The Waiting and the Breakup Thing

I really didn’t want to let him go. I am tired of being in the pattern of girl meets dom, dom breaks limits, dom disappears. I thought there must be a better way to end the story, some way to let him earn back my trust. I spent the couple of days after the bad scene concentrating on being 100% there for my students and trying to get in touch with my inner strength.

Because The Man and Sadist Girl were members of the venue’s security staff, I wrote to the venue owners to tell them what happened. Because of some stupid loyalty or hope, I left The Man’s name out of it. I gave his name later on, but I seriously doubt that there will be any consequences. I’m one voice against members of a close-knit group, and I’m sure it’ll be easy for them to convince their boss that I’m crazy or whatever. Power imbalances like this are what make me wonder if kink is ever really safe.

When it came time to get in touch with him, I was still very unsure, but I thought it would be good to plan a walk either way—we could either reconnect or debrief and part kindly. It seemed like a healthy way to try and break my pattern of disappearing doms.

He didn’t text back when I texted after school, so I started to figure out that it was really over. I called around 5:30 and got back an unfriendly text that said he would call when he got back from the gym. He made me wait for that call for a long while, but I got the kids’ behavior reports done while I was waiting—that seemed oddly fitting. I kept reading out relevant quotes to Sweetie: “Please pay attention and follow directions,” etc. Does not play well with others.

The call was quick:

“(The Wife) says I have to talk to you so I’m talking to you. I don’t think that you are healthy for me to be around. You are too fragile, even when I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“What are you TALKING ABOUT? I didn’t do anything wrong. I realized that I needed help and I told you! And you didn’t listen. It is not fragile to respond to something traumatic by being traumatized.”

“You weren’t traumatized and this isn’t about Saturday, which, I already apologized. You have emotional issues about me. You’re so nervous that it makes me fearful. When you met (The Wife) you were so upset that you could barely speak, even though there was no reason to be nervous.”

“I was nervous when I met her because I LIKED you.” (And, I didn’t say, because she started out the night by pouting and refusing to come to the table. And she had veto power. And she tried really hard to convince me that I would like a horror-themed play party. And because they were Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolfe-ing each other all throughout dinner. It was nerve-wracking, is all.)

“That wasn’t the only thing.”

“Explain please. I just don’t understand.”

“I don’t HAVE to explain. I can just hang up this phone and never speak to you again.”

(tiny voice) “Oh. Okay.”

I couldn’t understand why he was suddenly so mad, what in the world had changed since Sunday. I started writing this post as a “Well, AM I too nervous?” kind of thing but that is just pointless. Even if I had fucked up the dinner we could have talked it through. He was trying to turn it around on me for whatever reason, but it makes no sense. None of it makes any sense.

It’s always tempting to look around in a story and see what I could have done better, see what lessons I can learn so that it can all go better next time, but this is not the time for that. The plain and simple fact is that he fucked me over and then tried to gaslight me about it. It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t my fault.

I’m not fragile. I have “emotional issues” but who doesn’t—it’s called being alive. I tried to talk and process and do what you’re supposed to do, but none of it worked, because it was over, even sooner than I thought it was. I miss him so badly and I don’t know when I’ll be ready to date again. The fear and sadness gets less every day, and I’m ding my best to take care of myself and move on.

Triggers and My Voice: The Story of a Hard Limit

Note: If you’re someone who gets triggered by mentions of non-consensual sexual violence, you’ll want to skip this one.

Last week I talked a lot about being protective of my voice and being subject to panics. I’m unsure if these facts about myself disqualify me from experiencing BDSM in the ways I want to. I guess I thought there would be failsafes or at least compassion in case someone’s triggered, but that doesn’t seem to be the case so far. I’m trying to not judge the whole “lifestyle” based on one group of people.

A lot of things contributed to me being an anxious girl with shaky self-worth. I had both a happy childhood and a terribly abusive one. Both my mother and father were physically and verbally abusive to myself, my siblings, and each other. They often fought loudly about sex. One night, I’m pretty sure I heard my dad rape my mom. I got it to stop, in fact, by crying loudly. “Now you made (me) cry.” she said as the action simmered down in there.

But the biggest factor in me being protective of my voice was something that happened when I was seventeen. I’ve been telling the story in the same stupid way for twenty years: I was promiscuous in high school and it lead to an inevitable conclusion of rape and assault. That is a bullshit way to tell the story—it’s sad that I only realized recently that there was no cause-effect relationship. It was a terrible, evil crime, not a path I put myself on.

What happened was, my friend Sheri and I lied and said we were going to each others’ houses so that we could hang out with her boyfriend and his friend and get laid. That didn’t take very long, so after the guys were done with us, they dropped us off in the park three doors down from my house. We were considering sleeping in the park when a pickup truck full of hooting and hollering people we vaguely knew pulled up and asked if we wanted to go to a party and we said sure—I thought of how mortified my mom would be if she knew I was riding in the back of a pickup truck.

They either put something in my drink or I drank way too fast. I don’t remember drinking very much at all, but we were playing Quarters around the time that the guys started asking, “So which one of us are you gonna fuck?” I was woozy and tired and I didn’t want to fuck anyone, no matter how known for it I was. But I knew I didn’t really have a choice—I wasn’t in any condition to stop anybody, and this was kind of who I was now. So I chose Willie, the cutest guy at the party. He was a tall, skinny African American guy, cute but with kind of a dismissive face. I chose him partly because he was there with his girlfriend, I think her name was Lisa, a blond in acid-washed jeans. I thought he couldn’t do anything with her there, but he sent her home.

Willie took me to the party host’s bedroom and told me to get undressed. “All the way,” he said, and I did. He got on top of me and put it in, humped quickly and mechanically. I opened my mouth to cry out, not for help, but to moan so I’d be doing a good job. He put his hand over my mouth and I shut up. When he was done, he left the door open so that the whole party could see me scrambling around for my shirt.  

That’s when I started to get sick, just throwing up copious amounts everywhere, so, so much. I must have passed out then and when I came to, I couldn’t see, and they were hitting me with something hard. (I found out later it was tennis rackets) and yelling at me for throwing up. They were screaming all kinds of names at me, but I just remember them saying I was bad. I’m not sure how many people were doing the hitting, but Willie and Lisa were two of them.

I screamed and screamed and screamed and some angel neighbor called the cops. When they got there, Lisa or some other blond girl took me into the bathroom to try and clean up the blood that had spattered all down my shirt. I remember she was talking to me so sweetly.

So far we have three reasons why my voice (which includes these paragraphs) feels like a lifeline that could get taken away: “saving” my mom by crying, Willie’s hand over my mouth, and the screams that maybe actually did save my life. But the fourth reason is much guiltier: I didn’t tell the police the sex part of the crime. They couldn’t get it out of me. Everyone knew, but I refused to say it on the deposition. I’d been drinking, I was a slut, I didn’t know how to prove I didn’t deserve what happened.

I didn’t know how to prove I didn’t deserve what happened. I’ve told this story so many times, but never understood it quite that way.

I felt like I couldn’t really say it was rape because I’d chosen him, I didn’t try to stop him. The Accused had somehow become embedded in my consciousness, having the opposite (?) of its intended effect. I knew the danger of being “put on trial” for it and I wanted no part of that. So I lied my face off and told the police the assault story without the first part. A few of them, including Willie, did some jail time for the assault, but the fact that I didn’t tell the truth about the rest of the crime makes me feel like a co-conspirator, like I didn’t do enough to protect myself or my fellow women.

The crying, the hand over my mouth, the screams that saved my life, the guilt over not telling, they’ll always be in my body. Sometimes they make me very hard to be close to, but they also make me brave, protective, and they make me try to be transparent.

I guess what I want people to get out of this is that you never know what stories can be inside someone’s body. Every single person you touch, even in the most casual way, sitting next to her on the bus, tying him up at a play party, or hugging them on a first date, has a body full of stories. Give up the idea that enough negotiation can make those complications got away. The stories inside us, even the screams, are beautiful and deserve to be treated with care.

Last April I Accidentally Wore the Scarlet Letter: Part Three

After I kissed Scrabble Boy goodnight, I went into the bedroom and found that Sweetie hadn’t been asleep. She was laying there crying and looking traumatized. What’s worse, since the bathroom is right next to the couch, she’d felt trapped and unable to get up and go pee. I was a jerk about it, and we exchanged a few harsh words before trying to sleep for a couple of hours.

The morning was tricky and painful. I had no idea what he was thinking, and I just wanted Sweetie to somehow like me again. Aside from my inane morning chatter, there was very little talking. I passed her a note that said I was sorry, and passed him a note that said “I like you.” He finished up the robot-themed mix he’d been making me, and I made them breakfast: scrambled eggs with spinach and cheese. Scrabble Boy and I ate at the dining room table while Sweetie hid in our room.

Scrabble Boy drove us downtown to the teen poetry workshop we were helping to lead at one of the local universities. The day was so incredibly perfectly pretty-the flowering trees along the river were in full bloom and the sky was its very best cheerful self. We listened to the robot mix (Not as dreamy as the situation called for) and kissed at every stoplight. I loved holding his hand as we walked from the car to the gig. For two such hung over and twitterpated people, we did a great job with the workshop, except I was in no state to write anything coherent.

When he dropped me off afterward, I was full of worry about Sweetie and I didn’t want him to leave. We kissed and kissed and kissed. We decided that we would keep in touch via facebook Scrabble, which was the beginning of facebook Scrabble being ruined maybe forever for me.

I had another gig that night, but luckily there was time to take a nap with Sweetie first. By the next day, she started to like me again and we started to feel okay. We took a walk by the river and took in the flowering trees.

Scrabble Boy was on tour and also had to fly to Florida to attend his grandfather’s funeral. (So some of his urgency was probably grief.) We were in touch almost every day through poems and texts and Scrabble. He mentioned me in a coded way in almost every poem he posted, including this: “dear reader, I love you.” Of course, he could have meant any and all readers, but I wanted it to be me. Some of the poems were a little paranoid, mentioning “unauthorized activities” but I guess I just didn’t notice. I was writing unabashed and smutty-for-me love poems.

It took me a few weeks to write about it in a literal way, on my other blog. I wanted to acknowledge the fact that I was now sure of being bi and had experienced all these new emotions.

Are you ever watching a dumb sitcom or something where there’s a misunderstanding or something and you feel frustrated, like, why didn’t they just TALK!? That’s how I feel at every stage of this story.

As soon as I posted the post, I sent it to him, and he popped up on gchat almost immediately. He asked me to take out the paragraph mentioning his wife. She didn’t know. He used the phrase “not authorized” again. He was obviously scared and upset and I was LIVID with myself for making what seemed like such an obvious mistake. I did take the paragraph out, but unredacted it a few weeks later. It’s a really important paragraph, because it showed my first experience of compersion:

“And I had such an epiphany a little while ago when he posted a beautiful poem about his wife. I guess I thought I might be jealous, but I read it anyway. And a little latch-box opened in my heart and the sun shined out. I was/am genuinely happy that he’s in his real life, loving and loved and writing hot poems for her.”

Next time: We try to be friends…