calls her best friend to talk it out.

I called Felicity, who had been completely aware and involved with this whole dating process to begin with and knew that while I was dating I was staying away from sex and was working on my balance during relationships. What she didn’t know is that balance was completely skewed because of my inability to be honest with her about my feelings. Regardless, I told her I was thinking about taking Jimmy back because he was a boy and dumb and boys get scared and I wanted him to love me. I desperately wanted him to love me. And in the moment that I said those words to her, she said something in reply that would alter our friendship and the way we would interact from that point forward. She said:

    “If you go back you will have lost everything you worked for and you will be back to where you started six months ago and I will be so disappointed in you.”

Part of my heart died. Felicity had loved me when others had run. Felicity had handled my crazy and my tears and my need to sing and dance and snuggle and cook and be anxious and scared and always afraid. Felicity loved me like NO one had loved me and she accepted every part of me the way I came. My love for Felicity was founded in that, and now the woman I really actually loved told me that if I did something she thought was wrong, I would be back to where I had been before. She told me she would be disappointed in me. In one moment, I felt like I couldn’t be enough for her approval. I could never be enough for anybody. The depth of my codependency struck me then.

I was, all of a sudden, a little girl.

I was scared and alone and felt like no one understood and neither Jimmy nor

Felicity loved me how I was. When I sense disappointment from those I love most, I shut down. And its what I did. I couldn’t bear that a man I desperately needed to love me didn’t care enough to express his real feelings and emotions to me. And At the same time,

I couldn’t bear the woman that I secretly loved would be disappointed in me for doing what I thought was best—regardless of what that decision was. Within 24 hours, I shut down both relationships and cut off contact completely and utterly with both people.

What followed was the most obsessive and painful 5 months of my clean and sober life.

Keeping in mind that, retrospectively, I realize that neither of them did anything “wrong.” They simply responded to how I was acting. And while I felt wronged, I was playing the victim.

After shutting down and losing both relationships, I was alone. The people I felt knew me best had, in my mind, abandoned me. I obsessively looked at their Facebook pages but avoided running into them. I felt like I couldn’t handle real interaction with either of them but I couldn’t bear not knowing what was going on their lives.

Felicity, at one point, messaged me on Facebook and I was so inept at handling the emotional onslaught that it caused I nearly shit myself. Literally. I was emotionally incapable of facing the fear that she might not love me the way I was that I could not handle interacting with her.

I went from speaking to Felicity every day and hanging out a few times a week to nothing at all. Nothing. I ran away and it caused the destruction of the most wonderful, intimate, and connected relationship I’ve ever had in my life. Period.

Over time, I tried to reconnect with Felicity, to talk or just have conversation but each time I was turned down. By the time I had gained the emotional ability to deal with my self, she was gone… and dating a woman no less. And there I was and there she was and we weren’t a part of each other’s lives anymore.

Perhaps the reason that Felicity’s incredible love only lasted a season was because I wasn’t able to be honest with myself about the level that love had reached in my life. Keeping such things secret will eventually kill them and, because I didn’t nurture it, because I ran from it, I was unable to deal with the consequences that came out of it rotting and spoiling in the dark of my closeted heart. I suppose I will always wonder what would have happened if I had been real with myself in those moments. I also know that I was as real with myself as I possibly could have been during that stage in my life. But it didn’t make it okay.

I saw her occasionally from time to time. We ran in the same circles and she was on the periphery of my life for a long time: the occasional Facebook update or status update, the passing at a restaurant or meeting place and the acknowledgement of knowing that we knew each other once… but no more. We moved on and changed and grew and became something different than what we had been to each other in those six months.

Yet, those six months have forever changed my life. They remind me that I am capable of loving on so many different levels and that all of God’s creatures are beautiful and wonderful and they can be apart of me if I let them. I have not laughed as hard or as often as I did during that time. I will remember that laughter and the prayer most of all. They are the things I cherish of Felicity; they are the things that allowed me and pushed me to grow.