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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.

regular lust

50 Ways to Stay with your Lover

April 18, 2017

We aren’t. Wish granted.

Ta da

Abracadabra.

How bow dat?

The gods always smile on brave women.
Granted sometimes they are smiling because they can’t control their laughter when we forget ourselves and we turn into shadows of what we are and become nagging, bitchy things with teeth and claws and tears.

And then my period stops and ya, sorry bout dat.

Consider my shit together.

Everything is as it should be, as it always is. (Dalai Lama)

I lived without him before he showed up, I can do it again.

But the more I push, the sooner that is going to happen. So no more pushing.

Easy peasy. Like Sunday morning with or without pancakes.

No more clinging onto shit that doesn’t matter either.

Granted there was a rough patch, akin to a quick bend in the river, a drop in elevation creating rapids roiling and rolling, but that was then.

Back to our regularly scheduled ebb and flow, I got caught up on some rocks for a bit.

I am back in the water, here I float, unencumbered.

God I need to get back in the water. Willing the summer to get here quicker is futile, it will come when it comes and it is my job to make sure it is thoroughly enjoyed and glorious.

I keep forgetting what my job is.

Currently I am juggling two paying jobs, writing, being a mother, a girlfriend and whatever version of myself I feel like being today.

I am all of those things.

I decided this.

I decided on him, he decided on me.

The only thing making things complicated was an unconscious decision I made to make it so.

I forgot for a week or two that I am my own Captain Jean Luc Picard, this is my starship. I get to decide how this goes.

I walked into this first actual relationship in 4 years adamantly deciding that I wasn’t going to lose myself this time.

But I found myself slipping.
Spending time in places I don’t belong with people I don’t know.
Time I could have been writing, napping, working, with my girls.
Or just being home alone.

That familiar tearing feeling of being pulled in too many directions which makes me balk and want to hide.

I wanted to be with him, he’s awesome. The sex is prolific perfection. He is funny and strange and above all sweet to me.

I was saying one thing, thinking something completely different and doing the polar opposite of both.

Never ending search for the fulcrum.

The secret is all inside your head she said to me, the answer is easy if you take it logically.
Paul Simon 50 Ways to Leave your Lover.

I am not leaving my lover. Quite like him actually.

The answer is logical though. ‘No’ is a complete sentence. So is ‘Okay Baby’. Just gotta find that balance.

There is nothing wrong with him going to the bar and me being home asleep. He’s away right now and sooooo happy. So am I, both for him and for the time spent alone. I was so desperate for me time that I was spending my tiny allotments in unproductive ways. Overthinking being one of them.

We’re good together and we are good apart.

I wouldn’t stand for him demanding I go out, so why should he tolerate me demanding he stay home.

He shouldn’t.

Doesn’t work that way.

But somehow we work.

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.

men

Mountains, Monsters and Men

April 6, 2017

I wanted to write something.

I had it in my head and it was a good idea but…

I am on day one of flipping my schedule from days back to nights and I was up, bleary eyed at 6 this morning.

Logical me wanted to go back to bed.

Smitten kitten me wanted 5 more minutes with Mister.

I saw a thing once or a million times, in movies or on TV where the man cups his hand around the back of a girls neck, with his fingers lightly tangled in her hair and he pulls her ever so gently towards him and kisses her forehead.

Ya, that happened this morning.

I floated home.

Felt as good as it looked and seemed to me it would.

It’s funny, after everything…there are still new things that haven’t happened yet.

It’s the little things.

Always the little things for me.

Big romantic gestures make me squirm. Flowers, although lovely, end up dying. Gifts are just things, words are just words but a kiss on the forehead can feel like the whole world, when the whole world is still dark and he climbs back in bed for one more minute with me.

He pulls choice phrases and words from old posts on here.

One of them claimed that I had ‘copious amounts of sex’.

I thought I did.

Seemed like a lot at the time…but anything compared to nothing is something.

He is something else.

Copious has found new meaning.

Many things have found new meaning.

I wrote once that the only trouble with making something out of nothing is when the nothing starts to show through.

I had a whole lotta nothin’.

I used to make mountains out of molehills and monsters out of men.

“I only date beasts” I said.
“Tell the wolves I am home” I cried.
“Fairy tales and parables about monsters” I wrote.

But what kind of creatures aren’t brave enough to stick around?

Beasts, wolves and monsters don’t run. Well they do, when a hero shows up with a magic sword. And that is exactly what happened here.

These boys I made out to be something they weren’t, weren’t nothing per say…but they weren’t what I made them out to be.

Little did I know that eventually even the heaviest gilding fades, the nothing would show through.

Me and Jon Snow, still don’t know nothing.

Except now I have an inkling.

It was like when Buffalo Bill has Catherin Martell down the well, she’s snagged Precious in the fucking basket and says “I think she broke her leg on the way down…I think she’s in a lot of pain mister.” And he yells back “you don’t know what pain is.”

I used to know exactly what pain was. I also knew a hit could feel like a kiss when the body is starved for attention. (Unknown)

I used to starve.

I was Catherine Martell, living on scraps, down in a hole, in a madman’s basement just trying to find a way out. Rubbing the lotion on my skin when told to do so. Attempting to communicate and negotiate with varying someone’s who mocked my pain and dehumanized me to justify what they were doing.

Now I am out.

Been out for a while now.

But like most prisoners, I kept reoffending so I could go back to the “comfort” of what I knew. Yep, you guessed it…nothing. Or very little at least. Another word for a hole in a crazy man’s basement is oubliette, somewhere you put things you want to forget.

And there I sat, remembering them.

I suppose it makes sense, all I had for company was memories. Little moments and snippets of happiness stitched into a quilt to keep me warm.

Now the quilt is threadbare, slowly becoming the nothing it was made from. Pretty soon just my own indestructible, red thread will be all that’s left. As it should be.

It was a security blanket and I don’t need it anymore. I have a good man to keep me warm.

when i was married

Trusting Junkies

March 19, 2017

I can’t stay on your life support,
There’s a shortage in the switch,
I can’t stay on your morphine,
‘Cause it’s making me itch
I said I tried to call the nurse again
But she’s being a little bitch,
I think I’ll get outta here, where I can

Run just as fast as I can
To the middle of nowhere
To the middle of my frustrated fears
And I swear you’re just like a pill
Instead of makin’ me better,
You keep makin’ me ill

Pink

Ex hubby and I agreed on a few things.

Very few, but a few nonetheless.

He’d had a bad habit of dating opioid addicted strippers. My problem was I dated alcoholics. Mean ones.

We kinda bonded over this. Surviving it, the horror stories of relationships turned wars. Battle of us versus the pill or bottle depending.

He barely drank, cheated an awful lot though. Not sure if that was a step up or a shimmy sideways.

Survey says shimmy.

I was a step up for him, I was clean and a waitress at the time, an EX stripper.

I wasn’t a saint, more of a ‘been there done that, I’m a good girl now’.

Until I wasn’t.

I have never done heroin. Hillbilly heroin yes, morphine and its derivatives and that is where it ended. I could not even begin to imagine how sweet that high would have been to a girl like me whose head is rarely quiet. I can imagine the oblivion. Loved the tingling sensation on my skin, I fuck a lot to get that feeling. I fuss sometimes about how people can condemn some things without trying them, but I knew that white horse would drag me to my death so I stayed away.

It’s so funny. My stubbornness has saved me from and condemned me to hell depending on the day and the circumstance.

I was so committed to not being like his other girls that I refused pain medication after my accident, you know, the one that left me unable to think or walk right.

I had to get rushed in for an MRI and they asked me what I was taking for pain, I said nothing and immediately got a shot of morphine in my IV drip. They wanted to make sure it wasn’t the pain making me unable to remember anything. My threshold had been breached and I was going crazy from trying to manage.

But I was stubborn and I was careful and above all respectful.

I got through it with some Tylenol 3’s.

Sometime in the beginning of our relationship, really early on, we discussed how dating an addict is akin to dating a chronic cheater.

Stay with me here.

Someone or something is always more important than the person they are with.

I watched a woman I know, drive away and leave a girl to get beaten by her ex because said ex was a coke dealer and the one driving away didn’t want to disrupt her supply of drugs.

That shit changes you. Priorities become skewed and nothing else matters.

There is no Dana only Zuul. (Ghostbusters)

I am about to contradict the ever loving shit out of myself but bear with me here.

I still do not believe that a healthy relationship is comprised of two people who are so into each other that nothing else matters, that in itself is an addiction and not advised.

Love yourself, have your own life and then invite someone in who can work with you and not make a mess of this thing you have built for yourself, then you can build together.

But when you have to take a back seat to heroin, cocaine, work, alcohol whatever form their escapism takes you start to question your own worth. Is your life so bad that you have to drown yourself in other things? Am I not enough to compensate for how shit life can be? I strive to be sanctuary and a warm safe place. If you have to look elsewhere for comfort and joy, I end up feeling like shit about myself by proxy.

Can’t be helped.

Case and point. The guy I dated for 5 years before ex hubby, ex hubby the first I guess. Worked Monday to Friday. As the weekend approached he’d stop at the beer store, 6 beers after work Thursday, Friday? Hammered to the point of incoherency by 9 or 10 pm. Saturday day drinking to kill Friday’s hangover so Sunday was a write off too.

Let me get this straight…I couldn’t be a waitress because it kept me out nights and we didn’t get to see each other but he could drink himself blind on the two days we did get to hang out?

Shoulda left way before I did.

History repeated.

Same with the farm life. Shoulda woulda coulda left, but I didn’t.

I responded to his actual cheating with some actual cheating of my own, and some leaving and some more cheating.

Then I got my boobs done and my hands on some opiates.

For 90 days I didn’t feel a thing.

Sisterwife was a junkie in her own right, I watched her eyes glaze over, I watched her health deteriorate as she assaulted her one, working, donated kidney with wave after wave of whatever drugs she could get her hands on.

And no one but me seemed to see it. I got tired of yelling ‘are you blind, she’s not docile, she’s fucking high.’

I couldn’t beat them, so I joined her. Spring 2011 is a blur. Pretty sure nothing good happened anyways. How could it?

The summer came, I got a job and straightened myself out. By the fall I left.

I stayed straight, until 2 years later, I found myself dating yet another douchebag who couldn’t even change a tire or keep a job. Got my hands on some Percocet and started checking out every night so I didn’t have to acknowledge this piece of shit taking up half of my bed.

You can check out anytime you like but you can never leave. (The Eagles)

I thought I couldn’t leave, felt trapped, tried to escape anyway I could. And in effect I was cheating. Mentally leaving the relationship before I tossed his freeloading body out the door.

Now?

I know better.

The concept of “alone” is not some terrifying foreign concept.

If I start getting the itch to check out, I’ll just leave.

unable to even

Pressure Sex (trigger warning)

March 15, 2017

My girl, oh my feisty awesome girl, got sexually assaulted last year.

What do you say?

“I’ve been there, I love you, be brave, you got this.”

It’s almost a rote response at this point.

One in four one in four one in four.

Seems like more than one in four.

Seems like my answers and condolences are automated. “Welcome to the club sounds” awful.
But it’s astute.
There are so many of us and no one seems to know how to stop it.

I can tell you what you don’t do, for all the men out there.

What a male friend of hers did when she opened up about what happened a few days later.

He sent her full frontal nudes and dick pics.

She is still reeling and dealing. The betrayal of the supposed friend worse than the assault by the other.

I get it.

She did something decidedly brave in my opinion, she called him out. Not the first but the second, the shitty full frontal friend. Called him by name.

There is fallout, there always is.

She popped her head into my inbox last night, so I stopped what I was doing and said the things I have been programmed to say. The things I wanted to hear after I was assaulted, after dick pics, after men behaved badly.

I had posted yesterday that maybe we should start naming them, these men who do these things to us. The ones we called friends or lovers who don’t understand the words hurt or no.

These aren’t strange perverts in alleyways and parking garages waiting to victimize women, these are men we know. Men we felt safe with until we didn’t.

For every serial killer there is a chorus of neighbors saying ‘we didn’t know, he seemed like such a nice guy.’

Whisperings of abusive and perverted men passed around like dirty currency in the dark where they won’t make a scene ~ J.U.

I am wondering if we should all stand together as women and start naming names.
Not scratching them into the backs of bathroom stalls and hoping someone will heed our warning, but actually naming names.

I tried to call someone out, on that very status, that sparked a war. And I couldn’t.

Me, the girl who speaks her mind, who doesn’t lie, who found her voice and screams from the treetops. Good bad ugly…I am the one to say it. But I can’t.

I can’t say that 2 years ago I had too much to eat at a dinner he bought for me. We went back to his house, like we always did. He wanted to fuck like we always did, but I didn’t. I was feeling tired and sick and stressed and all I wanted to do was lay down for a minute and muster the energy to drive home. But instead I got fucked, rather roughly and unceremoniously while I was mentally disconnected from my body just waiting for it to be over. And that it might have been okay except for the text the next day that said something like “the sex last night was amazing”.

Was it now? Because to me it felt like you were using my body like you would a doll, just something to get you off in a pinch. Using my body like my soul wasn’t in there, that I didn’t matter. Not noticing that I didn’t make a sound or much movement at all, not noticing I was dry as a bone.

I never went back.

He still tries to talk to me and I say hi back politely, curtly or ignore it if I feel like I can get away with it.

Therein lies the problem.

I’m still scared.

A few months later I was lying in bed with Biker Body Pillow. We never fucked, just spooned when we were both broken up about someone else. He got hard in the middle of the night. I was the little spoon so I noticed.

I ignored it, braced for impact in the morning.

I have already written about this. About how a 6’5” heavily tattooed biker stood in my kitchen almost in tears when I explained how I had been programmed to deal with unwanted sexual advances from male friends. When he asked how many times and I couldn’t count. When he asked why and I explained because saying no is sometimes a dangerous thing to do. Which basically boils down to ‘blow them if you have to, it’s safer that way.’

Safer than saying no, safer than trying to leave. Diffusing bombs with your mouth and tongue, but not by talking yourself out of it. Because at some point you already know, they stopped listening.

I have saved a handful of women and girls by drilling into my son’s head, that “even if she stops right in the god damned middle, you stop. Cover her up and wait. Go if she tells you to go, stay if she tells you to stay.” It happened to him, with a girl and he told me he was grateful that he knew what to do.

This is what we need all men to do.

Stop. Cover. Wait and fucking listen.

But what do we tell women and girls?

Fight back, name names and in the morning, we rally.

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.

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.

the poet

Harley and the Joker

September 5, 2016

I wrote this whole article and I was looking for a pic to go with it, found this.

Sucker punch of truth right to the throat.

He did this to me. And I did that thing that I do where I tried to understand it, tried to be a better girl for him.

I watched Suicide Squad and saw myself in there. Just a ‘lil bit. But even a little of that is too much.

Apparently in a parallel Marvel universe Joker and Harley fell in love before he was damaged.

But not in this one.

I don’t want a life that resembles movies or comic books. I don’t want to jump into vats of acid to prove my love for someone. I don’t want my brain shocked and rewired to fit someone else’s ideal of what a woman should be. I have been a woman for 42 years and seriously, I got this.

There are spoilers in here.

You have been warned.

My dad’s middle name is Harley. Always thought that was so cool.

My dad is awesome.

The bar should be sofa king high for the men I date. And it ain’t. Couldn’t tell you why that is, probably best to ask my therapist. See if we can work that out before I date again.

I shouldn’t stand here and say that none of the men I have dated have cleared the bar. A few of them have, raised it a bit, right before they left. So, does that even count?

I don’t know what counts anymore. 1+1 should equal 2 but somehow it keeps coming out to 3 or more or negative one. There are variables and percentages and none of them add up to much of anything all things considered.

I saw Suicide Squad 1.5 times.

The first time didn’t really count as we went to the drive-in, pulled up at the wrong screen waited way to long in line for popcorn that wasn’t there and missed the first 10 minutes, and the screen was way too dark. Went back again to a small theater with reclining seats and took kiddo 1 and 2 with me this time. Saw the whole thing.

I braced myself the second time around.

I worried myself with my reactions to the relationship between Joker and Harley Quinn. I was secretly rooting for them somewhere down in my damaged little heart, and I didn’t like it.

When he tried to pass her off to someone else, I felt ridiculously ill. It wasn’t the concession stand hot dog neither. It was flashbacks, I had someone claim to love me and still try to do that very thing. Didn’t set my mind at any kind of ease when Joker shot the guy after. It felt like he killed the other guy for refusing her. Nope, nuh-uh. Not okay.

I have, in the past, fairly recent actually, fooled myself into thinking that was an expression of love. I was shocked and damaged into believing it was the ultimate in trust and choosing one another. It ain’t. Honestly…I don’t even think the joker in question was buying what he was selling either. Add him to the list of those who left.

I have balked at the idea of monogamy and marriage for years. I was tortured, manipulated and brainwashed into thinking that wasn’t the way.

Been out of captivity for almost 4 years now and starting to get used to it, comfortable in all this space to move around in, explore, try this or that. Red pills, blue pills, drink me, eat me, see if I learn, grow or shrink.

Back in my mid-twenties, high school sweetheart was on the phone, and the subject of my ex-girlfriend came up. “So I know you like women” he said. During the long pause while he gathered his thoughts and balls I braced for impact, waiting for him to ask for a threesome.

Maybe it’s my period, or the memory or both, but I am tearing up at his 15-20 year old response.

“I don’t want to share you” he said. “Is that okay? Would you feel like you were missing something?”

That sigh of relief came straight from my soul.

It was more than okay.

My whole life up ‘til then and since then has always been guys finding out I had a girlfriend (or 6) and deciding I owed them a threesome.
Because? I slept with women once upon a time?

YA, UM…I DON’T DO THAT ANYMORE.

Bisexual never meant promiscuous regardless.

I love who I love. I want who I want, and if I want you, you don’t have to worry about who wants me. My body has ways of shutting that down, so does my mouth.

Once upon a time I had a Joker & Harley Quinn kinda love. A couple of times if I am being totally honest.

Intellectually I know better, but my heart gets so confused and easily swayed. Fucking movie love, has us believing, sadists, psychos and stalkers are capable of love.

When I took my son to see it we had a rousing conversation about how Harley had Stockholm Syndrome, had been driven mad by torture and captivity and it wasn’t love, it was madness and psychopathy. What good is being the Queen of anything if the King of the kingdom passes you around to his friends? That isn’t royalty, loyalty or love.

Then I saw something.

Joker’s right hand man comes into the room to tell Joker where his girl is. Joker is laying on the floor in a pattern of weapons, knives and roses. Top right there is a set of baby clothes.

In Harley’s ideal delusion, “he married me.” Heart sighed again. Stupid heart.
For a minute there I thought ‘maybe he did love her’, in his own twisted way. But that does not negate the fact that he first had to lock her away and drive her insane to force compatibility. I have been there, locked away for months at a time, drips of Chinese water torture wearing away at my self-esteem and my own morals until I was a bleached out crazy version of my former self.

“Will you live for me?” right before he had her swan dive into a vat of industrial chemical waste.

What I almost did. What I am writing a book about.

Logically I know this is not okay.

And yet I sat in the theater and cheered them on in spite of myself.

My eyes welled up with tears when she said “I lost my puddin’.”

I’ve lost my puddin’ a few times, lost my mind too…but that’s okay, I’m finding myself.

Something loving, mutual, sane and easy, hold the puddin’.

regular lust

Boys Lie

September 2, 2016

Not poetry exactly. But pillow talk.

My girls wanted vacation dick and vacation dick they got.

I was the facilitator, I was the adulty adult, I was the common thread.

I drove us all back to the cottage, while they squealed and squirmed and talked much too loud. I woke up after 3 hours of broken sleep to drive the boys back to their trucks before the sun was up during what counts as rush hour in that tiny little town.

I used to be the girl getting driven home at dawn to make it to work, a lifetime ago.

As they were getting laid I laid in bed, worried at first for a myriad of reasons.
Are they safe? When 2 of them didn’t come back right away from the vicious lake I could not sleep. Then I heard a soft giggle through the window and relaxed a little until it quickly morphed into ‘what will the neighbours think?’

I only care what the neighbors think in said tiny town where I am from because that worry is in my marrow like a cancer I can’t shake, or a bone long ago broken that never mended quite right.

Then the soft gasping and moaning of sex came from inside the cottage and I relaxed a little into sleep. Had strange dreams.

The girl beside me on the other side of the locked door said she was a bit envious. I wasn’t.

Back in the days that I lived there I had no such friends, or very few. No one that wasn’t viciously jealous or angry when I got the attention, some attention, any attention. My ‘best friend’ would make sure there were days of consequences for minutes of pleasure. It was good to be home with my girls from the present hanging out in my past. It was cathartic. I got to see a very clear line between what was and what is.

I forwent the vacation dick. Joking that I couldn’t possibly sleep with anyone because I probably knew their brother/wife/girlfriend/parents etc. it’s a really tiny town.

Case and point, one vacation dick was my sister’s best friends little brother, born 4 years before I left that place so I didn’t even know he existed. He didn’t know about me either. The lake isn’t the only dangerous water. I am careful where I swim.

I found it odd and almost lovely to be sitting in the same place I had sat 23 years ago, at a table with a different incarnation of ‘my girls’ in the exact geographic location we used to.
Once upon a time it was almost always my job to get the girls and the car home. Some things stay the same.

Truth be told, I didn’t want anyone anyways. I am in the middle of sorting something out with someone and vagina has taken a rather high road about it. We begin to covet what we see every day, and what I see are texts from Lumberjack. I covet.

Mind you, I had a twinge of jealousy on the ride home. The two who got laid were speaking of pillow talk and snuggles.

Fuck I miss my lumberjack.

My kingdom for some snuggles, my kingdom to hear his actual voice again. See how closely my mina bird brain has mimicked his tone and cadence in the inner dialog when I am reading aloud the written reiterations I get from him daily. I heard a boy outside of a pizza place last week and my head whipped around, the voices were close, out east and steeped in honesty.

Then I wasn’t jealous anymore.

One of the bearers of vacation dick was actually a dick.

I sat quietly in the back seat as my 3 girls waxed poetic and got excited about how this one guy was such a good fit, the things he had said, he’d talked about trips to Bali. She was pontificating about how things might be.

I said nothing. But my mind was screaming no.

Just like every character ever in Star wars I had a bad feeling about this.

It was confirmed when we got home, found him on Facebook under a slightly different name than he had given, both profile pic and cover photo of he and his girlfriend.

There had been no mention of a girlfriend. Why say Bali? Overkill?

“Way to say everything I wanted to hear, asshole.” Was her message to him.

Here is what hurts me. And I will tell her this when I find the words.

Yes, it sucks balls that he didn’t tell you about the girlfriend so you could have made an educated decision. But all the things he did in the moment were good. They had prolific, great sex, we all went skinny dipping in crazy high waves and lived. We had a good night on the patio with an amazing dinner, laughs drinks, good times.

And now her memory of a lovely 2 day girl’s vacation is sullied not by a cute boy per say, but where her mind took him after the fact. She is mourning and angry about the things she wanted to see coming, not by what was.

When I lived in that town there was no Facebook to fact check. And I did have random sex with random boys who probably had girlfriends back home. It’s a cottage town and a risk you take for a night of fun.

I am not justifying his actions. They were shit. I just hope one day when she looks back on this she can appreciate the good times that were had and not the future she wanted that didn’t materialize.

I walked away from the weekend feeling clean and good and so very content with mylife exactly the way it is now.

Yes, I dream of Lumberjack and snuggles. But I am trying really hard to live in the moment and not look too far ahead.

Whatever will be will be. And what is…is good.

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