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.

Pagan Boy Visits in a Dream

 

A few weeks ago, there was this dream. I’ve had variations of this one lots of times--Pagan Boy and I were getting back together. We had a whole sexy thing brainstormed, but then I stepped out of his apartment for a moment. We lived in an art installation, the way you sometimes do in dreams. I spent the whole rest of the dream (I think it’s Prozac that makes my dreams so long and Byzantine…) trying to get back to his place. There was an electricity map where you could check to see who was home. I thought I’d find him back there, but there was someone else.

I woke up so sad. We’d finally made a date, we were finally on-again, but I realized all over again that he’s gone. Passed away from Covid last year while we were planning a remote friend-date to watch The Apple. We’ll never get back together. We’ll never meet for coffee and flirt. He’s just gone.

The griefs of Covid and its attendant tragedies take a long time to sift though sometimes. Everyone knows the stages of grief don’t come like a ladder, step by step.

Like any other lover, he… visits? during self-love times, and that happened the other night. It was a real memory, a real day in the summer of 1994. He was moody and I was crampy, but we went to the local naked swimming waterfall anyway. We sat on the margins of the fun, barely stitched together in our own misery.

I was self-conscious then about my tampon string, but my present day remembers one moment with great warmth and shimmer. Pagan Boy watched me from the shore or on a stone in the middle of the stream while I crouched down in the shallow water and opened my legs to him. The cold water and his half attention lit up my clit in 1994 and in 2022. He couldn’t really see me and I couldn’t feel much besides the cramps, but still, an opening up, a fresh opening-up.

We re-broke-up not long after that sunny sad day, but we shared a bed as friends after club nights a few more times. His monumental snores drove my roommates crazy, and I was smushed into the wall by our two monumental bodies in the bed. The smush of him felt good to me, made me feel real and loved.

We’d overhear the roommates fucking in the next room and the air between us would get tense and frustrated, but still, he stayed. Still, we slept.

By the time, in the twenty-teens, we were having coffee in the same town where my sister lives, we were both poly and kinky. He was an oasis of being myself in the midst of any family weekend. Without that oasis, I really don’t know what to do.