supplicium post mortem

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may be the worst part–that tgi is starting to sound like an old term, some disused, past-life word, a word which is outdated and babyish—yes, with all the beautiful, naive genuineness we both had then—but which is nevertheless embarrassing and lost to me.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.