Gina

Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact
But maybe everything that dies someday comes back
Put your make-up on, put your hair up pretty
And meet me tonight in Atlantic City

Well, I think I’ve hit on my break-up song. For many different reasons.

Apropos of the song: Dating A. was really the first time, EVER, that I’d had a serious, steady lover who grew up working-class in so many of the same ways I did. So much of our initial bonding was about class and family and culture. And, I mean, class is complicated, right? My family’s class status shifted upwards when I was a teenager, for one, and I wanna be real about that. And it’s not like I’d never dated another broke person before, and a lot of my & A.’s experiences were different too, as I grew up in San Francisco and he grew up in rural Oklahoma.

But we bonded so hard over our class rage, over our families, over both being children of working-class hippies who were the black sheep iconoclasts of their poor families. We bonded so hard over how both of us, again and again, managed to always make something beautiful out of nothing.

I am going to miss a lot about him, but fuck, that is one of the hugest things. It was so instrumental for me. It changed me, for the better, having a lover I could talk to like that. I have never had that kind of connection with someone before, and I’m feeling the ache of that loss so badly today.