The Idea of Friendship

The Idea of Friendship

One of the hardest things for me to accept is a friend deciding they don't want to be friends any longer. As if I am no longer important. And maybe I'm not... I remember the first time I was four and my parents were rather Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald stylish, so the other mothers in the tract home neighborhood didn't like my playing with their children. Almost as if my parents' behavior would somehow rub off from a four year old. Once when playing with some neighbor girls, their mother called for them and they stuffed me in the toy box and told me to be quiet until their mother went away.

I remember being in the seventh grade and having a crush on my journalism teacher who when I once walked into what I thought was an empty classroom, I found her crying on the window sill. I was so distraught with grief for her. A week later, was one of those stupid pep rallies and we were all required to sit on the bleachers and watch the cheerleaders flaunt their panties and watch the football players flaunt their tight ends. I saw my favorite teacher and said to my girlfriends, "Lets sit by Miss___________" . They called me Lezzie and walked away never to speak to me again in the six years we were at school together. I didn't even know what a lezzie was, but I did know i preferred  girls to boys. This went on throughout school and even after school when I lived in Berkeley, one of the finest Lesbian capitals of the world.

I believe I was too intense for most girls, even the ones who had the same interests as myself. I really wasn't interested in changing my preferences. I just wanted some friends. i preferred the daisy-like slender pretty girls which was my own description, and it was the more butch girls who wanted me.
What a dilemma. I was so lonely. The only thing i was sure of was that I was going to be a poet no matter what and in fact was one already, just then at 22, getting good at writing. And so I moved to a two room Depression cabin with cold running water, a wood stove to heat with and cook on and lived alone one hundred and fifty miles north of Berkeley. I wrote and wrote and wrote and learned and read and read and was so lonely I hitch-hiked into town for provisions once a month finally discovering the small country town I had chosen purely quixotically, was a town of lesbians. Sometimes loneliness guides us to where we need to go. Somehow I was seduced by a man and had two sons. The irony was not lost on me. There are maps and plans for people and one cannot always choose which map to follow; they are guided along whether they will or they won't.