A letter to a man I was in love with for 24 hours....

Ok, so I expressed an interest in you. An attraction to you. The first time I've expressed any such thing to anyone in a long time; since I broke up with my kid's dad. It's not the easiest thing being a single mom... you're constantly torn by the dualism that is your life: you're a woman, and a mother, and you somehow had to get to be a mother but mothers are never supposed to have the urges that got them to be mothers in the first place.

What I wanted to say: I wanted to fuck you, not date you. And this is where the conflict arises.

I don't want to date someone who has gone back to school to become more downwardly mobile. I don't buy into it anymore. Because downwardly mobile, removed from its subcultural context, is poverty. Plain and simple. I don't want a relationship with someone who is still very much in a space that they need to be someone for other people rather than themselves. I spent far too much time in that space. I gave everything to that space, including 10 years of my life, my sanity, and my health. If activism had given me back one tenth of what I had given it, I would still be doing it. But unfortunately, the scene being what it is, it doesn't. It uses you up, sucks you dry, and spits you out with nothing to show for it but rotten teeth from too many hand rolled cigarettes and too much cheap booze. I was tired of going to jail, I was tired of being concussed by being beaten about the head with nightsticks, I was tired of actively destroying myself all in the name of saving the world. I was also tired of the prevalent attitude of using people as means, not ends: Nowhere have I seen that more than in the activist scene. I was tired of my friends going to prison or being maimed by cops. I was tired of endless noise and solidarity demonstrations with our fallen comrades. I was tired of wandering, shaking my money maker to get enough cash together to get to the next city, the next country, the next continent.

It is a horrible irony in my life that I devoted so much of my youth to being a cool person, as I very essentially am not one. I'm one of the biggest geeks you ever shall meet: the peach-dress-with-jogging pants-and-red-shoes kind of braceface geek that grew too fast and gangly, teased into oblivion by her peers. It is a horrible irony that I devoted enough time and energy into being a "cool" person that I will never be seen as straightlaced again.... I am one of the statistical social problems now, the welfare queen single mom subsidy sucking miscreant that neo-cons like to pin all the world's ills on. But neither can I lay claim to being "cool" anymore, by dint of trying to do right by my daughter, living in the burbs, and accepting the life of compromise and consumerism that having a child in the 21st century seems to necessitate. So I'm stuck - again. Pushed into this corner by my past, intimidated by my future.

I had to examine very closely why I had such a strong reaction to you. It was visceral, and nearly painful in its intensity. I do understand that certain lessons keep presenting themselves to me: you didn't represent you, you represented an archetype from my past. A boy very much like you destroyed my life and sent me packing for europe from Eugene... it's gotta be the motorcycle and the Robert L. Pirsig connection, something that was never finished, just run away from. In fact I never thought I'd date a guy again after him.... swore off men entirely, and spent the next three years of my life in a relationship with a woman. Life has a funny way of coming round and biting you in the ass, doesn't it? Just when I think I'm over it all, you drop in and tell my libido at least that it's definitely not the case.

But alas, you were scared. Or simply uninterested. Better cut down on the weed, it's affecting your ability to give a damn. There is a difference between detachment and pot induced alienation, even though they may seem at some point to be one in the same. Scared in the same typical way that I wanted to date you. Didn't get the message when I said that I was attracted to the back of your neck and the way you smelled. Does that sound like an academic attraction to you? You kissed me so I thought you got it: I was inviting more of the same when I offered my one day off in the semester to you. It was a good lesson on my part, however: made me examine what I actually wanted and what I really didn't. For that, I thank you.