u/IWasMadeToRise

I live in a small town where a sweet old man planted a ton of fruit trees as a gift to the community before he died. There are several kinds of cherries, but none of them produced fruit this year. I was so bummed to miss my beloved sour cherries!

They did blossom. I don’t think it was a late freeze. We had an unsettlingly mild winter, and I don’t remember one. The only wind storm happened long after they blossomed. Could our snowless global warming winter have something to do with it?

Hi gals!

I saw this book described as a queer book a few times, and yes, she alludes to lesbian relationships is the past and her child in nonbinary, but I’m almost halfway in, and the *plot* is straight SF. All she’s done so far is pine for a man and rhapsodize about the dimensions of his unit.

Given that I don’t find her especially likeable, I’m having doubts about whether I want to spend six more hours of my life on this.

I just ended an abusive straight marriage that made me realize I’m a much bigger lez than I gave myself credit for. I have zero tolerance for centering mediocre men left. That’s what work is for!

I saw this book described as a queer book a few times, and yes, she alludes to lesbian relationships is the past and her child in nonbinary, but I’m almost halfway in, and the plot is straight SF. All she’s done so far is pine for a man and rhapsodize about the dimensions of his unit. Given that I don’t find her especially likeable, I’m having doubts about whether I want to spend six more hours of my life on this.

I just ended an abusive straight marriage that made me realize I’m a much bigger lez than I gave myself credit for. I have zero tolerance for centering mediocre men left. That’s what work is for!

**Edit** I just checked this and my post has exactly, ahem, sixty-nine comments at the moment. Thanks for all the great suggestions, fun banter and reminiscing about the E-room!

Hi!

I’ve escaped from Trumpland for a week and would like to be amongst my people. I haven’t lived here for 13 years, so my list is a *teeny bit* outdated. Are there any cafes or bars for ladies of a certain persuasion these days?

Even I know about Sports Bra, but I am hopelessly clueless about sportsball. And yes, I know the whole city’s kind of a lesbian hangout, but I need *concentrations*! Thanks in advance!

I’ve always identified as bi, but ended up mostly with men, partly due to plain old statistical probability. Rural Trumplandia is not super conducive to getting one’s gay on.

My first husband was a truly wonderful, beautiful human, but he up and died at 42. I was wistful for women, but being with him felt like a happy choice, not a compromise.

I eventually remarried, to someone who turned out to be the scary, cruel, dangerous opposite of the person I thought I married. Even when things were still pretty good, I felt a longing for women that was much harder to ignore. Then it turned into a profoundly damaging nightmare.

Now, I am doing my damnedest to get free of him and re-re-build my life. I’m not ready to date anyone, but when I think about even theoretically dating a man now, I have a visceral physical reaction. An unpleasant one. Yes, it’s certainly partly a reaction to being thoroughly traumatized, but that’s not the whole of it.

I’m not interested in women just as a way to fill the vacuum left by the absence of men. It’s not just that I can’t fucking deal with dudes right now. I think it just broke the part of my brain that thought they were worth any amount of trouble and cared about whatever value and meaning they supposedly confer upon my existence or gave a rusty fuck what they think.

Or alternatively, it fixed the part of my brain that hadn’t seriously entertained the possibility that I could be every bit as happy, or *more* happy with women if I actively embraced that part of my identity instead of just allowing it to tag along like an unobtrusive phantom limb.

No one would ever accuse me of being a conformist, even at my (dubiously) straightest. Maybe it really did just take life absolutely breaking me the fuck down twice to make me truly believe radical authenticity is a reward, in and of itself and that no question about untapped potential for happiness should go unanswered.

Few people who know my story would really blame me for being reluctant to upend the *very* fragile stasis I have achieved or tear down the identity I’ve reconstructed after clawing my way back from absolute devastation twice, but maybe thats what in going to have to do, because Jesus Fuck, the “phantom limb” is all I can think about now.

This idea is taking up a lot of space in my brain right now. Like, a lot.
I can’t help it. Sometimes the writing in spicy books is so bad that it distracts me from the … task at hand. It doesn’t need to be great literature, but it would be fantastic to find books with this theme that won’t have me wondering what drugs the editor was on!