Knotty Thursday: Gentle Heart Harness

 

I love the ritual of Wednesday nights. Putting on a little lipstick and blush. Picking out a pretty bra and underpants that don't have to look good under clothes. Putting on the lo-fi and making something new.

I decided to keep it a little simpler this time. I couldn't make it as squeezy as I usually like to because I didn't want to bend or break the heart. But it was perfect for laying around playing phone games and feeling dreamy. 

A Surge of Horny Health!

 

I had a coffeeshop maybe-a-date yesterday with a guy I’ve been interested in for a while. I was rom-com awkward and klutzy. He was either very gentlemanly or not interested, maybe both. But my body gave me very good news: I AM READY TO DO ALL THE THINGS!

We had a perfectly lovely and polite time talking about all kinds of things. He’s a writer too! He has a cool project going that he is super-passionate about, what could be more dreamy than that?!

I was tooooooooootally listening to what he was saying but also, his hands. So big. So thick. So strong-looking. Oh boy. Oh my. Oh swoon. Oh my goodness.

“These are very good hands,” I said “I bet they’re very good for…hitting people. Like, on the butt.”

In fairness to my shy phrasing, the coffeeshop was close to home and there was the real possibility of work clients overhearing. Despite my awkwardness, he briefly wove our fingers together, like a combination of a hand-hug and a vote of confidence. Yep, strong.

He had a call to get to (Or, “had a call” like a get-out-of-date-free card?) so I didn’t get to take him home. (In a gentle show of optimism, I had sort of tidied.) Instead, I stopped at the store to buy myself flowers and had a VERY pleasant nap.

Ohfriends. It might not be this guy, but it’s gonna be somebody. And they better WATCH OUT.

Power, Praise, and Trauma, A Love Story

 

I think I’m doing a pretty good job with the whole moving on thing. Most days, I forget it’s Ramadan til sunset reminds me. Sometimes I get excited about a new Feeld guy and see a glimmer of possibility, a sparkle of a bright future with a nice untaken man. But anger at myself is the strongest thing holding me back—I hate how desperate I was to please The Shy One, especially towards the end. And, because I’m broken, I hate myself for not figuring out how to please him.

He himself isn’t trauma to me, but there it was: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.

And I wasn’t alone in that. Once in a fairly low-stakes argument, he said “I don’t want any more conflict. I already lived through a civil war.”

After he got back from his big trip, in a higher-stakes argument, he let slip there was a trauma coming back to him, and that he didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t press.

That’s all the speculating I can do about his traumas, or what I imagined to be his traumas. I wanted them to be my business, but they weren’t and aren’t.

One thing I can’t quite get mad at myself for: I chose that ill-fated sequel. It was submission that sent me back to him. At that dinner last July, I offered to do anything, to be anything for him. I wanted to sit at his feet. Inspired by the new ways that The Song Sender’s scenes cracked me open and let the light out, I went in with a sense of surrender—to The Shy One, to the divine, to fate.

I felt giddily empowered that hot night in July, so adventurous that I even tried calamari. Submitting though I was, I think what made him feel safe trying again was my confidence. He really missed that confidence when it was gone. By the end, when he was shutting down post-trip, I asked “What am I for?”

I asked a mentor the same thing in my last days of classroom teaching: “I feel like I’m nothing, like I’ve got nothing to offer.”

The day after the breakup, I was laying on my living room floor crying “Come back, please come back,” I was a little bit talking to the heavens, a little bit to him, and a lot to myself.

It would be wrong and mean and kink-phobic to blame praise for what we both went through, but. He was so, SO HURT whenever I had a complaint. And I was utterly mystified about how I could be “good” for him.

The first time post-breakup that I had to file my Friday paperwork without asking him for praise after, it seemed impossible. Of course, it wasn’t.

I think the loss of his praise (or even just the times the praise felt rote) felt so scary to me because those many “Good Girl” texts had more power than I realized. Because deep down, just in part of myself, I knew I could never really be good.

Trauma wrote that message on my body and mind a long time ago, and one of the things he was doing, one of the many, many things he was doing for my heart and soul and mind was helping me rewrite it. I think the best partnerships do that without trying. It’s alchemy. It’s just life shining through all the closets and mess and fear. And it’s a permanent, if incomplete, transformation.

So I wonder if I’ll ever want to call someone a “Good Boy” again (probably) or if I’ll want to be anyone’s “Good Girl.” (Also probably.)

I wonder too if, given the way the trauma lives in my bones and steer me so persistently to self-sabotage, if the connection I had with him was the closest I could get to a man. Once, I let it slip that I thought he might be my last chance.

He probably wasn’t, but no matter what comes next I’ll do everything I can to love the broken parts of me, even on the days when it’s hardest.

 

 

 

Knotty Thursdays: Worship Me a Little, Sure!

 

It’s just kind of the best when a cutie reaches out on Feeld and says something like, “You can practice your ropes on me if that would be helpful?”

It was! I was superexcited to work on the back of a harness for once, having worked on just me for a while. And what a sweetie pie he was, deferential and kind, calling me Ma’am in nearly every sentence, once I offered him the option. He was very, very good. He had the floppy hair and wholesomely handsome face of a Disney prince. It’s a thing I said to him: “I’ve never tied up a Disney prince before!

I liked the bright flash of his green eyes, just a momentary glimmer. So pretty.

(I’m maybe a little more chatty than the average Ma’am, and maybe a little too sweet? I don’t know.)

There’s a certain kind of casual date I associate with post-pandemic life, where the boy under my hands just kind of…needs a rest. A relief. A little cloud of peace to live in for a while. Okay, wait, I just explained submission.

After I decorated him (“This is more ropes than I expected…” he said. Guilty as charged.) he asked if I would tie his hands. I don’t usually restrain anybody on the first date, but he asked so nicely! And I liked putting a chain stitch onto those pretty wrists! I liked how he obediently clasped his hands behind his back before I even asked him to. I would’ve gone for tying in the front.

Then he lay down on the bed on his tummy, ready to be petted. “I like being your little pet” he said. He was so good at it!

I didn’t let him be restrained for long! Yes, I was concerned about safety, but really I just wanted his hands on me.

“May I worship your tits, Ma’am?” I mean, it’s only one of my favorite things! He pulled my lacy purple bra down enough to get my nipple into his mouth while he played with the other one. It felt so good that I curled up into a human comma around him and yowl-moaned.

As good as it felt, I wanted no part of me losing control. I told him to turn over for a spanking, and he obliged. I pulled his underpants down just enough and spanked and spanked, leaving cute red circles on both of his sweet, soft cheeks. Then I felt the relief too, like a string of tension inside my body had been loosened, if not untied.

I wanted no part of the bonding chemicals my brain would give me if I let him get me off, so I regretfully told him we wouldn’t fuck. He lay next to me and got himself off, good boy.

When he did that quick-zippering-gotta-go thing after, it didn’t make me sad the way it usually might. (Oh aaaaggggony of The Shy One’s quick zippering the last night we were together. Sometimes my whole heart just wants to write a small opera about that moment. Eventually several paragraphs, at least.) The other night though, I felt like, “Oh, this is great, I can finish my library book that’s due.”

Besides that pleasant good-job-everybody feeling, there was another feeling, oddly pleasant as well: the Not Yet feeling. The deep, kind acceptance that I’m not ready to open my heart again, that it might be a while. The knowledge that while my mind might be antsy to move on to my next loves (Or even, come on! Likes!) my body, heart, and soul still belong to the Shy One(s), I don’t know for how long!

That’s the person I am, and the only person I have to be. No wonder taking my time feels good, it’s love. And loving myself.

Knotty Thursday: Human Macrame! Healthy Hoo-ha!

 

I started out with this nice simple design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KX_Tfn186sQ but putting a ring at the center of the harness felt so freeing and gave me so much extra length that I just got a little carried away. I like it.

Also a star of last night's self-date: the Big Pink Rabbit! I hadn't been penetrated by anything since January, given the blood and sadness and post-surgery "no visitors in there" orders, and whoa was I in an extra good mood all day today!

Also contributing to the good mood: I went to my follow-up appointment for surgery and all is well! The IUD is in the right place, all the biopsies came back clear, and I only have the slightest spotting! Please pray to all the slutty gods and goddesses and nonbinary deities that the evil rogue periods are done! 

Dear Sierra Leone, Part Three

If you weren’t so far away and weren’t, you know, a country, I’d have you over to watch Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It’s my second favorite movie, after Slacker. I used to have it on VHS. I’d watch it after scary movies so I’d be able to sleep. It’s about a scared, lost but fabulous lady and whether or not people can belong to each other. Spoiler alert: they do. (If you watch this movie, I’m really, really sorry about Mickey Rooney.)

The other day I was listening to Danny Lavery’s podcast (https://slate.com/podcasts/big-mood-little-mood) and he was talking about the Relationship Escalator. No one actually calls it that unless they DON’T want it, he said, they’d just call it “commitment.”

What a weird thing to feel bad about, wanting commitment, but it definitely feels like I was telling on myself when I let it slip. In my defense, it was in the haze of beautiful rosy-hued morning goodbye sex, right before he left for you. The Shy Ones wear stretchy bead bracelets instead of wedding rings, and I said with the confidence of the just-thoroughly-fucked that I wanted a bracelet too, a purple one.

I maaaaaaaaayyyyyy have said I wanted a commitment ceremony too. None of this meant marriage, it meant whatever kind of commitment we came up with. He said the bracelet part might be doable, but I wonder.

Is that why he came back liking me less? Did the bracelet idea get vetoed and he just didn’t have the heart to tell me? Or did I know deep down he wasn’t That Guy and push him away? Did he want to keep some of that freedom he felt with you and I was the thing most jettisonable?

It’s far past time to stop wondering, but he did bring something back besides  maybe a little malaria. (Which, I’m so sorry I overreacted. I only know it from novels. I thought he might die.) Maybe he brought back a deeper commitment to his faith, to his family, his eldest-son leadership responsibilities. It SEEMED like he brought back that gift of all families everywhere: shame. I heard it in his radio silences, in his quick zippering.

No matter which, I have a confession: I thought somehow this would be the Last Waiting. I thought I could somehow graduate from the always-missing-him if I got good grades those weeks in Being Self Contained. And I aced the exam, we both did. Unlike the regular text thread, burdened with pain and paragraphs and push-pull logistics, the WhatsApp thread from when he was with you, it was all love.

Thank you for making us that unlikely space to be free together, to belong together before reality smashed back down. Maybe because when he was with you, he was happy. Maybe missing him hurt less when he was across the sea than when he was across town.

There was a bracelet, not a wear-every-day-as-a-symbol one. It’s carved out of coconut shells, dyed beautiful jewel colors. It came with a necklace and red earrings like tiny coins. They live in The Box of Things to be Worked Out Later by Unseen Forces (The God Box for short) in an envelope marked Prayers for a Bigger Life:

Sierra Leone, I can feel myself getting unstuck and ready to be moved forward by grace and love to wherever and whatever. I think I’m finished writing to you, but you have my whole heart. So many, many things do.

Dear Sierra Leone, Part Two

 

Sometimes when I have a hard time getting a feeling into words, it helps to cut up a pop song. This used to be Robyn's Dancing on My Own.

Oh my dear. There was a place for us and it was WhatsApp.

I liked spending New Years with you and not with you. I was with Rainbow Pal, both of us sparkling and dancing to brass bands playing pop songs. It was Dancing on My Own when midnight came, our midnight, five hours after yours. Everything was silver and spangled and I was wearing the purple princess dress from my birthday. My synchronicity necklace from the flea market in Famous Art Town.

Rainbow Pal and I hugged and bopped silver balloons around the dance floor. No one really knew the words to Auld Lang Syne but we sang it anyway. I love, love, LOVE the sound of strangers happy together and muddling through a song.

Rainbow Pal wanted to stay late—brass is their great love and they knew eventually the band would be playing in the crowd and all would be right with the world. They gave me maybe the best gift a younger friend can give an older friend—the dispensation to go home at 12:30.

As I walked out to the car, a perfect golden firework popped in the sky over the parking lot, and I read it as a message from you. This year would be for me. It would be golden. I held it in my heart as a way of taking a picture, and I told him about it first thing in the morning. My morning, your late afternoon.

Oh Salone, I know I shouldn’t have gone back to him last summer. I saw the not-cute future of self-erasure and control and heteronormative bullshit. (Rainbow Pal has a shirt that says “Heteronormativity is a cult” and they wore it for me the day I was over at their place painting about our breakup, crying watercolor tears and maybe making them a little bit uncomfortable.)

But what if I hadn’t met YOU? What if I hadn’t woken up to your pink-sky beaches and your bright patterned fabrics and intricate tiles? What if I’d missed our New Years?

I wanted to cross the ocean between us. The Atlantic between us is as big as the gulf between me and my post-insurrection family. I don’t know how to be family-real the way he does, but I have other reals, I guess.

I only know how to shift and flow and get stuck on a rock sometimes until the water rises and takes me forward. Okay, that’s not the ocean, it’s the local creek I walk by whenever I’m confused or lost or it’s Friday.

I’m impatient to get unstuck, dear Sierra Leone, dear Atlantic Ocean, dear beloved local creek. Some days I can feel the current carrying me away from him, and therefore, safely, closer, the memory restored, the love affair done. Other days I’m stranded creek debris, waiting for rain, for the water to rise and carry me home, which is everywhere and nowhere.

Dear Sierra Leone, Part One

 

His face glowed so much there, in the WhatsApp pictures. I didn’t realize he was homesick ALL the time until, for twelve days, he wasn’t. Of all the empathies that came and went and landed or exploded between us, I wish I’d done this one more: Homesick boy. The fishermen pulling in their morning catch. Salone. Salone.

I didn’t know I could have travel compersion, but there it was, there he was. On his own, so maybe he felt a little bit more mine than when he was at home. Or maybe his lightness of heart was my lightness too, maybe we were both shining with you. Maybe we were hibiscus blooms in the dead of winter. Maybe I caught his tropical relief.

On his own, on three-wheeled motorbike cabs, or riskful and free on the back of the motorcycle taxis. (How could you ride one of those without snuggling into the guy’s back? But he wouldn’t have.)

And the beach. Second beach or second river and I didn’t ask where’s the first beach or the first river, but I did understand pink sky. The boyish sunset glint in someone so serious, so often downcast here with me.

Sierra Leone, I don’t exist there, nor should I. But also, I wanted to. And also, I should. Those wedding parades with their bright family-matched fabrics, their brass bands, their waiting outside for the aunties’ permission, where do queer lives go for their belonging? It wasn’t my place to ask but I did of course eventually. In his family, they go to straight marriages, they pretend. Like my own family, maybe everybody’s for most of history, they erect an architecture of lies as old as colonialism—be straight, be normal, be real.

There’s no way out of it. It’s his way to be real.

He told me he wanted to bring me to you someday. “Sure,” I said, “You can be like, mom, this is my girlfriend.”

“And then she’ll fight you.” He said.

“At least I’ll get to meet her,” I said.

I could have avoided it, I guess. The closet, the little humiliations. Becoming an object of fear, both rightfully and not. But then I would’ve missed you, and not known that I’d missed you, and we’d never have had (and not had) New Years together.

Oh my love, a place I’ll never visit. A place I’ll always.

Knotty Thursday: Pretty Armor for My Heart

 

Last night was my first try at a new tie in a while, and it felt so good! I need to practice weaving on some less-curvaceous part of me, because it keeps looking bunched up! Plus I had to keep it loose because it's so close to my neck and I was on my own. But still, I felt gorgeous! Here's the how to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfuGMaqXyKo

Because it was a neck one, it wasn't a lounge-around-for-a-while situation, but something even more exciting happened!! While I was puttering around afterwards, having a snack and getting ready for bed, I had the "I love you" thought--and it was directed at myself! I'm not sure when's the last time I felt that way about a self-date, but it's been at least months. It feels pretty great to be reunited with myself and with my friends the ropes. I've already got something picked out for next Wednesday night!

After I got everybody untangled and put away, I gave myself a treat: Paid for a month of Feeld so I could see my likes. Maybe I'll find a nice casual good boy to practice on? That would be a treat! :D

I'm sorry the back picture is blurry! But I like it anyway!

First Date, Full of Grace

 

OMG did you know there are guys who live BY THEMSELVES?! And you can just, like, go over there? Amazing.

Last Friday night, after work, I packed up some buttery chardonnay and some chips and drove ONLY NINE MINUTES for a couch date. It felt good to put on a cute bra, a low-key cozy-cute outfit, and nighttime lipstick! It felt so uplifting to just go talk to a cute stranger about whatever.

He was nice, and looked like he had lovely spankin’ hands, but he said something immature about my body that let me know this wasn’t the right guy for me.

And again, just like back at the heated blankets, a Shy One memory came like a visitation, only he’s not a ghost. The imprint was a clear rectangle of movie light on my soul. The way The Shy One used to move up my body with kindness and grace. With attention to detail. Married-guy ease and talent that I wanted to send Mrs. Shy One a thank you note for. A care I think I have to describe as dad energy. He took care of me. And now he’s taking care of me by being gone.

Back in real time, I hugged the nice but too-boyish thirty-something goodbye and realized it might be a while. Now that the push and pull and tears and hotness and dizzying affection of The Shy One are over (Have been over for a whole moon cycle.) my body, heart, and soul have time to understand what’s happened to us.

As I felt that time and space yawn out before me, I felt joy and relief and deep praise, from the top of my thoroughly beloved head to my driving-home toes.

I called BFF on the way home to brag about this date that hadn’t worked out, or had, in its own way. I felt giddy, sparkly, in a bubble of golden peace. (Don’t worry, I only had one glass of wine!)

Cozy in bed, I listened to the rain and wind outside, just wailing and spattering and gusting. I felt alive with the weather. I felt loved. I felt home.

The Heated Blankets (Love, Shame, and Bleeding All the Time, Part Two)

 

On Wednesday morning, I went in for surgery for my misbehaving hoo-ha. They were going to take pictures inside my uterus, clear out some tissue and send it for biopsy, and put in an IUD to hopefully regulate (Or even stop!) the rogue periods.

Pre-op was deep vulnerability practice. First, they have you take off all your clothes and get in your hospital gown, the classic butt-revealer. Mine was an off-sky-blue with an emotionally neutral geometric pattern that definitely did not stay in my brain. And then, I was chilly, and a nurse who called everyone “love” asked if I would like a heated blanket. Of course I would!

She put one heated blanket underneath my head and another over me. The tenderness, the warmth, and the kindness got me all undone, a pure Miranda July movie moment if there ever was one. The nurse dimmed the light above my head and I stared up at the bright rectangle of the light in front of the dimmed one. Relaxed by the warmth and care I guess, my spirit shifted to my first walk along the river with The Shy One, that moment of innocence and uncertainty, before we’d had the chance to break each other’s hearts twice. “We’re on your time,” he’d said, and I took his hand and turned us toward home.

I guess the heated blankets (I accidentally typed “hearted.”) got through all my layers of grief and hurt and loss-of-face and loss-of-hope and let me inhabit that moment more fully than I’ve inhabited any of our so-beautiful-I-don’t-know-what to-do-with-them memories. Fat drippy tears overflowed and I sniffed discreetly so no one in the pre-op room would worry.

These tears were different from all the other ones I’ve cried this past month-they weren’t the bottomless, howling, laying-on-the-floor grief of the first days post breakup or the let’s-listen-to-the-song-and-get-some-sorrow-out of the calmer next few weeks. These good, tender tears were a glimpse of what was real and good and blessedly, healthfully over.

The wait was long and the blankets cooled. My teary release turned to anxious boredom. I woke up from anesthesia to navigate a once-again bloody crotch, this time maybe productively so. My hands were covered in blood for the millionth time in these messy months, and I was glad I’d caught the nurse’s name so I could call out for a fresh pad. Someday, no more pads. Maybe soon.

As I recovered from surgery, more waves of emotion came in, darker and angrier and harder to write about. Trauma, drugs wearing off, new hormones, ongoing loneliness and hurt made me prickly and harsh for a few days, until the next wave of grace came, but that’s another story.