What's Stopping You?

A long long time ago, I met the first girl that I ever fell in love with, my Priceless Pearl, and she had an uncle who was a pretty horrible person.

I held space for her on the phone for many nights, as she processed the things he did to her and her cousin (his daughter) before they both "aged out" of his preferred demographic. Before my first kiss, I was taught, in pretty particular detail, exactly how a man can be horrible to a girl.....

Even to this day, it's hard for me to talk about this without getting lost in the things he did to her. The things he made her watch him do to his own daughter.


My entire sexual adolescence, I felt like I was banging against this wall made of time, wishing I could go back and stop him. And because she was so fucked up by him, because she had trusted me with these awful truths, we never dated. Oh, sure, there were moments of intimacy, of exploration, but I was never Hers. She was never Mine. But we were very good friends.

We were such good friends that both of our first spouses were intimidated by, and jealous of, our connection. When I told my ex-wife that I was done trying to save our relationship, the first thing she said to me was, "She's never going to date you." And when my best friend had the same marriage-ending fight, he said to Pearl, "Well, I guess now you can go date [amul] now, that's what you've always wanted, anyway."

-- This is kind of a tangent from what's on my mind, but at some point in high school, I went to one of my teachers to ask for advice, and he basically told me that there was nothing I could do, because I lived so far away, because it was all hearsay from her.

Two years ago, that man, the one I asked for advice from, that childhood mentor of mine, was accused by over 40 men of grooming and sexually assaulting them over the last 50 years.

I'm still processing that. --

But anyway, about a decade ago, her uncle died, and she called me to and asked me to hold space for her, as I had done long ago, so she could process her feelings about the death. I'd been there, after all. I wouldn't interrupt her with questions trying to follow the plot, the players, the tangled sordid mess of violence.

And as Pearl was talking, she..... She talked like an adult talks about the sexual gratification of others. What he was doing, not just what she remembered feeling. In even more specific detail. Shit that haunts her even to this day.

Shit that, perhaps predictably, formed a lot of the basis of my kinks. So much of my sexuality has been about proving that I'm not him.

And then she told me that he had not stopped, as she had previously maintained, when she turned 12. That he'd been doing it until she moved out.

That he'd been raping her all throughout high school.


I've spent a lot of the last decade kind of scrawling notes in the margins of my autobiography. Those last minute cancellations. Those phone calls when she was "inexplicably" recalling traumas from her grade school years.

And it was hard, because she lied to me, and it was hard because I had spent so much of that time wishing I could stop him and I could have stopped him but I didn't know.

She didn't tell me.


We stopped talking for a while after that. Pretty much most of the last decade. But then another one of the monsters from her childhood died last year, and she called, and I held space for her. I opened the book inside my mind that I had shut away, and once again I remembered names and habits and terrors that I had let myself forget.

Pearl spent so much of that call trying to apologize for putting that burden on me, and I kept telling her that she wasn't the one who put that burden on me.

But here's the thing. The thing I realized that night. The perspective shift she blessed me with.

See, I called her all the time, back in high school. Pretty much every night, right after dinner. 8pm.

And when I was on the phone with her, she wasn't alone.

She wasn't anywhere that she could be trapped.


All this time, all the decades that I've spent wishing I could go back in time and stop him, wishing I had known it was still going on so I could stop it. That entire time.


I was protecting her, after all.

-----

My last romantic partner, when we broke up, described my interest in power exchange and consent, in dd/lg stuff, she called all of that "disgusting patriarchal bullshit," and that my desire to save the women I sleeping with was "toxically masculine." 

I can't get a handle on that bit, because I do have this deep unfilled hunger to feel like I'm protecting the people I love. I just don't think it's "toxically male," because it's a trauma response, not some certainty of innate superiority. Because there WAS someone who needed saving, and I loved her.

Don't get me wrong, my savior complex was out of control in my 20s, but I feel like I've got it under control now, and I have fashioned that pain into opportunities for vulnerability. 

I think we're all formed by our traumas, and what should matter is how effectively we turn those traumas into tools.

But during the conversation that led to me end that relationship, she told me that she'd always seen this part of me, always found it disgusting, and the reason she'd kept things casual between us, it wasn't the politics like I had thought, it was because she didn't want to show me any part of herself that I might want to save.

That this is why, when she found herself dating an abuser, she didn't tell me until after the relationship was "over." Why, when she invited her "ex" to move in with her, and that turned out to be exactly as disastrous as I worried, she never reached out to me for any kind of support.

It isn't that there's some little kid inside me whose upset that he couldn't relive that haunting tale, it's that I was AM a man who has studied and fought against sexual and domestic violence for thirty years, and this woman whom I cared about ignored avoided my experience and academic knowledge, because I lived through trauma.


I lived through trauma.

When he did those things to those girls, he traumatized me too.

That's a hard thing to acknowledge, because I never met him. Because they "really" happened to her. Because I'm a boy.

I spent Thursday night at Lacuna Diving Bunny's place, so that I could try for the early flights to Denver tomorrow, having discovered that there was no way I'd get on a flight today. There was an APA party that I decided to go to, partly because I figured networking would be useful, and partly because I knew LDB needed to talk to Darth Ambivalence about some problems they'd been having. ( Read more... )

Things were fine, she'd made DA shut up and listen, finally, and they had figured out some ways to spend time together out of their home. They were working on it, and didn't need me to sacrifice any of my happiness in order to repair their own.

This was little consolation to me as I spent most of Friday utterly failing to fly to Denver.

Giving up, I spent the rest of Friday sleeping, although What Big Eyes She Has invited me to a party. I wanted to go, having met some of her friends from that group, but I was way too tired. Besides, her husband was going, and I didn't trust him to properly interpret the way I act around her. I'd had enough of dealing with other people's marriages.

Lithe also surprised me -- when she heard I was still in Chicago, she offered to have brunch with me the next day. If I say yes, can I still see you on Monday? "Yes," she said, and I whispered my little mantra to myself. I will not Plan, Sam I Am.

( Read more... )

Grizzled Alley Kitten stopped by my apartment a few hours later for a grocery run. While picking over mangoes and strawberries, I told her about my two dates with Lithe, and this led to a general conversation about all the things we never do, the strangely parallel list that forms the basis of our friendship: we never talk about our passions, never let ourselves enjoy a beautiful day like today, never trust our instincts. In staunch defiance of our weakest selves, we ditched our errands for the rest of the day and hung out on the beach, drinking lemonade and talking about the things we're too scared to admit we even think of, asked the questions neither of us ever wants answered.

Later, I went out to Gd's "Christmas in July" party. An old Santa Suit and a box of Xmas decorations were dusted off and brought amusement to the others. I came home, tired, my head full of thoughts, and tried to write all this out while the intensity of it is all still here.

I paused, exhausted from trying to be this honest with myself, and checked my voicemail. Amid the telemarketers and charity drives, two voices from my past asked me to call them back: a guy I knew from my old BBS days, and f(AD). I haven't heard her voice in over a year.

Tomorrow, I will make some phone calls.

Memory, like a gel-coated capsule. I swallow it down, and it sticks in my throat until some sweetness from life washes it down.

( Read more... )

Finicky Savage (formerly Deedi Dearest) called me today, and made me hang out with her. I told her I wanted to be alone with my thoughts, wanted to indulge in this thing that I spend so much energy avoiding, but she dragged me out of the house for lunch. Kept telling me I shouldn't think about it, shouldn't let myself get dragged down into it.

We ate at this Mexican restaurant near my old Chase Ave apartment, the one Not A Hooker sublet to me for six weeks when I first moved here. I'd wanted to go to El Cid, or that one restaurant Comfortingly Bouncy took me to that time I was mad at her. I couldn't remember the name of it, though, and it was Too Far Anyway. ( Read more... )

Memory.

"Sometimes, you say that with this look on your face like you're about to swallow a bitter pill."

( Read more... )

Well, I figured out what I've been avoiding.

( Read more... )

And I could almost like you
Now it's nearly over

It was strange (that's my new word for this weekend, I use it for everything) right from the arrival. I turned down a street I've come to many times before in the last year, the road upon which once my yearning, my beautiful, my Achingly Defiant lived. Only I stopped short, about a block or so, and climbed the long steps to Roo's home.

( Read more... )

One of the great things about guests is that you can leverage them against yourself. "Someone's coming?! I'd best make my place look it's spiffiest."

I was supposed to shoot Unpaintable Canvas again tonight, but she was on the rag and didn't feel up to it. Instead, she helped me clean up my apartment in preparation for Roo's upcoming visit. We got a ton done, and now all I have left to do is:
( To Do List )

Granted, a lot of that stuff doesn't HAVE to be done, but I want it done, I want her to see my place that much closer to the way I want it to eventually be.

Roo and I talked again last night. ( Read more... )

We spent a good deal of time talking about Christine, too, how I feel that her refusal to even speak to me is an insult to the decade we spent together. "Of course she misses you," Roo said. "She hasn't said anything, and it's Christine, so I'll never see it, but I know she misses you. How could she not? I think she just feels like she can't talk to you, like she couldn't do it without being angry."

I told her it was cold comfort, and thought about all the women I've loved whom I'm no longer speaking to. Cheryl, Andrea, AD and all the other, lesser lovers. The only lover I've ever managed to keep in contact with, I only dated for a week.

While UC and I were cleaning, I found a box marked Amul's College Love Letters. I haven't opened it in over a decade. But I know that somewhere in there is a postcard, on which is scrawled, "When you care enough to send the very least, send a postcard."

I don't really know what that has to do with anything.