Giant Woman

We’ve been through so much together.

Or maybe we haven’t.

Neither of us is the person we were when we met, and that’s amazing.  We have helped each other grow into the people we are today—better informed, better protected, more understanding.  We have held each other up when we could have fallen down.  We have endured hardships and challenges that have reshaped who each of us is, and who we are.

This world is a crushingly lonely place.  This world hates and fears almost everything I have ever been and it reminds me of that antipathy every chance it gets.  I spent two decades and change in a continuous nightmare of no smidgen of comprehension and closeness ever seeming close to enough, of never, ever knowing that the people who showed me kindness or friendship or love were sharing that warmth with me and not with whatever idea of me they’d managed to piece together.  They would tell me, you are not alone, and I dreamed of someday believing them.

That nightmare is a distant joke now, something I can call forth when I need it for writing and then set aside when I’m finished.

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Giant Woman
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Art and the Robot

A few years ago, I attended an art museum with Ania and one of her friends from her hometown.  There was friction between the three of us.  Ania hadn’t been in much contact with this friend for years at this time, and importantly, had come into her atheism and become involved with me in that gap.  Her friend, in turn, was still religious.  I earned some of her friend’s future antipathy to me by being a little too insistently flirtatious, which is not a good thing for a perceived cis straight man in a relationship to be toward a woman who is clearly uninterested, but most of it preceded that unfortunate buildup.  A lot of it coalesced into a rather unfortunate turn of phrase she used during that art museum trip:

“[S]he’s not one of those atheists, is [s]he?”

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Art and the Robot