I’ve experienced frenzied feelings about men and myself: lust, anger, confusion, little bits of love, resolve, excitement, sadness, wanton desire. I want someone to have the emotional capital and heart to meet me where I’m at. I’m weary of being honoured for my appearance, my work, and sometimes my intellect. These things are easy to like. Only time can reveal the complex weirdness that makes me tick. How much time do I give them? How much do I allow myself? Time to do what?
For them to like me or ditch me? For me to try and like them? Should it be so trying? The ones I keep picking always disappear into their hard bodies and risk-averse lives. Who do they end up liking anyways? I find hotness but no fortitude; niceness but limited sexual energy. I find men who share things I think are special, but they too fade into ten-digit silence. There’s more than time at play in the creation of these thick spaces between one another; it’s also about fear. When did we get so dangerous?
I listen to soft gurgles and the sound of air leaving his mouth. We breathe in unison but I am not asleep. Is he? I’m tired but also comfortable in this new bed. His body finds mine repeatedly as he turns and quietly burrows into me. When will he be the spoon? That’s what I want, to be taken and to be held, not hung on to. When we join a few minutes later I’m disappointed. Morning is often my favourite. Does this matter? What’s wrong with me? I finally find a guy who is beautifully kind and cute, and I’m uncertain.
As my body moves underneath him I look at the poster on the door and think: can I do this? Can we work on the sex? Of course we can, but I’m not used to working for someone and am tired of being the teacher. When healthy is hard, maybe that’s what these feelings are. I’m adrift inside the learning curve that comes with healing, when you’re truly grasping at straws, crossing all appendages, and hoping that your hard-earned self-love and buoyant strength will bring you where you belong.
The land of safe relationships is a foreign space that grows amid the memories and years of patterned living that must recede to make room for the me I want to be. Learning to dwell in the safety inside myself is also new. So much healing depends upon this dance between the inside and out, and those scary choices that don’t come with guidelines but offer a way through. To what? That’s on us, it all is. How is that fair? It’s not really, but it’s also magick. Life is about creation and compromise.
It’s also about trusting the voice we sometimes quiet or try to ignore because it says the hard things that have already been decided and await action. ‘Is Kindness Enough?’ This question keeps rising to the surface as I review the tiny list of things we share alongside the page of differences. I know it’s not enough, but I still fight with myself to determine if I really have the right to believe that. Who do I think I am? I’m a woman alive to my desires and a strong MF sense of integrity. I owe these things to myself.
Letting someone else in is hard, so is change. It might always be this way, with me sitting at the end of my own rainbow under rather dreary relationship skies, which are sometimes darkened- admittedly- by clouds of my own choosing. What an atmosphere! Finding the malleable seams of beauty along the way is the task, for there is no pot of gold at the spectrum’s end. There are only the shiny bits of mirror that reflect the jagged, sometimes fabulous path we travel to our selves.
Sticky, Sexy, Sad 