Porphyria Returns
22 October 2009 13:22![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amulThis strange interaction between Porphyria and I continues. I am never quite sure what is permissible, what is encouraged, and what is to be avoided. All the more difficult because Porphyria seems to shy away from direct questions, and the only thing I've learned to be certain of during her last visits is that if I ask directly, the answer becomes "no."
My carefully cultivated blunt approach is useless here, and while she tries to hint and suggest what her attitudes are, the language is not natural to me. I try, as she encourages, to accept that she wouldn't make the trip if she didn't value my company. Try to believe that the ardor she returns when I make a move indicates desire. But she never comes to me, and I find this confusing. I expected that by now she would have started to express herself at least occasionally in the language I speak, that I would be familiar enough with her to understand her.
I do understand her, when she talks of others, when it is not about her and I, and this confuses me even further.
The crux of it, I suppose, is that we both want half of the "normal" thing from each other, and the confusion rests in the exact definition of what that half looks like, what we're comfortable taking from each other, given time and geography and the quantum mechanics of trust. This only highlights the communication issue.
I keep thinking that she and I might be better served if she did not have to grapple with both being my houseguest, and wanting to spend time with me in particular ways. If she was crashing somewhere else, and our time together was by specific design, a few hours to be spent in a particular way, then I would have a much clearer understanding of what sort of behavior I could engage in while we were together. Perhaps then I would know, at any given moment, if I could reach out to hold her hand, or draw her tiny, lithe figure up against me. I would not have to watch as she plans for time with others and feel as though it was an opportunity lost for me.
Unfortunately, this grates against my most basic, most brutal, most overwhelming urge regarding Porphyria. What I want above all else is to be a safe and trusted space in her life. I want my home to be somewhere she feels comfortable lingering in, and I want my time with her to feel lazy and unrushed. I want to be a vacation for her, from the tides of her work-a-day life, from the pressures of potential long-term relationships, from the constant predator-and-prey tendencies that seem to mark so many of her male/female relationships.
And back to the front again, the wheels spin another revolution as I circle the wagons around my deeper truths and desires: that part of me which looks at all of my existence as an education thinks that this is not the classroom I think it is. Time with her should not be about what I can give, it suggests, but a chance to learn once more how to ask for what I want.
Or maybe....just maybe...I should look at this as a chance to just have some gorram fun and stop worrying all the time about Shoulds.
My carefully cultivated blunt approach is useless here, and while she tries to hint and suggest what her attitudes are, the language is not natural to me. I try, as she encourages, to accept that she wouldn't make the trip if she didn't value my company. Try to believe that the ardor she returns when I make a move indicates desire. But she never comes to me, and I find this confusing. I expected that by now she would have started to express herself at least occasionally in the language I speak, that I would be familiar enough with her to understand her.
I do understand her, when she talks of others, when it is not about her and I, and this confuses me even further.
The crux of it, I suppose, is that we both want half of the "normal" thing from each other, and the confusion rests in the exact definition of what that half looks like, what we're comfortable taking from each other, given time and geography and the quantum mechanics of trust. This only highlights the communication issue.
I keep thinking that she and I might be better served if she did not have to grapple with both being my houseguest, and wanting to spend time with me in particular ways. If she was crashing somewhere else, and our time together was by specific design, a few hours to be spent in a particular way, then I would have a much clearer understanding of what sort of behavior I could engage in while we were together. Perhaps then I would know, at any given moment, if I could reach out to hold her hand, or draw her tiny, lithe figure up against me. I would not have to watch as she plans for time with others and feel as though it was an opportunity lost for me.
Unfortunately, this grates against my most basic, most brutal, most overwhelming urge regarding Porphyria. What I want above all else is to be a safe and trusted space in her life. I want my home to be somewhere she feels comfortable lingering in, and I want my time with her to feel lazy and unrushed. I want to be a vacation for her, from the tides of her work-a-day life, from the pressures of potential long-term relationships, from the constant predator-and-prey tendencies that seem to mark so many of her male/female relationships.
And back to the front again, the wheels spin another revolution as I circle the wagons around my deeper truths and desires: that part of me which looks at all of my existence as an education thinks that this is not the classroom I think it is. Time with her should not be about what I can give, it suggests, but a chance to learn once more how to ask for what I want.
Or maybe....just maybe...I should look at this as a chance to just have some gorram fun and stop worrying all the time about Shoulds.