Played Like a Fucking Fiddle

My weeks are long and hard. Or, as my wife likes to say, “Perfect for a Sunday morning.”

Yeah, that's the kind of relationship we have. And frankly, I wouldn't have it any other fucking way.

Look, I love parts of my job. There's no doubt about that. I love leading people, solving problems, making decisions, and occasionally making somebody's life a little better because I was there to help. There's something satisfying about doing work that matters, and I take my responsibilities seriously. But I also have a duty to my future wife to make sure we're financially secure, and that's not something I'm willing to compromise.

There are two traditionally male duties that I hold sacred in our relationship: providing and protection. Yeah, I know, I'm a transgender  iwoman talking about traditionally male responsibilities. Get the fuck over it. I don't particularly care which gender society decided was supposed to do what. Those are responsibilities I've chosen to embrace, and they matter to me. I want Dawna to feel safe, secure, and loved. I want her to know that I'm going to do everything in my power to take care of her, just as she takes care of me.

And so, every weekday, I wake up at the ass-crack of fucking dawn, get myself ready, and hit the road before the sun has even bothered to wake up. I'm sure the sound of a Harley-Davidson firing up in the predawn darkness probably pisses off a few of my neighbors, but in the immortal words of my late Uncle Shifty, “Fuck 'em.”

He wasn't wrong. He might not have been right, but he certainly wasn't wrong.

Most days, I'm out the door by six in the morning and don't make it home until somewhere around six in the evening. Twelve hours of work, commuting, responsibilities, and whatever other bullshit the day decides to throw at me. By the time I finally walk through the door, I'm usually pretty fucking exhausted, and I'm sure I'm not always the most entertaining person to be around.

But Dawna hangs in there like a goddamned trooper. She makes the best of the little bit of time we get together during the week, even when I'm tired, distracted, or still mentally wrestling with something that happened at work six hours earlier. She listens, she laughs, she puts up with my bullshit, and somehow she still seems happy to see me when I come home.

And for the fucking record, the worst part of my day is leaving her.

I tell her that all the time, usually with a little smile, as though I'm only half serious. But deep down, I'm not fucking joking. I hate leaving her side. I want to hold her, snuggle with her, talk to her, laugh with her, and just exist in the same room with her. I want to be with my fucking wife.

Yeah, okay, she's not technically my wife yet.

But she is.

The paperwork will catch up eventually.

If you've been reading this blog for any length of time, you've probably heard me talk about learning how to be in a relationship. Learning how to share my life with somebody else. Learning how to compromise, how to make room for another person's needs, and how to recognize that the world doesn't revolve around whatever the fuck happens to be going on inside my head at any particular moment.

It's been a learning experience, to say the least.

I've been alone for so fucking long that sometimes I genuinely don't know how to be with another person. I'm accustomed to making my own decisions, following my own schedule, doing whatever the hell I want, and not having to consider how any of that affects somebody else. When you've lived that way for years, learning to share your life doesn't happen overnight.

But I try. I honestly fucking do.

Because I want to be with Dawna. All the damned time. Probably to the point where it annoys the living shit out of her.

And as it turns out, she has developed a rather ingenious solution to that particular problem.

She sends me to the fucking store.

This past weekend, Dawna was working her way through boxes and boxes of belongings we'd brought down from Colorado. We're still trying to squeeze two households into one, which sounds relatively straightforward until you actually attempt it. Then you discover that two people who have each spent years accumulating their own shit have an astonishing amount of shit between them.

And all that shit has to go somewhere.

Some of it belongs in the house. Some belongs in the garage. Some needs to be organized, some needs to be stored, and some probably needs to be thrown directly into the nearest fucking dumpster. But deciding which category something belongs in requires thought, concentration, and occasionally a willingness to confront the emotional significance of an object you haven't looked at in fifteen years.

It's not exactly a task you can rush.

And unfortunately, I'm not much help.

Not because I'm unwilling. I ask Dawna all the time if there's something I can do. I genuinely want to help her. I want to make the process easier, take some of the burden off her shoulders, and contribute something other than standing around looking confused while she tries to figure out where the hell we're going to put another box of things neither of us has touched in years.

But the reality is that this particular job requires concentration, patience, thoughtful decisions, and probably a healthy dose of peace and fucking quiet.

Yeah, I'm not conducive to any of those.

And I fucking know it.

I'm the woman who walks into a room, starts talking about something completely unrelated to whatever you're doing, asks three questions, gets distracted by something shiny, and then wonders why you haven't made any progress.

I'm not trying to be disruptive. I'm just really fucking good at it.

So yesterday, while Dawna was trying to make some progress on the boxes, she started finding little errands for me to run.

And you know what? I was happy to oblige.

Because I have motorcycles.

And motorcycles make even the most mundane errands considerably more interesting.

At some point, Dawna decided we needed a lower-wattage light bulb for the living room. Apparently, the existing one was too bright, and she wanted something a little softer. Fair enough. I'm perfectly capable of purchasing a light bulb, and if that's what my future wife needs, then by God, that's what she's going to get.

One light bulb.

Not two. Not a package of four. Just one.

Because apparently, light bulbs don't store well long-term.

Now, I don't know whether that's actually true, but I'm not about to argue the finer points of light bulb shelf life with a woman who's already spent half the day sorting through boxes of our accumulated possessions. She wants one light bulb, she's getting one fucking light bulb.

And since I needed to go to the store, I might as well take Nyx.

For those of you who haven't been keeping track, Nyx is my Harley-Davidson Road Glide. She's a magnificent machine, built for covering miles, and she makes even a quick trip across Santa Fe feel like something worth doing. So I fired her up, cranked the tunes, and headed out to get that light bulb.

Of course, I didn't take the most direct route.

That would be fucking ridiculous.

I mean, what's the point of owning a motorcycle if you're going to ride directly to your destination, accomplish your task, and return home like some sort of responsible adult?

No, I decided to take a little ride.

A little wind therapy.

And by little, I mean the sort of ride where you suddenly realize you've been gone for an hour or two and haven't actually accomplished the thing you left the house to do.

Eventually, I made it to the store, bought my single fucking light bulb, and headed home. I walked through the door proudly displaying my purchase, feeling rather pleased with myself for having successfully completed my assigned mission.

Mission accomplished.

Except...

Fuck.

I forgot the goddamned cigarettes.

Now, a normal person might have sighed, grabbed the car keys, driven directly to the gas station, bought the cigarettes, and returned home in ten minutes.

But I'm not a normal person.

And I hadn't ridden Aurora in a while.

Aurora is my Harley-Davidson Breakout, and she's an entirely different animal from Nyx. Where Nyx is a comfortable, capable touring machine designed to eat up highway miles, Aurora is a stripped-down, gloriously obnoxious motorcycle that seems to exist for the sole purpose of reminding me how much fucking fun riding can be.

And holy fucking hell, I'd forgotten just how amazing she is.

Aurora doesn't particularly care about practicality. She doesn't give a shit about luggage capacity, passenger comfort, or whether the ride is going to be relaxing. She wants to run. She wants the throttle opened, the engine roaring, and the world disappearing behind her.

Her preferred in-town cruising speed seems to fall somewhere between a hundred and a buck twenty.

Which, theoretically, should make a trip to the gas station pretty fucking quick.

Nope.

Took me a couple of hours.

Because once I got on Aurora, the cigarettes became something of a secondary consideration.

I started doing loops through Santa Fe, letting the wind and the throttle take me wherever the fuck they wanted. I had my AirPods in, the music cranked, and I was singing at the top of my lungs while enjoying every glorious second of being back on that motorcycle.

There's something about riding that I don't think I'll ever be able to explain adequately to somebody who doesn't ride. It's not simply transportation. It's not even just recreation. It's the way the rest of the world seems to fall away when you're on two wheels, the engine is pulling hard, and your entire attention is focused on the machine beneath you and the road ahead.

It's freedom.

Pure, unadulterated, fucking freedom.

And after a week of long days, responsibilities, schedules, and the endless demands of being a reasonably functional adult, sometimes I need that freedom more than I realize.

So I rode.

And rode.

And rode some more.

Somewhere around an hour and forty-five minutes into what was supposed to be a quick trip for cigarettes, my phone pinged.

A text message.

From Dawna.

Fuck.

Now, my phone is mounted on my handlebars, so I could see that she'd messaged me. And given that I'd been gone considerably longer than any reasonable person would expect for a trip to the gas station, I had a pretty good idea what the message was going to say.

She was worried.

Of course she was.

Her future wife had disappeared on a motorcycle for nearly two hours after announcing that she was going to buy cigarettes. Given what happened to me on Cerrillos Road last October, I suppose that's the sort of thing that might make somebody a little fucking nervous.

And she had every right to be.

So I slowed down, checked the message, and decided to respond.

Now, as everybody knows, texting while riding a motorcycle is a spectacularly stupid idea. You've got two wheels, traffic, road conditions, and a whole collection of other things demanding your attention. Taking your hands and eyes away from that to type a message is asking for trouble.

So naturally, I came up with a much better solution.

I made a fucking video.

Yeah.

I know.

Apparently, in my mind, recording a video response while riding a motorcycle was somehow a more sensible option than typing a text message. I even slowed down a little more so Dawna could hear my voice over the wind noise.

Then I sent another one.

Because apparently one questionable decision wasn't quite enough for the afternoon.

Eventually, I did make it to the gas station, purchased the cigarettes, tucked them into my vest pockets, and headed home.

And when I walked through the door, there she was.

My beautiful Dawna.

Smiling at me.

Goddamnit, I'll never get tired of that.

I don't care how long we've been together or how many times I've walked through that door. Seeing her face light up when I come home is one of the greatest pleasures of my life. There's something about knowing somebody is genuinely happy that you've returned, that your presence makes their day a little better, that makes all the other bullshit in life seem considerably less important.

I handed her the cigarettes, gave her a kiss, and asked whether there was anything else I could do to help.

Not really.

In the time I'd been gone, she'd managed to get quite a bit accomplished. Boxes had been sorted, things had been organized, and progress had been made. I was happy for her, even if I hadn't contributed much beyond successfully purchasing tobacco products after an unnecessarily lengthy motorcycle excursion.

Somewhere in there, I decided I'd make dinner.

Which, of course, required another trip to the store.

Now, you might think Dawna would have been getting a little irritated by this point. After all, I'd already spent a good portion of the day riding around Santa Fe, taking an absurd amount of time to accomplish relatively simple tasks.

But strangely enough, she didn't seem particularly upset.

In fact, she seemed almost encouraging.

I figured she was just happy that I was going to take care of dinner. After spending the day dealing with boxes, I could certainly understand why she'd appreciate not having to worry about cooking, too.

So off I went again.

And eventually, I returned with everything I needed to make what I thought would be a pretty decent dinner.

Swordfish steaks, rice, and snap peas.

Now, I should probably mention that I'm not particularly good at cooking fish. I can manage plenty of things in the kitchen, but fish seems to be one of those culinary mysteries I haven't quite figured out.

I either cook it too long or not long enough, and apparently there's a relatively narrow window between those two outcomes where the fish is actually supposed to be fucking edible.

Naturally, I overshot it.

So we had overcooked swordfish, rice, and snap peas.

But we ate.

Nobody starved.

And as far as I'm concerned, that's a successful fucking dinner.

Later that evening, as I was getting ready to go to sleep, Dawna was on the phone with her mom. They were talking about something funny, and she showed me a text message they'd exchanged. I laughed, settled in, and opened Facebook while she continued her conversation.

And that's when I saw it.

A post from my beautiful future wife.

Now, I love reading Dawna's posts. She's funny, thoughtful, and has a way of looking at the world that I genuinely enjoy. Sometimes she'll write something that makes me laugh. Sometimes she'll say something that makes me stop and think. And sometimes she'll reveal something about our life together that makes me realize just how differently the two of us can experience the exact same fucking day.

This was one of those times.

In her post, she was talking about the challenges of combining two households. About the boxes, the decisions, the endless sorting, and the need to concentrate on what she was doing without being interrupted every thirty fucking seconds.

And then she explained how she'd managed to get some peace and quiet.

She'd been sending me on errands.

Meaningless errands.

Little tasks designed to get me out of the fucking house so she could actually accomplish something.

The light bulb.

The cigarettes.

The trips to the store.

All of it.

I stared at the screen for a moment.

And then I fucking laughed.

That magnificent woman had played me like a goddamned fiddle.

All day long, I'd been wandering around thinking I was being a helpful, attentive, considerate future wife. I'd been running errands, picking things up, offering assistance, and generally feeling pretty good about the fact that I was contributing to the household.

Meanwhile, Dawna had apparently been conducting a carefully orchestrated campaign to get my annoying ass out of her way.

And the best part?

It fucking worked.

She got hours of uninterrupted time to sort through boxes, make decisions, and accomplish the things she'd been trying to get done. I got hours of motorcycle riding, music, sunshine, and the sort of wind therapy that makes a long workweek feel a little less exhausting.

And we still had dinner together.

Overcooked swordfish notwithstanding.

Now, here's where I could turn this into some profound lesson about communication, relationships, and the importance of respecting one another's need for personal space. I could talk about how healthy couples learn to balance togetherness with independence, how compromise is essential, and how love sometimes means recognizing that the person you adore needs a little fucking breathing room.

And all of that would be true.

Because I know I can be a lot.

I know that after spending twelve hours a day away from Dawna all week, I want to make up for lost time when the weekend arrives. I want to be near her, talk to her, touch her, and spend every possible minute enjoying the fact that she's part of my life.

But she has things she needs to do.

And sometimes those things are easier to accomplish without a six-foot-one, motorcycle-riding pain in the ass hovering nearby asking whether there's anything she can do to help.

I understand that.

I'm learning.

And if I'm being perfectly fair, I think I knew exactly what was happening yesterday.

Maybe not consciously. Maybe I didn't recognize every little errand for what it was. But somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew Dawna needed time to herself to get things done, and I knew that getting out on my motorcycles was a pretty fucking enjoyable way to give it to her.

So yeah, she played me like a fiddle.

But deep down, I fucking let her.

Because that's part of this whole relationship thing I'm still figuring out.

Sometimes loving somebody means holding them close. Sometimes it means spending the entire evening snuggled up together, talking about nothing in particular and being perfectly content simply because you're in the same room.

And sometimes loving somebody means getting your annoying ass on a motorcycle and disappearing for a couple of hours so she can unpack the fucking boxes.

The trick, apparently, is learning to recognize which one she needs.

And if I occasionally need to be manipulated into doing the right thing with the promise of another motorcycle ride, well, I suppose there are worse ways to learn.

Besides, let's look at the results.

Dawna got her peace and quiet. She made progress on the house. I got to ride both Nyx and Aurora, listen to music, and enjoy a little freedom after a long week of work. We had dinner together, even if I did manage to fuck up the swordfish.

And at the end of the day, I still got to climb into bed beside the woman I love.

So who's the real winner here?

Well, obviously Dawna.

She got exactly what she wanted, and I didn't even realize I'd been fucking managed until I read about it on Facebook.

But I'm not complaining.

Because if getting played like a fiddle means my wife gets a productive afternoon, I get a few hours on my motorcycles, and we both end the day happy, then she can play me whenever the fuck she wants.

Just don't tell her I figured it out.

I've got a feeling she's going to need another light bulb next weekend