Imagine wanting what you already have.”

Her words stop me cold, freeze my deep and purposeful breathing.

“What,” I think, “did that crazy hippie lady just say?”

I try to resume the assigned task, mindfully inhaling the chilled air of the fitness center and balancing my sharp sitz bones on a borrowed blue cushion. I will my swirling mind to settle softly like a leaf to the ground. But Mary Love continues to hijack my piss-poor attempts at being in the now.

We were waitresses, all of us, with different stash spots for tips. Mine was a tattered old envelope in my underwear drawer. I kept the amount written on the front, scratched out and rewritten over and over, to keep myself in the know and to protect from unlikely thievery.

When we were engaged to be married, back in the halcyon days of early 2001, my husband and I participated in an elaborate mating ritual that has taken hold deep within American culture. We registered for gifts. Daily cutlery, heavy silver forks, All-Clad pots in several different sizes, formal china for all those state dinners we would be serving, gravy boats, nesting mixing bowls and a much-longed-for salad spinner that retailed for $25.99. Among this orgy of conspicuous consumption was a set of everyday dinnerware from Villeroy and Boch.

workings of serendipity. My friend Ruthann, 90 years old, had a big grin on her face when she told me how she met her husband. She taught at a junior high school and parked in the same parking garage every day for nearly 20 years when she finally struck up a conversation with Norton, who had been teaching and parking there for just as long. They were both 40 years old. Once married, they had a sunny 30-plus years together, just the two of them in a sprawling white house in the hills, until he collapsed one day while picking raspberries.

Their meeting can’t be characterized as a near-miss. I picture Cupid yawning lazily near the parking garage entrance, or napping once in a while in a green lawn chair next to the elevators, his cache of arrows spilling across his lap while he snoozes, waiting for the perfect week, the perfect year to bring Ruthann and Norton together. Maybe spring, he must have thought to himself, they’ll finish grading papers and have the summer together with picnic baskets and rowboats, if Norton doesn’t get cold feet. No, better to take up the bow and let the arrow fly in winter, when snowy nights bring a longing for firelight and quilts and the pleasure of cold hands made warm by another’s touch.

e hadn’t even made it down the aisle before the marital drama began. “This is the worst place I have ever stayed,” sobbed my mother-in-law as she checked into the hotel I had chosen for her—and for our other 90 wedding guests. Considering that she had grown up in the slums of Mumbai, this was a pretty harsh statement. On top of the hotel fiasco, the plane ride had been stressful, the morning coffee served cold, the drive to the wedding location too long... and clearly I was to blame. She brought me, the mild, no-drama bride, to tears. I was completely freaked out, wondering what kind of family I was marrying into. Did they expect a subservient daughter-in-law who would bend to their every whim? Was this going to be the reality of my cross-cultural marriage? This was not how I had imagined it.

never took our dog for the cheating kind. After all, he’s a Labrador retriever—the model of canine loyalty. And if I do say so, he’s a mighty fine example of the breed. He comes when called, sits on command and fetches anything you could ask for, including the morning paper and cans of dog food. With a broad blocky head, he looks like we ordered him straight out an L.L. Bean catalogue. In reality it was the newspaper. We brought our handsome ball of fur home during our first year of marriage and he quickly became our “child.” But three years later, when we moved to a sleepy mountain town—where the streets are like sidewalks and the dogs roam free—our dog began leading a double life.

Upon moving in, we considered installing an invisible fence like some of our more responsible neighbors. Instead, we settled for a collar with his name and our phone number on it. While it may have seemed imprudent to let him roam free in the neighborhood, every time we pulled into the driveway he was anxiously awaiting our return. We boasted about his steadfast devotion. “He’s just not the wandering type,” we’d say.

After eight years of dating women (and two trans men), I’ve started going out again with what queer women like myself refer to as “bio boys”—people who are biologically born with male bodies they enjoy having. These people are known in the rest of the world by the common term “men.”

Things were relatively uneventful with my Chinese American bio boy, Steven, until we started having communication conflicts a few months into our relationship. Each conversation had me asking, “How do you feel about that?” and “What do you think about what I just said?” Naturally, I turned to my women friends for support. I expected we would do what we had done before, when I was dating women and trans men: drink smoothies and debate my lover’s motives, analyzing childhood-inspired neuroses and making plans of what I would do to make the relationship work.

high school began to feel as musty and claustrophobic as an old broom closet. I wasn’t the type to cut classes intentionally, so I signed on for a community work/study program which allowed me to leave the campus most afternoons by lunchtime to help teach at a local elementary school. But every other aspect of the school routine was boring or frustrating, even my boyfriend was beginning to drive me up the wall. I was sick of climbing into his secondhand brown station wagon, despite his willingness to drive me anywhere I cared to go. I was tired of his Pall Malls, his grimy basketball jacket, his dumb jokes and the way he guffawed after reciting them for the third or fourth time. I was sick of the corner coffee shop where my girlfriends and I met to share hot fudge ice cream cake. Each week I felt more miserable and disconnected from geometry homework, blue gym suits, football games I no longer bothered to attend and gossip. The only class I still liked was Drama, presided over by a gaunt, unkempt teacher, Mr. Wilder, who bore a passing resemblance to Ichabod Crane.

ake photographs of a dead child? No way. To me, it was creepy, exploitative and completely out of the question. I could not stop envisioning scenes typical of forensic crime lab dramas. Gray-hued cadavers placed on shiny tables in a windowless, disinfected room.

I was already a hormonal mess, sleep-deprived and completely traumatized by what was about to happen. First of all, this is not at all how I had foreseen my first childbirth experience. I was supposed to be at least eight months along with a lost mucous plug or ruptured membranes. I was supposed to be fat with rosy cheeks (like Mrs. Claus, only with anxiety and contractions).

My husband and I had never been parents before, and now we were about to meet a child we’d never change, feed or soothe. Our pastor told us that our pain was that of mourning our dashed hopes and anticipated joys. I just wanted this stillbirth nightmare to be over so I could go home and scream at the top of my lungs and pack away the crib and blankets. I wanted to hide in my bedroom and reflect upon why I was not meant to be a mother. I even felt like a disappointment to the labor and delivery staff in that I could not produce what so many thousands before me had.

was having my hair done when my townhouse was broken into. And trust me, “I was touching up my highlights” isn’t the answer you want to give when an officer asks where you’ve been because, hey, did you notice the three police cars in your driveway? And that all the lights in your house are on? What about your front door being wide open? You guessed it—all your most important material belongings in the world have been swiped.

On top of the fear I immediately felt, I was embarrassed to admit that while my home was getting ransacked, I was being coiffed and primped, coddled and complimented by my hairstylist whose job was 90 percent cutting my hair and 10 percent maintaining my ego. (When you’re a 30-something, single girl in Dallas, searching for a man who likes his women au naturel—with crow’s feet and without silicone—that 10 percent of an ego boost is not just nice, but necessary.)

“I really do hold to a personal belief that sex is something special to be shared only with someone who is truly a soul mate...and, let’s just say that at this point in my life I still haven’t found that ‘special someone.’” TM, 41, from my blog.

I, too, was a late bloomer sex-wise. Growing up, I had bought into the whole magical/true love/special someone scenario which, for me, translated into losing my virginity to a handsome, med school-bound boyfriend. He failed to materialize, and by the time I was 23, I was tired of waiting.

So I said screw it, and had sex with a guy I had gone out with all of three times who made some smooth moves on me one night in his basement apartment. So what if it was awkward and we never saw each other again? I was no longer a virgin and I was thrilled. Much to my surprise, though, I felt totally unchanged by the experience. I didn’t even bleed—my hymen was as blasé as the rest of me. I had saved my “precious gift” for this?

Elementary school projects never seemed to go my way. I was an eager child, an attribute that seldom made up for the fact that I often failed to think things through. For example, there was the science project where I tried to demonstrate how light affects spore growth by setting out two slices of bread on my desk and another two slices in my desk drawer. Result: a lot of dried-up bread. Turning in two weeks’ worth of pictures that documented the bread getting crumblier and increasingly more pathetic-looking was the most humiliating part of that ordeal.

Then there was the time that we all took home one of the butterflies we had raised in class because there were still several weeks of Alaskan winter to go before we could release them outside. I was unprepared for the responsibility of caring for something more complicated than a Tamagotchi, and the way the butterfly clung helplessly to my bedroom window and fluttered around my room all night freaked me out so much that I threw it away in the bathroom trash can, burying it alive under a heap of crumpled tissues. I still feel guilty about it.

a musician. I’ve been playing music for years but was always painfully aware of my inadequacies. I felt like the orangutan I’d seen in a video, going through the motions of washing clothes after seeing the humans do it. I’d memorize the chords, harmonies, and occasional runs taught to me through endless repetition. But I could see that the musicians around me were experiencing the same moments differently.

It’s been a frustrating experience, much as I imagine it must be for someone who is not so bright to see sharp people making quick calculations, or someone who struggles with language to hear others extemporize freely. I envied those who seemed so natural while playing and so focused while listening. I thought of their abilities as a natural gift that would always elude me.

I walked tonight after dark, flashlight in hand, along the public path which spans over three long blocks near my house. I was desperate for quiet after trying to ignore my back neighbors’ loud party for several hours—30 revelers had spilled out onto an upper deck with drinks in hand, filling the air with laughter and yelling until I felt I had to go elsewhere or self-combust.

The sleepy canal next to the path was invisible behind a canopy of trees, the resident geese and feral cats a comforting, silent presence in the depths of a chill winter evening. Overhead, the moon looked like a fat golden coin peeking out from an envelope of clouds. I felt suddenly grateful to the neighbors who’d given me an excuse to be out and about on this enchanted night.