Loose Ties

Eight months and eleven days ago, I walked out on my life. I've alluded to it here in various posts, but I bet sometimes those of you who don't know me personally are a little confused. It's understandable. It's a confusing situation, and I've hesitated to write about it I guess because I just don't know how. No part of the story makes me look like a good person, and maybe I just wanted to keep up the illusion that I'm just a lighthearted, sarcastic soul who moved to Portland and fell in love with a chick with a kid. That's all true, mostly, but there's just more to the story.

Nine years and ten days ago, I moved to Los Angeles. I moved in with my friend Lise (pronounced "Leeza"), and started to make the efforts to put my NYU film school degree to good use. In the beginning, that meant a super fancy position at Blockbuster. Then a temp position doing customer surveys at Universal Studios (read: riding the rides all day, and getting paid for it). Then I finally broke into "the biz" with a job on a BMW film directed by Tony Scott, which shot in both Los Angeles and Las Vegas. I got this job because my uncle had met an assistant director. Every single job in Hollywood that I got after that one came as a result of this first job, which means that my degree was literally useless. I could have saved all that money and just waited for my uncle to meet that A.D.

I did that job, then spent a couple of months on the Tom Cruise film The Last Samurai, and then spent basically the next year unemployed, save for a two-week stint on Hollywood Homicide. But at the end of that year (2003), I got the job that would change my life forever. Sounds dramatic, but it's true.

At the end of November, a transportation guy I had worked with on The Last Samurai called and told me that the costume department on Lemony Snicket was looking for a new production assistant. I got the job, and started right after Thanksgiving.

The job was supposed to last until March. I stayed on until June. But before I finished up that job, I had myself my very first girlfriend.

Christine was the assistant costume designer on the film. She was incredibly talented and very funny. We fell into a relationship without meaning to; she hadn't been gay before me (or at least didn't know it), and I hadn't intended to woo her and get her to join my team. It just happened.



I'm going to fast forward through the next six years. The highlights: Christine and I were in love, we moved in together, we adopted a dog (Jack, the best dog on the planet), we became Dodgers fans, we went to Chicago and Puerto Rico for movie shoots, we fell in love with a town named Marfa, Texas. We lived. And it was mostly good.

I'm not going to give the impression that I was unhappy for those six years. I wasn't. For the most part, things were really great. Christine was (and is) amazing, and I am so incredibly lucky to have known her. But things were never quite right for me, and I couldn't put my finger on it. But instead of being a big girl and admitting that things weren't right, I stayed.

In February 2010, Christine went to Venice (Italy) to shoot a movie called The Tourist. My sister had just had a baby, so I headed to Denver to stay with her for a couple of months. On April 10, I flew to Venice. But before that, on April 5, I got an email from an old elementary school friend named Katie.

She wrote, "Want to go half on a Facebook friendship?"

I took two days to respond, because I was busy getting ready to go to Europe, and because I could not, for the life of me, remember this girl. I called my mother and asked her to confirm that there had, in fact, been someone named Katie in my third grade class at Edwards Air Force Base. And then I racked my brain to come up with a memory. And failed miserably. To this day, I have only two shadows of memories that in any way involve Katie: eating okra at her house, and writing a song with her and a mutual friend named Natalie (whom I do remember; I didn't actually know that Katie was part of this song writing experience until she beat me over the head with the information).

When I did write Katie back, I asked her to provide me with something to jog my memory. And then I went to Europe.

Venice was, simply put, amazing. I am so in love with that city, and I would go live there right now if it were feasible. I had never officially been to Europe before (aside from living in England when I was a toddler), and Venice was the perfect place to go first. It's beautiful, and it has an energy that is both exhilarating and laid-back. It is so easy to get lost while walking around, and I actually found no greater joy than in standing in a piazza and realizing that I had been walking the wrong direction for the previous ten minutes. I had a map, and I marked every path I walked, so that eventually I could verify that I had seen most of Venice on my own while Christine worked. We ate well, we had fun with friends, we took weekend trips to Rome and Sting's Tuscan villa (yes, I stayed the weekend at Sting's house, but I can't give you any more details than that), and we enjoyed the fact that we were in fucking Italy, for god's sake.

Meanwhile, I was very quickly falling in love with Katie.

It shouldn't have happened that way. If I were really enjoying life with Christine in Italy, if I had really been happy with my relationship, I wouldn't have fallen in love with someone else. That's what you're thinking. And you're not entirely wrong. I remember having a blast in Italy, but there was still always that little something under the surface.

Katie and I just kept emailing. And it was so easy. There was nothing awkward or weird or hesitant in anything we wrote. We just started writing, and never really stopped. The emails were long and personal; if you think this post is long, you should see our emails. It didn't take long to get to know one another via that medium, and then we moved on to Skype chat, both with and without video.

I don't know who first pointed out that things had crossed a line. It just sort of happened one day, and we realized what we were feeling was more than just friendship. But that's crazy. We hadn't seen each other in at least 20 years, and one of us didn't even remember the other. How could we be in love?

But we were. And it was pretty much agony, since neither of us knew what the hell we were going to do. I left Venice on May 22, headed for Capri, Berlin, Paris, then back to the States. And all the while, I knew that I was in love with someone else. I hesitate to say it was torture for me, because I'm certainly not the victim here, but it was still hell.

The shit hit the fan in Berlin. My memory fails me on this one, since I don't know how it all happened, but I do know that Christine found out about the nature of my relationship with Katie. And it was not good. We still had about two more weeks left in Europe together at this point, and we had no idea what was going to happen to our relationship.

It's all a whirlwind from there. I hemmed and hawed, I made promises I obviously didn't keep, and we got back to the States with things still up in the air. We had to go back to Denver to get Christine's car, then I went to Idaho and Christine went to Texas. We came back, and spent two days in the car together on the drive back to Los Angeles. Then I spent another week in my soon-to-be former apartment, treating Christine like shit and generally just acting like none of this mattered to me anymore.

And it's not like I had Katie waiting in the wings. She didn't know what the hell she was doing either, and I honestly didn't believe that she would ever be able to leave her husband, simply because of what it would do to Merritt. I told her time and again, with selfish motives, that it did Merritt no good for his mother to lie about who she was. But this was difficult, and I couldn't expect Katie to just pack up and leave her life.

I spent my 30th birthday in that apartment. Christine even got me a cake. It was pre-made, from the grocery store. She found one with a soccer ball and net, and had gotten the person at the store to write "Looking for a goal" on it. Just like that. No punctuation. That about summed it up, I guess.

The morning after my birthday, I woke up at 5:30 am, took a shower, packed the rest of the stuff in my car, and then prepared to leave. I'm not going to share with you what Christine said to me as I said goodbye, mostly because I can't even think about it without breaking down. But at the time, I couldn't have been more callous. I said goodbye to Jack like I was just going to run an errand, and I walked out.

I spent two days driving up to Portland, with the intention of stopping there and then continuing on to either Seattle (where my parents live) or Idaho (where my grandparents and other family members live). I didn't know what I could expect of Katie, or even what I wanted from her, but I knew that I had to at least see her. What if we didn't have chemistry in real life? What if we saw each other and realized that this had just been some weird internet thing? What if I had made the biggest decision of my life for nothing?

I showed up at Katie's house on the afternoon of July 1, 2010. She opened the door, and I knew that hers was the only face I wanted to see for the rest of my life. Then she hugged me, and that was it.

I cry more now. Often, actually. Not every day, and not in an "I'm secretly a manic depressive on a depressive swing" way. But I certainly cry more now than I ever did in the 30 years I had lived prior to eight months ago. How could I not? I will likely never see Christine again, and I'll be lucky if I even get to talk to her. I will definitely never see my dog again. I had a huge, full life, and I will never know any of it again. Most of my friends were Christine's first, and it's not shocking that they chose her side in this. Things could not be more different for me today than they were on March 11, 2010, when I was in Denver loving on my nephew and completely unaware of Katie's existence on this planet.

None of this is meant to imply that I regret my choice. I believe I made the right decision, but that I went about it in entirely the wrong way. I like where I am now, warts and all, but I'm incredibly ashamed of the way I behaved, and it is impossible to explain how I feel every time I think of what I did to Christine. And I shouldn't even really have the right to be this upset. I'm the one who left; she is entitled to be angry and devastated, not me. But I can't help it. I never knew I was capable of doing what I did, and it's not easy to realize that you can be so heartless to someone who meant the world to you. It's not fun to try to figure out what that means about you as a person, or what you're supposed to do to make amends.

In short, if I believed in heaven, I would be convinced that if I died today, I'm not getting in.

And I don't really know when I'll get over all of this, if I ever really will.

If I may quote a mediocre band (that I secretly love), "I've got a hole in me now. I've got a scar I can talk about."

It's not Oprah, but this is a pretty public space in which to tell one's biggest and most personal story.

So, Meredith Baxter and I sort of have something in common. And not just that we were both famous '80s T.V. moms. We both bared our souls in a public setting. Baxter came on Oprah to talk about her new book and divulge secrets of her final marriage to a man, and I wrote a gigantic blog post about my history as an adulterer and an all-around terrible person.

I guess Katie is a true kindred spirit of Baxter's in this case, since they both realized late in life that they were gay, but whatever. This is my blog. Katie can write about her Sapphic bond with Elyse Keaton on her own time.


Next: guess who spent this week of repeats watching two full discs of the 20th Anniversary Collection?