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.

 

Knotty Thursdays: Heart Link Harness! And Welcoming The Shy One!

 

Okay, I know he doesn't look shy in these pictures, but he SAYS he's shy, and he does have a sweet, giggly carefulness, which, combined with his ADORABLE Sierra Leone accent, charmed the literal pants off me, so The Shy One, it is.

There are some people the ropes just really like! I especially appreciated his patience when I had to refer back to You Tube to remember how to make the hearts! 

And as soon as I got one heart right, I literally jumped up and down with happiness. PLUS he's a good kisser, so I'd say this was a pretty successful first date! 

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.

Why a Break and the Next Quest

It should be noted that I wished for extra time to write and draw this morning and then we got an early dismissal because of the blizzard. And a snow day for tomorrow! It’s pretty superstitious but I do consider snow days to be evidence that the universe hearts me.

As I’m typing this I reallyreally miss my Mystery Man (Yes, I got smitten with somebody via Twitter, are you even a little bit surprised?) but here’s how I realized I had to take a break even from him: On Sunday afternoon I was getting ready to go out and having a nice exchange with a couple of the Mystery Ladies and just for a tiny second I thought they might be displeased with me. (They were not.) Before I could stop and think, tears were coming right out of my face, and I realized several things:

1. Ohyeah, I’m kind of a submissive. And also just kind of not okay.

2. Even though I’ve never (as far as I know) seen him/them and only know some of their names, I have real feelings for him and his family. As Twitter followers and then as friends and then a flirtation, they’ve been in touch almost everyday for the past while, and I can’t afford to lose that.

(Also I can totally understand now how people get invested enough in strangers to be Catfished.)

3. He’s not a loophole, he’s just a guy I really like.

4. The internet is magic.

So when I got home from my weepy date with the new Spike Jonze movie (on not entirely unrelated themes) I wrote a love letter 140 characters at a time explaining why I have to let our cute little nice thing go for a while, and he wrote back all kinds of wonderful supportive poly-mensch things that made him even more irresistible. I feel like I’m fighting the tide of myself, but I can’t can’t can’t be worrying about messing up and losing friends right now.

The tears weren’t about the Mystery Ladies, of course. They were for all of the trying and failing to be good for Sweetie, for the emotional land mines I’ve kept running into over the past few years, for how hard it was to ever do anything right by anybody’s girl sometimes.

Last year, counting immediate metamours, I broke up with/broke things off with/ let go of at 11 people. Given that one of those was my wife of 10 years and there was also the whole Scary Party fiasco and a brand new career on top of everything, it’s no wonder I’m still randomly weeping.

I don’t want to take a break. I don’t want to keep saying no to genuine affection when it’s been my wish for so long. But in order to really be able to experience the love I’ve been wanting, I think I do have to shift the tide a little. I think that some of the crazy, excited, twitterpated love that gushes out of me all of the time (sometimes making a mess) is actually meant for someone in particular: me.

From years of bad decision, self denial, abuse and self-abuse, I’ve got the proverbial hole inside me. Like any vacuum, it’s eager to fill itself up, and will do so hungrily and desperately if I let it. The (sorry, there’s really no other way to say it) hole in my heart doesn’t care what’s healthy or fruitful, it just wants to be filled.

So I think what I really need to do here is to slow all the way down and let it be empty, then work on gradually filling it up with self-love. I’m not supersure how to do that, but I know that if I keep trying to love while I’ve got that emptiness, things will keep getting poisonous and broken, and I will really never learn to let myself be loved.

(It really is hard to write this without clichés, I apologize…)

I don’t think that I can fill up the whole thing in just a few months, but maybe I can learn some new habits, break the old patterns and learn some better ones. I think that if I can find a way to give all of the ridiculous love I keep feeling to myself somehow, I can turn myself from a vacuum to the endless fountain I was probably born to be, and give some nice people the infinite, generous love they deserve.

I got a pink glass vase from the dollar store to remind me of the gap in my heart I’m trying to allow to be not-filled-yet. I didn’t get anything to put in there, it’s just sitting there being pretty, with an empty space inside. (Okay, yes, like some other poor neglected pink parts I could name…)

The first few years of this story were all about learning to love my body, finding my inner Bettie Page, and as the Nakedest Person at thePagan Festival, I certainly achieved that. Whenever my work friends are fretting about their body issues, I kind of feel like they’re speaking a different language.

But now I would like to learn to give some of that brazenness and bravery to figuring out how to love my heart. I’ve spent so much of my life impatient with it, trying to tamp it down, pretending it doesn’t want things that other people decided I couldn’t have. In pursuit of experience and adventure, my poor heart has been through the ringer and I would really love to learn how to treat it kindly.

So the question is, what can I, on my own for now, give to my heart, to make it feel celebrated and loved like I did for my body? What’s the heart equivalent of Shibari or fireplay? Where is my heart’s nude beach?