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.
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