supplicium post mortem

If you find posts about teddy bears twee, maybe skip this one. Or you could go read Mija’s story about her bear, which is a better story and more exciting.

This weekend I found myself at a small toy store with my mom. She wanted to get a new bear for my sister [B, age 33] because mom’s new poodle had savaged and destroyed B’s bear that she’s had since she was 2 and in the hospital with a broken leg. We found two bears we liked, and my mom was trying to decide between them when Casey appeared. She told my mom that a) the two bears didn’t want to be separated; b) she needed a jealous present if B was getting a bear; c) she especially needed a bear because of her bad dream this week; d) she had her pocket money with her and could buy it herself.

Because I have such a terrific mom, she got the second bear for us! And she doesn’t even know Casey by name.

When we got home, the new bear told Casey his name might be RP. She was excited and surprised! RP, you mean like RP? But what does it stand for? she asked. He was like: Er, Real Pal? Casey and I weren’t sure about this. It’s possible the new bear was trying to make her feel better after her dream, and wanted to be what she needed. Personally, I doubt that is his name; I doubt he’s even too sure of his name, or else he’s embarrassed about it and doesn’t think it’s good enough so is trying to reinvent himself for Casey.

Anyway, we slept well with him even though he was pretty scared and unsure that first night. On the one hand, he was elated to be got from the store, since he had heard from the jumble of plush friends under the counter that it was possible never to be got from the store. So that was a dream come true. Even better, he was got with the other bear who he knew. They rode home in the back seat together. But then Casey’s bear went up on our bed, and the other bear went on B’s bed.

At bedtime, Casey’s bear was really nervous. He’d never been anyone’s bear before, and although he’d heard about it, he wasn’t at all sure how to do it. Plus, even though he was super-grateful to have his dream come true and be got from the store and become someone’s bear all in one day, he was strangely lonely for his friends at the store and their friend-pile under the counter, and even though he knew he shouldn’t feel this way, he wanted to be back at the store, which was the only home he could remember.

Even though he didn’t say any of this, Casey sensed it and hugged him and told him he was going to be a great bear, and in fact already was, and that she’d never had a bear Up Here in the yellow house, and that she was in fact hugely in need of one, especially because of her bad dream about her lost grown-up. At one point the bear asked if he could go talk to the other bear for a minute, but Casey was falling asleep and mumbled, In the morning. The bear was sad and wanted to cry, but maybe partly because it had been such a big day and he was tired. So he decided to be brave, and soon he was asleep.

In the morning, Casey took him into B’s room and left him there to talk with the other bear. They were so happy to be reunited! And Casey’s bear felt at this point like the older, experienced bear (even though B’s bear was a little bigger) because B’s bear was very very scared and lonely, having spent the whole night on B’s bed waiting in vain to find out whose bear he was. (B wasn’t there that night.) Everything Casey’s bear had felt, B’s bear felt even more! So, Casey’s bear set to making him feel better and told him this was a good house and also what you had to do when you became someone’s bear.

The next night Casey’s bear felt more confident, though still not perfectly confident, and they had another good night’s sleep even with her sore arm and worrying about having to wake up early. But then this morning he got unsure again because Casey had to explain that he was going to stay up-here in the yellow house while she went back to town, because he was her up-here bear. He really wanted to be her always-and-everywhere bear, but he was trying to be brave.

Wadsie

The trouble is, Casey couldn’t bring him back home because Wadsie, who is so very insecure, would feel so bad he might die, and then she would  not only have lost her grown-up, but also her oldest bear that she’s had her whole life.

Wadsie was insecure even before RP went away, and one time M said to me that Wadsie had told him a secret: Wadsie thought that if  only he had been a better bear when Casey was small, she wouldn’t be so sad now. And since RP died, Casey has been inconsolable at best, and most of the time not even here, and Wadsie’s truckle-bed gets closed a lot, and he is getting flatter and his stuffing older every minute, and he is 41 years old in people years, though he’s not completely sure because that is a lot of counting.

Moose

And it was bad enough that time Casey and I went on a retreat in Vermont and Casey got Moose, but Wadsie and Moose worked it out so Moose would live in the study and help us with our writing, and Wadsie would stay Casey’s bear. So, given all this, Casey cannot bring home the new bear (whatever his name turns out to be). But, she explained to the new bear that a) she would be back next weekend and b) she needs him to watch the room while she’s gone and make sure no bad stuff gets into it and c) she needs him to welcome her back every time she comes up to the yellow house so she can have a real bear up-here.

Wadsie in his truckle bed

Casey told the new bear that she probably wouldn’t need comforting after whacking—which is a big duty of bears generally—because she didn’t have a grown-up anymore. But she also said you never know; maybe if they were both very lucky and God loved her as much as she heard about him loving people, then maybe she’d get another real-deal grown-up, and her up-here bear could meet him and would get a chance one day to comfort her that way too.

The end.

When I was little, my family went to a local amusement park once each summer. It was called Boblo Island, and it was on a little island in the middle of the river. You would drive Downtown and board an old-fashioned river boat, one with wooden dance floors and windows selling cotton candy, and you would ride this boat an hour or so out to Boblo Island, where you would disembark for the day. Boblo was a good amusement park with kiddie rides and adult rides, but although it occupied the entire island, it wasn’t as extensive or as ambitious as places like Cedar Point or today’s Six Flags parks. Still, I remember entirely happy times there, on rides like the swings or the flume or the tilt-a-whirl.

The Comet

For years and years—into my 20′s—when I would get scared or very unhappy, I would summon to mind Boblo Island to soothe myself. I got into a habit in my 20′s of staying up far too late at night and subsequently freaking myself out with fear of ghosts. When this happened, I’d think: Boblo. Boblo! and I could avert a panic attack. I haven’t called upon the Boblo talisman in years, though; I don’t think it holds sway any more.

The other day, while I was kicking around the corridors of bereaved quasi-madness, the dogs informed me that regardless of my mental, spiritual, or emotional state, they still required their evening walk. Teary-eyed, I leashed them up and we went round the block.

I felt fragile, hung-over from crying, and not entirely in control. My mind ranged to friends I could call, but found none that seemed appropriate at that moment. Then my mind embarked on a fantasy involving some friends I visited this summer. It’s weird to fantasize about your friends; it’s the kind of thing you don’t confess out loud. You wouldn’t want your friends to think you were obsessed with them, or unattractively unstable, or clingy-needy-gross. But I suspect a lot of us do this secretly.

As my dogs were sniffing their way around the block, I was imagining going to the cottage where I had visited these friends of mine. It was cold and rainy around the block, and it would be cold and rainy at the cottage, too. My friends, the couple who owned the cottage, would welcome me, in my ragged, teary, distraught state. She would enfold me somehow and speak to me soothingly and incomprehensibly in Irish, and then make me sit in front of the turf fire while she prepared something for me to drink. He would secure the cottage and assure me that everything was quite safe, that nothing bad was going to happen there, and he would fetch me a dog to pet and cuddle. The two of them would sit with me and not say very much, although she would periodically come out with an unexpected, impulsive remark that would make me cry because it was so shiningly true. They would treat me half as their child and half as their friend. The rain would blow against the window panes, and the dog would be damp, and I would be safe and soothed and understood, and uncrowded there in the cottage with my friends who were in some ways so close, and yet distant enough that I could be entirely myself with them.

That is the kind of secret Boblo Island that comes to me now, when I am 41 years old and so very grown up, and don’t know what I am doing in the world.

a visit to the head boy’s study

written, directed, etc. by cdm

Something to cheer us up, eh?

Brand spanking new production written, directed, and everything’ed by yours truly!

Coward

two friends in Japan discuss smacking

Ack: I was inspired by the Iphone4 video, which you have probably seen. Lol-a-licious.

I’m going to try to write this without turning into a sobbing mess, and also without turning into a crazy person who gets locked away in a mental hospital.

This afternoon I had a nap. I dreamed it was raining, like it’s been here the last two days. I felt that I needed a wee, and this segued into the idea that Mr. Prior was going to see Casey, and gosh she hoped he would let her go have a wee and not have to wait. They were outside, sort of in the neighborhood here, and we heard RP moving some furniture around in the old study, to arrange things for the scene. And it was so comforting to hear that and to be with someone who did that. Casey wandered under some newish, young wisteria leaves, and the leaves brushed lightly against her face and head, just shielding her from the rain.

And then Mr. Prior was there, finding her. “A lot has changed, hasn’t it?” he said. “Like a big, gray hat.”

And then, in a flash of recognition—that he was there, but not there, not for long—she threw her arms around him. He had on his white shirt and black trousers, and it’s possible in the dream that he was taller than she was, like RP “really” always was. And she said something to him that I can’t remember, about him being there, really being there, physically in the flesh, because she could feel him and he was so warm and solid and smelled like himself and everything. I think she asked him where—WHERE—he had gone. And he said she should hug him and then say a little prayer for him, that he was going away and going to his maker (except it didn’t sound corny in the dream, it sounded so sincere and so delicate and so him) and that she should—

She interrupted him and clung to him even tighter, saying No No NO! And then he was going away, and we were waking up, and she was holding on as tight as she could ever hold on to anything, yelling that she wouldn’t allow it…

FYI, that hope at the start of this entry isn’t going very well.

There have been countless—and I mean that literally—times since he died that I’ve sobbed so hard I thought something physical would break, so hard I felt maybe it could kill me. This was one of those times, and it carried on even after I got up off the bed and went for a wee and got  a glass of seltzer and did the bodily things that usually accompany the exhausted calm after a paroxysm of grief. Except that it carried on, and I was still shaking, and Casey was breathing in that shallow catching way, and sobbing, and I felt in the twilight of madness, as if I might encounter Ophelia or Hamlet. And I wanted to do something Desperate, but I couldn’t think of anything to do.

This is the first time that Casey had her own dream about Mr. Prior of the type I have about M. I used to have those dreams a lot. He’s here again. He’s back. He isn’t dead. Even, I know he’s dead but he’s here just for a moment. I hate those dreams. I really hate them. They’re cruel. Lately I haven’t had them much.

Then this morning I did have one:

It was early morning in my kitchen, and M was back. In this dream, he hadn’t actually been dead ever, just unconscious so much that everyone thought he was dead. But now he was back! I was so glad to see him, and there was a feeling of ultimate ordering and rightness. Everything was in the right place in the world, and none of the suffering that had come before mattered any more. I kept touching him, embracing parts of him, and again he was so physically, tangibly present. I thought of the life insurance money I’d have to pay back, and how difficult that would be, but I knew it didn’t matter and that we’d work it out. He was tired and curled up in a ball on the kitchen table. I convinced him to come to the bed, which was still unmade from me getting out of it.

“See,” I said, “your part is still there, and your pillow.” I smoothed it so he could lie down.

Then I remembered his job—the job he had held when he died—was actually open again. [This is true in RL, and also in RL it is a job I applied for 3 times after he died, but was rejected for 3 times, for confusing political reasons.] In the dream I had an epiphany: it all made sense why I had been rejected from this ex-job of his I wanted so much, and why they’d been through two other people since he left and had the position open yet again—it was a Divine plan, and now he could have his job back! I didn’t want to overwhelm him explaining all this, but I told him his job was open and they were desperate for someone and he should call, or let me call for him, ASAP. And like the sense of ultimate order at his presence, this coincidence of the job felt like a kind of justice. My suffering had not been senseless or for nothing. It was all a part of something good the whole time. Because he was home!!! And even though he still had the aneurysm and could in fact die any time, or live on for years, I didn’t care because he was there in that moment, and I knew that was all that mattered, and the future didn’t matter, and the past didn’t matter, only now, here, with him, so tangible and so real.

That was 6 o’clock this morning. Twelve hours later, Casey had her dream. I don’t understand all the symbols in these dreams. I don’t have the will to try.

Dear God, we really cannot take these dreams any longer, and we cannot take the reality either. We are bleeding everywhere there is to bleed. We are boring everyone with this same message. Please. Please. Where is the volume knob that turns loud enough to make you hear?

Please.

Recently I had the opportunity to inspect a friend’s toy collection, cleverly hidden inside a hockey bag. She had some particularly appealing straps, which I found myself wanting to try out on Marky. She also had several nice canes. (If my friend is reading this now, she will probably be shouting that the word nice should never share a sentence with the word cane.) Even more surprising than the desire to whack Marky was the discovery that after more than two years, my eye was still “in.” I discovered this when I arranged some patio chair cushions over the back of my friend’s sofa in preparation for demonstrating the art of caning.

Back in the day (e.g. when M was alive and I actually topped from time to time), I was the inferior top. He had better aim, better everything. I was a pretty shabby top altogether, I always believed. Now I think my insecurity wasn’t entirely accurate. When I took my friend’s canes and applied them to the misbehaving cushions, I found my aim good, my wrist snappy. My friend seemed to think I was hitting hard—and it was only 50% or so. I started to think maybe my topping experience hasn’t been normal, only having topped one person, a boy who liked to take a lot and hard.

Now, back in my own home, I have begun to wonder if I actually possess implements any more. I think they must have disintegrated in the closet, or got lot permanently wherever I put them away that I can’t now remember, like my work SIM card, or my husband.

A few days before encountering my friend’s hockey bag, another friend showed me her flogger. It was purple and brown and beautifully crafted. She let me touch it, and it seemed like it could be soothing and massage-y.

“Do you want to try it?” Friend Two asked casually.

I froze with a polite smile on my face: “I don’t know!” Friend Two didn’t push it; she just set the flogger down on the picnic bench where we were sitting. I remarked that if she’d told me it was a massager, I’d be all over it, but the word flogger was too scary.

But scary how? Certainly I wasn’t afraid it would hurt. I was afraid, on some paralyzed emotional level, to have anything to do with an object labeled Flogger. To use a flogger on myself , or to let someone else use it on me, felt at that moment like it would be crossing an invisible yet indelible boundary. It would mean engaging with kink on a level beyond the verbal. It would be in a way like a first kiss—the first kiss in this life after M.

My real first kiss (excluding stage kisses) came very late, at age 20, and by that time kissing had become a barbed, electrified barrier. I’m not sure I remember my first kiss with M. (Insane!) I remember the hug when we met for the first time, on top of the Empire State Building, and I remember the heavy make-out session on my futon, the first time anyone had touched me in a few places, and how hugely, overpoweringly exciting it was, like nothing I’d ever imagined.

But as for the flogger offered to me casually as a mere sensation experiment, I must have frozen because I was afraid to cross any physical barrier into anything that smelt even vaguely like kink. (How I hate that word, but when I use my word, tgi, people always ask me what it means, so I come off as elitist, speaking a dead, obscure code. But I miss that word. Lots! Come back to me!!) To have played with the flogger, even lightly in fun, would have been to step off of the sidelines and into the play. I wonder if on some level I was thinking, or Casey was thinking: If I do that, then people will start misconstruing my conversation and think I want to be whacked, and I don’t. Just like Casey was saying (it must have been her even though I didn’t know her name yet) before that first kiss at age 20: If you kiss a boy, it means you want to have sex with him.

I was terrified to kiss that first boy, but after two nights of faffing about (and confirming with my promiscuous roommate that kissing did not equal consent to intercourse), I finally kissed him. It felt strange, but not bad. His mouth tasted of popcorn, which he had been eating. He was a freshman and I was a junior, which was seriously robbing the cradle. I remember that night he asked me what I wanted. I was still adjusting to having crossed the first kiss frontier, though I didn’t tell him that. He said he wanted a Relationship, and asked if I did, too. I said I’d like to get to know him a little first. We dozed off, fully clothed, in my narrow university bed. A couple of days later, I heard in the dining hall that he’d started dating someone else. I was blindsided, embarrassed, crushed… Still, it was a good first kiss. I wasn’t in love with him.

Besides first-kiss boy and M, I think I’ve only kissed two other boys. I am 41 years old, and I know this is not normal. My sister makes out on almost every date. Even if she’s bored with the guy, she’ll make out with him to see if he gets more interesting. I haven’t kissed anyone except family, on the cheek, since I kissed M goodbye that morning 26 months ago. It’s not that I’ve resisted; there’s been no opportunity.

by Richard Dadd

Still, if the opportunity to kiss a man ever comes again, I’ll probably be afraid to cross that threshold. I think in person I can come off as very reserved, bordering on cold or conceited; the truth is I’m scared, paralyzed in a way that makes no sense when I explain it. I’m scared of sex, scared of kissing, scared of playing, and apparently even scared of touching a friend’s leather toy if it bears the label flogger.

In the Land of Fairy, you must never eat the food or you’ll have to stay there. If I eat the food in this new world—this hateful world without M—will I have to stay? Of course, this world isn’t like Fairy. We’ve got to stay no matter what, and there’s only one way out—the way he already went.

As a widow, I have a license to be bereaved, even two years into it. I cry frequently, and I’m not embarrassed about crying around other people, although these days I’m sometimes apologetic, as it seems a bit much in many circumstances to inflict it on others. I wasn’t always this way. Before I met M, I had a phobia of crying in front of other people. So I did my crying by myself. Over the 13 years I was with him, however, I gradually got comfortable(ish) with him seeing me cry. He told me that, contrary to what I believed, I wasn’t ugly when I cried; I was “so cute”. He said that when I cried it made him want to make love to me. Sometimes I wondered if he wasn’t provoking me to tears on some unconscious level, but on balance I think he wasn’t. When he died, my filters were so decimated that I couldn’t stop myself crying, or caring that I was crying, around anyone. I don’t think I’ve fully recovered the old filters, and actually, I don’t want to because I think it makes me a bit softer and more open as a person. It mitigates slightly against my reserve.

As a child, and still now, I found anger difficult. Lots of people are like this. Anger is Bad. Good people do not get angry. Anger is a destructive force–axioms of my personality. M and Mr. Prior did a lot of work over the years trying to rewrite some of the axioms, for instance trying to redefine Good as meaning honest & true, rather than Polite & Well-behaved. This is probably a long, boring topic for you, but the point is that my musculature is overdeveloped from holding in anger and other unpleasant emotions for most of my life. M did a lot to release this. The release normally took the form of tears.

This weekend I am in the industrial midwest, having travelled here with my brother and sister for my father’s 70th birthday. I’m the eldest and closest to my father, in contrast to my sister, who seems to have almost an allergic reaction to him. He’s a nice guy, a decent guy, an honest, hardworking guy. He’s also a workaholic, hard to connect deeply with, and prone to emotional tonedeafness. As a teenager and young adult, I felt a lot of anger towards him for having left my mom and thus destroyed our family. I’ve since forgiven him, and I feel a lot of compassion for him. Nevertheless, his behavior is sometimes very tiresome, and I have had a lot of it over the last two days, combined with trying to take care of his vulnerabilities while also taking care of my sister so she doesn’t go into emotional anaphylactic shock. Such is the way with family.

Last night I dreamed we were all together (my dad, stepmother, bro & sis) and my dad was talking. All of a sudden I said: “Fuck you, Dad. Just fuck you.” I continued with a string of angry f-expletives. He snapped and ordered me to go to the other room, just like I was little and he was ordering me to my room. I stomped off, part angry, part nervous of suddenly being in trouble. In the other room, I realized Casey was “in”. I think her shoes were even on my feet, and I was kicking stuff like she does, or wants to do, when she’s angry. I’m a little vague on what happened next in the dream when my dad came in to talk to us / tell us off. I think it was a combination of adult-me apologizing and explaining my frustrations, and Casey-me kicking in anger and shouting more provocative things.

I woke up from this dream and thought: I must be angry with him, who knew? But I kept thinking about the dream—you know how sometimes dreams keep drawing you back to think about them, as if they contain some kind of addictive substance? And what drew me back to the dream was the experience of Casey. I longed, and still long to be able to be back in her. Casey was frequently angry. Casey was allowed to be angry. Casey was allowed to scowl, to stomp around, to shout grouchy things, to make outrageous claims, to hyperbolize without rational tempering. M had a portmanteau for Casey’s go-to mood, which was glumpy (glum + grumpy). And Mr. Prior, the only person I have ever encountered in my life like this, he could deal with Casey’s feelings. He could take her anger. He knew when her misbehavior was anger, when her glumpiness was anger, when her sadness was anger, and when her anger was sadness. He allowed all of it, and he loved her so intensely when she was Bad, when she was out-of-control, when she was angry. He wasn’t afraid of it or her.

I think most tops, when faced with a scowling, sad-angry-provocative Casey Morgan, would conclude that she needing whacking and that I was indeed asking for whacking via “playing” her. It wasn’t like that. And he understood that. All those years of playing—if it can even be called playing—opened up huge wings inside the mansion of my personality, until they were more or less integrated, at least around him. But when he died, there was no longer anyone who could see Casey—See (deal with) her or see (perceive) her. I have to be a grown up all the time now, except when I am by myself. When M was alive, I sometimes found it a trial to have to be a grownup all day long at work. Now I’ve been grownup for 26 months straight. Now she mostly comes out in dreams.

I cannot tell you how much I want M right now, how much I want him every second, but especially right now. The last time I was here at my dad’s with him, we were looking through the famous & voluminous family photo albums. My father loved taking pictures when we were little, and you were often having to put on nice clothes and smile during photo shoots. I’d always loved these photo albums, but M saw them with different eyes. I remember him poring over some pages of me when I was two or three. I thought I looked happy (I was smiling), but he drew my attention to the eyes. Look how sad they are, he said. He pointed out  a lot of things in these pictures. I don’t enjoy looking at them anymore. The myth of the happy pictures was shattered for me. Don’t get the idea that there was Abuse in my childhood. There wasn’t. We’re talking ordinary life unhappiness that just didn’t have a legitimate channel for expression before I met him. Or so it seems.

If he was here right now, he’d hold Casey tight and call her by the pet names he had for her that said she was special and his and entirely safe and loved in his arms, no matter how she behaved. Once he called his real kid by one of those names and she got so jealous it wasn’t even true.

I’m sorry for complaining so much. I have an unbelievable amount to be grateful for. But Casey says being alive is unbearable. She’s a kid, so everything is exaggerated. Still…

When it comes to men, I don’t like facial hair. I detest tattoos. I dislike guys who slob around all the time. Maybe you will understand what I do like if I say that this picture excites me so much that it takes my breath away:

by Michael Appleton

It is a beautiful photograph so redolent with masculinity that I feel I could resurrect an old-fashioned activity and swoon. You can smell the room, right? That gentlemen’s store smell.

When I was little, my father would take me with him on his Saturday morning errands: the dry cleaners, the tailor, the market, etc. We’d always stop at a certain men’s clothing store. It didn’t make bespoke suits, like the shop pictured above, but it did smell of men’s clothing. There was a long shoehorn I used to play with, a contraption that produced a flame for your cigarette or cigar, and some butterscotch hard candies. I don’t know what my father did at this shop every week; I think he just went to check stuff out and to talk to the men who ran it.

But the store in the picture: you wouldn’t go there merely to browse. In fact, the picture looks less like a store than like the corner of a man’s dressing room. I look at the dressing gown, the shirt, the jacket, and I think of the man who would wear them, how he would look in them, and how his body would look underneath them, when he took them off, or when I took them off him. I can smell his shaving foam: Taylor’s of Old Bond Street. I can see the jacket on him, or being taken off and hung over a study chair. I imagine his cuff links, being threaded through the cuffs, or unfastened to roll sleeves up to the elbow. I can feel the heat of his body through the dressing gown, his hardness when engaged in a kiss. The man who wears these clothes is a man who understands something essential about what it means to be masculine, and that something does not involve track suits or tattoos or vegetarianism or a lack of grooming, any more than it involves emotional illiteracy, sports obsession, extreme skepticism, or compulsive topping. I can’t find the words to describe the potent masculinity in this picture, but I am drawn to it inexorably, as the feminine has always been drawn to the masculine ever since opposites began to attract.

Yet, my kind of feminine does not possess a waspish waist, stiletto heels, makeup, or a flirty little personality. Mine rides a bike to church and there changes into stockings and a skirt knee-length or lower. Mine wears tomboy shorts in the garden, or gray flannel when summoned to a certain type of study. Mine can surrender to love while seeking surrender in return. It can work a Melita drill, cook pizza from scratch, scuba dive to 170 feet, make algebra lucid, or deal with children who suddenly start to cry. It isn’t a Victoria’s Secret catalog, but it craves this.

by Michael Appleton

English flannel with Twist? Yes. Please.

Friends, please take no notice of the previous posting. Or, if you must, please notice it only as a fit of pique. Please do not take it personally. Do not take it as a criticism. Do not take it as a savaging of things you (and I) hold dear. Take it as an opportunity to say to yourself: gosh, if this is what Casey has to say, it’s lucky she hasn’t been blogging lately.

That is all.

Thank you.

self-pitying rant #677A-1610

in which I despair of my situation by rubbishing friends, acquaintances, and men I’ve never met

I’ve been feeling on some level that I am growing away from tgi, perhaps forever. This isn’t exactly an iteration of Lost Kink. I’ve been thinking that maybe I will one day look back on tgi, and on my marriage, as an immature phase, an ultra-elaborate construct, a fad. A thirteen year fad. I’ve even felt–and this may be the worst part–that tgi is starting to sound like an old term, some disused, past-life word, a word which is outdated and babyish—yes, with all the beautiful, naive genuineness we both had then—but which is nevertheless embarrassing and lost to me.

Today everyone I know is a grown-up and they speak of kink or spanking or TTWD. (There’s something cute about Graham‘s the activity, but to me that sounds limited to play transactions, transactions being the key word.) These grown-ups inhabit The Scene, a world of parties, of fetish categories, of cant role-play traditions and phrases, of play-dates, of poly couplings, of atheisms, and while many of these grown-ups are extremely lovely people, and have been extremely lovely to me, they are acquainted with other grown-ups who scare me, or who at least make me want to run home, hug the dogs, and then hide under the bedclothes and talk to God.

I never want to go to another spanking party. I never want to write another blog entry. I never want to get another Fetlife message. I never want to meet another top. I never want to read the word kink again. I never want to have to watch a spanking video or to read or write another spanking story. I never want to have to go on another coffee date, platonic or otherwise. I want to burn up all of Casey’s clothes and all the implements and toys and everything in M’s closet, including his newspaper from the day he died, and his unwashed laundry, and Mr. Prior’s tweed jacket [...no, not that, never that...] and his Church’s shoes and his kilt wot he wore at our wedding and all the rest of it [...except maybe a couple of Casey's clothes, ones we can wear out...] and never again hear the words kink, spanking, TTWD, and take the word tgi and put it in a little box, and dig a hole really really deep in the backyard, down where the tomatoes put their roots, down below the Gotham rocks, and put the box there and cover it up and let it get eaten by the worms and the roots and the little black ants that the exterminator sprayed for yesterday.

There isn’t going to be another person to look after Casey. Any person who gets beyond a coffee date, he would quite rightly say: Casey was who you had with M. Let it stay that way. Let’s have something else, a new character. I won’t be able to explain how Casey isn’t a character because I will be busy processing the psychological virtue of his suggestion. Mr. Beyond-a-Coffee-Date won’t be capable of, or interested in, loving me for who I am, in finding that out, or of letting me into who he really is. He will be busy listing his needs and deciding if I’m a girl who can meet them. Or maybe he will be trying to convince me that my needs are the same as his. Or perhaps, that an activity that he’d very much enjoy would be just the thing for me. He will be trying to convince me, directly or indirectly, to Let Go of the past, to Move On, to Accept the Death of that part of me. He may have read that this is necessary, maybe in a paperback book, and it will correspond very nicely with what he wants, which is to get my eyes off M and on to him, so I can start giving him what he wants. He will want to play. He will expect to use safewords, to negotiate. He will hope my Needs can be met without much effort from him while he gets his own Needs met by me. Isn’t that what relationships are, anyhow, mutual use?

The word tgi will never be mentioned. It is buried, and anyhow I will have learned not to say it. Oh, he’ll want to know All About me, but only to find out how much I am a suitable needs-match for him. He will never have experienced the world cracking open and God breaking into it, launching that blinding rescue operation, taking two people, each somehow lost, and steering them together, two rescues in one, a divine efficiency; steering them together not so that they can use each other as objects in their own fantasies, not so they can use each other at all, but so they can long to know each other, so much and so deeply that they sometimes forget themselves, that they become for each other human channels for that love that passes understanding, that love that longs for them too, that longs for them to grow closer and closer to their real selves, and turn more and more from the lies, the fears, the illusions, the distractions, the selfishness, the wounds inflicted by this broken world and its people.

Mr. Beyond-a-Coffee-Date might find such ideas religious and repellent, or perhaps lovely and poetic, but he will not understand the kind of sanctuary that can be made in a home like this. He may think he understands, because he may think he’s had it himself, but it will shortly become clear to me that he hasn’t. What he has had will have been a sympathetic fit with a woman willing to serve as a movie screen for his kinks and psychodramas, and vice versa.

So, yes, Casey is something I was with M, because–as I will suicidally explain to Mr. BCD–I am not actually kinky. I once fell in love with a man, and he loved me as I have never been loved, and Casey and Mark and the Others were ways we sometimes expressed ourselves, exercised ourselves, when we were loving one another. Mr. BCD will think he knows what I mean. This lifestyle is who I am, he will tell me. Kink is who I am. I won’t know how to explain that I am incapable of loving a kink. I’m only capable of loving a man.

And pretty soon it will become clear to me that I am guilty of the worst kind of leading on. I have entered into coffee dates and beyond on the pretence of looking for a friend, a playmate, or possibly “more”. Mr. BCD will think we are meeting in the hopes of a sexual relationship, or a play relationship, or at least a sympathetic ear for his concerns; perhaps he will be there for a simple diversion from the humdrum life between parties. I have, I’ll realize, led him on. The one at fault is me for being dishonest, not him for being self-serving. The truth is I want the old kind of love, but it isn’t something I can procure on my own. It needs that cracking open of the world, another wave in the rescue operation—for me, for him, and for the bits of the world we touch.

Come, you thunderclaps.
Come lightning, come quake.
Move, plates, atoms, seas.
Tear, curtain.
Blow aside, veil, an instant
All it takes.
Fall, arrows; roll chariots; pierce spears.
Come parachutes, come knights, come infants.
Burn, fire.
Pour, rain.