Fear and Devotion, Part One

I still think closure is a thing, just not the whole thing. Not a cure-all. My newfound friendship with The Shy One didn’t stay tenable for long—that probably comes as a surprise to exactly no one. I loved being able to share a little bit of my life with him, to send him a sunrise, a ring around the moon, a short video of my work area looking just so. I loved the glimpses of his life that I got while we were avoiding almost all topics. It was such a lovely respite from missing him. I felt peaceful, hopeful, and complete in a way I hadn’t for such a long time.

But.

There was a moment last fall that I’ve always meant to write about. I was at brunch with Rainbow Pal (Not too long before a 5% difference on Palestine/Israel made Rainbow Pal and me feel unsafe to be around each other—a different heartbreak for a different day.) It was a rough week—I was just back from a family trip and my body was pretzeled with grief. The war had just started and everything felt brutal and mean.

Anhedonic, is the word. But joy prevailed: RP and I were talking about whether we think I’m poly or not (the eternal conundrum) and I said something like “I don’t know, when I was with (The Shy One) I didn’t want anyone else in the whole world, it was all about him.”

Saying that unlocked my heart, and a butterfly swarm of giggles came out. An unlatching, a relief. A bubble of assurance and self-knowledge so profound that I couldn’t stop laughing. RP said later that they loved seeing me come back to life—they helped me come back to life. I miss them so much.

But anyway, devotion.

Back to the present day, dating is just being a little bit scary. Talking to so many people, sometimes rematching by mistake and feeling like I might be stupid or mean, sometimes not matching because the person looks a little familiar, getting a “Hello?” when I hadn’t written back in like ten minutes, it can feel so depersonalizing, so disembodied.

Most app-suitors are kind-if-boring, but the ones that aren’t kinda add up in my body and heart. Accreting.

Sex, Love, and The Shy One, Part One

It’s been three and a half months since his breakup email, not that long in the grand scheme of things, but I feel a lot of shame for not having moved on properly yet. I can feel him in my psyche, perhaps unfairly cast, the heartless, contemptuous version of him, hurrying me along like “What’s wrong with you? Why are you still thinking about this? What is the big deal?!”

I should probably think about where that judgey voice is coming from, because I don’t think that’s what he would say to me, if he said anything, which he doesn’t.

Three and a half months of perfect silence between us. Eventually my heart and mind will understand there IS no “between us.” Cold turkey is the only way when it’s this deep. I’ve quit smoking before, I know it eventually gets better, and this kind of quitting makes me way less bitchy.

I know this is right, that this is things working themselves out, but I just run low on faith sometimes. Patience wears thin like the toe of a sock, useful until it isn’t.

Last Sunday, I took a field trip with Rainbow Pal to the nature preserve over by the airport. We talked about everything, big talk only. I egged them on to message cuties in their Feeld queue and they did the same for me. We (Okay I) prevailed upon some strangers to take our picture in front of the beautiful waterscape. We saw a heron, turtles, yellow water flowers.

Rainbow Pal and I found the perfect shady bench to have a picnic of popcorn and fizzy water. The bench was pleasingly broad in the bright green dappled shade. I saw a frog hop close to the shore. The trees made a perfectly patterned net of coolness and light.

It was the perfect place for a sad confession. I told Rainbow Pal I was really struggling with the worry that sex might never again be as good as it was with The Shy One. We attributed his prowess to the fact that he’s been married so long. I mentioned that I’d wanted to send Mrs. Shy One a thank-you note after the first time.

I’ve been thinking all this time that he’s so good at sex because he’s so tended-to, so cared-for and thoroughly loved. He was so loved that he had extra love just lying around to give to me! I think I just explained polyamory. I’m so burned out and empty from all the sharing, but could I ever truly leave poly behind?

But putting aside Mrs. Shy One (PLEASE) and wherever else his beautiful skills came from, I need to untangle what his lovemaking meant to me. I need to claim whatever part of the experience as MINE.

I would attribute my swooniness and devotion to the love I felt for him, except, it was there RIGHT AWAY. From the moment I took his hand on our river-walk first date, I felt like: Oh. Yes. This.

His first touches were so kind, so meant for me, so loving before we ever knew each other at all. Maybe he IS just really, REALLY good at it, maybe everyone he kisses and touches feels that warmth, that thorough grace, but I want to believe that some of that sparkle, some of his hunger and softness and playfulness was just for me. I want to believe it sparked from the chemistry of just us, the alchemy.

“I love your body,” he said the first night, sitting behind me in bed and wrapping his arms around my waist. Simple and unbothered generosity. Animal bonding. Grace.

Dear Sierra Leone, Part Two

 

Sometimes when I have a hard time getting a feeling into words, it helps to cut up a pop song. This used to be Robyn's Dancing on My Own.

Oh my dear. There was a place for us and it was WhatsApp.

I liked spending New Years with you and not with you. I was with Rainbow Pal, both of us sparkling and dancing to brass bands playing pop songs. It was Dancing on My Own when midnight came, our midnight, five hours after yours. Everything was silver and spangled and I was wearing the purple princess dress from my birthday. My synchronicity necklace from the flea market in Famous Art Town.

Rainbow Pal and I hugged and bopped silver balloons around the dance floor. No one really knew the words to Auld Lang Syne but we sang it anyway. I love, love, LOVE the sound of strangers happy together and muddling through a song.

Rainbow Pal wanted to stay late—brass is their great love and they knew eventually the band would be playing in the crowd and all would be right with the world. They gave me maybe the best gift a younger friend can give an older friend—the dispensation to go home at 12:30.

As I walked out to the car, a perfect golden firework popped in the sky over the parking lot, and I read it as a message from you. This year would be for me. It would be golden. I held it in my heart as a way of taking a picture, and I told him about it first thing in the morning. My morning, your late afternoon.

Oh Salone, I know I shouldn’t have gone back to him last summer. I saw the not-cute future of self-erasure and control and heteronormative bullshit. (Rainbow Pal has a shirt that says “Heteronormativity is a cult” and they wore it for me the day I was over at their place painting about our breakup, crying watercolor tears and maybe making them a little bit uncomfortable.)

But what if I hadn’t met YOU? What if I hadn’t woken up to your pink-sky beaches and your bright patterned fabrics and intricate tiles? What if I’d missed our New Years?

I wanted to cross the ocean between us. The Atlantic between us is as big as the gulf between me and my post-insurrection family. I don’t know how to be family-real the way he does, but I have other reals, I guess.

I only know how to shift and flow and get stuck on a rock sometimes until the water rises and takes me forward. Okay, that’s not the ocean, it’s the local creek I walk by whenever I’m confused or lost or it’s Friday.

I’m impatient to get unstuck, dear Sierra Leone, dear Atlantic Ocean, dear beloved local creek. Some days I can feel the current carrying me away from him, and therefore, safely, closer, the memory restored, the love affair done. Other days I’m stranded creek debris, waiting for rain, for the water to rise and carry me home, which is everywhere and nowhere.

What I Want, Part Two: Being a Romantic Slut

4. I want submission.

Near the beginning of the summer (Before it was even Kate Bush Summer!) I was on a mini-road-trip to The Fancy Garden with Rainbow Pal. I haven’t gotten to write about them yet, but they’ve been central to helping me dream up the creative sluttiness of the past couple of months. We’re both tenderhearted artists and I believe we might be platonic soulmates—they’re right up there with Angel Face when it comes to transformative friendships.

Anyway, as I was driving us home, they were telling me about a dom they used to have, and WHOOSH I remembered.

The hush of letting someone take over control. The precious, adorable feeling of being small, so small I’m almost nothing. And yet, seen in a slutty, delightedly filthy way that really happens to me so rarely. As anyone who reads me knows, I’ve been playfully spanked, had my hair pulled, been called a “good girl” during rough blow job practice, but none of it was THAT FEELING. Surrender. Pushing myself to bend and please. And that clearheaded feeling the next day, the one I didn’t realize I’d been missing.

And the DAY AFTER that conversation with Rainbow Pal, I ran into The Song Sender at the movies. So many aspects of subbing that I LOVED him for in 2011 came back again, and so many new games and desires sprouted up in my filthy heart. I assigned myself homework. I told him lovely, rough-to-sweet, elaborate slutty stories, fiction and not, in person and over text. I lost my mind and sent him poems about mystical submission to god. Aaaaaaaallllllllll the pictures I sent him, naked and not.

It’s confusing to have felt so seen by someone who will also never actually see me at all. To have been so fulfilled by someone who both feared and actively got off on disappointing me.

Somehow, in all of that, I got a taste of what a loving dom might feel like. I don’t know if it will be in the context of a romantic relationship (I hope so!) or if it will be its own thing. I’ll never find anyone to replace The Song Sender, yay and sob, but I hope to find a kinder, deeper, more sustainable version of that beautiful, BEAUTIFUL feeling.

5. I WANT ROMANCE and synchronicity.

The night I had dinner with The Shy One and we decided to be some kind of a thing again, it was like eleven million degrees out. But he’s not a PDA guy, so I had to put him in my car to kiss him. We kissed like it has been two years instead of two months. He smelled so him, and we were both dressed up so nice for dinner, and we were SWEATING. But it was so hard to let him get out of the car.

People get so tripped up by the word romance. I think it freaks a lot of people out because they think it’s about wedding dresses, and babies, and all the other Relationship Escalator things. Those things ARE a kind of romance, but they’re not what I mean.

Back to that road trip with the submission conversation, Rainbow Pal and I talked a lot about the Romance of Life, and that’s what I mean that I want. Beauty, sensuality, pleasure, awe, those things are all around us, whether we are partnered or not. When The Song Sender wasn’t passing the Turing Test or when somebody I wanted to date turns out to have been a hookup, I still always have flowers, the ocean, the intricacies of clouds.

There’s always a song that comes along and gives the exact right message. There’s always the advice I give myself in dreams. There’s always the Tarot deck to unstick my imagination when it’s getting stagnant.

I love the romantic moments I share with partners, like when The Shy One texts me flowers, but I’m also SO GRATEFUL that this list item is one I can keep giving myself.

6. And to that end, I want to keep dating myself. It was one of my 10 goals for 2022, and it has opened my world up maybe more than any other goal ever. I would love to keep giving myself the beautiful moments I deserve. Each time, I know a little deeper that I deserve them.