What I Want, Part A Million

 

Like what Lorelai Gilmore eventually got, but with fewer hats.

Stars, hide your fires,
these here are my desires,
and I won’t give them up to you
this time around.

And so, I’ll be found,
with my stake stuck in this ground
marking the territory of this
newly impassioned soul.

--Mumford and Sons, “Roll Away Your Stone”

Festive Easter Mumford and Sons are waaaayyy more assured than I am, of course. It’s not that I think new love’s not possible, it usually-to-sometimes feels possible. But I sort of have no idea what kind of person will capture my imagination next—love surprises me and vexes me every time.

At the same time, I want to rid myself of the idea that I have to adapt to any given situation that comes along, as if it’s somehow…undemocratic? to have preferences, as if I’m not entitled to want perfectly ordinary things. Specific things. It’s necessarily a kind of bitter don’t-make-mistakes-again list, but I’m sure time and attraction will soften the edges soon enough.

(OMG someone in my self-compassion group just said that oxytocin is physically addictive and takes around 90 days to…un-addict? I have no idea if that’s true but it makes me happy to retroactively curse every sweet ex with 90 days of jonesing.)

Anyway! The list so far:

1.     I’m a get-in-all-your-business person. I’m a family person. No matter what someone’s situation, I want to know their entire gestalt. I loved the way that The Shy One had begun folding into my family and chosen family, and it would have been so fulfilling if that folding-in could have been mutual.

 

Yesterday one of my neighbors told me she was trying to win over her boyfriend’s kid, and I felt so full of joy for her. Her perfectly ordinary trajectory gave me the hope that those kinds of steps might happen for me AND that I might have the courage to admit I want them. Doesn’t have to be kids, could be family, chosen family, neighborhood bonding. I know it takes time and trust, but I want to be in the next guy’s world.

2.     No closets. There are plenty of reasons to be compassionate toward closeted folks, to support them and listen to them and root for them exactly where they are at. But if I date them, I’ll end up being treated as a threat to their happiness, their safety, their social capitol, their parents’ approval, whatever. That is an AWFUL position to be in, and SO TRIGGERING given my life as my own family’s scapegoat.

So here’s the rule: I have to be able to tag a guy on my main-feed, un-anonymous Instagram and be like “OMG look at my boyfriend’s whole face he’s sooooooo dreamy.”

I feel like a lot of the stuff on this list is what straight (and straight-sized) women feel entitled to as a matter of course. So I’m gonna try to learn that good entitlement.

I want to remember that shame that’s understandable is still shame. It still gets on me and in me, and the world (and past traumas) will provide me with enough shame without me voluntarily signing up for more. Discreet boys can stick with discreet ladies. Maybe the shame makes it hotter?

3.     I’m going to scream the next time someone calls me “Solo Poly.” I think it’s a totally valid thing to be but for me, it feels like I’m expected to be on the margins of someone’s “real life.” That’s really sad and triggering for me, and it’s possible I assign it to myself as punishment.

Or maybe I’ve been afraid to say what I want—I want a guy’s undivided attention. He can be poly, I think, but he has to have the capacity to be ALL IN, to give me his whole heart. I can give my whole heart to lots of people, flowers, clouds, sunsets, etc, there HAS to be some dude who can do the same.

And he should please definitely, definitely, DEFINITELY stay over and make pancakes in the morning. Maybe linger around all day and snooze.

That’s enough for now, I think!

What I Want, Part Three

7. SEE ABOVE.

8. I want to keep getting better and better at the ropes, learn all kinds of new knots and harnesses. It’s time, too, to learn a little more about restraining the cuties. I want all kinds of Ma’am and Sir pleasures. And I ESPECIALLY want to tie The Shy One to the bed a BUNCH more times.

9. I want to take, send, and receive lots more superhot pictures. Lots of beautiful cute-iful pictures. Something about the way The Song Sender saw me made me super-smitten with selfie-ing. I got bolder in asking for and sending smutty pictures, collected so many new ways to photo-flirt! I’d love to keep that going. Photoplay was such a big part of my early adventures-- I can’t wait to see what lands in the Hidden Folder next!

10. I want good communication. I want to learn good communication. I’d love to break through my layers of crush and guardedness and just figure out how to say what needs saying, with way less angst and drama on my part.

That means figuring out how to say “I miss you” instead of panicking that I’ll be forgotten. It means writing though layers of old bitterness and hurt so I don’t take it out on the sweet people of now. I could be so much better at this!

I want to let people be in touch the way they want to, but I’d also like all the cute texts all the time please! With emojis. And pictures of flowers and trees and pets and clouds and hot, hot bodies. I want to know each dear is thinking of me and let them know I’m thinking of them.

11. I want to fall asleep easier when I have company in bed. I love being in The Shy One’s arms listening to him snore sweetly, enjoying the warmth and peace, but it’s SO hard for me to fall asleep that way! That’s partly because of the excitement, my heart won’t stop racing with him no matter how many (SO many) times I’ve come, racing with happiness and exertion and oh-my-goodness-how-am-I-so-lucky-ness! But I would love to relax into him, into any of them, and fell asleep. Not worry about farting. Not worry he’ll disappear. Just know he’s with me, and drift off.

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Quarantine Crush Part Eight: Phew/Sob/Yay!

I couldn’t sleep after I asked him if he meant the songs, so I got up and went to my email, to the poem thread. I didn’t write a poem there, just told him how I felt. It was a pretty unhinged thing to do in the (here) middle of the night, but I’m glad I wrote it. I’m glad he knows.

His late-even-for-the-west-coast reply brought equal parts relief and heartbreak. He hadn’t meant the songs the way I did. He has a partner and they’re happy. That meant I didn’t have to worry so much (still some though) about his safety. I was grateful to the person, so QC was being looked after. (It’s tempting to say here of course he’s taken, he’s the Actual Best Person, and that does have sort of a fatalistic ring of truth, but lots and lots of perfectly lovely people aren’t taken, I know. Like me!)

What a letter this was. It was the kindest, calmest, most accepting, most platonically loving letter in my collection of I-don’t-like-you-that-way notes. Genuine, golden, shining care for my well-being and valuing of the real-life writing relationship—what more could a person even ask for.

My heart physically warms up when I think about this letter. The only rejection I’ll keep to calm me down in times of jangledness—a talisman, a charm.

The wanted to keep writing poems back and forth and I hope we will again someday, but not now. For me, writing with someone takes so much trust, maybe the MOST trust, and I’m saying this as someone who has submitted to being set on fire for fun. (Oh Fireguy! Here is a cuddle in case you’re reading, and even if you’re not.)

After the (probably shouldn’t have been a) surprise partner fact, the trust was a little harder to access, and what we were doing felt (to me) too intimate to do with someone who belongs to somebody else. Even if we’d done away with the songs and the daily chitchat and the encouragement, I would still have ended up combing the poems for signs of love. I really, really HATE combing through poems for signs of love. I’d rather let the poems and the people and the real feelings just be what they are.

So I said a grateful bye-for-now to the Zoom reading, citing (my new favorite euphemism of ever) “time zone issues.” They’ll be IRL and back to being far away soon enough anyway. I got to hear Adorable Co-Host read a poem and I got to send one last (for now) post-reading high-five to QC. I’m so pleased and proud about his latest.

It felt good to put myself first, to give myself the space (So weird to need space from someone who is 2,500 miles away, but, phones are little Pavlov machines.) to paragraph everything through.

I miss his daily presence in my inboxes and I’m certainly more bored and lonely than I was last week. Way less sobbing though. I really, really wish we could have continued that series of poems, it was really good. Maybe we can write again someday. (In the first draft I accidentally wrote “today” instead of “someday.”)

In the end, I’m a little mad at myself for the crush part, but I think all in all this was a very, very good adventure. It feels productive and hopeful to have let out a love that has lived in my body all this time, to be able to hold it up to the light. I’m glad he knows how I feel, how important he is to me. I’m so, so grateful that I could be there a little while for a dear friend in a harrowing time. I’m proud to have had and been a bright spot.

Dear QC, dear everyone (well almost everyone) in every Kitten Calendar story, thank you. I have the luckiest life.

Supersweet Election Love Story: Part Three

After I found out that the thing was mutual, I felt nervous about going into work. I didn’t know how I was supposed to act, whether I was supposed to hug him hello and goodbye, etc. His desk was in a very male-occupied space and it always felt very vulnerable to visit him there.  Election Day, on the possible cusp of our first female president and with the fate of the world hanging in the balance, I was also fretting about whether I’d been too affectionate in my voting-morning text. I’m not superproud that my Call Me Maybeness helped get me through the day, but there was also poetry and canvassing and a general sense of patriotic/neighborhood love that made such a fraught day as bearable as possible.

Then, of course, the worst happened. After a year of hope and struggle and fighting misogynist trolls and as much canvassing and phone banking as I could handle, after a year of telling the library kids it would be okay, of telling Bernie Bros to fuck off, of boycotting conservative relatives, the worst happened and Trump won. Wednesday morning, at the college bookstore where we work together, Sweetie and I listened to Hillary’s beautiful concession speech and cried even as we tried to take courage. On my commute, I alternated between singing along with my upbeat playlist and sobbing. If I never hear Fight Song again, it’ll be too soon.

My plan when I got to my afternoon job at the library was to be strong and soothing for the kids, to help them feel as hopeful as possible, but when I got to the children’s department, my friend the Nice Genderqueer Librarian saw me and burst into tears so we held each other and I sobbed loudly and brokenheartedly in front of the kids and everyone. There was nothing else to be done at that moment.

One of the other security guards was down in our department showing concern and accepting a hug, so I was brave/needy enough to snivel “Can you get (Mr. Makeout Music) for me?” She smiled and radioed for him. He totally Muppeted out when he saw me, just reached his arms out as far as they could go and gave me the warmest, friendliest, most joyful hug imaginable. I got the chance to tell him “I’m sorry white people suck so bad!” which is a sentiment I’ll be expressing as often as possible for the foreseeable future. (Seriously, if you’re a white person reading this, get it the fuck together and stand up for people of color. And while I’m at it, if you’re a man reading this, get it the fuck together and stand up for women. It’s past time to inventory your privilege and start using it to help. We’re past life and death here.)

Oh pals, Mr. Makeout Music took such good care of me that day. He talked me through the good and evil factors at play in the election and helped me to articulate my silver lining, which was that good people were drawing together in anger and love. He also asked if he could come visit me at the bookstore that Friday, since the library was closed for Veteran’s Day. I was delighted at the prospect of him distracting me at both my jobs, so we made plans for a picnic on the Hogwarts-esque campus where I work. No one would begrudge me a long lunch on such a week.

That sad Wednesday was made much less sad by the fact that he spent almost my whole shift by my side. He brought his notebook down and worked on a paper so soothingly next to me, it was just such a comfortable family feeling. He joked with the kids and parents and watched me stave off apoplexy when a mean-girling parent tried to challenge my taste in music.  When he switched tables to play chess with my teen assistants, I drew flowers, stars, and tiny red hearts all over his homework while I had a Shine Bright Like a Diamond singalong with one of the little girls. I was totally singing to Mr. Makeout Music. When he turned around from chess to see how the homework-art was progressing, his eyes flashed something so beautiful and perfect and clear. I felt bathed in a glittery cloud of safety and strength, like I recognized someone so special and devoted and true. And, I hopehopehoped, mine.