He first came here for the river and the salmon. He keeps coming back for me. He says he’s never met anyone who likes birds so much. He also says he likes me drunk because my walls come down and I sweet talk. He likes to take care of me and I let him. And the second time we met, we spent three days together. We kissed and kissed and kissed, and I understood we were both affection-starved and healing little by little with every kiss.
While he slept and I stared at myself in the hallway mirror, for the first time in my life, I understood what it was like to have an adult relationship with someone. I once told the rodeo cowboy that a secret lover had texted that he was coming to get me. The rodeo cowboy wondered what I was going to do. I laughed, “what men want with me and what they have the actual balls to do with me, are two entirely different things, darling.” That went for him, too. And that has been my absolute reality with all men, until now. My new friend said he’d come back and he did. He said he’d take me in, and he did. And he is absolutely not afraid of me and what I want, he gives me and more. It is sad to say that in my 47 years, “counting the tears of ten thousand men” with my feet always slipping, I have never had such an adult relationship. There’s always been the secrets, the complications, all odds stacked against them, their fear of me, their inferiority complexes. Is it any wonder they have broken me?
My new friend says he’s got me pegged, and perhaps he does, because when he said, “you only like me because I live 3,000 miles away, don’t you?” I couldn’t lie and I laughed, “If you lived here I would have never given you the time of day”
…because I’m that fucked up. But my new friend takes me as I am, and even loves me for it.
My Love is for the Birds - Sketches 