ask, and you shall receive
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…and I’m back! It was brilliantly glorious to be without internet and cellphone service for three days. The first day I was going through an anxious withdrawal, feeling very cut off and absolutely sure that something horrible was going to happen that I wouldn’t know about because I was so cruelly cut off from the world. The second day, I was basking in the serenity of knowing no one could reach me. I didn’t have to be available! For anyone! I could shower without worrying that my phone would ring. I could go to sleep without the wary alertness that I might receive a text message from mi’lady. It was positively LIBERATING. And then going back to the fully wired reality… it was welcome, but not needed. I think I need to take technology vacations every once in a while. And perhaps relax a bit on the idea of needing to be constantly available.
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Since I’ve been back, I’ve been working through some weirdness. It sprang up seemingly out of the blue. Mi’lady and I were tangled up in her bed, post-sex, marvelling about how we’ve been together almost nine months and it seems both much shorter than that (we haven’t settled into taking each other for granted! joy!) and much longer (how could we possibly have learned each other so well in such a short amount of time?). “You’re quickly moving into the rank of Second Longest Relationship!” she said, “as long as we stay together another month and a half, you’ll beat B.” I laughed, and said “my goal is to be your longest relationship, and then some!” “Well you’re… let’s see… 3/8ths of the way there…” she said. (Funnily enough, she’s 3/8ths of the way towards becoming my longest relationship too. We’ve both been in significant 2-year relationships previously.)
And then she got quiet and pensive. The problem is, I feel like there’s this standard that her ex-girlfriend has set (the Longest Relationship girlfriend, that is). She still feels all kinds of pain about this break-up, which is now over two years ago. She feels bitter that her ex says she learned through their relationship that she could be loved, while mi’lady learned only that she could be broken. She says it was like all that work, all that energy, all that love, all that time, all for nothing. And she still gets hurt when her ex does things like untag herself from pictures on Facebook that they’re both in. Mi’lady says it feels like her ex is trying to erase her from her life. “What was the point?” she says.
Sometimes I’m afraid that forever and ever, despite anyone else who comes after, no matter how much she loves them, she will never quite love the same. She loves me, for sure, but somehow she’s endowed her ex with all this power, this ability to cause her pain like no one else ever had and ever will have. Obviously I don’t want to cause her that much pain. I don’t even want her to give me the capacity to cause her that much pain.
But what I do want is for her to realize that it’s not her ex that hurt her that much, it’s she who let herself be hurt. My belief is that she needs to let go of her, take away the power she’s given her to hurt her. She put all of herself into that relationship, every last little bit. So when she lost it, she lost herself too. The reason I know this is because I understand it all too well. I did the exact same thing with my Longest Relationship, and I lost myself when she broke up with me, too. But then I took myself back. I’m still struggling with keeping myself, and not give myself away entirely to mi’lady, as I tend to do. But I want to find that balance, of how much of myself to give in order to have a strong, sustaining, loving relationship. And I want her to find that balance too.
I don’t want her ex to have this mythic status. The one who broke her heart. Is that crazy? Is that unreasonable? Do I need to just let it go?
This is a meme borrowed from greg. I couldn’t resist because it has SEX in it. HA!
1. Boxers, briefs, hipsters, bikinis or none? Boxers post-sex, hipsters the rest of the time.
2. Last book you’ve read or are now reading? I’m in the middle of two books. (1) Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh). Good book, but the only edition of it I could find anywhere has the TV miniseries pictures all over the cover. Number one way to deter serious readers from a good book? PUT PICTURES FROM A TV MINISERIES ALL OVER ITS COVER. (2) Lolita (Nabokov). Read it before, hated it. So I’m reading it again to try to convince myself of its “literary merits” and ignore the sleazy pedophilia. Harder than it sounds.
3. When did the realization hit you that you’re a lesbian? Well, technically, sophomore year of college when I fell in love with my ex-girlfriend. (See my National Coming Out Day entry for the deets on that story.) But, really, it was in fifth grade when I had a huge crush on Joanna Eastmond. She moved to South Dakota the following year and I have no idea what’s happened to her. She’s Mormon though. So I think it’s safe to say that would’ve gone nowhere.
4. Give us some details of your first lesbian sexual relationship: Oh my god, eye-opening. Just, wow. I had no idea it was possible to get that wet, to be that turned on, to feel so explosively sexual. We were each others’ lesbian firsts, so we got to do the whole exploring-everything-because-it-was-all-brand-new thing. SO MUCH FUN!
5. Rate your sensitivity level from 1 (low) to 5 (high) for your hurtful feelings: Probably 4. I’m pretty sensitive. But then there are times when I’m surprisingly not sensitive, and then people will apologize to me for something they thought probably hurt me because I usually am sensitive, and I’m all like “what? what’d you do? I didn’t know you did anything.”
6. Name the farthest place you’ve traveled to from home: I guess Hawai’i was technically the farthest from my then-home (upstate New York). Greece (the island of Evia) is the furthest from my current home (San Francisco) (though at the time I was living in Germany!).
7. Ever get caught “doing it”? Or explain the most embarrassing if you’ve had many: Never been caught “doing it”, and the only time I’ve ever been caught hooking up at all was last winter, at mi’lady’s holiday party at her house. She calls me into her room in the middle of the party and we start making out madly on her bedroom floor (at this point we’d been dating for all of like, 3 weeks) and after maybe 10 minutes her best friend knocks on the door and then just BARGES ON IN! Like the knock was just a protocol? I don’t know. So we look up at her like deer in headlights, and she looks terribly flustered, goes completely red, and is all “OMG” and backs out of the room in a confused hurry. We mostly thought it was pretty funny.
8. What is your biggest accomplishment? Hmmm. Somehow I don’t feel all that accomplished. I guess it would be finishing my undergraduate honors thesis in philosophy, and getting magna cum laude on it. That felt pretty good, especially since as late as November of that same year I wasn’t sure I’d be able to finish it.
9. What is your major weakness? Relying on other people too much for my own sense of self-worth.
10. Do you normally keep your ex’s as friends? Nope. Never have. Once I move on, I’ve moved on. My college girlfriend and I are I guess “friendly acquaintances” now, but I just can’t do the friends thing.
11. Have you gotten your heart broken more or have you broken more hearts? Well, above-mentioned college girlfriend totally broke my heart after two years of dating — she broke up with me right before I was moving to San Francisco to be with her. (Luckily SF is a place anyone would want to be regardless of relationship status.) That sucked, and I lost about 25 pounds in two months (and people, I was only about 135lbs to begin with) and cried every single day and was miserable and alone. And then slowly but surely, I started getting over her, and several months later I found mi’lady, and then I broke my ex’s heart, because it turns out she’d been still in love with me the whole time and was harboring hopes of getting back together and was heartbroken when I told her I was with someone else now. Karma, y’all. So I think I’m even — heart broken once, one heart broken.
12. Ever cause any divorces? I certainly hope not!
13. Ever participate in a ménage de trios (three some)? No, and can’t say I’m really itching to either. I think I’d be overwhelmed.
14. Are you a boobs, butt or legs woman? OMG BOOBS. My tongue is hanging out of my mouth like a dog about to get a treat just at the thought of mi’lady’s. Mmmmmmmmmm.
15. Muffled or loud? Oh, loud, absolutely. I can stifle if necessary, but oh my when it’s good I just can’t be shushed…
16. Name the most unusual place(s) you’ve “done it”: Well this isn’t exactly an unusual place, but it shows my unusual skill, haha. I was driving down to LA with mi’lady, I was driving, remember, and while I was driving, I fucked mi’lady in the passenger seat. That was really, really hot, because I had to keep my focus on the road so I couldn’t look at her and couldn’t touch her aside from the fucking, but she was writhing and wet and groaning and trying not to be too obvious to cars passing us on either side… Okay I’m getting wet just typing it. And I’m at work, totally not a good place to be turned on. …. Other unusual places: bottom of a slide at a playground at night (we slid down on our backs with our heads first, and fucked with our heads hanging off the bottom edge of the slide), at the symphony (that took some skill, we weren’t even in a box! we had coats on our laps and had to be reeeeeally really covert), in the back of a cab (poor cabbie, I’m sure he knew what was going on), in the back of the car while my ex’s sister was driving and her husband was in the passenger seat (that was just rude, I feel bad about that now), in the fitting room at Target while trying on swimsuits…
Okay I need to stop writing about sex, because it’s way too distracting at work. And I’m NOT EVEN GOING TO SEE HER TONIGHT! Though I shouldn’t complain, we had sex three times last night. Well, maybe I should count it as all one time, since it’s not like we got up and did other things in between, but each time we were going to stop and then just couldn’t. We got this new toy, see–a rabbit vibrator dildo in a harness. Mi’lady has never been able to come internally, so we thought maybe with a vibrator and with some clitoral stimulation at the same time it might be possible. Oh BOY was it possible. Watching her come like that was insanely hot; since she’d never come that way before she was just so shocked and overwhelmed and a bit confused and her body had this whole reaction without her fully realizing what was going on. She just looked so completely vulnerable and at the mercy of this feeling. So amazing. But then afterwards she needed more, she needed another orgasm in order to feel full and completed. And then she needed another… Oh man. So, so good.
Okay now I REALLY need to stop writing about sex.
I ran into my Ex today. I knew it would happen eventually; we both live in San Francisco, and we’re both gay, so we were bound to cross paths at some point. But I didn’t think it would be on a harmless Sunday afternoon downtown.
The day started off innocuously. Actually, it started off really well. For some reason, I was inspired to go to church. Don’t ask why, I certainly don’t know. I grew up singing in the choir at an Episcopal church in my hometown, a fairly conservative, traditional, docile church. But I’ve never felt particularly religious and so I stopped going to church when I left home. But yesterday, for some reason, I decided that I would go to church today, so I went to Glide Methodist church in the Tenderloin. It’s a social justice church, an anti-oppression church, an all-inclusive, welcoming church. So it advertises itself. And I can’t imagine it being more true. It was just, overwhelming. In a good way. I was so moved to be there and feel like part of this force. Especially with our brilliantly momentous election coming up, everyone there was so rallying around this notion of change, of choosing life. And they kept reiterating, “NO ON 8!” There was so much energy and camaraderie… I think I’ll be going back. I know I’ll be going back.
And then I went to vote. They have early voting here in California and I figured I’d do it now so I don’t run into any crises on Tuesday–since I’ve moved recently, I wasn’t sure they’d gotten my change of registration. Turns out I and half the city had the same idea, so I waited in line for three hours–THREE HOURS–at City Hall to vote. Phew. There were No on 8 people campaigning outside, though, reminding us: “Barack Obama says NO ON 8! Arnold Schwarzenegger says NO ON 8! Diane Feinstein says NO ON 8! My mama says NO ON 8!” Et cetera. Cute. And I VOTED!! I nearly cried as I was checking the box for NO on 8 and for Obama. Today I’ve just been really teary for some reason. Been feeling moved, awed, inspired by humanity. So it felt so heavy and meaningful to cast my vote.
And then I finally left City Hall after three and a half hours and there was my Ex, walking by. I was kind of stunned, and I think she was too; we didn’t really know what to say to each other. It was like this wall was up. We were going in different directions, so after a couple minutes of awkward, stammering “so how are you? Yeah, I’m great, I’m happy, blah blah blah,” we parted ways. “Would you want to hang out sometime? Like go with me to the Academy of Sciences?” I asked. “Yeah, sure, that would be cool,” she said, noncommitally. Sigh. Now I’m feeling drained.
Those lips, I kissed those lips,
I woke up with my arms around that body,
tangled up in those legs.
Those eyes, I soared and floated and sank in their gaze,
I ran my fingers through that hair,
fluttered my eyelashes against those cheeks,
Mesmerized by the fantastic reality of our lives and bodies intertwining.
No longer intertwining, as we stand here.
I see those lips, those eyes, that foreign body;
Tactile memories flood my senses, confuse my composure.
The air is thick with evaporated love, like carbon monoxide
Or laughing gas.
A couple feet away,
I could reach out and brush her cheek,
But my arm can’t interpret such a gesture,
and those few feet are unreachable–
What was once so effortless now so utterly impossible.
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