Autistic Euphoria and The Guy Next Door: Part Four

 

I was so busy bouncing, listening, interrupting, and picking out songs that I didn't realize he'd drawn Happy Eraserhead Baby! A moment of pure garmanbozialessness,

So after I found out about Girlfriend Next Door, I told The Guy Next Door there wouldn't be any Art Nights for a little while, but that I was happy to be friendly neighbs and wouldn't rule out hangouts in the future. I started Operation Mind My Business. I was genuinely friendly and welcoming to Girlfriend Next Door when she was housesitting, and there seemed a chance that all the crushiness might be over, that my ever-elusive dignity might stand a chance.

(Wait is the idea of dignity kind of a pain in the butt? I think maybe it is!)

But by the time he was on his way back from his trip, I just missed him. So I texted, "It's lonely here without anyone making me tea." and reinstated art night.

(Later on, a Codependents Anonymous friend would identify this choice as "abandoning myself." Maybe it was but I can't quite regret it all the way.)

Three Thursdays ago was our last Art Night. There were only two between us, not sure why my brain made it into such a ritual that it might as well be an institution! Except! Oh yeah, OCD, autism, and an acute case of twitterpatedness! I worked so hard getting the apartment ready! I agonized so hard about what to wear! Strangely, I don't remember what I did end up wearing! So weird! So rare!

Autistic Euphoria and the Guy Next Door: Part Two

 On Thursday evenings during the busy part of the year, I try to stop everything and make some art. Whenever I want to get to know somebody, friend or date, I invite them to join.

The Guy Next Door came across the yard to my door with a gardening book he'd picked out from one of the VERY numerous Little Free Libraries on our surrounding blocks. He showed me an illustration of a wall garden he wanted to create "for us both to enjoy."

(Ladies and gentlehumans of the kitten jury, I submit this as evidence that I wasn't crazy for thinking he might like me back! Not that you asked to see evidence!)

He sat down at my table. I played my summer camp playlist, skipping the songs that felt too emo or too harsh for the occasion. We were doing watercolors and it was just...it was so easy. He talked so freely and I felt so comforted by how open he was about his life. Divorce, love, disappointment, sobriety (of the California sort). It felt so easy to share my own stuff back without feeling like it was too much, like I was too much.

All that sharing made me powerfully smitten, so fast! I knew I couldn't fling myself at him because I wasn't ready and he's LITERALLY my next door neighbor. (In retrospect, flinging might have been the safer choice.) Instead I made plans like this:

"If I knew you better, I'd scoop you up and take you to the beach with me on Sunday. Let's stay friends for at least a year so we can have a beach day next summer. You drive so I can be high on the way home. We'll listen to Atavista by Childish Gambino."

"Okay, I can do that!" He seemed happy to be included in my weirdly specific daydream. Art night dream.

I had tickets to a little-bit-out-of-town showing of Fire Walk With Me, my favorite David Lynch movie and maybe the second-scariest movie ever. (First place goes to The Blair Witch Project.) "If I knew you better, " I said, "I'd give you my extra ticket because (BFF Formerly Sweetie) does NOT care. I see us at a David Lynch event someday, you as the Log Lady and me as... I don't know, I'll have to pick a less obscure character than I usually do."

Typing these visions of the future, they feel more than a little nutso, but I promise, he looked so happy about these plans. He was, as they say on My Brother, My Brother, and Me, playing in the space with me.

I forgot to feel embarrassment or shame for being so enthusiastic and nakedly fascinated by him. (If there had been real nakedness, I think things might have gone better. OR worse! Who knows.)

He seemed nakedly fascinated by me too. (I wonder if that was just the fact that he was higher than me. As OCD therapy would say, maybe, maybe not.) Under his gaze, I bounced. I rocked. I fell into special interest holes and he said he was happy to fall down in there with me. I was giddy with unmasking, and he seemed to be in a giggly joyful state as well. Maybe he was. Maybe it was real, at least this part.

Mostly he sat across the table from me, but sometimes he came over next to me and we sat stonedly shoulder to shoulder. When he was leaving, he gave me a hug that just crossed the boundary over to sensual--his fingers moved over my shoulders in a desire way? Or just it was that over-familiar weedy hippie-boy hug that used to send me into an anti-Platonic tizzy in my college hometown in the mid-Nineties.

Maybe my evidence isn't incontrovertible, but I really want to convince you this wasn't just me fooling myself for the millionth time.

Yet.

Knotty Thursday: I Think It's Past Ghost O'Clock Buuut...

 

I wanted this treasure to be my Wednesday guy, (He clearly wasn't available for boyfriending) and he seemed amenable to that last night, but shrug emoji! My Inner Patriarchy is making me feel ashamed for having semi-accidentally had a hookup, but I'm sure once the disappointment wears off, I be glad he was at least *A* Wednesday guy!

Plus! I asked him to bring me flowers and he did! That gives me all the Ma'am feelings and all the hopeful feelings.

These ties would be prettier if they were tighter, I wanted to be very gentle on a first night! I'm happy to be reunited with my ropes, and hoping the Thursdays will stay knotty! Wish me luck! 

Proud Graduate of Summer Therapy!

 

“It really pisses me off that in like six months, I’ll be like oh, poor us, just a bad match. I hate magnanimous.”

--Me, a Little Over Six Months Ago

The last session I had with Summer Therapist, Tuesday before last, I’d given myself the assignment of telling her the whole fortune-cookie-Thursday-to “It’s Monday morning” Shy One breakup story without turning the frustration back on myself. I had the feeling she’d wanted me to get a little better at blaming him for what happened, and it seemed like a good experiment! It was!

I liked not stopping the story to empathize with TSO’s perspective, blame myself, or say for the millionth time “How did I let this happen?” or “Why couldn’t I have just made it til Tuesday?” (Or made it til our trip, or not sent so many needy texts, etc) Bargaining is a really powerful destination on the Billy Map of Grief!

Dear Young People Who Probably Don't Remember The Family Circus: This is what I mean by the Billy Map of Grief! He goes all over the place!

But when the experiment was over, there was something I had to admit to myself about my (dear!) Summer Therapist—she was really into the idea that TSO hadn’t really loved me! She even, in the midst of some advice about taking it slow heartwise, suggested that maybe I hadn’t really loved him either!

This seemed crazy to me, because I’d started therapy with the goal of taking the TSO experience on board, letting myself believe it had really happened so I could let it go! I was hanging on to him in my head and heart because I wasn’t sure it had happened, because maybe I thought he was the only one who could witness the fact that I’d been loved by a man. Of course, there was another witness there, the only one I’ll ever really need to check with: me.

I kindly typed this all into the therapy app and said a gracious and grateful goodbye to the Summer Therapist. Then I called BFF and sobbed. It was the kind of sobbing (I just mistyped it as “subbing”) that scrubs out my insides, that came up from my soul in a wail and a gust. And then I felt better.

I could see why ST wanted to downplay the relationship—it was a way of trying to make me be kinder to myself, to get me to expect more. But in wanting to assure me I deserve better, she ended up seeming dismissive of this experience that had meant a lot to me. I didn’t need it not to be love in order to let it go. I didn’t need to (as ST did) dismiss the realities of poly happiness in order to envision a partner all my own.

It made me realize that no matter how monogamous I get, and I think it might be quite monogamous indeed, I’ll never subscribe to the narrow, heteropatriarchal definition of love that my ST was (probably unintentionally) leading me towards. That’s because, no matter who or how I love, I’ll always be queer, I’ll always be silly, I’ll always be curious and expansive and wholehearted. I’ve never been more grateful for my adventures, for my weird heart, for the messy and ill-advised and beautiful alchemy I’ve always been able to lead myself into. And out of!

I realized a thing that maybe shouldn’t have been new at almost 49: I’m the only one I need to check with about what’s happened to me. I know when I’ve loved and been loved. I don’t have to run it by anyone. I don’t have to prove it.

Friends, it’s still a Billy map. Though I don’t visit the Hidden Folder much any more, there are days when my heart is full of him, of them, of bitterness, of what ifs. But there are also days when the banter is going well on the apps, or I get turned on by myself, or I start to picture what Boyfriend Life would be like, and I’m so, so grateful for all of it, for everything ever. Magnanimous is my heart’s default setting, mostly, and I hope that never changes.

Yay it’s Frilly Friday!

 

Is using Prisma capitulating to the robots? Maybe! This bodysuit is from the Christmas box and I really love it because! It's long enough that the crotch snaps don't immediately unsnap! If I scooch down the top, (the lace is so stimulating!) it's very nice to sleep in too!

Part of my Fat Liberation process has been learning that I’m worthy of beautiful and specific clothes. For most of my life, my choices have been so limited and now suddenly there are choices! And there are beautiful, sexy fat people all over my socials. My gorgeous city even has its own facebook community specifically for practicing/celebrating/enjoying our fat bodies.

I’ve already written so much about what The Shy One’s beautiful Christmastime box of all different lingerie meant to me, but the abundance of it is really so profound. As a fat woman, some parts of beauty and pleasure have long felt unavailable to me and now, suddenly, there it all is!

Last week, after Dumb Fatphobic Lap Lane Thing happened at the pool, I asked my body what I could do to pay her back for all the things she puts up with, all the things she is and does for me. And in that moment, the Instagram algorithm did its knowing-me-too-well-sometimes thing and showed me a beautiful pool-blue, floral embroidered babydoll set. I definitely clicked through! You can see it next Friday!

Over the past month or so, I’ve been working my way through the Christmas lingerie box, enjoying, then sleeping in, then gently washing, then hanging up Marie-Kondo-neatly each beautiful set. This was one of the things I wished for as I set out on my grief journey back in February, and now the time is here! Oh Frilly Things, we’ve made it! We lived!

Plus, I have plenty of other cute slutty stuff in my collection!

So on Fridays, I’ll show you a glimpse of how cute I am when I’m loving myself! I hope you enjoy it, I know I will!

What I Want, Part One (The Easy Part)

There’s always a certain amount of futility in these lists, because the next characters who come along could knock me on my ass just as much as any ever have. If you’d told me in June that “summer fling with The Song Sender” would be in the cards, (Literally. The Lover and The Devil! Yikes and yay. Yay and yikes.)  I would have laughed in your face and told you about a dream I had a few years ago, wherein I was explaining to him: “We just call it strangling now.” More about that guy in part two, but for now, the easy things:

1.     I’m solo poly, and not necessarily destined for the kitchen table, at least not right away. I like my space, and I’ve discovered in the past few weeks that I like each combination to have time to grow before stirring my darlings’ darlings into the mix.

 

That doesn’t rule out future deep relationships with metamours or even some magical unicorn miracle, but I want to take my time. Every person is a LOT. I am A LOT. I would like any given combination to have its feet under it before I start to learn the next humans. Because I will LOVE THEM TOO and that will be, you know, a lot.

 

2.     I definitely do want polyamory. I would love to stop trying to wedge myself into monogamy every few years out of—self-protection? Weird poly/bi phobia left over from my divorcing years? There have been such LOVELY combinations of humans, such bursts or yes-this-is-exactly-it happiness that I would love to see some more.

 

The Shy One, The Song Sender, and a hookup whose name I barely remember but who made for a fucking GLORIOUS week. This Charming Man, The Lovely Guy, and that other hookup who gave me the wrong name. The Good Boy, The Southern Charmer, and The Adorables. Ideally, most of those would have lasted a lot longer, and I know that humans are NOT art supplies, but I felt like an artist working in the medium of slut, and I would lovelovelove for that to happen again.

 

3.     I don’t necessarily want The Relationship Escalator, but I want feelings. Lovey-dovey feelings, friendly feelings, and d/s feelings. Nobody has to love as easily or as quickly or as thoroughly as I do, but I want them to not feel/seem like a trapped animal when the warmth and affection come into play. Talking about relationships the other night, The Shy One said “I just go in kamikaze, and if it doesn’t work, I just try again.” BFF-Formerly-Sweetie has always called my same strategy “jumping in with both feet.” I don’t always, but when I do, I would love to hang around long enough to let them see if they can catch up.

 

To accomplish that, I would like to not get so mad at myself for the feelings. I would like to give myself space to feel them and be a little less quick to flee.

 

And yes, I would like some of them, eventually, to adore me. To love me wildly, emphatically, and forever. Please.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Second First Date with The Song Sender, Part One

 

I know we already skipped ahead to the ropes because Thursdays exist, but it’s time to backtrack a little. When The Song Sender texted me the Sunday morning before our Wednesday plans to iron out the details, I swooned. There’s seriously nothing hotter than not having to chase someone down for logistics. Plus, I thought it might mean he and his girlfriend were working on their calendars, and that made me feel all warm and fuzzy, like welcome to polytown, TSS.

But really it was mostly about the logistics. I like being all Virgo-y. I have calendar reminders set for every friend, for checking on my niece who is going through her first breakup, for futile reminders that I should vacuum a little each week. I like structure and predictability in ways that run counter to how sex, love, and romance like to operate, though oddly compatible with my BDSM mind. NOT compatible with some of the young millennial treats who’ve come and gone this past year.

So yes, oh my goodness, plans. And a guy my own age! By the time I was driving downtown to meet him, some of the dizzy unsureness had simmered down, but neither of us was sure if it was a date or not. In the neighborhood where we were meeting up, someone had stickered the stop signs to say “stop giving up” and I took that as all kinds of different advice.

He looked tidy and gentlemanly when I saw him there waiting, wearing a nicely-chosen blue plaid shirt. His grizzled mutton chops (Which, along with his bear-size and insistent blue eyes, make him look like if you looked up “dom” in the dictionary) were freshly trimmed—he’d already sent me a post-haircut selfie.

We hugged hello and he let out an affable growl. There was a feeling of being pawed-at even though I wasn’t, and that felt VERY pleasant. I was a LITTLE more sure it was a date.

Third Date Flag, Fourth Date Tears, Part One

Possibly, for the fourth date with The Shy One, I shouldn’t have chosen a date that mirrored my ill-fated Valentines date with The Good Boy. But it’s a good date! I was superexcited to see The Shy One and antsy to get some street art up, so that’s what I asked for. He even helped me staple some silk flowers to a watercolor that said “Forced Pregnancy: The Cruelty Is The Point.” The grimness of the message seemed extra grim, juxtaposed with his gentleness and the sweetness of his smile.

I was happy to see him, but I also felt removed, a few steps away from there being a me-shaped hole in the wall. There was a question I had to ask, and I wanted to force myself to accept the answer no matter what. On our third date, the one with all the presents, near the falling asleep time, after hours of slow, voluptuous cuddling and deeply affectionate sex I might write about someday, I mentioned wanting his address for a thank-you note.

“Just a thank-you note, nothing else.” That threw some cold water on the hours of intimacy and warmth of the night and the seemingly open-hearted month-long epistolary romance of our Ramadan routine. (Can a romance be epistolary if it’s comprised mostly of cute Bitmoji and flower pictures? I say yes.) Rightly or wrongly, it felt like he was protecting his safe little marital-paternal bubble from whatever unexpectedness I might mail. Of course, the kids wouldn’t know about me. I couldn’t expect that.

(I did have a painting I could send him from our second date, when we painted together, but he kept forgetting to take it home and I couldn’t picture it ending up anywhere other than a closet. I kinda want to make it street art, just so it could live.)

He did give me his address, and I did send the thank you note, but I felt constrained and worried that I might be giving too much information away, in case the note somehow fell into little hands. That would be his responsibility, not mine, but I still felt like too much.

(It should also be noted that I’ve been watching a lot of Downton Abbey lately, so my etiquette sensitivities may be a little haywire.)

So. While I was standing on a bench securing a long-up canvas (a list of names of mass-shooting victims, #stopaapihate edition) to a fence, I asked him the question: Could I post pictures of him and me on Instagram?

“Oh sure,” he said, “If you show us just as friends.”

His conservative background, where he and his wife are in their outness journey, those things are valid and important. They aren’t responsible for the rest of the conservatism barreling down upon all of us. Closeted poly isn’t banning books, I know that. It’s not The Shy One’s fault that, in 1998, my mom asked for that same “friends” dissembling as I introduced First Girlfriend into the family. It’s not his fault that on the last not-him date I went on, the suitor dropped my hand as soon as other people saw him with me.

But I wasn’t going to dissemble online, so there weren’t going to be any public pictures of us, not in the regular feeds. Not with faces. We kept walking, talking about other things, but I was a little bit broken, and I wanted to run.

 

An Absolutely Beautiful Mess, Part One

After three maybe too-intense dates, The Good Boy and I are on a pause so we both can figure out which end is up. (BFF says that’s what fizzy water is for because the bubbles go up. I don’t know why I find that observation so comforting.) Let the untangling begin:

On Wednesday the 9^th, The Good Boy and I were scheduled to have our third date—an actual go-someplace date! We were going to see the new J-Lo romcom—I’d originally planned it as a self-date but he suggested we go together before we’d even had our first couch date.

I think maybe the combination of Ma’am-ing and Valentine’s week made me lose my mind about our movie date a little bit. I was so, SO excited to get dressed up, for him to buy the snacks, to sit in the back row and hold hands, maybe make out a little. My anticipation was a little bit teen-girl-childlike, maybe bordering on unhinged.

So of course, OF COURSE it got cancelled, or, I thought, postponed. TGB was having issues with his other partner, and they needed the night to talk things through.

TGB had been together with his First Poly Partner for about six months and she was the reason he was trying nonmonogamy. Until this cancelled night, I hadn’t thought much about her except to respect her nights and be grateful she’d sent him out into the world so I could meet him. Grateful was my main emotion about FPP, and somehow, it still is.

I’d already bought tickets for the movie, and TGB paid me back double. I felt two ways about that! A little queasy, kinda I’d been bought off, but also, yay money. I bought a book I’d been wanting.

I pulled all the way back (Well, I mean, as far as a smitten kitten could.) from him that night, having no desire to become a factor in whatever they were resolving. When he gave me the all-clear the next morning, I asked if he’d like to come over after work on Saturday. He works from three to eleven, dealing blackjack. I really hope I get to see his professional-grade card-shuffle someday.

That Saturday night, I planned to do my yearly Valentine’s street art project. I’d saved up about six months of paintings and protest signs and doodles and was also planning to restore some of the watercolors that had been up for a while. It’s a love-gift for my neighborhood, which is truly one of my Great Loves. (Along with my apartment, my cats,  the Hope Diamond, and my new magenta ropes.) When it turned out the casino was overstaffed and he was getting the night off, I invited him to join me for the art.

This was a BIG DEAL—I’d only ever gone on street art walks with close friends or by myself. It felt like letting him in on a secret part of me. Maybe too intimate. Kinda like when I invited This Charming Man to the Fancy Garden, but this messy date turned out WAY better than that one.

I’m sure I’ve called many, MANY things THE CUTEST THING THAT EVER HAPPENED but this was definitely in the running. He carried my bags of art and silk flowers. He handed me the staple gun when I needed it, goading me gently when he thought I was using too many staples. (Ha like that’s his business!) He reached up his nice long arms to add color to the paintings that had faded with time and weather.

I felt nervous hanging up political pieces in front of him—we hadn’t talked at all about politics since he’d passed my screening questions. But it went okay! We talked a little bit, very lightly, about empathy and growth.

In the moments when we weren’t working on the art, he held my hand like it was important to him, like it was a detail he’d looked forward to, a little like he was staking a claim. We took a short walk through the woods. I think I could be forgiven for thinking something romantic was happening between us, and maybe it was. Maybe (I hope not!) fleeting, maybe already on the way to over, but, on my end at least, definitely hearts-floating-up-around-my-head romance,

The Good Boy: Part Three (In Which I FAVORABLY Compare His Dick to Famous Works of Art)

Trying to write about him lying supine and not-quite-passive, in a harness and black briefs, obviously hard and temptingly huge, makes me flustered and so close to losing the actual use of words.

As I pulled the rope tightly/gently around his inner thigh, I asked if it felt okay. He smirked and said I better check again, so I did, lightly grazing the valley between his thigh and his dick. A jolt went through me, temporarily deleting my knowledge of knots and everything else, but I righted myself and kept laddering.

I felt powerful and benevolent sitting over him, turned on but super-focused on the ropes at hand. I rhythmically twined over and under his pretty legs, holding the square shape in place, winding on to the next rung. When I neared his left ankle he said, with the teensiest bit of irritation, “Can this be done now?”

So I tied off the rope and climbed on to kiss him. He had so many loose ends, ropes of different colors, strands I’d meant to weave in with the rest. He was a bed of soft vines.

We ended up in a delicious cuddle. As he spooned up sweetly I said “Hmmmmm, it doesn’t really seem like you’ve submitted.” His tenderness was urgent, emphatic. This was not a Helpless Boy.

“Do you think you could spank a person?” I asked, rolling onto my belly. My velvet pants had been discarded a while ago, and I was wearing raspberry-colored lacy soft briefs.

Friends, he CAN spank a person, each impact hitting at the exact right angle, the exact right strength. When he was ready to move on from spanking, he spread himself aaaaalllllll the way over me, arms over my arms, holding me down so kindly. He was grinding his huge, hard dick against my ass crack, hitting all the spots at once. The Good Boy had gone a little animalistic and I could NOT have been happier.

“Okay, I’m gonna need to turn over.” I said.

So. I’m a size queen, we kind of know that already. Recently I was even brazen enough to add that preference to my profile, even though it seems unfair to all the other dicks. The Good Boy’s dick IS unfair to all the other ones. Thick, long, and curving upwards, it is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen in my entire art history major LIFE. Starry Night? Please. Duchamp’s Large Glass—so pretty and thought provoking and also on the themes of energy and inspiration, but no. Yoko Ono’s Yes Painting? Okay, maybe that one compares.

Anyway, BEAUTIFUL. And about to be entirely mine.

Knotty Thursday! Oh My Goodness, I Can't Even

 I don't really have words for my first night with The Good Boy yet, but I am superproud about how far my rope skills have come. It's so wonderful to see a bunch of different short Thursday practices come together in such a beautiful way. A lot of credit must be given to my warm (and switchy!) canvas, but I think I'm having a little bit of an artistic breakthrough. 

The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow, Part Eight

I’ve read and thought so much about the ways that trauma gets stored in the body, the way that it lives and moves and gets processed in a way that is separate from time and the everyday. Why don’t I know very much about the way love is stored? I’m always pretty dazzled by the way that unexpected things can jostle it loose, can strike a gold vein and expose it, all sparkly and vulnerable and ready for mining.

After the first giddy rush of paintings and artifacts, we got some very strong coffee and sat outside the museum in the chilly sun, catching up. I honestly could have talked to him for five hundred and seventy-two more hours. I didn’t ask him enough about his last thirty years of adventures, I wish I’d talked less and asked more.

In the course of reminding me of my born-again-virginhood at the time we were together (It feels so cringy to even type, I’m sorry!) he said A Thing. It was A Thing that, I’m serious, rewired my entire brain. He was maybe just being campy and probably at least half joking but it hit me right down the middle anyway:

“You could’ve put out more.”

It set me free so much to hear this perfect angel I had idealized for so long just say a horny, jackassy man thing to me. The idea, even the little chance, that he had felt real desire for me shifted my perspective an embarrassing amount, really changed the way I saw myself in the past and present. It was unbalancing and delightful.

As you know if you’ve read this blog in past years, the story I can’t help telling myself about men is, they can (temporarily) want me, but they can’t love me. I believe this even though love has happened to me with men at least three times. I don’t know why the story is so embedded but no amount of paragraphs or therapy has ever dislodged it.

The story I’ve always told myself about The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow is that he was an innocent child whom I tried to corupt with my broken and slutty ways. I was a Bad Kid who hurt him. Seeing myself as a threat in general is one of the most annoying ways that rape culture has gotten under my skin, and I am happy to peel away another layer of it.

(Honestly though, writing this feels like I AM being a threat to him, like I’m still a bad influence on his lovely and put-together and situated life. I’m afraid I’m writing him right out of my life, that paragraphs are predatory in their own way, but I’m writing through it. Maybe I can be a good bad influence or maybe not I’m not even an influence at all, who knows.)

Exploring the rest of the museum felt like one of those dreams where you keep discovering new rooms in old and beloved homes. (Writing this feels like one of those dreams where I meet a man I’m fascinated with then spend the rest of sleep tangled up in dream logic trying to find him again. But not in an unpleasant way.) The time just flew by until he had to go meet his boyfriend for lunch. We made plans to hang out in my city next time, at my local museum.

Sweetie had driven me to visit the Boy, so she finished up her time at the local fancy garden and met us in front of the museum. We waved goodbye and then she and I spent the rest of the day exploring and catching Pokémons.

I was crushy, and giddy, and elated, and trying not to be embarrassed about all those things. I had to admit to myself that teenage me, like Rory Gilmore, had had a wonderful boyfriend. (But way better than Dean and without the Donna Reed cosplay.) More vexingly, I had to (for like the millionth time) admit to myself that I still believe in and long for love, that my erstwhile fantasy life of asexuality and spinsterhood might not actually be what I want. Ugh, longing. I guess I was lucky to avoid it for the few months that I did.

The next day, my whole body felt like spring and I made the super most of it. I got naked on the (very private) back patio and made myself a new chalk mural. I danced in the sun like a goof and then went to bed for a very good long time. I want to give you all the details, but it seems like somehow Favorite Aunt would know.

So I’m trying to think of ways to honor my slutty self this summer—I can’t make the Sparkly Festival, but shall I brave the nude beach? I’ve definitely gone back to swiping, and I’m letting myself think that snuggles might not be too far away. It’s nice to be back in the present tense, grateful and glowing.

The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow, Part Seven

I sometimes wish the other people in the story had just as many paragraphs I could read about their inner lives, but they don’t. The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow is now the Man Who Sewed Me a Pillow, walking around another city being almost a complete mystery.

After the stupid Beatles letter, about twenty-five years went by. (What are we, Twin Peaks?)  Then, you know that feeling where you run into your (probably gay) first love at a family funeral and can’t stop flirting? No? Just me?

That’s how, about five years ago, I decided that the Boy-Now-Man Who Sewed Me a Pillow needed to be my friend. I got his number, took his picture to go with it, texted to apologize for being such a jerk in high school, was forgiven, then proceeded to do almost nothing about really making friends. I’d invite him to my yearly Christmas party, he couldn’t make it, we’d talk about making other plans, then not make other plans. Each year, Favorite Aunt would join facebook in reminding me to wish him a happy birthday. (If she was reminding HIM to wish ME a happy birthday, there’s no evidence.)

Then this year, a year in which I’d resolved to remember how to make new friends, a favorite artist got a retrospective in his city. I invited myself for a visit, set monthly reminders to actually remember to make plans, and then, to my great disbelief, there were plans.

I’d been thinking of this kind of the way I would any other awkward new friendship, but a few nights before our visit, texting him about museum logistics, I felt a surprising tide of warmth. It felt as though we’d always been making plans, ordinary and wonderful as making plans with Sweetie or Favorite Aunt or anyone else I readily and easily love. It startled me a little that I could feel that much closeness with someone I really didn’t know at all, even though I guess that’s what this blog is mostly about.

The warmth that spread through my body over this really very ordinary exchange reminded me of the feeling I sometimes got during trauma work—something was being gently prised loose, except this thing that had been stored in me wasn’t a hurt or a breakage but a treasure, a hope.

***

***Note: I watched The Unicorn Store right before writing the first draft of this part, but it probably would have been pretty glittery anyway.

Boy, The Unicorn Store really had my number.

There had been some doubt about whether we’d get to see the exhibit we’d planned for, the one I’d written into my 2019 goals, but there he was with tickets when I arrived, peering down into his phone looking EXACTLY the same except for a little grey and a cute beard and looking EXACTLY right for his way-cooler-than-I-am city. I called his name, we hugged, and we breezed into the museum, a little awkward but mostly in the care of bright colors, details, textures, and happy banter.

We had never hung out together so far from Favorite Aunt (though in a way it didn’t feel far from her at all…) so I thought it would be weird. Objectively, it IS weird to make plans with someone you knew for six months thirty years ago, or, more accurately kissed and loved but never really knew at all.

But really, as we moved from room to room catching up (in between times of me getting in trouble for taking too many pictures) nervousness and oddness gave over to a silly joy that had its own momentum. The sensation, which I’ve felt a couple of times before, was one of my heart unlatching, of becoming unseparated from him, from art, from myself, from love, from every beautiful thing that has ever been in the world.

(Is all)

It was both the old-friend sensation of no time having passed between visits and the mystical feeling of meeting a muse. It was both picking up where we’d left off (wherever THAT was) and noticing a labyrinth-string that I’d been following all along.

As much as I would have liked to be some imaginary cool, restrained person, I couldn’t really stop myself from becoming a high tide, an effervescently glitter-shining sea of exclaiming, gasping, giggling. It was both a Very Big Deal and the easiest, most natural thing in the world.

The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow, Part Four

That teenage summer, there were just a few moments between us that genuinely felt connected to sex, at least as I understood it then. I remember being on top of him, both of us thoroughly clothed, on the floor of Favorite Aunt’s sewing room, while a family party went on below. It’s hard not to imagine myself with the intent an evil scientist, trying to pin down a beautiful and helpless butterfly. I’m not sure if he remembers it that way, if he remembers it at all. Present-day signs point to no on the helpless-butterfly-pinning. (At least not in a bad way. But I can only speculate.)

I had sworn off sex as a respite after the Big Trauma. (He told me a few weeks ago, while having coffee outside a museum on a perfect sunny-chilly spring day, that I had referred to myself as a “born-again virgin.” A LOT. That quote both breaks my heart and makes me laugh—of course that person would become a pansexual sex blogger! I feel really awesome at life right at this moment!) Anyway, I was doing the reasonable-seeming-at-the-time thing of blaming my sluttiness, my adventurousness, for the fact that I had been drugged, raped, and assaulted at a party right before that summer.

I told the Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow that we would wait until we were old enough to get married (by which I meant, like, when I was 20 and he was eighteen) and THEN have sex. Silly as it is, that strikes me as a pretty badass thing to say to somebody, especially someone you’ve only known a few weeks. Imagine saying that to a 2019 guy! Back then, the idea felt romantic and like a relief from all of the impersonal sex my body and soul had been though the previous school year. (Sex which, LET ME MAKE IT CLEAR, I chose a lot of and some of which I really enjoyed. I wonder if I can write about it in detail sometime?)

When I found out, years later, that the Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow (By then technically the Man Who Sewed Me a Pillow) ended up with a guy, I imagined he had been relieved by our lack of sex, maybe for the chance to rest in the performance of heterosexuality before embarking on the road out of the closet. So many oversimplified assumptions in one sentence! I told myself this story for DECADES, and maybe it is true, but I’m pretty appalled at my binary thinking, the ability to write off my own experience as well as the entire spectrum of sexuality and desire, even in the face of so much experience and SO, SO many paragraphs.

This seems like a good place to stop and let it all sink in over the long weekend. Kondo-ing my feelings takes a lot, and right now is that part where all the emotions are in piles all over the place and I need to slow down, touch each one, and see what sparks joy. Maybe next week I’ll finish the story and then everything will be treasured and have a place.

Dear people who are kind enough to read this, enjoy your Easter or Passover or Cherry Blossom Festival. Eat chocolate and look at flowers, I love you.

The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow, Part One

For this one, we’re going all the way back to the early Nineties, to the summer after the Big Trauma happened https://kittencalendar.blogspot.com/2012/04/triggers-and-my-voice-story-of-hard.html?zx=e0bd5bdf8967148e. He was fourteen and I was sixteen.

Unable to stop taking their unease with the Big Trauma out on me and on each other, my parents, near divorce and overflowing with violence, sent me to stay with my Favorite Aunt at her beautiful Colonial-era home, about six hours away from my immediate family’s cramped and feral suburban home. Favorite Aunt had always been the person who most vocally liked me when my parents, clearly and emphatically, did not. She was an oasis of hugs, praise, and affection, in a childhood full of coldness, contempt, and turning to teachers as my only daily source of grownup approval.

She was also, though, Catholic. That part of the story makes it hard to not become incoherent with rage. Favorite Aunt’s spirtuality felt like a bright white escape hatch, a way to clean and simplify myself of such a dirty and complicated life, a way to escape the pain, trauma, abandonment and fear of the previous months. Of course now I understand that in being pulled (temporarily, I’m relieved to say) back into the religion of my upbringing I was both victim of and complicit in a more effective and insidious factory of rape than any teen party, no matter how out of control, could ever be.

At the time though, it seemed that the best way to regain control after a brutal rape and subsequent assault by my dad (https://kittencalendar.blogspot.com/2018/10/metoo-letter-dear-dad-stfu-about.html) was to blame myself, my sluttiness, my sense of adventure. That seems heartbreaking now, but at the time it felt self-explanatory. Such is the power of an adult willing to dole out affection. I don’t think my Favorite Aunt was rape-culture-gaslighting me on purpose, because at the time, blaming myself seemed as natural and as life-giving as air.

Favorite Aunt’s charisma and generosity of affection means she often has children as friends. (I share this quality, for which I am very grateful.) She thought one of these friends, the artsy, quiet son of one of her church families, would be a perfect match for me, and he was. (All these years later, she still ships us, in spite of a lifetime mostly apart and a mountain of evidence. This doesn’t bother me as much as maybe it should.)

I don’t remember how he and I got together, whether we were pushed or drawn, probably both. I can’t clearly remember my first kiss with The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow (also, the first truly kind or loving kiss I’d known) but I know it was postcard perfect. Favorite Aunt and I went to visit him and his family where they were camping for a week, on a vacation island not too far ways from Favorite Aunt’s home. We walked (maybe I was holding his hand, seems like something I would do…) down the beach a little ways away from the families. We stood beside the water, the tall waves making for the closest approximation of privacy we were likely to get.

I remember the sea as rough but kind that day, the dizzy feeling in my throat, the sense of finality, of accomplishment. Having a sexy feeling that was also loving, with anyone besides myself, was a new and blissful sensation, as big and reliable and all-encompassing as the ocean itself.

The day went by fast. Favorite Aunt and I had made homemade poptarts for him and his family (how Emily Gilmore of us!) and we gave the container to him out the car window as Favorite Aunt prepared to drive us away. He kissed me on the forehead and said, not unkindly, “You have really big dandruff.”

All of the beach days and other excursions with Favorite Aunt meant that my scalp was sunburned and peeling. I was only a little bit embarrassed. I was a jumble of salt and skin and hot-pink feeling, riding away from the beach and towards a sunset as pink as my cheeks.

A Brief Gilmore Guy Revival: Part Two (Concern-Trolling Is Gentle Voter Suppression)

We didn’t talk much, at least not in the fun/deadening let’s-discuss-all-of-our-interlocking-relationship-dynamics poly way. After three hours of easy bliss, we lay in the afterglow. I was holding him tenderly as he started to talk, first about his day and then about the then-four-days-away Midterm Election:

“I want to believe there’s going to be this big, sweeping Blue Wave, but I just don’t think it’ll happen. I think we’ll pick up a few seats but…”

He went on to talk about how bleak things were going to be over the next few years. When he got to the part about how the Democrats didn’t have any strong candidates for 2020, my body went from being a sparkly cloud of bliss to being an angry spring. I disentangled from him as if I was disentangling from the entire last three years.

“Who do you want it to be then? BERNIE?!”

“No, actually I don’t really care for Senator Sanders…”

“WELL, you’ve got that going for you.” I hissed.

Part of my reaction, I have to admit, was good old-fashioned daddy issues. Gilmore Guy’s erasure of Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Corey Booker, et al felt too much like the anti-Gillibrand conversation I still felt trapped in with my dad. (OF COURSE dad didn’t acknowledge the letter I sent. OF COURSE he didn’t.)

It was also too much like the role-flipped therapy session I’d had earlier in the week, comforting a clearly-not-a-match therapist by trying to convince her that the Resistance does, in fact, exist and have an impact.

I’m so happy to have the election results to back me up as I continue to un-gaslight myself about this!

It frustrates me so much that they can’t see it, that they can’t see US or our work, even as it slowly but surely lifts the country out of our mess. I realize that as a member of the Resistance, it’s part of my task to HELP people see it, but having my own reality denied so often really hurts—it’s too much. The time theft is too much. The emotional labor is too much.

I’m not here to try and convince anybody of my existence, to convince anybody that the movements I love are not helpless or worthless or stupidly hysterical. (I’m all about reclaiming the word “hysterical” but that’s another post for another day.)

(My off-script textbanking exchanges with Republicans earlier in the Midterm process have really gotten to me as well, but the right is clearly not the only problem here.)

“I’m just worried about voter suppression,” He said. Of course! We all are. We were both up off the folded-out couch and I was angrily putting on my clothes.

“You’re DOING voter suppression when you tell us we can’t win!”

Concern-trolling is definitely not as evil or insidious as governors who purge voter rolls, exact-match laws, or Native Americans suddenly having to root out street addresses from obscure bureaucratic labyrinths, but it IS part of the problem and definitely should be voted most likely to keep me from snuggling.

I argued probably not very well. He said:

“Let me explain why Kamala Harris can’t…”

Perhaps realizing that I will be having some version of this conversation until she is elected, I fucking SNAPPED.

“I told you I don’t want to have this conversation. Do something about it or Shut. Up.”

(That may have been mostly for dad, sorry. But also yes, shut the fuck up.)

“Don’t scream at me in my own house.” He said, apparently out of arguments. My voice was raised, but screaming was an exaggeration.

The saddest thing about writing down that moment is realizing that he was happy to have me raise my voice in all of the sex-wails that I wanted, but not to stand up for myself, not even to defend my own worth.

“Have fun SITTING ON YOUR ASS and criticizing everybody who’s doing the WORK!” I hollered as I grabbed my purse and umbrella from the kitchen and headed for the door.

“Get. Out.” He said in that annoying I’m-the-reasonable-person tone that I know so well from back when I was married to Sweetie.

After I’d splashed through the rain to my car, the dash clock read 12:06. I’d aimed to turn myself into a pumpkin by midnight and he had (inadvertently, I hope) helped me along.

I wish I could say that I feel righteous and free after that, but I just miss him. I feel lonely about it, and sad. I’m glad I blocked his number and deleted his texts, because I keep wishing I could reach out, somehow repair the connection, somehow be in those arms again.

But even causally, I can’t be with someone who doesn’t live, at least mostly, in the same reality as I do. America has changed so deeply since 2016, and I’m one of the lucky many who can see the underlying positivity: The networks of activism, the interlocking movements full of loving, fiery momentum. Resistbot, Pantsuit Nation, Solidarity Sundays. THE MARCH FOR OUR LIVES KIDS, for god’s sake. The way PEOPLE ACTUALLY CARED about the Midterms!

I want a partner who, no matter how bleak and scary things get, can see the goodness and care that’s growing every day. I wish, in that afterglow moment, I’d mustered the empathy and strength to convince him, to bring him into that hopeful view and keep him safe there. I know I can’t keep him safe, can’t keep anyone safe no matter what. So I run when my body tells me to run, fight when it tells me to fight, and I hope for the best.

Snuggles in the Time of Kavanaugh, Part Four

            Part of the reason the Kavanaugh hearings were so painful and traumatizing was that Dr. Ford’s testimony recalled my own teenage rape so clearly. I felt protective of Gilmore Guy as he helped me navigate those feelings, mostly by being wonderful and adorable and nice-smelling and superhot.

            But when, after several increasingly tense attempts at PIV sex, it started to slide into place, I could feel his focus on his penis’s performance. His determination and fixation made me feel like I wasn’t there, like he wasn’t there either. I slipped back from this safe, celebratory moment to that decades-ago drugged, mouth-covered, trapped, lost teenage feeling. I lost the battle against panic and told him so. He stopped, of course, looked scared and concerned. I felt all of my OWN pressure to get back to cheerful so we could fuck, my own increasingly futile determination to not be so scary with all of my feelings.

            “What do you need?” He asked again and again, in a voice that was at once scared, caring, and businesslike. I apologized for panicking and he said something understanding about “emotional labor” which struck me as a sad phrase to have to use on a second-or-third date. Nonetheless, he cared for me and treated me kindly, to the point where I wanted to return the good-listener favor. I asked him what was on his mind and he said:

“I miss (Gilmore Lady).” I just couldn’t help it, I started to cry. It wasn’t cute crying by any stretch—lonely, hurt, sad tears, empty and heartbreaking. It was a moment of inescapable honesty and I lost all attempts at being I-love-sharing-modern-open-relationships lady.

I cried and cried and confessed and confessed. I told him how much I want to be someone’s sun and moon and stars (“Not YOURS. Not on the second date. I’m not CRAZY.”) how what I really wanted was romance, how I’d already told him in the woods that I’m not a secondary.

“Do you want me to go?” He asked delicately.

“No. You can think I’m crazy tomorrow. Just… don’t go.”

“I don’t think you’re crazy,” he said forcefully, climbing back into bed and wrapping me up in his arms. As kind as he was, and even as he didn’t mind me playing a guided meditation to try and get to sleep, I couldn’t settle in next to him. I went downstairs to the couch and almost immediately, exhausted and scared (not of him) I fell asleep in my own personal space.

When I woke up in the morning and, after my morning writing, meditation, and Spanish practice, went upstairs to him, I saw all over again what a gift he was. He was just lying there on his belly checking his phone, locks in a grey bandanna and fanned out over his naked back and shoulders, looking like a perfect treasure of a man, and I told him so. I really didn’t want to let him go, and we made the VERY most of the morning until it was time for me to get ready for work.

We made plans for the weekend. We texted and texted and texted. I sent him long, fretful, feminist paragraphs and he sent kind and thoughtful responses back. I could send him fraught texts in the middle of the night without scaring him away, that does not go unappreciated. He was a champion. He really tried, and so did I.

When it came time for our third-or-fourth date, a NO rose up in me so strong and goddessy that it felt like it was coming from the center of the earth. I said rather more than I meant to about unicorn hunters and the treatment of secondary partners how I might LOOK less-than, but wasn’t.

He looked regretful and sad as he left, and I was sad too. But more than sad, I was SURE. I was brave. I could see and admit what I wanted, even though poly norms and society in general would tell me to expect and accept less. I was embarrassed that I’d said so much, but mostly I just felt proud.

A week or so after that, Gilmore Guy and I exchanged kind goodbye/thank you texts, and I’m glad. I couldn’t be more grateful for his visit to my life, and I’m glad I got to tell him so directly instead of just hoping that he reads this.

I feel like I am a new and different person in a post-Dr.-Ford world. Her bravery is a new resource that empowers me to stand up for myself in the screaming-at-the-Supreme-Court way but also in the smaller, more daily, even in the more snuggly ways. I can’t say enough about my gratitude for Dr. Ford and for all of the women who came before her and with her. My childhood self had Anita Hill, my present day self has Christine Blasey Ford, and we both have Murphy Brown, so I think everything might be okay.

            After I said goodbye to Gilmore Guy, I changed my “Relationship Type” in OK Cupid to monogamous. I’m not sure that’s exactly right either, but there’s no “sun and moon and stars” option. So far, it has the same trials and indignities as it did before, but also the same hope. Steven and Gilmore Guy kindled a good flame in me, and I’m going to take care of it.

Gilmore Guy Part Three: Please, Please, Please

Though Gilmore Guy lives on a busy block and it was Friday night, I did show up wearing pajamas. I wore my favorite old soft pair, the ones I usually wear after the beach when I want to feel femme-y and relaxed and posh—black with purple, line-drawn lilies, stretchy but with pretty, sheer trim. Underneath, I had on a regular good black bra and one of my few pairs of undies that doesn’t go all the way up. (Confession: Though it’s hard to imagine anybody reaching around inside them, I really like wearing briefs. I wish they weren’t so stigmatized! Darn you, Bridget Jones! Although come to think of it, they really didn’t hold Bridget back, did they?)

I didn’t know which bell to ring, so I texted and he came down. I’d broken a sandal-strap on the way from the car, so I had to awkward my way up the steps. His (their) apartment was impeccably clean, with a feeling of the midcentury about it, like Mrs. Maisel’s apartment but not so fancy. The walls were painted a warm, vivid orange, which should have been hideous but was not.

Though we’d talked all about sex already, including the awkward testing talk, there was a lovely tentativeness between us—it’s nice that no matter how worldly anyone gets, the time before a first kiss is so often fizz and jangle, innocent and silly and new. It’s a wonderful, excruciating feeling, and I wonder when it will happen again.

His alcohol selection rivals my pen collection (and my Instagram feed) in terms of pure (artistic, one hopes) obsession. I handed him the mint from my garden, which I had forgotten to wash. His mojito-ing process was LONG, and he got sidetracked a few times having me taste fancy things I hadn’t had before. I noticed the sprig of pink silk-flower butterflies in a vase on the table, the same dollar store ones I use in my street art. I took it as a good sign.

His living room was warm and full of pillows, festive with street noise from the bar downstairs. The room very clearly belonged to Gilmore Lady, but could have equally housed Max Medina. I scanned the bookshelves (mostly philosophy) wondering if their book collection was merged—I mean, of course it was, right? His DJ equipment was in there too, though he said he hadn’t used it in quite a while.

We watched the Demi September 21 videos (Seriously, google it, “electrolemon September”) and then settled in for the Gilmore Girls.

“Stars Hollow looks so different,” he said, and filled me in on facts I’d forgotten about how things changed after the pilot. I was soooo happy to be starting my yearly rewatch, next to this gorgeous man, with a bespoke mojito in my hand, proud of my mint and swoony with good luck.

            Unsurprisingly for two switches, it took a little effort to figure out who would put their arms around whom. I wanted to wrap him up, take him, cocoon him protectively, but he did that for me instead.

            Probably about ten minutes into the Stars-Hollow-is-so-different pilot, I looked up into his face and it was easy. It felt natural and right, as if we had been kissing for our entire lives. His mouth was soft, yielding but also insistent. Our faces, our mouths, we fit together and the night clicked into place. Our fate, at least for the next few hours, was sealed.