“You’re a flasher,” says the pretty woman with the mouth made for kissing things that are already wet.

“A flasher?” I responded.

“Yes. A flasher. You let women in for fleeting moments — then you close up again. You’re an emotional flasher, vulnerable in moments, but essentially closed most of the time!”

In other words, she was suggesting that early in my romantic interactions I let women in — I lure them in with promises of being penetrable (pardon the dick pun). I lead these poor souls to believe that the kind of open I am in the beginning will remain. But it’s all a smokescreen for the wall they will hit in a few months, she points out. I don’t really give up the goods; I’m just good at making it seem like I do.

It took me more than a beat to swallow her accusation. I mean, I’m the most vulnerable person I know, I told myself. I let everybody in, right? I go on stage and share my most intimate, my most insecure parts with complete strangers. I give up the goods, in my work. And my work is the most vulnerable place I have, right? I threw these questions rapid-fire at myself and waited.

The silence echoed inside me. And I was forced to look — I mean really look — at my crap. And what I have discovered is astonishing. I am finally forced to admit that I have some issues that I have been ignoring.

I have built my entire emotional history on my inherent and constant vulnerability. I tell all who will listen that my exes left me. That I was all open and ready to do forever with them, and just like my mother and my father and my brother and my grandmother, they left me! Never mind that my brother was 11 and that he was sent elsewhere by my emotionally unstable mother; never mind that my grandmother was too old to care for me or that she died because she was almost a century old. I felt left.

So I was going to spend the rest of my life playing the constant victim, never to take responsibility for anything that happened to me. Good or bad. If it was good, I was just lucky. If it was bad, then I’m targeted. This had become a familiar groove. It made sense. It has given me ready-made scapegoats, people to blame for everything.

It is October, 2008. The dreaded fall is here and I have been single for exactly one year and some. I am almost healed from my break-up last fall and I am dating, and trying to take all matters of love and relationship and commitment slowly. That means I have to look at what is happening. I have to pay attention and make decisions that I intend to take responsibility for, regardless of where the proverbial chips fall. I am noting my patterns. I am seeing how good I am at being present in body but absent in every other way. If shit is askew, I will stay. If she is beating me, my body stays. If she is cheating, my body stays. If she is absolutely NOT the person I should be dating/fucking/eating her pussy — no matter, the body I live in stays put.

And that staying makes me seem very vulnerable, like I am without power to onlookers. But something odd happens to the rest of me; my mind goes somewhere else, my heart picks up its skirt and scuttles away to a place where it can’t be reached. My deepest, softest parts peel themselves away from her and disappear inside me. Seasons pass and my emotional absence gnaws brutal at my isolated lover. Summer ends. The chips begin to fall. And, before we know it, August is done. As the winds arrive and the leaves turn, the already lifeless carcass of my cherished relationship sputters to a predictable end.

And I should pause here to tell you that I usually lose my lover in the fall, somewhere around September or October. One or two have stayed till November; but somehow, my relationships have figured out the time of year to most disastrously end. And I give my best victim performance in the fall. I brood, ache, wear the injustice so tragically well that people begin to hate my ex for leaving me.

And I suffer all through the winter — calling her names and writing passive-aggressive poems about the scent of her cunt, how the memory of her reduces me to ashes, how death is but a cruel temptation in the absence of her skin. I use the stage to vent, to be open and vulnerable, all the while ignoring that the end was a godsend, brought about by events. For I am as culpable as the poor girl who only left to save herself from the cold, lonely winter ahead.

So yes, I’m a flasher, an emotional flasher, a tease — a woman who leads poor, defenseless lesbians to think they can easily enter my soft, wet parts when, in actuality, my real insides are harder to get to than those who, at first glance, seem closed. Hmm. What do I do with that? Can you teach an old dyke new tricks? I dunno. I know that all this is food for thought, for growth, for therapy, for the list of things I have to figure out before (or while) I knock at the heart of the next woman with whom I will fall in love.