He’s Not a Pet, He’s a Bird Who Flew in by Mistake: Part One

 

"He’s not a pet, he’s a bird who flew in by mistake." That’s what I told myself in a dream last Saturday morning. In the dream I was talking about an actual bird, sort of a muted, pastel painted bunting, but I knew right away who dream-me was talking about. In a span of a few days, The Song Sender had gone from an actual-date-offering, text-attentive Sir to barely passing the Turing Test.

There was truly some beautifulness between the aftercare panic-and-flee of our second date, the un-break-off that I initiated, and the true end on Wednesday night, when I probably should have been practicing my knots instead. I’m equal parts irritated to be spilling more paragraphs on him and ecstatic to have so much to say.

I’m even sort of comforted knowing there are a few people out there (Looking at you, Steampunk Guy!) who truly cause me to take leave of my senses. Not in a cute, aw I’m crazy about you sense, but the actual departure of my mind. This time, thankfully, I guess my mind hadn’t gone TOO far away.

I was surprised at how amenable he was to making an aftercare plan. He even signed the paper during our dinner in a nearly-completely-empty pho place. But, he was even harder than usual to talk to, and he said there would be a little more negotiating to do when we got to my car.

He told me that he didn’t have space in his life for something as intense as I wanted, that we could only be really casual, if at all. The reason for the robo-boy texting was at least partly because a lady who’s subbier, easier, and less available (just cheating on her fiancée rather than expecting anything relationshippy or, you know, ethically non-monogamous) had popped back into his life.

I mean, as has been THOROUGHLY documented here, The Song Sender is actually pretty awful, he really is, but I thought, why not? Why not get dominated once a month or so and free myself from endlessly worrying about the tone of his texts, endlessly worrying that he was forgetting me. It seemed fine.

So I took him home and it was..fine. The hair pulling and the “pretty little slut” and worrying about bruises but not too much. He kept “forgetting” that my right arm has been broken and dislocated and can’t deal with quite as much manhandling as the rest of me. That fucker was definitely going to dislocate my wrist someday if we’d kept on.

In between finishing himself off and getting up to pee, he asked me if the song Goodbye Horses was on the makeout mix I’d made us. I listened to a few notes while he was in the loo and deemed it perfect, until he was like “It’s time for a movie moment, I have to show you this clip from Silence of the Lambs.

“UH, maybe AFTER aftercare?”

Sadistic or just stupid? Maybe both. I stayed this-is-fine cool and did my aftercare steps, and they simmered me right down. And then there was the clip, in all its lotion-in-basket, rotten, viciously transphobic horror.

“All these queer kids going around liking this song ironically, or unironically,” he said, “Not realizing this is where it’s from.”

Honestly, fuck you FOREVER. I still stayed cool. I had on my slutty-brave armor and it would NOT be disrupted by this fool. We lay there semi-snuggling and looking at each other’s Feeld profiles. It was kinda fun.