Of Bridges And Water

It's been too long since I've written; I have too much to say. It's been too soon since I've written; I can't step back and pick out a pattern.

When I look up from the keyboard I see seagulls picked out in brilliant pink-white by the setting sun, highlighted against a dark background. I have a three-song playlist on: The Lumineers and Temper Trap, Stubborn Love and Ho Hey and I'm Gonna Wait. I've been listening to it for three days, and it's primed me for something. There are two contented rabbits curled up within sight, and a dying rat in the other room. Bananas are frying quietly behind the music, and their smell of caramel and cinnamon matches the golden dying sunlight. I'm in my house, alone. I've been folded open but there's no one here to receive me but you. So, receive me.

Blake is gone. Nothing has changed in this regard except: we've had contact three times or so, tiny facebook exchanges where he sends me a link or I send him a piece of information about the graff I've been brewing. Last night I sent him a bottle of it along with the stuff he'd left here. He sent me a thank you, he'd drink it when he wasn't sick.

That's twice he's let me know when he's in a bad way. I disregard it because I have to, because being a prop for someone who can't support themselves is one of the things I fear most, because I don't want to set precedent, because I don't want to bow to manipulation instead of an open request, because... I choose to disregard it. But it is hard, and it hurts. I love him and I don't want to see him unwell or unhappy. I miss him and although I need so much distance it hurts me in so many places. I feel like, when he hints at being not-so-well, he's extending me trust and I'm proving unworthy of it when I deliberately turn my gaze away.

It's better to feel pain than nothing at all; the opposite of love's indifference.

Blake isn't the only person I'm deliberately turning my gaze from these days. Some things went down with Graydon that weren't okay with me and I had a couple choices; I could put the work into engaging and explaining and processing and fixing, or I could just turn away. I've turned away, left all that hard work and struggle behind me, sought out a different path. So here I am on a path that feels free and unnatural and rubs against my moral grain or my feeling of being a good person who tries hard for people I love. Here I am alone in a room talking to a keyboard.

The future is certainly unwritten. I trust it both more and less than I should, I think. I trust it to bring my people back to me if it can without harming them or me, not just Blake and Graydon but my very dear others who are off on adventures and lives of their own. I know, though, that I've tethered myself to too many people to ever have them all close at once again. I have-- oh, my dears, I haven't told you of my startling, disturbing abundance yet! --I have so much, sometimes my flesh can barely hold in everything I've been given but the absence will also always be there.

She'll tear a hole in you, the one you can't repair/ But I still love her, I don't really care.

I am becoming a magnet again. People are responding to me as if I were January sunshine. I don't think I'm ready for it. I'm trying to be busy living my own life, spreading myself lightly, certainly falling for Dave but also doing too much brewing and dancing alone in my livingroom and being good friends with my amazing neighbour and starting the ball rolling on switching jobs and dating and reconnecting with oh so very many people and reading poetry too late at night and keeping my fridge marginally cleaned out and, and, and...

...and always, at the beginning of things, I can give people what they want. We've been down this spiral of talk before, I can't live here, but I keep coming back to it. I love intimacy with people. I love closeness and the insides of folks when they open up and are such an incandescent complicated irreproducible pattern inside.

People want to be loved. But on the whole they want something more from that love than I can give them. They want safety and there is no safety on this earth. They want strength but my strength is all from personal momentum and cannot be long lent. They want to lay down the burden of their selves but I consider carrying that self a holy act.

All that comes later, though. Right now people look at me and see that I see them. They open up, let me reach in, bare their bellies. I love that they do this. I've been through it too many times not to be afraid. I suppose that's why I love the self-contained ones, people who are aloof and for whom I don't seem like I could ever be necessary.

I'm too tired to continue. I've been crying as I write. I haven't cried like this in a long time. Winter's finally over. As I've been recently reminded, it's time to move to to spring: renewed warmth but also all the rainstorms that drive decay and growth.

An Abundance of Snowdrops

Okay.

You know, I spend so little time on the internet actually interacting with folks. I've become a more-or-less passive consumer, which is a bad fit for me. I just spend some time chatting with friends I haven't seen in awhile, nearby and far-flung, and it was pretty great. So here I am, a little bit recharged, with a bit more to talk about.

My counselor has an implied belief I find super interesting. He seems to believe that if you practice acting as if you're worth self-care in little bits, then you will get better at it and your actions around being a worthwhile person will expand. He's never stated it outright, but it's the underlying basis of some stuff he's said. I think I find myself in agreement.

There just seem to be so many habits I need to form, or break. I need to get better at interrupting myself between the desire-for-company and scheduling, to ask myself if spending time that way is a good idea really.

I am also getting into a time where I get to learn lots more about how I interact with sex, kink, my role as a top, specialness and intimacy related to play, and what I want from deeply kinky relationships. I think the next few weeks will give me a pretty steep learning curve in that regard, and I'm going to try to anticipate it as much as possible.

Turned off the music, no longer feeling deep and lyrical, just floaty and loved. Guess I'll worry about more things later.