Day 0614

Are perfect love and perfect eroticism totally different things or the same thing?
I have a feeling they may be the same, but that love is (hopefully) long and eroticism is more momentary – so intense and specific, it can’t last.
To me, being looked at – being seen by someone and wanted, that is erotic.
But these are also the ingredients of love.
Not having to speak. Talking with eyes and touch and sound that does not contain words – that is erotic.
Being comfortable in shared silence is love.
Being vulnerable and yet utterly safe; that is erotic.
And it is my definition of love.
So are they the same thing?
Is that perfect erotic moment the rabbit that the greyhound of love is chasing?
Wouldn’t that make it clear why people mistake erotic moments for love? Why a lover’s eyes staring into you, taking in your core, your liquid, skin covered being can look and feel like love. Even when it is just a moment’s happenstance? A moment stolen – literally – from another that feels magically connected and connecting?

Day 0397

It takes a helluva lot of self belief to ‘go with your gut’. At least it does for me. I almost always have a gut reaction to people and then tell myself that I have to get to know them first – before I have a real opinion.
But I think I’ve been wrong.
I think that approach has been about knowing I want to and need to see the best in people, to have compassion and to understand them.
But knowing the real them rather than the best them would be more true wouldn’t it?
And more compassionate in the end?
Supposedly our ‘gut’ instinct is the culmination of our experience and knowledge that manifests faster than a brain can think: we get a first impression and then wait for our brain to justify it.
More often than not my first impressions of males who have become companions of mine have been oddly on point.
Except for that first Great Love. In his company for the first time my entire body, heart and brain just sang for him. No interpretive or objective capabilities were present. At All.
But my first serious boyfriend: I felt that he was a good looking but boring jock. And it turned out he was (as well as being a compulsive liar).
He who Must Not Be Named – I got an over sensitive and judgmental reading off of him. Also a strange adherence to ‘rules’, but I didn’t piece it together.
The Rebound Man: an intellectual bully. Spot. On.
And Halfman. Well, that was a little different since my first impressions were in a work context. What were they: seriously introverted, closed off, lacking passion, lazy but with interesting eyebrows. Hardly the stuff of which dreams are made. If only I were the type who could like a person only for their body, I would have kept myself relatively safe from deep, heart rending harm.

Day 0393

Have I ever mentioned that I’ve never had a one night stand?
It’s quite on purpose – not solely a total lack of opportunities. That feeling of waking up and wondering if you’re still welcome isn’t one I’ve ever wanted to choose to have (and quite a few other reasons).
I got a taste of it though when, early in our relationship, Halfman asked me if I wanted to stay the night at his place. Normally I had to run off, cutting passion short, to fulfill my true priorities in life.
But this one winter’s night I didn’t need to, so I said ‘ok, that would be nice’.
It felt wrong from the start. And I should have listened to my gut.
My gut – there may be a nicer word for it like ‘instinct’ – told me I felt uncomfortable and unsure and a bit too caught up in someone else’s not thought through whim.
But I went. We went for a conflicting thoughts and emotions head clearing walk through his neighborhood, his arm around me in the dark, our hips knocking together gently as we walked down to the wharves and through the small, winding streets.
And then back to his flat – The Cave he called it. The evening and night were passionate and fun and gentle and tender.
But in the morning… In the morning, there it was; that empty feeling that accompanies not knowing if I’m wanted, not knowing if the desire to share my company has disappeared and filled with its opposite.
And Halfman was closed that morning. I couldn’t read his feelings.
I tried to enjoy myself as we lay in the warmth of the covers, but I couldn’t shake that feeling.
So I left. Politely and with warmth, but I left. And I couldn’t help feeling relieved.
And when I got to my car parked on the street outside, I sat inside and cried.
I must be so blind to myself not to have read the signs then and decided it was all going to end like that, whenever it ended; with me feeling shut out, dismissed and left to deal with the complexity of that relationship all on my own.

Day 0351

It was this same kind of night a year ago: dark and windy. The end of autumn. A year ago I sat at my desk at home and finally – after 24 hours – worked up the nerve to open an email from Halfman. I still didn’t know he was only half a man at that point. To me, he was that very very close friend who I had fallen in love with, who had wrestled with obligation over passion and who had ‘chosen’ the path he felt he needed to. Though I still suspected he’d chosen that path because he fell into the most easy of those available: that’s what he told me after all (‘I didn’t really make a choice, it’s just where I ended up’ I hear that’s a great recipe for a happy marriage). Anyhow, my heart was finally starting to mend on that stormy night when I opened my email and there he was, asking me to open to him again, telling me he missed me passionately and wished he was lying next to me at night.
It ripped me apart.
It was about three weeks later I discovered he was Halfman. But the end of me started right there.
I can deal with a decision as long as I know what it is. I can work my way through anything. It’s when there aren’t decisions or there is flip flopping that I start to die.
When I don’t know if it’s safe to open myself up. When I just don’t know.
I am glad in a way that he showed me his true self: both through the moving away from his non-decision and from the lies that unraveled from that moment.
One person’s declared love is another’s selfish longing.
And the two have very different effects on their objects.

Day 0295

I am such an ‘in my head’ kind of person that those few moments in my life that I’ve got lost in passion have been gifts from the gods to me. My head and passion are totally interconnected when it comes emotions, what I’m talking about here (and blushing over slightly at its mention) is physical passion.

Of course true passion is never purely physical – at least to me – that’s why it happens so rarely in my life and why it grabs me and holds me tight when I do happen upon it.

When all the factors combine to allow me into a physical situation where I am totally there – well, that’s just amazing. There are perhaps two people this has happened with in my life – and not continuously but in recurring moments.

In moments where I feel capital ‘s’ Safe, when I feel no threat of mockery but total respect for my presence, that is when it has happened.

One of the recent experiences stands out in particular.

I will avoid TMI for all our sakes, but it was spontaneous (as all great moments are), it was beautiful and tender and on the back of delicious and impromptu foodstuffs and wine. There was no sound except us, no light but the moon (if there was one) and a total loss of both of us in the moment.

We both, in fact, remarked on it the next day and it lead to a discussion of passion and all that it means and appears to be.

So it was satisfying intellectually as well.

I think I am growing mature enough that I can see that moment in particular on its own, unspoiled by what came after. I don’t think I’ll sit here and relive it in my mind EVER but I do remember the feeling, the quintessence of it. And that is still worth something to me.

Day 0266

I have a serious weakness for men who present a somewhat inaccessible shell on the outside but are quivering masses of enormous feeling on the inside.
I think it must make me feel like I’m special when these men show me the softness in their hearts – maybe I feel like I have somehow assisted them to feel more.
For about a year after a very unpleasant experience I had in university I was completely numb. I couldn’t feel anything: inside or out. I would lie in the bath and let the water grow cold and not even realise until my lips were blue and I was frozen deep inside. I didn’t feel impermeable but like I’d lost he essential ability to feel anything.
It was scary. And lonely.
And to this day I can feel the visceral joy of the moment I started to feel again; the moment when my brain stopped working so hard to shut out unpleasantness that it shut out all the happiness as well.
I think it’s that time in my life that makes me feel such kinship with males who seem to lack emotions: I recognise them and want to break through the barriers they’ve formed.
I have done it a couple of times now, but the breakthrough always passes. Their defenses reknit themselves and I find it impossible to penetrate them again.
Men who are open from the start are not nearly as interesting; their feelings for me somehow less real and intense.
They say that in our closest personal relationship, we re-enact the pain and hurt of our worst moments, the deepest darkest habits we’ve learned to protect ourselves.
Somehow that makes sense while also being one of the most heartbreaking truths I’ve ever heard.

Day 0227

I feel desperate for that feeling this morning — that one where I sail along on the air rather than walking with my feet on the ground. The one where my heart PUMPS so hard I can feel it shaking my ribs. Where I look into someone else’s eyes and the world swirls into them like a drain in an emptying bathtub. Or a toilet flushing. Maybe  that would be more apt?

I think I am just feeling a bit lonely.

And of all the things Halfman brought to me, he did remind me and show me that I could still feel that way. After 15 years of not feeling like that, it was a revelation: a welcome one.

And I suppose, if I were feeling like looking at it positively, that is better than forgetting that feeling was out there.

That feeling that makes you run out of petrol when you make a surreptitious pitstop for a cuddle, that lets you think it’s normal to make out in a car under a winter bare tree when you’re 40 years old. That feeling that has you leaving for work early so you can dive under the covers with a naked boy for an hour before your first morning appointment, that convinces you that his touch means something and his breathless smile is for You.

But I know, absolutely know, I don’t want a relationship: one where you tell each other about your day when you both clock off. Where you have to figure out dinner together and pass each other in the hallway, and be careful not to disturb the other person when they’re sleeping even though you just really really need to go to the toilet or switch the light on. I don’t want any of those delicacies of a real relationship. I just want the thrill of falling. I want to savour it.

Maybe that is what let me go down the Halfman Hole … the enthusiasm to grab that feeling. And then mistakenly falling in Actual Love. And allowing something that should just have been what it was to become part of my heart and soul and skin.

I am sure they are out there: a brain and eyes I can fall into deeply.

But I am still nursing wounds. I am still haunted by lies. And being forced to be something, to play a role I didn’t agree to and for which I have yet to forgive myself.

Days 0162 & 0163

Uh oh. I think I have been maligning someone wrongly — or, more accurately, maligning them in the wrong way.

It suddenly occurred to me this morning that the words passive and passion  come from the same place (Word Nerd Alert: The root word for each is the French passif – suffering)

And here I have been referring to someone as passive and interpreting that as them not feeling anything.

I now wish to correct that.

I think Mr Passive Pants actually feels everything. In fact, I think he feels everything so much that he is unable to articulate or even act it out.

He is in fact rendered passive by his overwhelming passion.

Now, where once I felt angry at him for not being able to feel, I now feel utter pathos for him and his inability to do anything about what he feels.

I can be passive too after all, with my bullying sister in particular. But that is really the only place I can be branded fairly with that label. From that experience of tamping down my feelings — of experiencing them but not letting them determine my reactions — I learned that I must must must not be passive in the rest of my life. I feel everything. When someone is angry, my skin tingles; when another person hurts, I feel their pain; when the world makes no sense or I can’t stand what is happening, I get up and DO SOMETHING about it. I’m not saying I’m not quiet or subtle: i think most often I am. And I need to work on expressing anger; I’m not so skilled at that one – it gets stuck in my throat and turns inward.

So what does this revelation reveal? It shows me that Mr PP [Ed note: tee hee, I just said ‘pee pee’] hasn’t reached aplace where he can let his emotions come out of his mouth and his heart and his skin and his brain. He instead does it by proxy, at least when it comes to the injustices of the world; hanging about with those who make a difference and speak up, with those who feel and express; with those who put their senses into action.

Oh, how I hope he hangs about with them so he can learn how rather than to escape learning how. As badly as he can behave, I am certain he would be Extravagantly Beautiful if he could let it all out. Because he is beautiful inside there: I saw that much with accuracy.