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lost boys

Hearts and Moons

June 25, 2017

One of the more liberating things I have ever heard in my entire lifetime is that I am allowed to feel more than one thing at once.

I think I had the same sense of relief way back when I realized that bisexual was a thing I could be and was.

Still am to a degree. I admire and celebrate my girls girly bits a lil more than is normal I suppose but Manda Bear has got the butteriest-butter skin, Panda and Shae have got the booties like pow pow pow…and honestly, I think every stripper after a time learns to appreciate the female form in a way most women don’t. Naked is our normal.

I haven’t slept with a woman in years. Sisterwife kinda beat that want out of me. But hey, moving forward.

Where was I?

Oh ya. More than one thing at once.

Story of my life.

Double edged epiphanies. For the first forever of this blog I always started out “So two things happened”…because that is just how it is. I don’t tend to catch on the first time so I get two earth shaking signs from above, or below, depending.

I gotta try things more than once, reread books, rewatch movies because I might have missed something.

I am Jacob Two Two, forever repeating myself because I feel/felt unheard.

My newest noticeable MO/ blog phenomenon is writing an article, hitting publish and realizing I have WAY more to say and then writing part two.

To be totally honest all my articles have sucked donkey balls the last little while. Why not suck twice as hard in twice as many words…

I admit it. Massive drop in quantity and quality.

I used to have this schedule. Tuesday Thursday Sunday. Write for 3 hours or so, sometimes 16, sometimes the piece would just fall out pretty perfect in under an hour. But lately, I am of two minds about everything. My schedule has gone to shit. I need some structure and discipline dammit. I need to decide what I want to say before I say it. But alas, this is going to be yet another bit of free flow drivel.

I write better in the mornings and I have been sleeping til noon. Not okay.

I need to be a little bit easier on myself. I realize now, when speaking of newer boys or situations, I did not yet have all the facts, or their true nature hadn’t revealed itself or shit just changed as it always does.

Fuck, I used to write nicely about ex hubby. Can’t now really except to say he still continues to be a better father figure to my kid than my kid’s actual dad. So there’s that then.

It’s been a year and a day since Panda and I made our first pilgrimage to the beach and found me exactly what I had asked for the night before. A nice and easy summer fling.

And for a time it actually was.

Just like for a time everything else was good.

Until it wasn’t.

I posted to Facebook a year ago today “I do so love it when they open their mouths and by speaking become exponentially hotter.”
I read that and grinned. T’was the truth. Just because he is gone doesn’t make it less true.

I was never overly smitten with him. He was just a band-aid. Did his job quite nicely. I found out 6 months later that he had been engaged the whole time, but if I put on his giant size 13 work boots and walk a mile…I wouldn’t have said no to me either. Who wouldn’t want dinner and a good fuck after a 16 hour work day a million miles from home.

I don’t hate him.

I don’t hate much of anything. Never have. Pineapple on pizza, but I will pick them off and not make a fuss over it, it is pizza after all.

I have been accused of reading too much into things, thinking too much so I suppose that is a sort of fussing and possibly over analyzing. But that is kinda who I am as a person.

I can be happy for them moving on and forward and still be sad that they left me behind.

I end up alone with gaping holes in the landscape of my life, the spaces they used to fill. It’s a matter of time really. Suddenly I have more of it and less of him.

My heart looks like the moon. Craters everywhere from being smashed into. Hard to walk around sometimes. Everyone leaves a hole I gotta navigate around. And sometimes I fall back in.

lost boys

Erasing My Fault Lines

April 11, 2017

Um, all of them Rob
ALL. OF. THEM.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20):
Now is an excellent time to FREE YOUR MEMORIES. What comes to mind when I suggest that? Here are my thoughts on the subject. To FREE YOUR MEMORIES, you could change the way you talk and feel about your past. Re-examine your assumptions about your old stories, and dream up fresh interpretations to explain how and why they happened. Here’s another way to FREE YOUR MEMORIES: If you’re holding on to an insult someone hurled at you once upon a time, let it go. In fact, declare a general amnesty for everyone who ever did you wrong. By the way, the coming weeks will also be a favorable phase to FREE YOURSELF OF MEMORIES that hold you back. Are there any tales you tell yourself about the past that undermine your dreams about the future? Stop telling yourself those tales.

https://www.facebook.com/Rob-Brezsnys-Free-Will-Astrology-133041234078/

But that is what I do. Isn’t it? Post-game analysis, see where I went wrong…

I was wrong…right?

Rob says stop, so stop I must.

This is the end, my only friend the end. The Doors

I haven’t been that emotionally down in a long time.

How about ‘every new beginning comes from some other beginnings end’ (Semi Sonic)

That works.

I never write about endings on here, or very rarely I guess.
Sometimes it’s because…’and then he never called me again and I have no idea why’ doesn’t really make for a gripping story.
Sometimes it’s because things just faded into a friendship, or with the ones wherein I had the revelation that I was 7 of 9 and not ‘his girl’ like they had promised.

Why would I want to archive that? I pick up the pieces and move on, sometimes slowly… then all at once.

I’ve been left and I have been hurt and I refuse to visit pain on others.

I am rarely the one to leave. End of story.

In the interest of clean breaks and tidy endings…

On a long enough timeline the truth always comes out. Still waiting on a couple but I know they’ll come.

My first foray into dating ended after 3 months of happy when I asked if we could be boyfriend/girlfriend, him saying he ‘wasn’t ready for a relationship’ and me waking from a midsummer night’s dream with a very loud voice echoing in my ear stating “her name is Kayla and she has cotton candy hair.”

It was actually K___ and her hair has been baby blue, baby pink and lilac respectively in the months and years that have passed since then.

18 months later, when she was mean to him, I consoled him. Not like that, just said nice things.

The next one fell into a deep chasm of depression and had to move away atop a mountain.
No great mystery there.
He is as happy on his side of the country as I am on mine.

There was a patented Fuckboi in there, again nothing to be solved, he just was what he was. Well, is what he is. He still pops into my inboxes from time to time. I say hello and deliberately leave it up to him to plan something, knowing he won’t. He never calls back until the amnesia wears off again and he wonders what I am doing or runs out of other girls to fuck. He has abandonment issues the reasons for and the likes of which I have never seen so I refuse to be cruel. Ain’t waiting around neither.

Thai Fighter was engaged the whole time.

Black 19 was incarcerated, again.

The mystery of Lumberjack may well remain unsolved. He blocked me from everything ever and it’s not like I ever saw him. The only thing I was good at was living without him, so that’s a freebie.

Gelfling…well that is a whole other tale along the riverbank. I met his new girl recently and everything suddenly made sense, twice actually, once for him and once for another. A two-fer if you will. A perfect balance of me being too much and them feeling not enough. Can’t be helped I supposed. I refuse to shed my muchyness and they have yet to grow up. The hazards of young un’s I suppose. No great loss in retrospect. Like setting down the Holy Grail and deciding on a sippy cup instead. Better call not-Becky with the red hair.

There is a footnote here.

I am hard to explain to people. I am older and strange. By vocation I am a writer of truths and porn, plus the stripper thing. I am not not-Becky, red headed or otherwise.

To be with me, to claim me in public you have to be pretty brave. You have to give fewer fucks than most about what other people think.

Am I worth it?

I think so.

Nevertheless she persisted.

I cook, I clean, I fuck and I love. I clean up nice and can carry a conversation.

I don’t bitch, steal or lie.

I am already way ahead of most.

I know this now.

Took me a while.

I was mired down in the idea that I had to take some responsibility. But it isn’t mine. I did my part. I showed up and I cared. I contributed to their happiness and well-being. I asked for very little in return.

I’ve long held the belief that I as the common denominator must be part of the problem, even if it was so basic as ‘I felt bad about myself and thereby made bad decisions’. At least I made a god damned decision.

That scene in Good Will Hunting at the end. Robin Williams looks through Matt Damon’s file, sees the abuse and says “It’s not your fault” until Matt Damon breaks down and sobs from his core.

It’s not my fault, these things that have been done to me. It’s truly not on me that they left. I did what I was supposed to, I came all the way forward and stayed.

It’s not my fault at all.

regular lust

Hey Jealousy

April 5, 2017

“The green fairy that lives in the absinthe wants your soul.” Bram Stoker’s Dracula

There is another green fairy who tries to eat your soul and succeeds sometimes, she is a scary monster and not a nice sprite at all.

Hey

jeal·ous·y ˈjeləsē/

noun

the state or feeling of being jealous.

“a sharp pang of jealousy”

synonyms:

envy, covetousness;

resentment, resentfulness, bitterness, spite;

informal the green-eyed monster

“he was consumed with jealousy”

suspicion, suspiciousness, distrust, mistrust, insecurity, anxiety;

possessiveness, overprotectiveness

“the jealousy of his long-suffering wife”

I don’t mean envy. Enviousness, to me, is something completely different.

God said Thou shall not covet.
So I don’t.
I’m happy with what I have where I am and I know that if that changes, I have to change.
I can and do love many things but I don’t need to beg, borrow or steal them from anyone else.

Jealousy is a totally different creature.

I stopped being jealous years ago.

It was one of those times where the Universe swooped in and said “oh you think you are jealous now? Lemme give you something to be jealous about.”

And she did, and it was bad, then it was over, Amen.

I hated that feeling of butterflies in my stomach turned to sharp poisoned things trying to beat their way out. Knowing another woman had been in my house, my bed, my life and wanting something that was never mine to begin with.

Had I stopped coveting what was not mine, I would have saved myself a lot of time, trouble and heartache. I know that now.

I read something once about ‘good men can’t be stolen’. This is true. If he loves you he’ll stay.

Addendum, the best revenge on a woman that stole your man is to let her have him.

Not big on revenge either. Time sorts everything out, some people like to call that karma…it’s really just time spiralling in and out, changing perspectives and a little cosmic comeuppance every now and again.

I love my life now, couldn’t have any of this without all of that.

Cruz has been reading the blog. Uh oh Spaghettios.
When we met he said he wasn’t big on reading and I sighed a big sigh of relief. That didn’t last long. One thing I asked for repeatedly when I was trying to figure out what I wanted in a man/partner/relationship was ‘someone who wants to know all of me’. And that is what he is doing. Trying to learn me, figure me out and it should be bliss, but sometimes it ain’t.

I write fondly of my exes.

Hurts my heart knowing it troubles his.

I have to say nice things, I don’t want to remember the bad bits, although they are in here too. The crying jags, the nights without sleeping trying to deal with this loss or that one. There were so many I can barely keep track and I lived through it and wrote it all down.

Once it’s down on paper I can let it go.

This is my catharsis.

I know, beyond all doubt, I don’t want to go back there.

I asked him over and over to check the dates. But honestly, I don’t think that helps.

I know if he sat down and reiterated and regaled me with tales of his exes the way I write I’d die a little inside with every syllable, every bit of praise he doted on them.

I’m being a little melodramatic, but it stings. Like putting your tongue on a 9 volt battery, you know it’s gonna hurt and yet we do it anyways.

Part of me wants to know, because I want to know him. Not just the shiny fun bits, all of it. He is honest and forthcoming in a way that occasionally knocks the wind out of me. His lack of filter matches mine and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

“Do not ask the price I pay, I must live with my quiet rage, tame the ghosts in my head that run wild and wish me dead.” Mumford and Sons

More melodrama. Hurts less than a paper cut really, I know he is mine. I trust him implicitly.

I know what I went through and I know how I feel. I pretty things up in here by throwing flowers on graves. Doesn’t make them any less dead to me.

I was looking for something I didn’t think existed. But in my tenacious as fuck way, I kept trying.

She thrusts her fists against the posts and still insists she sees the ghosts.

I do see my ghosts, and occasionally, when we go out, I see his too.

We talk openly about where we have been, what went right/what went wrong. At some point without discussing it, we decided on full disclosure and I wouldn’t change it.

I said to him the other day “I wish you would read the posts about what I wanted”. The posts wherein I made detailed lists of what I was looking for, hoping that if I wrote it all down the universe would listen.

And she did.

Past is gone but something might be found to takes its place (Gin Blossoms)

I wouldn’t trade him for any combination of them.

Now is blessed, the rest remembered. Jim Morrison

regular lust

I Only Date Beasts

March 21, 2017

Bittersweet and strange
Finding you can change
Learning you were wrong
Tale as old as time
Beauty and the Beast

He fucked me 6 times yesterday and still thought I was hot enough to mention it at 6am, on our way to MacDonald’s drive thru on his way to drop me off on his way to work.

He called me beautiful and he is a beast.

Been looking for one of those for a long time and up until now they have been weighed, measured and I was left wanting.

Not anymore.

I thought I had one once, upon a time not that long ago, but he was all talk and no time for me.

So I left.

Why does it always have to be ‘I have you or I hate you.’???

Weren’t we just friends? Didn’t we trust each other a few weeks ago? We talked every day. Now I have to walk around this hole in my life. It’s just a puddle not a crater. I’ll live.

I was just one girl out of several on his roster.

I never understood the phenomenon of “You aren’t behaving the way I expect you too so I shall name thee whore, cast you out and never talk to you again.”

But honey…

I am a whore and damned proud of it. He was proud of me once. Showed me off to his friends with pics, but I never met them. Apparently I was the hottest of the girlfriends.

I didn’t win anything.

One would think that if a guy has a hot girlfriend said friends would hound him to do something about it. But what do I know?

His business partner managed to drive to Milton nightly, in the dead of winter to bang some random flavor of the month chick, repeatedly and raw.
I lived a lot closer and I got ignored so hard that I questioned my own existence.

When I said I couldn’t wait anymore Lumberjack said ‘You knew what you were getting into. I’m over it. You wasted my time.’

Wait…what?

You plucked a nympho out of thin air, basically winning the lottery and fucked me…4 times in 9 months? With 2 blowies and a finger bang thrown in, for what?

To be blocked on everything?

His last one left him because they never went out. So I never asked to go out.

I didn’t ask for much.

I tried to be understanding. I waited and waited and waited.

“She didn’t understand I work so much so I can have this house, she can come over any time.”
But I wasn’t allowed in that very same house after he moved upstairs.

It was over then and I hung on for 5 more months.

He stopped trying as soon as I put out.

That’s the norm.

Or it was…

Ever just the same
Ever a surprise

From trashed to treasured.

My ex-husband called me a turboslut after he read the blog. Said he was ashamed he’d ever known me and touched me. You and me both buddy. I shudder and long for the day that my skin cells have regenerated enough times that they never knew you existed. Not long now.

We waited 3 months to sleep together and I went to prison for 7 years for honoring that probationary period.

Besides, I kinda am all those names I’ve been called.

I am not ashamed of it anymore.

Thought I had found someone who thought it was great too, but he never showed up to claim his prize.

Fuck him.

Over it.

Something wonderful happened the other day.

Something wonderful has been happening for 3 weeks now.

I told y’all I slept with a young Scorpio on the first date.

We went to see Get Out and we decided we weren’t done hanging out yet.

I was so fucking frustrated and he is so fucking hot I caved, maybe 20 minutes after I said I wasn’t gonna.

It was worth it.

I had joked that we wouldn’t last long enough to see Beauty and the Beast.
One of the previews we agreed on seeing whilst sitting in the theater. It wasn’t a joke. I figured he’d bail sooner than later. Why wouldn’t I?

They all do.

I fucked him, put my clothes on and he drove me home, all the while me thinking “that was really good, too bad I’ll never see him again.”

I even said it out loud before I shut the car door.

He came over the next night.

Not the one after that because I was working, but the next night.

Probably 15/20 days we’ve seen each other, at least for a few hours.

On the 14^th day he asked me to be his girlfriend, even though he thought I’d say no. He wanted it enough that he took a chance. Of course I said yes.

When it’s been more than 24 hours since we’ve fucked he gets these lusty eyes. Or when he looks at me really. We’ve joked about fucking in bar bathrooms, it’s really only a matter of time.

I told him what ex hubby said, the turboslut thing.

He did something I wasn’t expecting, he took back the nickname and made it into a good thing.

He makes a lot of things into good things.

He said last night while we were lying in bed, pretty much out of nowhere, “I don’t know why these guys all left you.”

Honestly babe, I don’t know why they left either, but I am glad they did.

Beauty and her beast? He surprised me with tickets on Saturday. Walked nostalgically back through our first date. (You shushed me here)

The Adventures of Turboslut and her Fuck Monster.

My kind of fairy tale.

lost boys

Raising the Dead

March 10, 2017

Poor Panda.

I rolled in way too early this morning.
There was a hungover girl on our couch.
I tried to be quiet.
I failed.
Woke ‘em both up.

She had been up drinking last night and did leg day at the gym yesterday.

Shoulda been the good roommate/hostess and made them coffee, fetched them Advil, listened to their misadventures from last night.

Well, I did do those things.

Then Panda asked how I was doing and I couldn’t hold back that high-pitched, keening wail that I do when I go full white girl and cannot even.
I know it scares the shit out of her and I couldn’t stop.

Funny enough, I was speaking completely rationally through the sobs.

I am being emotionally blackmailed by my uterus right now and it is making me feel like a crazy person.

Rational me knows this.

Irrational me is imagining Doomsday scenarios.

The trip switch has been flipped and I just gotta ride it out.

I realized something, and articulated it through my hiccupping crying jag.

I write shit down in here to bury it.

I make it into a story so it doesn’t hurt me anymore.

Until…

Remember that scene in the Mummy where the expedition guide dude yells out “You must not read from the book!”

He is not wrong. Bad idea.

The seas are about to run red anyways and I went and triggered the other 6 plagues of Egypt.

I have called this blog a giant coffin, named my heart a graveyard, I admit that I am haunted.

I am the white people in the horror movie that hear ghosts whisper ‘get out’ and I stay anyways.

I opened the Necronomicon. For reasons unknown I thought it was safe to say shit out loud.

It ain’t.

“Oh for a moment of forgetting, is a moment of bliss.” Peter Gabriel

I got 11 days of forgetting and it was bliss.

I was so scared that I had hurt someone that I went and ripped all my bandages off, showed all my scars, explained how I had been hurt…and fuck, it hurt.

“I had feelings for them and they left me and it really sucked.”

And just like that, inner peace shattered.

90% of the time I have a handle on all this.
Everything is temporary, everything is as it should be blah blah Buddha blah.

Then I remember.

I wrote an article called “Open Letter to my Exes” and I fucking thanked them.

Seriously?

Admittedly I am really happy with who and where I am, but come on. I am not a Saint nor a martyr.

So on that note…

Seriously, fuck you guys.

Fuck you fuck you fuck you.

I am so fucking hand-shy now I start waiting for them to leave before the second date.

Fuck you.

Every plan beyond a day or two later makes my stomach roll with fear. I should have butterflies dammit. But nope. My hopes go up for a split second and I have to smash them down. I’ve heard that before. I have heard all of it before.

Fuck you.

This uterus of mine has me feeling ugly and worthless a few days a month. These exes of mine have me feeling ugly and worthless every time I think about when they left.

I know this will pass but for now I’ll write it out and bury it.

Maybe this time it won’t come back to haunt and hurt.

men

From Neverland to Maybesomedayland

December 4, 2016

Shit shit shit.

Daddy’s little secret, don’t you know what you came for?
And you notice where you are ~ Daniel Wesley (Ooo Oh)

Just noticed where I are. And kinda what I am.

We don’t have a ddlg relationship per say.
(Dominant daddy/little girl)
I follow a few people on Instagram and Facebook that participate in said relationships. Some of it makes my heart happy and my princess parts tingle and some of it I just don’t get.
I am a submissive because I like the lack of control, I crave it really. I love how the world just shuts up and goes away when I am with him. For a few hours I don’t think about adulting, I can just get lost in him and just…be.

The rest of it?
I can think of better things to put in my mouth than a pacifier, don’t want any stuffies, toys yes but the kind that fill me up, not teddy bears. I am grown.

I do call him Daddy when the moment calls for it, he call me good girl, I like that. I like a lot of things he says, does and is. I have rediscovered things with him that I liked before that were lost with shitty partners. I trust him implicitly with my body. My heart? I thought I did, I want to.

Fuck, I am feeling like a secret.

I do not want to feed the fears. I do not want to bring them to life. But I need them out of the dark places they dwell so I can identify them, assess and possibly kill them before they do harm.

I walked into a tattoo shop last week with my Sunshine. We both wanted little quotes, hers took so long I didn’t end up getting one but I had 2 things in mind.

Virtues grow on the graves of our sins by Matthew D Eayre

And a Michael Xavier snippet to round out the holy trinity, I already have two.

What I should have gotten (and most likely will get soon) is the one thing that has gotten me through everything since I decided to wake up and not live in my head.

Everything is as it should be. The Dalai Lama

Logically I know that all my doubts are coming from my past.
That time that my ex-husband had a whole other relationship outside of ours and did a bad job of hiding it. At the same time a girl I worked with had to survive the horror of losing her boyfriend in the most freakish of accidents and also finding out hours after his death that he had a whole other family with another woman and had for 4 years. He was better at hiding it. I don’t know how she got through it. But I guess when it comes down to it you either deal or die trying.

In the grand scheme of things I have been through shit that would have killed other people, or turned them bitter, and I am still here. Clumsy heart on my sleeve, trying one more time. And everything is really as it should be.

I know why I started feeling squirrely this time around. I did that thing again that I ought not to do, I started thinking ahead. I imagined snowy Sunday mornings making pancakes in pajamas before we made a pilgrimage to Home Depot. I envisioned waking up at 4am for some stolen snuggles before making us coffee, him leaving for work and me writing before I had to head out. Then coming home for couch snuggles and a quickie before bed.

It’s not the reality of the situation that hurts, it is always the fantasy of how we want things to be.

I want him more than I have him. I feel like with our schedules the way they are the only way to see him more than a couple times a month is to live together. I have no idea if that is in the realm of possibilities. Haven’t talked to him about it and I can’t see us having that discussion for a while.

Having never experienced anything close to a normal relationship I can only pontificate that this slow progression is actually what is supposed to be happening. I have no frame of reference for such things, but I have heard rumors. Some people actually get to know each other before they rush into things like ‘I love yous’ and co habitation.

I may yet get my wish, who knows. He is the first person in a long time, since I woke up really that I have actually wanted to be domestic with. Even ‘he who inspired the book’ had his own place in my Fantasyland. I liked sleeping over at the Giant’s house but I never wanted to live there. Gelfling talked about getting in my trailer with me and parking it on some secluded beach somewhere where we could “fuck and make art”, I smirked at the idea but it never felt quite right.

In the past these things have always been rushed, too soon and or been done for the wrong reasons. I moved in with guys in my 20’s because one or both of us had been evicted. It wasn’t out of love, but necessity. Same when I moved to the farm, to be perfectly honest it was a full on territorial pissing. Mine mine mine. I didn’t love it there and I didn’t really love him. Sure there were moments, but as a whole it was never okay.

I think I would rather be alone than trapped in another house/life with the wrong person.

Everything is actually as it should be, or it would be some other way.

Whatever happens, happens.

If it stops being good for either one of us, it will be time to let it all go.

Turn the key and engine over.
Let her go
Let somebody else lay at her feet.

Gaslight Anthem 45

Till then I’ll see what stays. Hopefully him.

men

Open Letter to my Exes

October 29, 2016

I opened an old blog post this morning called “Not Forgotten”.
I read the words, knowing that I had written them, they sounded like mine, the subject matter familiar etc…but I swear I forgot I had published it.

I am not sure if that is literal irony or just the way Alanis Morrisette uses it, which, in itself is ironic.

I think I’m at 300+ posts by now. Sometimes they get lost, then remembered.

I found another called “Rainbows and Unicorns” about finding a lovely tattooed Scorpio surfer boy on the beach the day after I’d asked for a summer fling.
He didn’t last the summer.
But I was monkey-barring, hanging on to one and reached for another.
Once I let go I fell in the nicest of ways and was caught so there is that then.

Not sure what happened. Thai Fighter went ghost. Maybe his best friend saw me on Tinder, maybe he met another girl…it’s all part of the great unknown at this point. It’s okay. I wish him well wherever he is.

I think/hope he is back in the Philippines, his happy place with his baby boy changing nappies.
We had a good run.

No harm no foul, I knew exactly what he was when I found him. I didn’t get attached. Just enjoyed the ride.

I have been turning this over in my mind a lot lately.

All of my exes have been immortalized in one way or another up in here. Some more than others.

But titling something open letter to my exes is click bait extraordinaire.

And lately I have been grateful as fuck for all of them, all things considered, so here goes…

Open letter to my exes,

Thank you. All of you.

I wouldn’t be where or who I am now without you, and I love this house and this self/life I have now.

Love,

Sarah

I know it would probably be a more popular post if I ripped into them, one by one said horrible shit, personal things, gossip and drama.

But I am not that girl.

I sat on the porch last night, drinking wine with my Sunshine and I said “Men are my drugs, doesn’t matter how bad they are for me, I do them anyways.”

It’s true.

I also said, I’ve never had a good relationship.

This is also true.

And yet, here I am, trying again.

There are no good drugs, sure they can soothe and balm for a time, but in the end, you are alone on the bathroom floor with your addiction and the drugs are gone.

We were originally speaking of addiction, and how I came to date my rapist and how she ended up with the one who hit her. We were both a little out of control with the partying with the actual drugs before we met these men who had a PhD in control, just not in a good way. But they served their purpose.

We decided to be grateful for them and I felt lighter.

I stumbled on this a while ago, touched on it lightly.

Rumi said ‘you have to keep breaking your heart until it opens’.

And I have.

I don’t know if I’m done yet, but I know I am more open than I have ever been.

I spent 4 years not being in a relationship. I was still with men, but one of us always had our arm out holding the other away.

Sometimes I made bad choices. Often I made bad choices. On occasion I would try to summon my inner girlfriend. When they were over 22 at least or not raging manwhores or admitted fuckbois they didn’t seem unattainable, until they were. But then I held on anyways.

I pretended I didn’t want to be in a relationship, but deep down I did.

What was that movie where the girl made a wish for an impossible man, one brown eye one blue, rides horses, flips pancakes?

Ah yes, Practical Magic.

I can’t remember why she didn’t want to get married, but I understand it.
Once again, never been a priority for me, we’ve talked about this.

I think my wish was a little more practical, I just wanted to be someone’s first choice, see subtext wherein I wanted them to be my first choice too.

I had that dream October 8^th 2015 about finding my perfect man in a communist dystopia, all concrete, grey and right angles. I wrote about it in a post called “Dream Love”.

Not perfect, I believe in the concept of perfect like I believe in marriage. Unlikely, but possible. Compatible with me. The two sides of his body distinctly different, giant sized tall, lounging on a couch watching movies and laughing and keeping me safe. Just being happy we found each other at all.

I think I found him, finally. He is 6’ 5” half covered in tattoos, each side of his body distinctly different.

He is away right now and I feel like I am in a relationship with my phone. But god knows I have been through worse.

I saw a meme today.
I see memes every day.
This one said ‘god heard you, be patient’.
I’m fucking trying I really am.
Huge shout out to all the boys I’ve waited for before now.
Thanks for the practice in perseverance.

unable to even

Wedding Rings and Other Things

October 6, 2016

Him: “We’re just waiting for Sarah’s family to arrive”

Me: (oh Jesus no)

Random wedding guest: “Who?”

Him: “Sarah’s parents”

Me: “Sean, what did you just say?”

Him: (one more time for the kids in the back) “Sarah’s parents aren’t here yet.”

Me: “No Sean, I’m Sarah, you are marrying Erin remember?”

Him: “Oh, ya. Erin’s parents. Sorry.”

Coulda stabbed him in the heart with his boutonniere pin.

Coulda woulda shoulda.

He wasn’t sorry enough to stop himself from doing it twice more.
Not during the ceremony though, small mercies.

I had enough before the sun went down and bailed. I should never have gone.

Don’t go to your exes weddings mmmm kay?
Even if they INSIST, just don’t go, chop a limb off if you have to but just don’t go.

I’ve been to a few weddings.
Twice as a flower girl, those marriages are still going after 30+ years.
The next marriage ended eventually.
The first one I went to wherein I was a friend of the bride…she’d pulled me into the bathroom a week before and said “I don’t want to do this.”

“You don’t have to, you can stop this, it’ll be okay.” I said.

She didn’t stop it, she left him 3 months later.

I’ve never been a bridesmaid nor a bride.

Went to 2 weddings last year, both beautiful and wonderful.
I went to both alone and left feeling really alone.

Been engaged a handful of times. If that hand had closed around a firecracker after lighting it and was missing a digit, which is kinda a metaphor for said relationships, dummy me didn’t know when to let go.

I didn’t keep the rings.

The kind of man I want works with his hands and couldn’t wear a ring anyways.

There is a scene in Four Weddings and a Funeral wherein Duckface is speaking to Hugh Grant and says something to the effect of “You don’t have to enter every relationship thinking ‘I must get married’, but you can’t be in them thinking I mustn’t get married either.”

I was Hugh Grant. Until recently.

My dad looked at my mom and said ‘that’s the girl I am going to marry’, and he did.

His parents met as teenagers, before the war. When he came back his family actually hid my grandpa from my grandmother saying “once Neva knows he’s home we’ll never see him again.” That lasted a week, and proved to be true. They loved each other so much. So do my folks.

I met my “one I want to marry” when I was 13 years old. For 26 years I didn’t want to marry anyone except him.
Yes, I agreed to marry 3 other people, but somehow I knew it was bullshit and that it wasn’t going to happen and it seemed rude to say no so…

Anthony proposed three times between 2006 and 2011, told sisterwife he had to because I found the ring in his pocket when I was gathering laundry. Not sure how explained asking me twice more after that, not sure I care.

Survey says, whatev’s.

It was because of the Black Wedding of Sean and Erin that I came to find out how I had been ousted from my farm life years prior.
I was sleeping with Sean you see, back in the days of being engaged and enraged with Anthony and our sisterwife.
Sean’s best friend told Anthony where I had been spending my nights.
Sean made sure Anthony found out so I would get thrown out and go back to him.
That same friend made sure Anthony found out I was at the wedding too.

Ew.

None of them loved, honored nor cherished me. And they did not forsake any others and want only me, so again whatev’s.

Made me feel like shit though. Probably the worst I had ever felt. To be betrayed like that under the guise of being loved. To be forced from my home, as shitty as it was, before I was ready to go.

I think that is part of the reason I value the free will of others so much. I know what force feels like, to be cornered, abandoned, manipulated, used and tossed away with no choice in the situation other than whatever notion brought me there is the first place.

Bob Marley said there is no bigger coward than a man who awakens the love in a woman with no intention of loving her back.

On this, and most things, Bob and I are in utter agreeance.

Whatever they awoke in me felt like love, until it didn’t.

“Her heaven will be a love without betrayal” (Beyonce)

Yes, this.

The night I met the Giant I read his palm in the blacklight. Saw him getting married, focused on his career, can’t remember much else, but he is going to have one serious accident or illness and smooth sailing from there.

I joked that he wasn’t the one for me because I was never getting married.
I’ve never been that little girl who plotted, planned and schemed about her wedding day. I just didn’t. My parents eloped. I was 6 when Charles and Di got married, watched some of it on TV. Looked like a long expensive mess to me.

I still see it as sacred. I still want to be chosen by someone that I love, who loves me and stays.

It hurt me that the Giant thought me a joke really. He said he would stay and was gone in a week.

Just because I don’t have my head full of flowers and rings and white dresses doesn’t mean the idea of loving someone for a really long time doesn’t appeal to me. It is in my DNA after all, this forsaking of all others. I was just handshy for all of the reasons listed above.

The end of Four Weddings and a Funeral is Hugh Grant saying to Andie McDowell, would you agree to not marry me and stay not married to me for a really long time.

I like that ending.

I do.

men

Sleepovers

September 14, 2016

“You can stay the night if you want you know.”

I wanted to scream with joy.

Deep breath. Calm down.

“No honey, I didn’t know that.”

Me and Jon Snow go waaay back.

I know nothing.

I presume nothing.

I demand nothing.

I ask very little.

I lie, never.

I came as close as I have to lying in a good long while. T’was a half-truth.

I filled in the other 50% the next day.

What I said was “I don’t want to bleed on your sheets.”

“You didn’t come prepared?” he said.

Good point…

I used to be. I used to have clothes, bathroom kit, with tampons and errrthing stashed in my trunk.

When did I stop doing that? And why?

Maybe because the circumstances that dictated I might need to bolt in the night are long over and I let it go.

I said “Honestly, it was 8 when you called, 9 when I got here, I figured I had an hour, two tops.”

That was the absolute truth.

He gets up well before the sun, his sister lives upstairs and shouldn’t be disturbed.
There were rules.
Or I thought there were.
I think he changed them, in my favor.

I guess enough time has passed, enough words spoken, enough exclamations of ‘go team’ for him to be comfortable.

He told me a story involving a few other women would come the night before, sleepover and still be there when he got home after a 10 hour shift. I recoiled in horror…how could anyone be so shameless, presumptuous and invasive? Bad manners.

I could never. Even if I tried, even if I wanted to.

Yes, I have allowed myself think about falling asleep after sex, waking him up with my mouth, how well he snuggles on the giant-sized couch and how it would translate to his giant-sized bed.

He fell asleep a few times that night, every time I wiggled or readjusted he would pull me back immediately and even closer than before.

I should’ve been happy, and I was. But I was terrified too. These are the kinds of things that would haunt me, I know my ghosts better than the living.

I hadn’t seen him in 6 weeks, and every ounce of my being wanted to stay, fall asleep next to him and draw the moment out as long as humanly possible and then make some sort of agreement with the gods to slow time down for me.

The one thing I DO know? Every moment could be the last one. So I make it count.

But I panicked.

I haven’t slept beside a boy in a good long while.
Last time I did, I was the interloper and I woke up not knowing how I got there, knowing I didn’t belong, that I had stolen time and sleep in a place I had no right to be in. Good thing I didn’t bleed on his sheets or she might have known I was there.

I never want to be the girl who leaves things behind. I won’t overstay my welcome or make excuses to come back. I abhor being where I am not welcome.

The girls my husband brought home loved leaving clues and excuses, both for them to come back and for me to leave. I didn’t listen.

This ‘one who said I could stay’ has been around for a good while. We talk every day, but schedules and vacations planned before we knew the other existed have made it so we haven’t physically seen each other in what felt like forever. But when I walked in, his sister said hello like I belonged there, the dog gave me a cold-nosed, warm greeting and he made space for me on the giant couch, pulled me right in and said I could stay.

I am sure that if my body functioned as bodies tend to do, at his house, he wouldn’t be disgusted and throw me out. He’d probably just say ew with a grin, kiss my forehead and point me towards the washing machine.

I know how to clean up my messes and leave no trace. Been doing it for years.

I have been trained that the best parts of me are the ones that don’t exist, just the spaces between. Between my legs where I let them in, between my ears when I pretend I’m not as smart as I am, between my words where I wait and listen, in the deep breaths where I gather myself enough that I can pretend my feelings weren’t just blown up by the bombs they just dropped. Ignoring the holes in the landscape of my psyche and acting like I was never there or hurt.

Until a boy I like asks me to sleep over and I have to pull off the highway because I am crying too hard to drive home.

Precedents.

-18 months with one and he begrudgingly said I could stay one night, so I fought exhaustion and risked falling asleep at the wheel to make it home. The relief on his face when I said ‘thanks, but no’ was all the answer I needed.

-3 months with another. He had such a bad sleep in my bed the first time I put him in the guest room and shut the door every other time he spent the night. Never did see his house from anywhere but the road.

-Another with preemptive, awkward excuses as to why I couldn’t possibly stay. I never asked.

*There was one good one in there, stayed at his house once before he fell apart and took any notion of ‘us’ with him.

It’s been 4 years.

I pretend these things don’t bother me, but they do.

I have this huge false bravado when it comes to men, dating and the things that have happened to me.
I never ever blame the new one for the ones who came before.

I’m too busy blaming me.

I was too loud, too much, said the wrong thing at the wrong time, expected too much, took up too much space, too much time.

So I keep them at arm’s length, pretend I don’t need anything beyond the slightest scraps of attention and affection and I starve just to make those spaces that were so coveted by the old ones that much bigger.

Truth is I am terrified.

I wasn’t ready yet.

To risk racoon eyes and morning breath, snoring.

What if I talk in my sleep and say half the things I am thinking?

At some point I am going to fill that space he makes for me, the one he pulls me back into and actually stay the night.

men

Laughter is the Best Medicine

September 12, 2016

I haven’t been writing much lately. The book is stuck in a weird spot, my hero and antihero took themselves a walk ages ago and took my motivation and outdated muses with them.

I am also scared of manifesting what I’m writing about. I don’t want my book love anymore.

I found something better. Safe, sane.

The kind no one wants to read about, and the kind I don’t feel compelled to write about or share.

My girls tried to pry my phone from my hands last night to read what he’d said that was making me smile.

Nope, nuh uh. This is mine, besides, they would need a decoder ring and I am not sharing that either.

It doesn’t look like anything spectacular on paper.

I have had ‘spectacular on paper’. Boys and men who wrote so eloquently, words dripping with love and intention and promise. Then nothing… and the silence was deafening.

Magic words, conjuring spells and beautiful illusions.

That is the thing about loving these magic men, the final act is always the same.

Puff of smoke and they disappear.

Or they are just a man behind a curtain. Looking and sounding bigger than they are.

It wasn’t the talking wolf in Red Riding Hood that saved her, it was just a lumberjack who happened nearby.

Truth be told, I’d already killed the wolf. I don’t need saving, I just want some snuggles.

I was talking to a darling friend of mine. She is a writer and she loves my writing.

She sent me this.

https://www.facebook.com/MonikaCarlessAuthor/photos/a.808458765894457.1073741828.807727775967556/1175781619162168/?type=3&theater

With the message “I feel like this is about you and one of yours. Past love maybe?”

T’was.

He was my poison, and my remedy. For a while I had more of him in my veins than my own blood.

I had to keep him on a low dose, metered IV drip, the withdrawal was too much. Then slowly but surely I started weaning myself off. But every now and again, there would be a puff of smoke in the air, a turn of phrase and I would be back at square one, tremors, shakes, tears and a craving I couldn’t control.

I am feeling better now.

My cells regenerated, triggers lessened.

Time heals even the deepest wounds.

I called him by his real name for the 3^rd time ever.

Rumpelstiltskin Rumpelstiltskin Rumpelstiltskin

She got a little starstruck and curious, asked if her impressions of him were true.

They were, so I let her keep them.
Spoke only of his talent and intelligence.
His passion, intensity and wisdom.
How he motivated me to be better, at everything.

But one story slipped out and it made me sigh with a rather huge twinge of nostalgia.
Twinge is an understatement, this memory grabbed my arm, wrenched it behind my back and wouldn’t let go even after a 1000 cries of uncle.

He more than once said I was guarded, because I was. After a few scoldings I stopped talking too loud or too much. Kept my swearing to a bare minimum, tried to conduct myself with dignity and composure. Failed miserably, I am not a composed girl. But I tried. Only told stories upon request, kept my answers short, like I was on the stand, on trial. And I was. Left as much emotion at the door as I could. Held my dorky self down until she passed out from lack of oxygen.

Except this one time.

We were talking about the weather of all things, he was perplexed by how hot/cold my part of Canada gets. There were metric conversions and I said something ridiculously stupid and I started laughing. Hard. At myself. I had to put in Herculean effort to stop. When I get the giggles, there is no ending them, but I managed.

You must understand I have the derpiest laugh ever. It’s this low ridiculous chuckle better suited to an old black woman in a rocker on a porch in the bayou, with a slight case of dementia. My friends mock me as they laugh along with me, which makes me laugh even harder and derpier.

I love letting go, but in that moment (with him) I was scared.

That laugh was capable of crushing the eggshells I walked on with him.

I waited for him to make a thinly veiled excuse to quit the conversation.

Instead, he took a deep breath and told me a pirate joke. Even did a rather convincing pirates ‘Arrrr’ at the end for effect.

And I laughed my strange dorky laugh some more, and he joined me.

For a minute there I thought everything was going to be okay. With him.

I wasn’t wrong, everything is okay. It always is, at varying levels.

I hope he is okay wherever he is.

I learned something from all of this.

It feels so much better to be unedited.

Yes, there are things I can always change, tone down, turn up, learn, etc…
Life is a natural progression of refining who I am as a person as I experience the world. Seeing some of my behavior in others and using them as a mirror to reflect on what works and what doesn’t.

I laugh at older outdated versions of me. The girl who cared too much, who was scared too much.

Belly laughs are now (and always have been) important to me. They are my joyous noise unto the lord, my unabashed moments of bliss at being alive, they are a spontaneous explosion of gratitude for this one perfect moment. It is my brain mixing up a superb cocktail of happy chemicals and me getting tipsy on it.

Laying on the couch with the new boy the other night, he grabbed my hip in a ticklish spot, squeezed and I giggled. I apologized for immediately, saying I knew I had an annoying laugh, which is my knee jerk Pavlovian ingrained response. He proceeded to pause the movie and tell me funny stories in funny voices and tickle me until I forgot I wasn’t supposed to be laughing.

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