Sixth chapter for book 3 in my vintage diary series. 

Monday 30 May, 1997 

I don’t really know what to do with myself! Or even what my emotions are. I feel overwhelmed, relieved, in disbelief that it took so long, and also a nagging worry that “What if I m wrong? What if it doesn’t work?”

But I think it will.
Because I can’t remember ever feeling like this. It’s like I have ants on my insides!

Last weekend Bear came over and we had such a great time. It was one hundred percent like old times. We talked about how we met, and where he  had lived, and where I had lived, and the quirks of those buildings, housemates and going out and the bars we both knew.
How life really was, one big party, in many, many ways.

Maybe our lives would have changed and our dates would have toned down, regardless. I mean regardless if Bear would have chosen his now girlfriend over me (or is he rethinking it? I wonder if he is on the verge of moving out..)
With all the lightheartedness and banter, when we thought of all the crazy shit that happened in our college years, I really felt something coming back to life within me that has been dead or at least knocked out since 1994.
Something I lost in my internship, or writing my thesis, or I lost it because Bear and me didn’t live together in the same city anymore.
We were both abroad.
Sometimes I still think the separation of our internships was what broke us, but either way, water under the bridge.

What I mean is that I felt something coming back to life that was more than just him and me. More than the inevitable joy and value that came from being his lover all those years, more than that bit of me that he was always holding in the palm of his hand.

I felt the joy, banter and lightheartedness that had been mine to keep, forever, and that I had lost.

Our sex was simple and satisfying.
I hadn’t been sure if I wanted sex, but got in the mood when we were talking about the past, and we watched a VHS of Jim Rose Circus Sideshow, that I had bought a good while back.
A sentimental purchase, too. Because we had attended the show in Amsterdam. So when I saw it at the record store, at one of the moments when I had felt particularly disheartened by feeling sidelined by Bear all the time;
I bought this VHS.

The irony of me buying a VHS with “sideshow” in the title, and filled with painful hard to watch moments, to overcome being painfully sidelined by Bear, was not lost on me. Unfortunately. Maybe that’s why I never actually watched it. But we did now, and because we were together and it sparked some great memories, it no longer held that sting for me.

When he left, I felt unburdened. Carefree. And on Sunday, there was no backlash either. So it wasn’t just the date itself that had the vibe of uncomplicated times, but it had stuck. I was spared from the backlashes as well.

So I already had a great weekend, but I was up for a breakthrough and ants crawling on the inside, apparently! Today.
Via Nikki’s letter.

Nikki sent me a funny, five page letter, with enough sexual innuendo to make a nice dessert to Saturday’s sex. He didn’t include a Bon Jovi bootleg for me to review for the fan club, which I didn’t regret because I am behind as it is. Maybe he knew that. But he gifted me an original copy of Madonna’s Girlie Show, Live Down Under.
He knew I had liked her a lot in her Bed with Madonna years, and even more  so in the Erotica Sex years.
Those were the best! 

But it all seemed a long time ago, and although Bedtime Stories was more than palpable, I dropped out when she took on the role of Evita.
It reminded me too much of her Live to Tell cleanup in the 80s.
Choosing 50s clothing and feminine hairdos when you could be rolling around on stage in your garter belt, was as lame to me now as it was then.

The Girlie Show was a really small tour, I remember that. Jim Rose Circus Sideshow probably saw more people in 1993 than Madonna’s Girlie Show, but if she had toured The Netherlands, I would have been hellbent to go! 
Typical, that when the world speaks badly of her, and perhaps because of that, she only does this tiny tour, it is exactly the time I would have love to come.

So it wasn’t that I didn’t know The Girlie Show, it’s just that with her “retreating” to soft curls, bedtime stories and the whole Evita saga, I had not hunted that tour video down or something.
My interest in her had faded.

Until Nikki sent me this VHS, and I watched it, and it was like I found that joyful part of me, the girlie part of me. The part that had been mine to keep and that I somewhere along the road started tying to Bear either being there, or not being there.
And I found my sense of body too. The body I had when I was a teen, and that started getting heavier with age, with quitting smoking, with desk hours , and with coming to terms being Bear’s sideshow.

I have had multiple times when I knew I was going to lose the pounds, and failed. So that’s the part of me that is in disbelief right now. It feels dangerous to have faith in something I have failed at so often.

But I know this feeling inside of me.
And seeing Madonna’s lean body was like a reminder that was my body. That body, the performer body. Not this body, the sedentary one.
It was a reminder that if I wanted my old life back, my laughter, my confidence, the way to go about that was not by changing Bear, but by changing me.

The way out was to stop being a sideshow, and owning who I was.
The fucking main act.

.
~Lauren97

Showtime | 1997 diary
is the sixth chapter of book 3, diary 1997