Dance of the Cerebellum.

I usually don’t friend on the first date.

There’s still too much of the game to be played before you get to see my trivialities, my lols, my 8,000 vanity shots.

There needs to be order about the thing, this dating thing, this ‘I wasn’t even sure if it was a date until I asked you mid-non date about it’ thing. And you told me that you hoped it would be. And so it was.

I write everything here. I write about love and sex and alcoholism and family dysfunction and self -exploration and -derision and -love. I write about healing and change and acceptance. I write about banalities and wrap them in a coat of revelation.

I only just began writing again, and I won’t censor because you’re here now. Even though, that’s what the game is. That’s what the beginning is. It’s an opening, always by degrees. Here are my cards, the ones okay to be seen. Next hand, here are a few more—are you folding yet? Am I? Here, one by one, is the rest of the deck, a little coffee-stained and edge-frayed.

I had a dream about you the night you asked me to dinner. I dreamt you told me you were 18. And we kissed. And I pressed mine to your soft, full lips.

And yesterday, when it happened in real time, you told me you were 25. And we kissed. And you pressed your soft, full lips to mine. …

I usually don’t friend on the first date.

There’s too much to be known and unknown, to be veiled, and slowly opened. Too much trust to be laid down before I am willing to open myself and what I offer here. And too much I want to say here in this writing--to myself and my friends--about that process of opening. This is my platform, my cauldron of community, where we all get to dive in and find the pearl at the bottom.

And I need to dive, explore, create, and parse. I need to tease and relate and recall and make sense.

I am a Libra, after all. Communication is our oxygen.

If I friend on the first date, you’ll see that I know what a Libra is and does. That I talk to trees and ‘heart the 80s.’ That I argue with myself about every last particle of myself.

"Respond to Friend Request."

I usually don’t friend on the first date.

"Accept."

But I guess there’s an exception to everything.