No TV, no music, no people, no phone - just the hissing of the radiator and the clacking of the keyboard and an occasional meow from Luka and I don't remember the last time I feasted on such solitude.

An interesting difference, between solitude and loneliness. One I'm really taking care to appreciate.

And not to keep coming back to relationship stuff - except that I am - but I'm in love, dammit, and I find myself pulling away and looking at it as if it were this odd, alien artifact that I can't quite wrap my mind around. Am I really holding this thing? What is it exactly? What does it all mean? And one would think that I'd never been in love before, never loved before, and while that's not quite true, I've never really loved as an adult before, and it is this difference that I am wondering at.

I think back to my past relationships, and it's funny - today I lunched with three of my coworkers, and I marveled at the fact that many of them maintained friendships with their exes, and then commented, "I would, except that all of mine are irredeemable assholes."

(And I really must interject for just a moment - I went to Dictionary.com because I wasn't sure how to spell irredeemable and they have a free toolbar you can download!! (Which I almost spelled "downloaf"; I suppose I need the toolbar more than I thought.) I was so excited that I almost downloaded it immediately, and then remembered - oops, not my computer.)

So anyway, my bunch of irredeemable assholes. I was being a touch flippant (except in the case of the louse; with him I was being charitable), but it's been occuring to me lately: I have started to begin to be able to look at the part I played in my relationships that went wrong.

Mind you, I don't take one iota of responsibilty for the awful things that the louse did to me. No blaming the victim here. But as the sting fades, I am able to better ask myself, with no recrimination, with a sense of detached curiosity, "Hey, why exactly was I sticking around? What sorts of things was I thinking about myself that would lead me to think that I had no options, that being treated badly was still better than being alone? What sorts of things did I contribute to facilitate his bad treatment?"

(I'm starting to get tired. I'm not sure if this is going to make as much sense as when I started. I'm gonna do my best.)

I'm thinking of how especially with my first boyfriend, and still a whole lot with the louse, I couldn't bear to be alone. Being loved seemed to fill some sort of aching void in me, and being away from my boyfriends emptied out that void again, made it fresh and raw. My god, I couldn't stand to spend a weekend apart, and I would panic, and wildly overreact, and feel completely adrift. I remember one weekend in college, Brian#2 had spent the entire weekend with me, and it was Sunday evening, and he was about to leave, and my god, it was so cold, and my dormroom was so bleak and stark and lonely, and my life was so bleak and stark and lonely, and I began to cry at the thought of him leaving, and I am certain that he felt manipulated into staying, and he did, and I got my temporary reprieve, at a very high cost.

I am tempted to say that I am ashamed of my behavior - I surely would be if I acted like that now - but you know what? I was 18, I was lonely and homesick and depressed and confused, and I have a lot of compassion for that lonely girl almost 12 years ago. And it is starting to really get through to me, I am finally understanding it in more than a superficial, intellectual way: all the mistakes I've made, all of them, the worst ones, the most embarrassing, the most shameful, the ones with long-lasting repercussions, the ones I would never repeat if my hindsight had been my foresight - all of them, necessary lessons. And I'm a slow learner.

Yes, yes, I know how elementary this all is. Straight A Aimee, head to the back of the class! But that's just fine with me, at least fine with me tonight, alone, delighting in my solitude and my own enjoyable company. So it took many years and much pain to get here, and of course being here isn't staying here; as stagnant as I may imagine myself to be, I'm in constant motion.

And how intangible a reward, no? I'm not sitting here winning the lottery or accepting accolades or gaining fame or fortune - I never could have imagined that this certainty, this solidity and stability - that this quiet and invisible strength would feel so damn good.

(Still tired. Still going on. Still making sense?)

Tonight I am delighting in spending the night alone; Sunday Ben is going to help his father move and unpack into his new apartment - I have toyed with the idea of volunteering to help out, but I'm not sure yet. I may want to spend Sunday apart (not to mention that I haven't met Ben's father yet, and they have a sort of uncertain relationship, and it may not be time for me to meet him yet anyway.) Next weekend I am spending the long weekend with Shalini and Craig (hooray! Martin Luther King weekend has become our weekend to hang out in our jammies and drink wine and gab until obscene hours of the night, and this time it will be done in their new house!) and while Ben is free to come along, and I would enjoy it if he did, I am going to enjoy it period. Ben will be spending two weeks in Pennsylvania for school sometime this month; at the end of the month I'll be spending the weekend with my parents and visiting Marty and family. It's a lot of time apart, and I'll miss him, sure (especially while he's in PA), and it will ache, but it won't hurt. And I enjoy the ebb and flow, the coming and going, the movement.

(Oh, my sweet Ben... in bed a few weeks ago, we had just finished making love and as he was about to pull away, I held him tight against me and said, "stay with me, please", and he just held me back, kissed me, loved me. I told him, "I was just hit by how much I would miss you if we weren't together, that's all." And he understood, and he was happy to do it. I think of the louse, and how he would have viewed me as sucking the life out of him, and I am even more appreciative of what I have now.)

I feel like the Energizer Bunny tonight (this is how you know I'm tired; similies referencing dated commercials) - still so much to say. I've been quiet for a while; it's bubbling up.

(I am reminded of how large swaths of unscheduled time intimidates me; I write so much better, so much more regularly, when it is in the course of my daily routine.)

I think that tonight's project meeting at Lori's really energized me, got my creative juices flowing. This is really happening. I'm finally getting working on it, I'm wanting to work. Lemme see if I can explain it, since I mention it often but don't know if I've ever laid it out in one piece. She's doing a conference/course as part of her dissertation, which (very broadly, no pun intended) is about art, fat women's bodies, beauty, and all that good stuff. Societal pressures, issues, all that. (Me speak good, don't you think?)

I don't think I really appreciated until tonight that hey, this is really something! I have something to contribute! I'm scared to death to put myself out there like that, but also really excited. Claiming visibility, making a very public statement that what I have to say, the life I lead, the things I create, have value. Wowee!

The thing is, I haven't found myself really able to talk to too many people about it. I haven't really known where to start. I think part of it is that my (continuing) journey of accepting myself as I am, of seeing my body as inseparable from the rest of me instead of as this foreign, unpleasant thing, of looking at myself through completely different lenses - well, it's been a very internal journey. It's been sometimes hard and rocky and tenuous, and slow. And I kept a lot of it to myself - other than in safe accepting communities - because I wanted to protect it like the parks department puts fencing around newly seeded lawn.

So now I'm in this position where I haven't talked too much about my being fat, about how I'm changing, how much I'm rejecting a lot of strongly held societal ideas because they've done me nothing but harm, and dammit, I'm taking charge of my life and I know what I need to do to live it well, no matter what anyone else might think. So how do I suddenly turn to my friends and (maybe) family and say, after being so silent for so long, "Hey, come see me be fat and fine with it and celebrating my body and myself in a really public space, being unashamed for all to see!"?

Part of it is not wanting to deal with all the newbie questions, the "but what about your health? What's wrong with dieting, anyway? So-and-so did such-and-such a diet and lost fill-in-the-blank pounds! Why wouldn't you want that? And what about the obesity epidemic and all those fat kids? (The Helen Lovejoys: "Oh, won't someone please think of the children!")" If we're talking about my friends and family, we're talking questions that would be entirely well-intentioned and not at all mean-spirited and could even potentially open up a dialogue in places where these issues have always remained unspoken (although this is where I have to admit I still have trouble with defensiveness; it is difficult to hold such an unpopular stance and I can get crabby about it) and maybe I just don't like change, ruffling the feathers of the status quo.

But it seems so inauthentic to do something this big, this positive, and do it quietly. Hide it. Make something up when asked, "what are you doing this weekend?"

I'm also not entirely sure how to bring it up with Ben. With Ben it's a little different than certainly you, my reading audience, in that here I bare all with no fanfare, and with Ben, I am revealing myself layer by layer (a dance of the seven veils?) I am happy with that process, but to share my work with him - especially in such a public way - feels risky. Who knows? Maybe he'd love to go to the reception and be able to point to my piece (complete with pictures) and say with pride, "hey, see her? That's my girlfriend."

(And I am totally tickled - and relieved - to remember that his dad's an artist. A real live got-his-own-studio-has-shows-and-installations artist. While that makes me nervous in a way ("Oh my god, he'll know that what I'm doing isn't real art") it's also very reassuring to realize that this kind of thing is familiar to him; he's not my dad proclaiming from on high "who needs that art shit anyway?")

It amazes me how incredibly charged this fat stuff is. Such a simple three letter word and hell, I'm still not so used to saying it out loud (spoken aloud, I can still sometimes hear the condemnation it carried in my childhood.) It gets people so riled up, so uncomfortable. And I'm so used to glossing things over, smoothing over the rough edges (which is, of course, what fat girls who don't fit in learn to do; we're awfully good at survival skills) - such scary stuff to stir up that hornet's nest.

But hey, scary's good sometimes, right? Means things are shaking up!

You know, it's funny. Last year I had put out a ton of personal ads on all sorts of sites, and at Rose's recommendation, I tried Spring Street Networks , the ones you see in The Onion and Salon.com. You put up a free ad, and then pay to contact people.

My first ad was not too long after leaving the louse; I wanted some distraction, I wanted to go to bed with someone who appreciated me, I wanted some sex, so I created a profile as "sexyfatgirl", tailored for finding a bedtime friend, and figured I'd see what happened - who would take the bait.

(I learned though much experience that I'd much just rather say that I'm fat - unapologetically - right out there from the get-go and weed out people who would be turned off by my body (or worse) automatically. Got me a lot fewer responses, but saved me a lot of unnecessary angst and trouble in the long run.)

Anyway, I didn't get flooded with responses, but I got a lot more than I expected. I went on a couple of dates, didn't really like the "ooh boy, you'll sleep with me!" attitudes I encountered, realized I didn't even want a casual sexual fling (especially since I was in that period where a guy would touch my hand for 10 seconds and I would just want to run away), and so I nixed that ad and started fresh.

This time I changed my handle to "happyfatgirl", used an even better picture (from my brother's wedding), and said flat out:

I'm not looking for a casual fling or a one night stand.

I'm not looking for someone who thinks that all fat girls are desperate and figures I'd be an easy lay. Or a personal trainer who thinks I'd be a great project.

That said, if you're still with me, what I'm looking for is to meet someone I can be friends with and maybe fall in love with.

I would even eventually like to (gasp!) get married and have kids.

Does that mean that I'm some kind of altar-mad grab-'em-as-they-come Bridezilla wannabe? Nope, not at all.

I want to take things slowly. Get to meet people. I'm not into forcing anything. I want to have a delightful time getting to know someone and having fun together and letting intimacy build naturally.

So, if you like what you've read and are intrigued, if you're intelligent, fun, well-adjusted, relatively educated, kind, outgoing, employed, affectionate, and enjoyable, if you think fat girls are sexy and you love the idea of staying up all night and talking - and maybe not talking - well, then I just might be the girl for you.

And, as you can guess, once I made it clear I wasn't putting out, I didn't get zippo. Zilch. Nada. Nobody was looking, I didn't particularly care - I was getting plenty of dates from other sites and other methods - and I plain old forgot about it.

Well, wouldn't you know it, almost a year later, that's the ad Ben responded to, that prompted him to write (as I've mentioned before), "a guy with long arms likes a big girl to hug," that was the only one that grabbed him and inspired him to actually write to someone, among just hundreds and hundreds of profiles. (And he had to pay to do it, to boot!)

And I've gotta say, I wrote that second ad out of frustration. Of, "if I'm gonna keep running into all these jerks, I might as well put it out there what I'm really looking for, dammit!" I didn't really expect that there'd be someone for whom my no-holds-barred "this is what I want!" would be appealing. I'm sure liking it a lot.

But anyway, the whole point of this terribly long tangent is that hell, even with me being so upfront on paper about my size, and with Ben being pretty obvious about finding me just damn hell attractive and wonderful just the way I am (hee - he recently told me that on our first date, as we were walking up the stairs to change subway platforms, he was admiring how sexy my legs were as he was following behind me) - even with all of this, it's still hard to talk about the fat stuff, even with Ben!

(Something that had really impressed me early on in our relationship, in its tentative stages, was Ben casually remarking to me that he showed his friends my profile. It took a little time to dawn on me - long after we'd hung up - but hello, it's all out there for anyone to see, Aimee in all her (figuratively) naked glory, happy fat girl, the big old F-A-T word in solid print, full body pics that don't hide a thing, cold hard digits right there - 5'8", 275, (and yep, I wrote them here too, and I never do that, because I fear that people will look at me as some supposedly impossibly high number instead of Aimee, never be able to get it out of their heads, never look at me the same, but you know what? Fuck it. You people who love me will still love me - it's not like you never noticed I was fat before. Now you just get to stick a number on it if you so desire. Big freakin' deal.) - and Ben was happy to show his friends, to let them see pics and stats and to say, "hey, this is Aimee, check out how great she is." Hot damn. Any potential fears of being the girl who a guy wants "between the sheets, but not in the streets" (or however it goes) was nipped in the bud right then and there.)

So.

I think I may have hit the wall. I feel like I've got more to say, maybe, but the connectiveness is dissolving and my cohesiveness is fading, and you know what? It's 4:15 AM. I think my fire's sputtering out for tonight.

It's good to be back, folks.