supplicium post mortem

We should’ve got up late. It’s a holiday, and although I had things to do, they weren’t until later. I should have woken up with him wrapped around me, his hand doing something to my nightclothes so he could feel my bottom. He would whisper into my half-asleep ear about Marky, how naughty he’d been, how TL ought to see him in the afternoon and do a proper uniform inspection. He’d whisper to me about Casey, too. RP and TL had decided that she had got out of hand. She hadn’t been misbehaving, though, I’d protest groggily. No, he’d agree, and that was a symptom of the problem. Things had been too hectic, and clearly she was in need of some quality time with Mr. Prior. Movies? I’d ask. Across his knee, more like, he’d say. I’d cuddle back to him, feeling him pressing against me. We’d carry on along these lines until the wolfhound came to the side of the bed and licked us, whining that we must get up. He should have taken the dogs out in the sub-zero morning. I would have made the coffee. He insisted it tasted better when I made it.

Perhaps we would have pottered around doing chores until my physical therapy appointment. It should have been a day when both Casey and Mark got seen. Mark would have reported to TL’s study, or the house-room. Casey would have been summoned upstairs to RP’s crimson study—the one I keep thinking I ought to use more as a writing space, but can’t. I should have told him about the dream I had the other night, in which I was some rebellious prep-school boy cornered by an exacting master, my nemesis. He was going to give me six, and they were going to hurt, a lot. He told me to bend over, and he produced a fearsome (and improbable) cane, rigid and ridged, rather like Abel’s walking stick. I/my boy avatar was scared. The master held the cane against my bottom and waited. I mentally prepared, told myself to breathe, not to clench, to stay down, that I could take it. Still, he waited. I trembled. The door to the study was open, and passers-by peered inside. Yes, the master said to the peeping boys, this is what happens when you break the rules. He lifted the cane; I inhaled; the alarm rang.

Today was the kind of day that could remedy interrupted dreams, though I wouldn’t fancy a RL encounter with that sort of stick.

In the real day, I dragged myself from bed when the wolfhound insisted. After throwing the ball around the sub-zero park, I dragged the dogs home and embarked on morning chores. I organized the chaos of unrecorded to-dos. I tackled some email. I went to physical therapy. I walked around the city by myself imagining tweets I would write if I had a smart phone, and things I would do if it were the day it ought to be. I went to Muji and found a pair of pyjamas that fit perfectly. They are what M would call whack-me pyjamas. I thought about how much he would like seeing Casey in them, and how cute she would be in them.

And I thought about how he was the one who really got ripped off, not me. I have more life to live, I have great friends, I am healthy, the rest of my family are all alive, I can pay the bills, I have great dogs and a nice place to live, a garden in summer, neighbors who look after me, the best church in the world, and the love of God whether I deserve it or not. He didn’t get to live more than 45 years. He didn’t get to see his son grow taller than him. He didn’t get to have children with me. He didn’t get to read the things I’ve written these last three years. He didn’t get to read the things I’d written when he was alive but hadn’t shown him yet. He didn’t get to see me Sunday night, at the story slam competition where I read After the Party, a little fantasy featuring someone like him; he didn’t get to see me wearing the tartan skirt I’d just bought; he didn’t get to see me win the competition. He didn’t get to grow old. He didn’t get to see his projects blossom. He didn’t get to be with me when I really knew how to love him.

It feels perverted—and by this I mean fundamentally unsound—to put on outfits that look cute when there’s no one around to appreciate them. The Russian lady who inflicts bikini wax (plus) on me insists that you do things only for yourself, my dear, not for anyone else, only for yourself. While there’s something comfortingly self-sufficient and feminist and self-actualized about that, the sentiment rings hollow somehow. Connecting with others, depending on others is part of being human. I tend to agree with R.R. Reno that the opposite of piety isn’t unbelief but sovereign desire. So perhaps I can be forgiven feeling unsound wearing cute outfits that he can’t see anymore.

And of course beneath my noli me tangere exterior, I secretly long for attention. I’m not exactly the kind of girl to ask for it, but I get jealous of other girls who garner attention. Having been round the houses with this once before—coming out of my twenties—I’d say my reticence is not coyness, but a kind of armor. I know I can’t have the sort of attention I really want, so rather than seek out something I think will frustrate and hurt me, I work on ideas like humility, on not looking to other people for validation, on being grateful for what I have, on getting used to the idea that this will probably be it, and that it’s enough to get through the day, and I’m not in a war-torn nation, not oppressed, not cancer-ridden, not a million bad things, so I need to stop feeling sorry for myself and try to be of use to other people.

In the day that should have been RP would have had a chat with Casey about this attitude. He would have reminded her of her Four Things. He would have paid her several sorts of attention. In the evening M and I would’ve watched House on tv. Would he have liked Lie to Me, or would he have found Tim Ross a plonker? It would have been–should have been–the kind of day where you don’t mind that it’s winter, that the night comes soon and lasts long.

First, please know that I love my family very much and would be lost without them. They are good to me and stand by me and are nice to me and believe in me and would stick up for me any moment.

But here’s the thing: no matter how much you love them, at a certain point it’s healthy and right that you grow up and start your own life. You don’t leave them behind, but to some extent you escape that first family. I had done this. It took a long time for M to get me to see that we had a new family now. The parts of the old that weren’t so great—these we didn’t have to have. We could make our own traditions. Yes, we’d still put my childhood ornaments on the Christmas tree, but now on Christmas eve, he’d make mince pies and we’d listen to his Britpop Christmas CD. And yes, my parents will always be my parents and I love them, but in a way, I didn’t have to be that child anymore. RP was looking after Casey, so the old life was past, and the new, better, realer life was here. And I could love my sister and mother and all the rest, but with his help, I could take them with the right amount of salt, and when it was time to leave, we went home to our house that we had our way, to our dogs, to our bed, and to all the secret love we had together. At our wedding, we’d given ourselves to each other in Christ, and now this was my strongest bond. This was the new family, the new life. I wasn’t living in my childhood house any more.

Today I had Christmas brunch at my apartment for my mother, my sister, and my sister’s childhood friend. My mom had unexpectedly been staying with me since Thursday due to a minor medical emergency. Her difficult dogs had been in my way, frazzling my nerves, keeping me awake, and increasing my workload. I am coming down with a cold due to lack of sleep. We all had a fine time, I guess, but by evening, I really wanted everyone to go home. I had had visitors for 3 weeks and needed to spend some quality time with my dogs and do the zillion things I had to do to get ready for my UK trip tomorrow.

Except no one was going home. My sister and her friend were lying on my bed watching agitating videos on their phones. My mom was feeling weak and had gone upstairs to nap. It had become clear that she and her dogs were staying another night. I took my dogs around the block.

On a quiet, dark side-street, I leaned over someone’s wall, buried my head in my arms, and started to cry. I felt trapped by this family—a family I love but want to escape. I wanted my own family, with M, the one I thought I had, and I wanted the kids we were trying to have, the twins. I wanted it to be Christmas in the new life, with him and our children, and our dogs, and Casey and Mark and all the others. I wanted us to be able to come home from being with my mother and sister, but instead, my house was invaded by this old family. And no matter how much I love them, it just feels wrong in a way for them to be so much in my house and life—the house and life I should have with M.  My mom and sister think it would be fine, in the absence of a husband, to have a turkey-baster baby and bring it up all together in kibbutz. I feel physically nauseated by this idea. It is simply incestuous. But lacking a family of my own, now, I can’t seem to get them out of my hair.

It would be one thing to be a life-long single woman. But to have got used to the new family, and now be back with the old… I know it’s colossally ungrateful to say this, but it feels like getting rescued from the orphanage and then having to go back.  But I’m emotional, and I don’t really feel well.

There’s a blizzard headed into town when my flight to Englandland is due to leave tomorrow. My house sitting and dog sitting arrangements have grown inordinately complicated and unsatisfactory. My mom isn’t well and who knows when she’ll be better, or how much help she’ll need, especially with her horrible dogs. I am thinking this trip was a terrible idea. I should stay home, quit trying to make it happen, just take care of my mom and my dogs, and get some work done over the school break. It was selfish and stupid to try to make it happen. And kids in orphanages don’t get to go to parties.

I know I’m not being very rational. Things usually look better in the morning. I’m not a cynic about Christmas. I love Christ. And I’m so grateful for everything I have, and all the friends and family who love me. Still, I can’t say I’ve enjoyed today, except the part about turning out the light at the end.

Perhaps in contemplation of my New Year’s Anglo-Irish jaunt (weather permitting), last night I dreamed again of parties.

In this dream, I was visiting some friends, Mr & Mrs Lovely, before a party they were to give. Mr. and Mrs. Lovely were sitting on chairs, but another American visitor and I were lounging around on the floor. We were all joking and bantering. Mr. Lovely, American-friend, and I were sort of wrestling. Cheeky remarks and gibes were coming out of my mouth. He wrestled with us playfully, but he didn’t push it when he felt my uncertainty. American-friend wrestled differently, like she meant it, like she wanted to lose to him, like she intended to get herself smacked.

Soon the hangout dissolved, American-friend went upstairs, and it was time to get ready for the big party. But Mrs. Lovley was berating Mr. Lovely, telling him to figure out a way to get me to play. She felt it was his duty as a man to get creative and help me out, “so that she can get past this one place and start to live the rest of her life.” Mrs. Lovely had the idea that I was frozen about crossing this threshold, and that simply being able to play around at a party would draw me firmly into real living. She felt somehow that if I remained an observer at this party, I’d be missing a chance to stop being an observer of my own life. He, paterfamilias, needed to take initiative.

I’d earwigged their conversation and was burning with embarrassment. The thing was, I explained, I was deeply ambivalent about playing. Mr. Lovely was paying attention to me now, and the vague quietness I’d observed when visiting in the summer was now a kind of pregnant sensitivity. We faffed around in this uncertain tension until I asked if I shouldn’t simply list all my fears. Mr. Lovely said, “I think I’d concentrate on the possibilities.” So I picked the thing top-of-mind: Just who would be seeing little Casey?

To ask this question was already to have come a long way off the sidelines. To voice this question revealed that I was capable of imagining Casey being present. I was in fact already imagining falling into her, and into her clothes, and secretly inside I already was starting to feel like Casey. The question revealed, also, everything about how I play: in role. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say: wearing a costume so that other people can see what this inner me is all about.

I couldn’t endure the idea of playing as X (my real name) because X is a grown-up, pulled-together, balanced person. She isn’t especially fragile (though she isn’t the iron clad maiden she was in my 20s), and even though she manages a certain amount of frank vulnerability, it’s all on the verbal/literary level; it isn’t immediate or physical. There’s an adult distance about it all. To play, though, means to allow forward a part of myself that is not very X. This part I call Casey, and over the years with M, Casey developed beyond a label and into a full-blown person. ¹ To play as Casey, who is an extraordinarily vulnerable little girl, more so than when M was alive, is to make visible the psychological reality of playing itself.

So Mr. Lovely and I were pondering this question: who would be seeing little Casey, and why? I explained again, as if it needed explaining, that she was scared, bereaved, lonely; she would not be very robust. Yet, someone dealing with her couldn’t allow her fear and bereavement to dominate. The point, as Mrs. Lovely had put it, was to nudge her over a frontier. I don’t think she   would cross it willingly, but if she turned up to a scene, that would be consent enough. At the same time, if someone steamrollered her, or gave the impression that he didn’t understand her, or didn’t base his command on that understanding, then she would merely comply in a mechanistic way. It would be robotic, and not only fail to accomplish any threshold crossing, but it would scare her away worse than now.

Understandably, Mr. Lovely found this all a bit overwhelming. Mrs. Lovely and I went shopping for the party, and on the way back she almost ran over a bunch of schoolkids. I yelled and grabbed her arm; she swerved to avoid them, just. She was angry at me. I apologized for yelling and for touching her. She said that she was never going to hit them. I very much doubted it.

Back at the house, I hoped to find Mr. Lovely to talk. I was beginning to imagine a scenario—the very fact that I could imagine something seemed to be a hopeful sign. What if, I wondered, Casey had brought home a bad school report? It would be terrifically shaming for her, since she’s such a good student. She would have bollixed up the first term at her new school out of an inability to join in. The same reticence that kept me on the sidelines at parties would have caused every kind of problem at this school she was attending. She’d avoided homework and then avoided the consequences, she’d offended teachers with her silence, which seemed to them churlish and sullen. They certainly didn’t understand her, and this had made her worse. It was a train wreck.

A discerning interlocutor would be able to see what her teachers couldn’t see. He would realize that she didn’t need yelling at, that she was already ashamed beyond endurance, and that it was her sadness and this boil of emotions that needed addressing, not her homework per se. At the same time, she had not behaved as she ought. She had declined genuine offers of help. She had indulged in procrastination and avoidance. Most importantly, she had allowed herself to carry on until she reached the state which now tormented her. How could she treat herself like that?

It couldn’t be a guardian with a real relationship, because that would be fake. Casey has no relationships with anyone but TL. But what if it were the man of the house where she was staying over the holidays? He, perhaps, knew some of the staff at her school, perhaps her form teacher. In any case, he had her report in hand whether or not he’d any right to it, and as a grown up, as the best available representative of loco parentis she had just then—in that fleeting, un-ideal moment—he intended to have a word with her, even though he had no previous relationship with her, even though he would have no serious relationship with her beyond that holiday. He didn’t appear bothered by the unofficial, presumptuous character of the interview. He was paterfamilias, she was a child under his roof in need of guidance, he intended to provide it. End of story.

The dream ended before anything could happen, before I could even speak to Mr. Lovely again. We were in a building high up in the Gotham skyline, almost as high as the Empire State Building (where M and I met). A storm came upon our skylighted room, blowing rain in the cracks. I woke up.

I overthink. I overimagine. I rehearse excessively in my mind. But it was always this way. M and I wrote over three hundred long emails each before meeting. We, especially I, explored tgi and ourselves from every possible theoretical angle. I can’t endure reading the correspondence, in part because it’s too grievous, but also because it’s so very tedious with all of its intellectualizing. I hope I’m not intellectualizing that much now. But, as I live alone with my dogs and my computer, words, dreams, and thoughts remain my chief vein of experience. And I suppose this kind of rehearsal is preferable to an impetuous, confused, disaster of a real-life play encounter.

Of course, party play isn’t the same as deep play, and role play as other people know it is, I suspect, a distinctly different activity to playing Casey. I don’t know, yet, if there is anyone amongst my acquaintances capable of playing with Casey. Besides, being on the sidelines of parties isn’t a bad thing. At least it’s being at the parties.

And—just as I was bringing this to a close—let’s not leave before putting under the microscope the glories of my reserve. If I stepped off the sidelines, it would mean sacrificing this quality of mine—that I don’t play, that I am charming and nice and only a visitor from afar, that I am not a pawn in gossip, not an adherent to one side or another in whatever drama is unfolding, that I possess a lofty wisdom born of distance and of not having a horse in the race. Why should I want to give any of that up? Then I would be just like everyone else. I would be part of everyone else. Feuds and tensions would involve me. What I did and said would start mattering to people personally; I would start offending people on more than an intellectual level.

And—this is the heart of it, isn’t it?—I would grow attached. My massive, neglected needs would come out of the deep freeze, and then where would we be? I will tell you: in torment. I would have allowed myself to need these people to the core (with Casey even!), and then I would be all alone again at home in Gotham.

Also, I know my heart. It is essentially monogamous. Certainly it has room for friends, deep true friends, but that is distinct from its central longing. Which is a way of saying that even if I did live in the land of parties and could join in on equal status as everyone else, I would still be…well, wounded after an honest encounter via Casey. Wounded in the sense of having undergone a surgical procedure.

People talk of sub-drop, but this is more serious. Sub-drop as a term implies a neuro-chemical depression after extreme stimulation. Like a hangover or a post-cocaine crash. You did something very intense on a physical and emotional level, so you felt “high”, you “flew” as some people like to phrase it, and now, as a prelude to normality, you have come down from that high, a disagreeable descent.

I’m not looking for a high. I’m looking for a Real. I’m looking for a breath of real, intense air on this planet where I have not been able to respire. You flew, you dropped—a normal course of things. You finally breathed, now you must again hold your breath—not.

If I was still 26, if I had never lived a real life, this would not be so difficult.  But I have. I know what I’m toying with. I know what kind of heart I have. I know how it feels to live, how it feels to be a phantom, and how it feels to long for a life I can’t have. Of these three, it’s the last I dread most.

LOL Day, as you probably know by now, stands for Love Our Lurkers Day. This event has for the last five years been organized by Bonnie, as a part of her ongoing, devoted efforts to bring people together. So before we go further, Thanks Bonnie!

casey in her boater hat this summer

As this blog has ground nearly to a halt, it probably has no lurkers left. But in case you are new or not-new and still lurking–a warm hello. Maybe today will be the day you leave a comment and delurk? While you’re thinking about that, here are some pictures of casey in some of her hats for you:

When I started this blog, in a half-blind urge to speak of the part of my lost marriage I couldn’t speak about with everyday people, I thought no one would want to read a blog with a subtitle like “whacking, bereavement, God.” Who besides me would want to read about all of those things, what’s more at the same time? Apparently, there are people who do, and many of those people have become real friends. Without those friends and this blog, it’s hard to imagine what would have become of this shrouded part of my character and my experience. To those friends–giant hugs.

If you’re a return or regular reader, you will no doubt be thinking: why doesn’t Casey blog more?! I’m not entirely sure, beyond the normal excuses of life getting in the way. But if I were to be really honest–and what are blogs for if not that kind of risk?–I suppose I could guess a couple of other reasons:

1. Bereavement. It continues. How many times can I write the same thing? I am wary of losing friends by turning into Casey-one-note. So increasingly I keep it to myself.
2. 

   winter uniform hat

   Ambivalence about The Scene. As you might have gathered, I’ve gone to a few parties in the last two years. I haven’t yet played with anyone else. I haven’t had a romantic date. I haven’t kissed anyone. As time goes by I wonder, increasingly, whether I ever will do any of those things. Many of my friends write about their play dates or parties, but I don’t want to write about these things. First, I think it would be churlish to write posts about liking but not liking a certain party. Ditto with writing about being depressed by prospects. If the Scene depresses me, it isn’t because there’s anything wrong with the parties or people at them, it’s because of a mismatch between what I need and what’s on offer. So, I don’t see how it’s productive to complain.

3. Anxiety about outing. Because I work in a sensitive sector, and because of the integral role church plays in my life, the prospect of being outed scares me. I’m quite cautious in my face-to-face encounters, and I try to be careful about what I write, but sometimes fear grips me, especially when I read about other people being outed by vindictive former friends/partners. This has made me self-conscious about some of the fiction I write because it strikes me as the most vulnerable part of this blog. I have no inherent qualms about the stories I write or the kinds of experiences that attract me, and I find them all fully compatible with professional integrity and with my fairly orthodox religious beliefs. My worry is that my interests are so open to misunderstanding. I mean, I live in a cosmopolitan city. If my employers or fellow parishioners were to read that I got up to a bit of kinky adult sex in my marriage, so what? But there is a lot in my writing that could be misinterpreted. So I worry.


casey's peruvian hat

4. Real world writing. I do write fiction in my regular life, and that has been waking up from bereaved coma and taking more of my time and attention over the last year. When I started this blog, I thought of it as a kind of CPR. The CPR has more or less worked, and while I do not feel like a whole or healthy person, I can’t say I have not been resuscitated.

In other news, I fell off my bike and broke my elbow last month. I’ve acquired a roommate/free lodger in my sister’s boyfriend, who fell victim to some shady real-estate maneuvers and found himself evicted with 4 hours’ notice last week. Before he moved in, I had visitors staying for six of the last ten weeks. Besides that, my garden has been very busy and demanding (until elbow broke), the various channels of work are very busy, and the current novel is moving itself to the front burner. So there you have it. Nothing too thrilling.

I think, on this day of appreciating friends known and unknown, I’ll leave you with a passage from C. S. Lewis’s The Four Loves. It’s from the end of “Friendship”. I do like what he is saying about Christian friendship, but I also think it applies to all true friendship.

Christ, who said to the disciples, “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,” can truly say to every group of Christian friends “you have not chose one another but I have chosen you for one another.” The Friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others…They are, like all beauties, derived from Him, and then, in a good Friendship, increased by Him through the Friendship itself, so that it is His instrument for creating as well as for revealing. At this feast it is He who has spread the board and it is He who has chosen the guests. It is He, we may dare to hope, who sometimes does, and always should, preside. Let us not reckon without our Host.

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.

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.

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.

I don’t know if I want to write this post. Maybe I would rather pretend this is a usual, boring day. Maybe I would like to pretend that the thing that bothers me most is that a colleague is dying of cancer and I can’t bear to see her 13-year-old daughter, my student, left without a mother; and so maybe what I really need to do is bake a cake so I can send a big chunk of it home with this girl this afternoon. It scares me to feel death so close again. Maybe I would rather think about this instead of the fact that today is my wedding anniversary.

Nine years ago was the day I can honestly call the happiest day of my life, as cliché as that sounds. Nine years doesn’t sound long enough. Wasn’t it more like twenty? Could so much have happened in a mere nine years? Could I have lived the seven best years of my life, and the two worst? Could I have lived not only that best day, but also that worst one?

We married in church, in the chantry chapel rather than at the high altar, on a snowy, frigid Saturday in February 2001. About 80 people came. There was ivy and white roses. I wore a dress that had been made out of the antique lace of my mother’s wedding dress. He wore his kilt. I was never allowed to know for sure whether or not he wore anything underneath it.

I walked down the aisle with my father, M waiting at the end, as the organist played Elgar’s Nimrod. Seven years later, I would walk down a parallel aisle behind his coffin, to that same music—though that second day was a much bigger event, at the high altar, hundreds of people, Fauré’s Requiem.

But let me tell you about the rehearsal on Friday night. It was just me, him, our two witnesses, and the Rector. We had decided to do the 1662 ring vows [With this ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow: In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost]. At the rehearsal the Rector said: If you want to do this properly, this is how it goes… And he took the ring and demonstrated how M should slip it onto the end of my finger three times—in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost—only slipping it fully into place on the last word. There we were, the Rector and I, and all I could think was: OMG! It’s popping the cherry with this ring!!! And then I was blushing and cracking up and I couldn’t stop, and it was almost as bad as the first time I had to kiss a boy, onstage in Cinderella, when the rehearsal dragged on and on because I couldn’t stop laughing and flinching away. M kept a discreet distance during this ludicrous display of nerves, and eventually I pulled myself together and we carried on. Later, and from then on whenever we recalled the rehearsal, he always laughed, shaking his head, about how Casey had turned up out of nowhere and interrupted it all with her snickering.

One of the readings, a common one at weddings, was the Song of Solomon 2:10-12. “Rise up my love, my fair one, and come away! For lo, the winter is past… the voice of the turtle is heard in the land.” In later years, when I was learning letter-press printing, I set this text and did a big print of it. The print still hangs above our bed—my bed—and reminds me of the overpowering relief I felt that day, and all the days I knew him. The long winter was indeed past. Rise up my love, my fair one, and come away!

There wasn’t a big party. We had a small reception with cake in the parish house, and a dinner with the family at a restaurant. Then he and I left for a long weekend at a B&B upstate. I couldn’t get the time off for a honeymoon then. We would take one later, in the summer, we said. We were still waiting to take it seven years later when the marriage was ended by the only force acknowledged in the Book of Common Prayer.

I still wear both of our rings, albeit on my right hand. Death ends marriage, but it doesn’t feel ended. I wish there was a rite to help you take off the rings.

And you know, I was never going to get married. Maybe this surprises you. My parents split up when I was thirteen, and unsurprisingly, it devastated me. I came of age in the 1980s and early 1990s amidst a very liberal, feminist education. There is a video interview of me in my early 20s—conducted by my little sister—in which I say we (meaning the girls in our family) don’t believe in marriage. We don’t think much of men in general. We could do without the whole patriarchal construct. Instead, we would have lovers. (I am paraphrasing, but that was the gist.) Of course I wanted a boyfriend, even a life relationship, but I figured if I met someone and we were serious, we wouldn’t need the “crutch” of matrimony to stay together. And if we couldn’t stay together without the institution of marriage, then we shouldn’t be together, full stop. But then—about three years after this arrogant but defensive interview—I met M, and the world as I knew it passed away. Gradually, as we were together, as he moved here, as I realized this wasn’t a “practice relationship”, I began to feel that marriage wasn’t necessarily just a patriarchal institution. And somewhere in those first six years, I came to know that I wanted to marry him, before and through God, not because I wanted to secure him, but because we already were bonded together for life, and I wanted to sanctify this bond. I wanted to be “bound” together via the only authority we both acknowledged entirely, the authority, we both believed, that had brought us together in the first place.

http://malesubmissionart.com/

But let me not get theological. You know, Pandora tweeted today (actually re-tweeted) about a beautiful blog I’d never seen before, Male Submission Art. I am a switch, but a lot of male submission kind of turns me off; also, I am generally so much more stimulated by bottoming, that I often wonder if my switchiness was just a desire to accommodate M. But then I look at this site, and oh gosh, some of the images are so hot to me. And as I was perusing the blog this morning, I thought about how much M would have liked it. At least I think he would have like it. I think it would have been right up his alley. Maybe we could have taken some pictures like that. God, I wish he was here today to look at it with me. God? Please love him extra special, from me, not just today but every day. Every single day, every hour, every second.

http://malesubmissionart.com/

Where does the time go? Three-hundred sixty-five days ago, I came out from behind a sort of veil and started this blog. The reason, while not deliberate, was fairly obvious: I needed someone I could talk to about this whole part of my life, this whole part that I no longer had, in a sense.

Back in the dark ages (1990′s), I had a website. Quite my-first-html, it contained stories Mark and I had written and was a front for the conceit of Home School (a small domestic boarding school RP and TL started together in “Ireland” after M moved here to Gotham to live with me). After a while, I let the site lapse, and eventually took it down. M and I weren’t part of any public scene, and while we had a few online friends, we knew even fewer of them in real life. So, eventually, to me at least, the site felt like a kind of exhibitionism that I no longer wanted to maintain. So it went away. Now, when I think about some of the things on that site, I cringe so much I could poke out my own eyeballs.

Fast forward to 2008/9 when personal websites had been supplanted largely by blogs. I knew this and had visited the occasional tgi blog, but the blogosphere can be overwhelming. Just contemplating the extent of it made me feel I might hyperventilate. Also, people I knew who blogged (non-kinky) seemed to be entirely consumed by it. Since, in my regular life, I also write, I was protective of my creative energy. I had for several years been trying to pare back hobbies so that I could actually complete large creative projects. I didn’t have time for blogging. If I started up with that, when would I have time to do my real writing?

Eight months after becoming a widow, however, my real writing wasn’t happening. It, like so much in me, felt dead. So in that sense, I had nothing to lose starting a blog. It might, I reasoned, even serve as a kind of CPR. I was done being a taskmaster to myself. I was done with Should’s. I was done berating myself for not Accomplishing enough. If writing a few tgi blog posts distracted me briefly from the crushing desolation of a widowed January, then hallelujah. If it kept my creative heart from stopping, even barely, then Thanks be to God.

And this is what it did. Sometime last spring, the flash fiction began. Several months of that was the key factor, I think, in enabling me to return to my regular writing last November during NaNoWriMo. In that way, and in so many others, my resuscitation commenced. It is far from complete–far from it–but I think it is safe to say it is under way.

And besides regularly and sincerely thanking God for this (atheist friends, avert your eyes), I also feel a profound gratitude to all of you, and to the other friends I have made, online and off, over the course of this year. You have read my gushy outpourings. You have borne witness, sometimes silently, sometimes not, but always palpably, to the love and to the suffering. You have patiently offered hugs and encouragement, over and over. You have not criticized.

To all of you, to each of you: thanks.

You will have noticed by now that, in violation of convention, I do not have a blog-roll. Blog-rolls are great. They are how people find like-minded friends in the dizzying blogosphere. They help drive traffic to other sites you like. However, they have always stressed me out, and because of this, I have avoided adding one. The stress comes from two sides: when I see myself on someone else’s blog-roll I feel: Yay! They like me! and I feel part of an In crowd. When I am not on someone’s blog-roll I feel the opposite: they don’t like me! Or, they don’t know about me! I am a pariah. Neither of these attitudes is edifying. So, to try to detach from them, and to avoid the stress of worrying about whom to include on mine, and whom I would be offending by excluding, I have worked with a different rubric, which is to link to people within posts, when I’m responding to something they have written, or when they join in a writing game with me. Anyone who writes with me gets a link, and I always comment on the stories that come out of challenges I’ve posted (so long as I’m aware of them).

However, today is a day for celebration, not of me and my superhuman brilliance at having blogged for a year, lol, but of the friends who have made this year worth living. Therefore, in lieu of a blog-roll, here is a page written in partial appreciation for all of the wonderful bloggers I feel so lucky to know. You can also find it via the friends tab in the header.

Again–to friends known and unknown–thank you.

Today I received an email from Chris Baty, Daddy of NaNoWriMo. Maybe you received one, too. Here is how it began:

I ran into your 2009 NaNoWriMo novel yesterday, and it said that you two are currently “taking a break.” I offered my condolences and mentioned that I’d probably be seeing you today. It quickly scribbled out a note for me to give you. The note seemed kind of personal, so I didn’t read it. Here it is!

“Hi! Come back to me. I’ll be better this time, I promise!”

Maybe Chris sent this email to every one of the 166,700 participants, or perhaps he limited it to the 32,000 ish “winners”. Whatever. He’s trying to encourage people to finish what they began. My book and I are indeed currently “taking a break” for the holidays, but it’s like the kind of break M and I used to have to take in the first year, when he was still living in Englandland. Anyone who’s ever carried on a long distance love affair will know what this feels like. Time is always your enemy. It’s forever and ever before you see each other again, and then when you’re together, time evaporates. Even after he had moved here and moved in with me, I would still feel traumatized when he had to travel, even for a short time like a week. On some level, I think, I couldn’t accept that I really had him–and since that sounds as though I considered him a possession, let me rephrase: I couldn’t entirely accept that something this good, someone this good, far and away the best thing that had ever happened in my life–that it was for real, and wasn’t going to be taken away like other good things. That I could rely upon it.

As I’ve written before, we got married after being together six years, and we were married for seven years before he died. I think it was really only towards the end of that, in the last couple of years of marriage, that I began to treat him–us–as a real, permanent, true, reliable thing. The rooms inside me that reserved themselves, reluctant to surrender to the good thing lest it disappear, even they gave in. When he died, I found I didn’t have anything reserved anymore. All of me was with him. We had become us.

I am thankful that I haven’t become the kind of person who is afraid to give in like that again. I want to. I need to. I was more myself then, more truly me than I’ve been before or since.

long winter, long path

We are knee deep in winter. I thought last winter was the longest winter of my life, but now, here is another one, no less cold, no less long. The thought of my book sending me a little note saying, Please come back, I’ll be better this time–it makes me cry because I love that book, and I haven’t left it, I would never leave it, and it doesn’t need to try to be better for me, because I love it in all its messiness, and it’s up to me to clear the beds around it so it can come up and grow right.

But if there was someone to take a note to that other shore for me, I would write the same thing to him: Please come back to me. I’ll be better this time. I promise. I won’t fight for so long. I won’t fight at all. I won’t work so hard at stupid things. And did you know, yesterday when I had the Host in my mouth, all I could think and feel was you, your tongue on my tongue, you inside me, and it felt like you were there somehow in that melting, wine-tinged substance in my mouth. If you would come back I would kiss you all the time. I would make love to you all the time. I want to touch your eyelids, your cock, your hands, your bottom, every bit of you, even where your hair is thinning and where the skin is red from your wrist watch. I’ve learned a lot, since you’ve been gone. I’m smarter now. I can do more things. I take up more of the bed, but I’ll move over again. Your son has got so tall.

Please come back. I’ll be better this time. I promise. I promise.