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.

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.

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…

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.

When I write the phrase little chat, it is usually in upper case, Little Chat. I think you already know what that means. It is probably time I attribute the phrase to its originator. Mark first used, upper case, early in our correspondence, but I incorrectly remember hearing it first in a vignette he wrote for me.

Our email correspondence (until he moved to Gotham) stretches to almost a thousand emails each, almost all of them saved individually in txt files with names like “fmark232.txt” [the 232nd email from Mark to me] or “tomark33″ [my 33rd email to Mark]. As you can imagine, it’s hard to find a reference amongst all that, especially 15 years after the fact.

Tonight I was searching for the text of this Little Chat vignette, which I did using the Search function on my PC. It turned up many emails, and the first one I opened turned out to be the one in which he confessed that he loved me. I barely remember this email, but encountering it again absolutely slayed me. I won’t quote it. My eyes are still swollen.

I did eventually find Mark’s vignette and have posted it below as well as under the Stories tab. The scenario was Mark and Casey at the Lewises. This was an alternate reality to Home School, one we only played a few times. The idea was that Mark and Casey had run away from the Orphanage and had been found and adopted by the Perfect People (Dr. & Mrs. Lewis). I later (or was it earlier?) wrote a companion piece to his vignette, which I also posted under the Stories tab. After reading them both, I feel his is much better: more direct, less fussy and complicated, more spontaneous and full of heart. Looking at both scenarios from far away, I would say that we never lived or much played the letter of them, but the mood and heart of them were a constant feature of our life together, especially Mr. Prior’s life with Casey.

Without further ado, then, here is Mark’s piece, Wednesdays.

Wednesdays

by Mark Hastings

Sundays are for Regulars, for weekly cleaning.  Sundays are always spent together, at the Lewises.  Casey and Mark go to bed sore and peaceful and clean and warm.  Whole.  Sundays are a deep rich blue, the smell of dark polished wood, a full stomach and a feeling of belonging.

By Wednesday, that’s worn off a little.  Mr. Lewis is fond of saying, as he shaves on Wednesday morning, that Wednesday is the worst day of the week. Equidistant from the comfort of weekend.  Neither the residual freshness of Tuesday, or the slight anticipation of Thursday.  Nothing but acres of dullness.  Mrs. Lewis has Commitments on Wednesdays, so supper is usually something cold.  Mark and Casey both have School things that they hate. For Mark, it’s morning gym, ninety minutes of effort with the school Sergeant’s swagger stick flailing its response to slackness, and the inevitability of at least one vault-horse caning, ‘poer incurriger les otters’.   For Casey, double Latin in the afternoon with the psychotically sarcastic Mr. Whitworth, whose greatest pleasure is to decline irregular verbs in time with his strap-strokes, and who makes a virtue of leathering girls just as hard as boys.  Out in front of the class, but facing towards your peers so they are spared the worst witness of unprotected strapping, and can better concentrate on construe.

Mark has learned to avoid the Wednesday vault-horse, and Casey the mid-week strap, because on Wednesday evenings they have their “Little Chat”.

The children do the dishes after supper, while Mr. Lewis goes to his study, and Mrs. Lewis rests up.  There is a sense of anticipation, although it isn’t the edginess of Sunday, before the Regulars, because often a Little Chat is just that.  Even so, the dishes get done well, and quietly, on the whole, on Wednesdays.  Mark and Casey smarten themselves up, and jaunt carefully along the downstairs corridor to the study.  Sometimes Mrs. Lewis joins them, sometimes not.

Little Chats are lucky-dippy.  In the months since Casey’s arrival they have ranged from a particularly uncomfortable interview over a broken ornament (Casey), cleverly replaced on its shelf (Mark) and not discovered broken for some time afterwards (Mrs. Lewis), to a riotous game of Racing Demon in which Mr. Lewis was heard to swear when Casey stole his Ace of Spades, was sent to the corner by his family and threatened with a very hard whacking by Mark if he ever did it again.  On average, one or both of the Lewises feel that one or both of the children would benefit from a little additional discipline perhaps one week in two.

Little Chat discipline is always the same – slipper, paddle or hand, administered in traditional manner, across the knee of the parent in the clock-ticky quiet of Mr. Lewis’s study.  It’s very different from Regulars. Canes, birches, crops and straps are banned.  Punishments are measured in minutes, rather than strokes.  Usually either a Quin, being–as Casey might explain–five minutes, or a Dix, being ten.  Mark hates Dixes, with a passion, especially when they’re paddle, and administered by Mrs. Lewis. Casey has mixed feelings about the whacking, but she loves the closeness and warmth of Little Chats, the fire glowing orange while the wind blows white outside on winter Wednesdays.

So, Wednesdays are made red, a smell of incense, a little adventure, and fun.

Think you?

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.

I wrote a little bit in the past about the first scene between Casey and RP, which was the first time I ever got whacked. It was during his first trip here in the summer of 1995, and we played it as a follow up to Mark’s first scene with TL (the first time she whacked him, or anyone). The scenario was that Mark and Casey had been seen sneaking out-of-bounds into the chapel balcony (at College, where TL and RP were co-housemasters and where Casey had just arrived as a new Fifth Former from America). A bit of wrought-iron gate had snapped off in the process. Mark had been caned. Casey was offered 4 strokes of the cane or 200 lines. I think her exact words were: “I don’t want to do the lines.”

M’s first visit lasted four days. On the last day we drove out of town and went on a hike in the woods. Afterwards, I remember being in my kitchen, him shaving at my kitchen sink, the smell of his shaving foam, and this overwhelming desire to be back in that relationship between Casey and Mr. Prior. I secretly got my hands on M’s pack of Marlboroughs, and as he was shaving, I went through to the study.

Picture my apartment as it was then: a four room railroad-style flat with no doors between the rooms, kitchen at the back, study at the front. It was August. Casey sat down in the “kid” chair, which was tucked out of the sightline from the kitchen. She lit a cigarette and pseudo-smoked it, ashing into a candle on the bookshelf. There was a box fan blowing a cross-breeze, and she took care to blow well into the fan so that the smoke would be visible, even if she wasn’t.

It seemed to go on a long time, this mouthing of cigarette smoke, the noise of the fan. And then suddenly, there he was: Mr. Prior.

“Morgan!”

She jumped six feet in the air, it seemed, having heard nothing, seen nothing. Stubbed out the cigarette. Stood up. He was gob-smacked by what he was seeing. How was it that this girl, this American girl, new to College just a few days hence, had decided to use his study, of all places, to smoke a cigarette? I don’t recall the dialogue, but it was brief. She was instructed to change into her uniform (she was wearing blue cotton shorts, sneakers, t-shirt) and report back in ten minutes.

In the dressing room, I put on her newly cobbled-together uniform. He had brought me a patch for my blazer. I’d found the blazer, grey flannel trousers, and Casey’s school shoes at the sadly now-defunct Domsey’s Warehouse. The patch had finally been stitched onto the blazer. I dressed, she dressed, trembling. We paced in the hallway. Scared. Frustrated. Confused.

On top of all this was another thread that had emerged in their earlier scene, and this was about Casey’s father. Carl Morgan was in military intelligence and was stationed somewhere dangerous, hence her being shipped off to College (parents divorced). But, she assured Mr. Prior, he was coming to visit her for half-term. He had told her so. In fact, she wasn’t going to be staying at College very long. She was pretty sure she’d be going home soon. Her dad had said so. This is what she thought about in the corridor waiting for the ten minutes to be up.

When she approached the study, RP was seated at the desk [my desk!]. He noted with grim approval her finally-arranged blazer, but got straight to his flabbergasted outrage.

“I just beat you yesterday!” he complained. What on earth could she possibly have been thinking?

“I wasn’t really smoking,” she said.

He almost did not know what to make of this. She explained that she’d only been stage smoking.

“Where did you get the cigarettes?” he asked.

Oops. Thou shalt not peach. “I’d rather not say, sir.”

RP was a Public School man and a gentleman and was prepared to accept this, for the moment. But he wanted to know why on earth she did it. It simply made no sense to him. “Were you trying to get yourself beaten?” he asked.

“No!” She struggled to explain, even to herself. “I just wanted… to be in here.” She dried up.

A silence full of so very much. And then somehow, through some genius of his, or grace, he seemed to get it, even though she didn’t. Even though I didn’t.

This time there was no choice of lines. It would be eight strokes. I can’t remember the technicalities of it, why eight, what they were apportioned for, but he told her to meet him in the Houseroom.

And so in the Houseroom [kitchen] she waited, sick and shaking before the Houseroom table. Pretty soon he came through, carrying the cane. Imagine, a man walking into my kitchen carrying a cane as if he knew what to do with it. He took off his jacket and instructed her to do the same. He took her jacket from her hands and told her to bend over the table. When she was in position, he pulled the tail of her shirt out of her gray school trousers [as previously discussed, purely for theatrical value!].

And it began.

She saw right away that he’d been going easy the first time. This hurt a good deal more, on top of the (first ever) four the day before. She was getting twice as many. He was hitting harder. I think she yelped.

Afterwards, when told to stand up, she gave the customary thank you. They shook hands. He met her eye and said, “Well stuck, Morgan.” It was sincere. There was that palpable but restrained love and care. My chest was melting like lava. I wanted more than anything to say there, with him, in that.

A little later there was a short scene in which he said good-bye to her. Mr. Prior had to take a short leave from College to sort out a personal situation. Miss Lincoln would be in charge. But, he told Casey, he would be keeping a particular eye on her. Again, the lava melting bones. Like heartburn in all your cells at once.

And one more thing, he told her. He had managed to reach her father on the telephone.

“When’s he going to get here?” she interupted, suddenly happy, hopeful, plunging entirely into that blind confidence in a rock-solid good thing.

“I’m afraid he isn’t able to come,” Mr. Prior said gently.

Imagine a tidal wave, searing, crushing, destroying.

“What do you mean?” said a small voice.

“He was sorry not to be able to talk with you himself,” Mr. Prior told her. “And he is very sorry he can’t come visit you as he said. He will see you at Christmas, though.”

Her lip was trembling. She blinked back tears.

“Oh. Right.”

“So,” RP continued, “it looks as though you’ll have to put up with us for a while longer.” She nodded, trying not to let the tears show. He put his hand on her shoulder. “Casey,” he said calling her by her Christian name for the first time, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” she whispered. “It’s no big deal.”

When the scene was over, she went away and sobbed.

Writing about this now, especially having read other people’s scene accounts, I can see how odd it must look. The tgi gives focus to the scenes, but it isn’t really the center, or even the most powerful force. The most powerful force, perhaps, is Casey’s heart. How it longs to be with Mr. Prior in his study, somehow. How lascerated it is by her real dad, who loves her very much but cannot help but let her down. How much of a cataclysm the whole visit turns out to be, how much she loves him (M, Mark, Mr. Prior) by any name, as she has never loved anyone or conceived of loving.

He had to get on a plane later that night. I collapsed in bed and passed out from the ordeal of his visit, from overstimulation, from a kind of grief. He promised to come again, soon, October. Ten thousand years away.

But then came, as so often with him, a lucky strike extra, a gift of grace. At eight AM, my phone rang. I dragged myself from unconsciousness to answer it. His flight had been teched. He was still here. He wasn’t leaving until that evening. We had a whole extra day.

I am so grateful I never knew—then or even the morning before he died—what was coming. I knew, then, that we needed the extra day. What I didn’t know was how much we needed it. How very much.

Today me and TL had a big fight, maybe the biggest one we’ve ever had. It was like this: I rode my bike to church, which I do most of the time as long as it isn’t snowing, raining, or snow/ice on the ground. I’m allowed to ride even when it’s really cold (like last weekend in 17° F temperatures) so long as the streets are dry. RP was fanatical about bike safety [concerned & attentive in the face of a hopeless cause, ed.]. He disapproved of i-pods while biking, got furious when I rode in the rain, and insisted I carry rain gear at all times in case I got caught out and had no other alternative but to ride in it. He also forbade me to ride in the dark without a lamp. He dished out some strong whackings over violations, I can tell you.

So, anyway, it was cloudy and damp, but not raining on the way to church. Then, just as I had changed and was wheeling my bike through the crowded lobby, it started chucking down. One of the Vestrymen said, “Casey Morgan, you had better put your bike away and come back for it another day.” I peered out and was intimidated by the downpour. I started to take my bike back down to the basement, but then decided to ride to the subway and take the bike back that way. TL gives me a warning look that says, Just because you look cute in your rolled up blue jeans & sneakers does not mean you will be allowed to ride home in this. Outside, though, the rain isn’t that hard, and I decide to risk it.

I plug in my earbuds, put on the Glee soundtrack, and take off the wrong way (only 2 blocks!) through midtown traffic. TL hits the roof and starts calling after me to come back and what do I think I’m doing, etc etc etc. But I do it anyway.
It takes 35 minutes to get home, it’s 36° F, and by the time I get back I am soaked through. TL is waiting for me at the door, ready for murder. After standing over me while I towel off my bike, strip, stand under a hot shower, dress and dry my hair, she hauls me into the study.

Showdown.

She has calmed down somewhat, but still she is incandescent. I trot out the standard responses to her lambasting: other people were doing it; Lance Armstrong rode in the rain; I rode extra carefully and didn’t have any accidents or close calls; I got warm and dry as soon as I got home. She wasn’t having it, though, and she was losing her temper. I knew full well, she said, that if RP were here he would crucify me. I deserved the cane, just to start, and probably That Thing too. I gave her a look that very clearly said, Sucko,TL, cuz he isn’t here, is he?

“Don’t you look at me in that tone of voice!” she thundered.

She was scaring me. I tried to calm her down. “Look,” I told her, “I know I shouldn’t have ridden home in the rain, and I’m sorry, but you’re worrying about something that didn’t happen.”

Did I not agree, she asked, that riding in the rain was dangerous?

I did, actually. Drivers get nuts, my breaks don’t work as well, the road surface turns more lethal than usual, and the soles of my sneakers slip against the pedals.

So what if I had got killed? she demanded.

“I would be happy to die,” I said in all truthfulness.

She stared at me. “Be that as it may, there are a lot of people who would be devastated and possibly have their lives ruined if you died, especially after…” I blushed, feeling suddenly ashamed. “And what if you weren’t killed but only injured,” she continued. “What if you could never ride your bike again, or walk the dogs, or write?” Damn. She had me there.

Me: I know. I said sorry.

TL: Why didn’t you just take the train?

I told her how the train took longer, was boring, cost $2.25, and was a big fat pain with carrying my bike up and down all the stairs.

TL: So, all things considered, would you do it again today? Honestly.

I thought.

Me: Um, I guess I would.

TL: Why!?

Me: Because nothing bad did happen except it was a nasty ride and I got cold.

TL (standing and yelling at the ceiling): Dear God, send me someone to deal with this wretched child!

So, off she stomps. I hear her crying in the other room, and I feel bad because she’s right about the danger, but I hate her for not being able to do anything about it.  I decide to get my mind off it, but just then that other one shows up. You know her. She’s the one who writes most of these entries, STEALING MY NAME!

Her: Casey, you aren’t being very kind to Miss Lincoln.

Me: Sue me.

Her: I’m serious. The point here is less bike safety and more trust. Miss Lincoln has been trying harder than any human being could to take care of you, hampered as she is. And today you showed her how little you care for her efforts.

Me (quietly): I care.

Her: How caring is it to leave her feeling powerless to stop you risking your life, as she sees it? How caring is it to push the point and remind her she can’t really stop you doing anything?

Me (even more quietly): Not very?

Her: You knew you were upsetting her. You even agreed with her about the danger, but you did it anyway because you were willful, weren’t you?

Me: Yes?

Her: Do you think God would like you tramping all over Miss Lincoln when she does everything possible to look after you?

Me: (small voice): no.

Her: And I know that sometimes you just need to be bad because you’re so tired of being good all the time. And because you’re so angry about everything. Right?

Me: (nod)

Her: Just try not to be so callous towards Miss Lincoln while you’re getting on with that, all right?

I mean—Geez! How fair is that to be double teamed, especially when one of them almost never talks to you?! So now I feel super bad about how I acted to TL, and I know I should be in trouble for riding in the rain, especially on a horrible day like this, but as per usual, there is nothing to be done about it. So as a last-ditch attempt at some kind of penance, I decided to write the whole thing out so you can see what a mean and selfish kid I really am.

So now you know.

I was recently asked what I missed most about Mark. My first impulse was to dismiss such a question as unanswerable, unless Everything! counts as an answer. However, in this case it happens I brought the question on myself, so to dodge it would not be cricket. So I thought, I know. I’ll use a lifeline! I’ll ask the audience. And this isn’t cheating, kids, because 1) you get three lifelines and I haven’t used any yet; 2) other people can usually see you better than you can see yourself; 3) it’s pretty much the only thing I’ve been blogging about for the last year; 4) It’s almost my one-year blogoversary, so, um… there!

Right, then. What do I miss most about him? We will accept entries in comments, email, or tweets @caseydamnmorgan. Best answer of any length can have a story written for them. (Yay?) To give everyone a fair chance to complete their research or cogitation, and to accommodate text-based masochists (thanks to Bitchy Jones via Caroline Grey for this apt term), the deadline will be next Sunday 1/24 at 6pm EST.

Ok, go forth and think about meeeeeee hahahaha.

When you live like a hermit as I do, you occasionally fall into correspondences. Since I met M via just such a correspondence, I’m always hopeful that one of them might prove interesting long term.  Today while slogging through the woods in the snow, dogs in tow, I recalled an autobiographical essay I sent to a correspondent earlier this year. It struck me, particularly in light of Emma Jane’s Christmas present, as suitable subject for a post. So, slightly adapted, here it is. I don’t think the correspondent in question actually read the whole thing in the first place, and who can blame them, it being rather long. Note to self not to overwhelm skittish correspondents with lengthy self-revelation.

In previous exegeses I have written about the growth of my tgi imagination from its unlikely beginnings in the Waspy, industrial Midwest. Besides sharing photos of my dolls, I haven’t written much about the girl I was before adolescence, a girl who bears slight relation to casey, but is far more anxious and goodie-goodie. This is her story, my story:

Despite  feeling very peculiar when reading or watching stories about tgi, I was terrified of and squicked by the reality. Part of this was a negative response to having received it in the way that I did (more on which another time). Part of it, though, has to be the gargantuan dependence on the idea of myself as a Good Girl (read: compliant, accommodating, approval-worthy, Nice). I’ve met several people into tgi who have said they didn’t misbehave while growing up. Neither did I. My parents employed a bit of light hand spanking with my brother and me for what I think of as “getting out of hand” moments. Never were there rules understood in advance, broken deliberately, and punished. The idea of deliberate punishment (whether physical or not) was enough to send me into a meltdown–because being punished would have meant that I was Bad, not Good, not me, and not lovable. I was anxious enough with my parents’ un-articulated boundaries. I was addicted at a young age to the crack of their approval. I lived in fear of losing it.

When I was six, just after joining children’s theater, I went to try outs for The Three Little Pigs. The deal at children’s theater was that our director, Mrs. R, would try a bunch of people in a bunch of roles, and you could say what your preferences were, but you had to accept whatever role you were ultimately given, with good grace. Be a Trouper. She had me try out for all the pigs and even the wolf. I was burning with shame and anxiety because I was terrified of being cast as the wolf. That would mean I was Bad. I knew I wasn’t my character, but I was young enough that I felt that their…moral state?…connected itself to me, that people would judge me as they judged the character. If I was forced to play the Big Bad Wolf, then I might not only be Bad, but it would mean I was the kind of girl who deserved to be punished, maybe even spanked! Even the first or second pigs caused me anxiety; they, too, were Bad because they lazily built their houses of inferior material. They deserved their tragedies, and worse. The third pig was the only role that would allow me to sleep at night. By massive luck, or by type casting, I got the third pig. You really cannot imagine my relief.

A little later, I was cast as a village girl in a play called The Little Juggler. It was only my third or fourth show, and I had only a few lines. We village children were mean and bratty and teased the vegetable sellers and little juggler boy. Mrs. R came up with a bit where the vegetable seller gave me a swat with a carrot after a snarky comment my character made. I froze with embarrassment, shame, confusion, horror. I almost cried during rehearsal. I was sick to my stomach for days over it and eventually was forced, through sheer desperation, to assert myself enough to talk another girl into trading lines with me. I couldn’t explain why, just that I really really really wanted to trade lines. She agreed. Later Mrs. R asked what had happened with the lines. I think I blushed beet red and near-tears blurted that we had just wanted to swap lines. She let it go, though I’d no idea why. As an adult, I now suspect she recognized one of those awkward and inexplicable childhood embarrassments, and had mercy on me.

So, spanking as a real life topic was not the slightest bit funny for me. Everyone I knew got it growing up. It was a standard punishment along with grounding and having your allowance taken away. At school there were playground games that included the “rickets” or the “spanking machine”, i.e. having to crawl through the legs of your playmates and be swatted by them as you passed. Other kids found this raucous fun. When in 3rd grade [age 8] we had “moving up day” and visited the big 4th grade classes, they played a ball game called SPUD at recess. When you lost a round, you got an S, then a P, etc. If you got up to SPUD, you had to go through the spanking machine. I felt sick to my stomach and insisted on watching only. It made me so very frightened of 4th grade.

When you misbehaved at my school, you got Sent To The Bench (which Mark hijacked in the first story he wrote for me, The Benefit of the Doubt). The Bench was a pew-like bench outside the Assistant Headmaster’s office, just inside the main entryway. Everyone could see you there. Astoundingly (or depressingly) I was never sent to the bench in all my time there, surely one of the few if only students for whom this was true. In reality, you got told off, or in middle school got a detention with the telling off. Before middle school, I had the idea that you might get spanked. Some other kids wound me up (or fanned the flames of rumor) by telling me they heard that was true. (Reality: not!)

Perhaps you are beginning to understand the little nervous wreck I was underneath that perky, A-student, nice girl in the Lilly Pultizer dresses and school uniform? She’s still here a little bit, but M (and RP) effected a lot of rehabilitation over the years (for instance, RP’s institution of Casey’s four rules).

I wore underpants at all times except when in bath or swimming costume, another habit that was whacked out of me (Casey) by RP, who forbade it under nightwear as unhygienic and perversely over-modest.

Once when I was 8 or 9, I asked my dad if French kissing was dirty. I asked it rather boldly, expecting him to 1) be impressed that I’d talk about French kissing and 2) say Right you are, it sure is. He looked at me for a second, probably surprised, and said: Of course not. It’s wonderful. I didn’t really believe him, and on some semi-conscious level thought he was giving me a party line.

I felt enormously conflicted and peculiar when my mom would read me a book called The Lonely Doll [discussed by EJ and earlier by Adele] which featured a father teddy bear taking his son across his knee, as well as  his quasi-ward, the lonely doll. It’s a terrifically twisted book–I mean, teddy bears spanking dolls?–but then a good deal of my tgi play involved my dolls spanking each other. See, I never spanked them because that would be Mean, and I wasn’t Mean, I was Nice! However, they were not all nice, and some of them were quite strict school teachers or even orphanage matrons/masters, so I was able to identify with some of my poor Holly Hobbie dolls who suffered under such wonderfully mean grown-ups. The Lonely Doll might actually be a bit of a metaphor for meeting M (if you overlook the nauseating layers of twee). Whatever her name was, this doll lived alone. Then Mr. Bear and his son came along, and she had friends. But then she and bear jr. let their hair down and played a little wild and made a mess; and Mr. Bear spanked them! She was so upset because she was sure they would leave her (because she was Bad! Not lovable!), but actually they stayed. And she wasn’t lonely, and Mr. Bear presumably dealt matter-of-factly with her and bear jr. when they misbehaved as they should like little animals exploring a wide world.

I say there is not much of this girl left in me. I say she bears only slight resemblance to casey. Is it true, though? Casey might be more willing to be naughty. She might not shatter under the shame of being punished. But she is still a recovering good girl. She is, I am. There is still work, we think, for someone to do.