Who Said Anything About Love?

So this is the first in the experiment of TMI Thursdays, to replace Sunday Confessional and as luck would have it tonight's topic was the same one I originally had planned to write about for a Sunday Confessional (before I decided to make them TMI Thursdays) which was blocked from me writing last Thursday because Le Internet was dead. And none of that made any sense but I think I needed to write something to get my brain flowing (if you could read any of my college papers the first two pages or so are basically that type of thing)
Anyway I think I may be in love and its sort of thrown me for a loop and I've been questioning a lot of things recently. As you may have guessed by my constant fawning its Hubby and she's a girl which sort of confuses me. It's not like I'm tied to any gender essentialist model or a sense of heteronormativity, god knows even if I weren't a tranny or a cultural anthropologists in this day and age such notions seem somewhat outdated, it's just that I'm not sure if what I feel is love and I'm going through all past "relationships" in my mind and heart and trying to decide if I have ever actually been in love. Lord knows I've had some crushes and infatuations, and like any school girl dreamt about marrying a certain someone and being 60 and old together, but I think those were just romantic idealized notions that being a teenager and fancing myself a poet I clung to and aspired to be.
Like the girl at H-W where in 10th grade I ended up writing her a book of poetry, and then her asking me if I was gay in the back of our chemistry class in 11th grade. I would have sworn I was in love but I think I was just in love with the thought of being in love.
Then there was April from my team in AmeriCorps who I made out with a few times, yada yada, who also asked me if I was gay (hmm a bit of a pattern) then there was Bethany who was probably the closest thing I've had to a love, if it was not love. She became attracted to me when I told her about the poetry I wrote for Katie and when I got shipped to New Orleans with the Red Cross every day of my deployment there, when I got off work at 8 and she was home from teaching kids in Baltimore I would call her outside my crappy hotel room and we would talk for like an hour and it was all so natural and so pure. Then we became a couple for the rest of our AmeriCorps time and I even took a red eye to Fort Lauderdale to surprise her with a christmas present, which really freaked out her dad before I won him over. I think part of the reason I was drawn to her was the fact she was a southern daughter of an evangelical preacher but she had that spark of adventure and desire for something more, and maybe I was that something more and something different to her, I don't know, but even after we moved apart we would still talk often and were stuck in a type of pseudo relationship where I'm pretty sure we could have gotten married if we were like in the same state and not living two very different lives. She got married to some guy that she met because of Hurrican Rita when I was in Italy, which really freaked me out because conceitedly I believed he was kind of a second choice pig.
It's just that sexually guys are more my type. I'll make out with pretty much anyone, guy or girl, because making out is fun but I don't think I wanna like fuck any girls. The only time I got involved with two trannies it just got sorta of out of control because I just wanted to talk then yada yada alcohol, yada yada naked. But in high school I realized after like 2 years I had had a crush on a guy on my football team. Nothing happened (though I wonder what became of the likely lad) and in college I had a crush on a really good guy friend for like three years ( I have an IM from sophomore year where I was discussing him being my type "if he were gay" with my girl friend dismissing the possibility) then us hooking up quite a few times senior year (my gaydar is amazing) before I grew bored of it. And I only lust after male celebrities (if you hadn't noticied)- I only want to be the female ones. But I know thats not love because I was only interested in getting in their pants- I've never had a real emotional connection with any guy; only with my girl friends, and especially with those few cases where I wonder if it was love.

Like with Hubby, we met at Oktoberfest and by two hours of us knowing each other she became my Hubby and we were completely comfortable, like we had known each other for years. Then last semester going to her formals and dancing the night away, and then dancing the morning afters away, I mean I never dance! And all of our Thursday Thursday conversations and poetry readings- I have never had an akward or bad moment with her around. Hell we've already planned our wedding and lives (when we're 50 year old cat ladies) And now with her halfway around the world we write each other the longest emails, and longest regular letters with such a blessed comfortableness and familiarity and everytime I see a message from her in my inbox I must admit that whole day is tremendously better. Even if its not love I know we will be friends till the end of this life, and maybe longer, because it feels like we might have known each other before. But I don't know what love is, or what it feels like besides such joy and familiarity and knowingness, and that notion of self improvement. Like I know I want to become such a better person for her, so she'll be proud, (one of my biggest fears is to disappoint her while she's off doing amazing things) and I'll be worthier, kinda like in As Good As it Gets when Jack Nicholson at dinner tells Helen Hunt that he has started taking his medication because she makes him want to be a better man. Thats what I feel. I mean I've never thought about her sexually in any way, but is that perhaps a greater love? Maybe it is just an incredibly sororal love, an agape of sort, or maybe its soul love, which seems to me to be the highest of all; I could deal with that I think. (It's a little sickening how mushy this is; I blame my iTunes shuffle for knowing my mood.)
I've already told her if I can actually write her the first Thursday of every month, an actual letter, it will be the greatest thing I've ever done. And at that point in September of 2009 (wow) I should be sure of these feelings. And maybe if it is actually love (at least on my side of course) I shouldn't be thinking about it because that will make the wait even more interminable. I should repress and repress more. Yeah its not love, it's just a silly phase I'm going through ( a great song by 10cc [speaking of s*m*n] covered by Tori Amos [speaking of covers])
Sigh, god I love that girl. Does this mean I'm a lesbian now? (and if so how did I go from being a gay guy to a lesbian?) I'll guess we'll see in 25 months.

(and yes the title is from Joe Jackson's Different for Girls...I guess it really is)

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