The Debrief, or A Love Letter to the Blond Squad, Part 1

He turns to me in the car, lighting a hand-rolled.

"Okay. Tell me about the group that we're going to go meet."

"Okay." I pulled down the visor mirror and started putting my makeup on, talking as I did so, feeling very...couply. It was such a "working as a team" thing to do, especially since for once it wasn't my fault that we were late. I had come to his house in plenty of time and he had pushed for some extra time to reunite after the long week apart. It was the kind of thing I could have refused, or could even at this moment be snippy about, and I made a conscious decision not to be. I was at least an hour late for everything in my life besides work and this time I happened to be late because a nice boy had wanted to spend a little extra time with me one-on-one. It was complete madness to turn him down just so I could be only 15 minutes late, like I had something to prove to the Blond Squad.

That was the worst of it, though. Because I DID feel like I had something to prove. My relationship with the Blond Squad had started out wonderful and something I desperately needed and had since become a source of much tension and angst. As it became a source of tension, I was later and later to events, or maybe that causality was reversed but who knows, and then it was mentioned to me (only because I PRODDED) that "some people" felt that I wasn't contributing enough to the pot luck events (which was EVERY) event and I did in fact need that wakeup call, so that was good. But all comments that sting because they feel true, I've never gotten over it, and that was fully two years ago.

And then there was another comment once when I hadn't...

...no. No. You know what? I am not dragging all this up again. I just had a WONDERFUL weekend with all of them at a wedding and I am not stirring the muck AGAIN just to write this post. Muck falls to the bottom where it belongs, and some touchy-feely people may feel like you're supposed to stir it up again ALL THE TIME so that you can keep that water nice and dirty, so you can see where all your muck is at all times, so it's nice and fresh and you can keep it in your immediate vision FOREVER, when what you WANT is to let the muck die down to the bottom, where it can harden and become rock, because what THAT does is become bedrock.

The bedrock. The foundation for your many, many years of future relationship.

I occasionally make mistakes. That is what people do. The Blond Squad had made mistakes too, and I love them and accept them as they are, and they do that with me, and I KNOW they do that.

Although at the time of this conversation with the driver of the car smoking a handrolled, the Blond Squad and I hadn't attended the wedding yet, it was pretty close to the horizon and I was already surfing the upward breezes of the rising warm air as the storm of my relationship with the Blond Squad was passing. I was getting better at accepting myself. And therefore, I could accept them. And therefore, I didn't give a DAMN if I was late. I wanted to catch everyone, and whatever time I could show up and accomplish that goal, I'd be good to go. And so, thinking of all of that, when this nice boy asked me to spend a little more time with him, I thought over all of that and said, "You know what? As long as we get there less than an hour late, I don't give a damn."

And therefore, here we were in the car, him lighting his hand rolled and me putting on makeup in his visor mirror, completely at ease.

*Part 2 Coming Tomorrow!*