Between·the·Sheets |American Boys – Part 7|

On Sunday night I made all of my previous Between the Sheets posts private.  ”My identity has been hijacked!”  I thought in a moment of paranoia.  These moments aren’t altogether uncommon for me.  As a person who regularly tries to envision next season’s fashions (and then sees those visions walking down city streets and on billboards), who tries to predict the impact of an artistic project (and then feels the results), I regularly have highly intuitive moments that I haven’t been able to explain.  My dad thinks I have “the gift,” something his mother had also.  I think this gift is just the result of an active imagination that’s been allowed to run wild for the past few years.  I temper it when necessary.

Every time I think about curbing my expression, something pops up to remind me to keep going.  This time a reminder came in the form of a message from a friend I haven’t seen in at least two years.  It read:

I was talking to K. yesterday about how you make us optimistic about the role of social media in relationships because we really love your fb posts and blog!

The posts are once again part of the public domain.

I experienced this moment of strangeness because for the past month or so I’ve been dating someone who’s words have increasingly felt like they’ve come from my head.  I wondered if he’d read my blog, memorized my words and simply repeated them back to me.  A definite possibility from what I’ve learned about his recitation skills.  On the other hand, who has that much time?  I hardly have to time to work, feed myself, sleep, and maintain one healthy romantic relationship.

Had I been duped by my own vanity? [Probably.]  Had he charmed me by quietly observing and getting to know me and mirroring my wants and desires?  It seems like it.  And how am I supposed to continue being expressively honest if people are going to use it to deceive me into thinking they’re into me?  Did we really have so many of the same dreams and interests (dreams and interests that I have most definitely detailed on this space but don’t openly talk about with many people) or had he just said the right things at the right time to get laid?  I don’t actually want to know the answers to any of these questions, and figure that no harm was meant, but I did learn that it only takes the use of one M-word (monogamy) to scare off an indecisive, and possibly inauthentic, love interest.  This is a great asset, and one I plan on using as frequently as possible to sort the curds from the turds.

All of this is an experiment for me.  Life is an experiment.  I’ve moved from wanting to have romantic experiences with no or little consideration of future outcomes, to actively wanting someone in my life who is interested in being with me exclusively, who is also curious about practices like devotion, growth, acceptance, joy, and pantries.  Yes, I said it.  Pantries.

I recently had pantry envy while attending a party at a friend of a friend’s house.  My foodstuffs space in my current apartment is well stocked for what it is, but if an emergency hit I would be sustantance free in a week or so.  This panty I saw was so expansive, and filled with enough food and alcohol to sustain a small clan for a number of weeks.  I might be exaggerating.  This pantry is just a metaphor for something else I’m looking for: abundance.  Being an artist, living on meager wages and learning how to be happy with that has been formative, but I don’t think I’ll be able to sustain it for much longer.  My desires are waking up in a big way, and to love myself I have to figure out ways to honor them.

One big desire I currently have is to find my soul mate.  I say this with a certain amount of shame.  In a big city like San Francisco, where people are constantly trying on all kinds of identities and experimenting with various relationship formats, it feels provincial to want monogamy and exclusivity, but I do.  I’m not even sure I have time and resources for one romantic relationship.  When you live like I do, and value what I value, even friendships can become both a source of financial strain and great anxiety.  I desperately want to be able to support myself and to be generous with the people around be, but this is not always possible. There are some things that I’m unable to do right now, and that triggers some major insecurities for me regarding relationships.  I’ve had to learn how to accept help, but I also have a good sense of when I need to pay my own way.  It’s a balancing act, and it’s difficult to find my center.

I want someone who is willing to share details about their personal life, their struggles, triumphs, and joys.  Someone who has a vision of who they want to be, someone who is decisive, who is moving along their path with confidence, a sense of humor, and lots of compassion.  Someone who has their own tastes and preferences, not someone who is constantly kowtowing to my desires, but who actually listens to them and gently encourages me to go for what I want, while making sure they are getting what they need too.  I want someone who is not lazy about the relationship.  Someone who is actively cultivating and nurturing those things that are most important to them, and who is willing to rethink patterns and habits that are no longer serving them.

So after a nine month break from relationships and a month+ fling with another goddamned musician (When will I learn my fucking lesson? Right now.), I’ve decided to continue writing about my explorations in love, romance, sexuality, and desire.  I am changing the tone of these posts slightly.

The specifics of this last encounter (he said, she said, sexy time) aren’t what I’m going to focus on (those details are for me and my therapist).  I’m done telling the stories of romance.  They’re always so skewed, and in all honesty my goal is to forgive, forget, and move on.  Penning my misadventures is humorous for those who get to read them (I’ve been told I’m more entertaining than Cosmo), but sometimes I really don’t want to remember all of the missteps I’ve made along the way.  I want to focus on lessons learned and next steps.

At the close of my last session, my counselor, who seemed excited that I’d started dating again, told me to focus on the idea of intimacy, on what my idea of intimacy is.  I remembered a list given to all the participants of FemSexComm, and immediately decided to give it a once over as I began to think about this post and my idea of closeness.

Most of the items on this list given to us in class represent levels of sexual intimacy.  Is it wrong that I don’t consider sex in and of itself to be a very intimate act?  I currently think of sex as a way to strengthen and deepen an existing bond between two people.  I am not particularly bothered by casual sex, and see how it could be preferred at certain stages, but if I had my druthers I would always avoid it.  Why?  Because I cannot trick my body into not falling in love with a person.  I can make rationalizations in my mind, but my body goes haywire for sex.  I can’t really think or function.

I tend to be very cautious even hesitant when it comes to sex because when the body gets involved, nature takes over.  When nature takes over there’s no telling what might happen so it’s important for me to establish trust in another way first, before having sex.  I am only starting to get somewhat okay at doing this.  Not everyone (and no man I’ve ever met) thinks about sex in this way and that is hard for me to remember that.  I need to ask 100% more questions before I even think about sex.

Moving on to intimacy, I’m going to put this list into three groups: items I consider intimate, items I don’t consider intimate, and items I’m neutral to.

Intimate

Holding Hands (in public)

Dry Kissing

Hugging laying down

Touching a person’s upper body with clothes on

Touching a person’s lower body with clothes on

Rubbing bodies with clothes off

Not Intimate

Mouth contact with someone’s breasts

Penis to anus contact

Rimming

Oral-vaginal sex

Oral-penile sex

Hand contact with someone’s anus

Masturbating in front of someone

Using a vibrator on someone

Using a dildo with someone

Showering with someone

Hand contact with another person’s penis or vagina (clothes off)

Penis contact on outside of vagina or anus (no insertion)

Talking Dirty

Cyber Sex

Phone sex

Neutral

Open mouth kissing

Vaginal intercourse

Licking

Tickling

Rubbing bodies with clothes on

As I learned from this exercise, I find non or lightly sexual gestures much more intimate than sex itself.  I mean, a person can talk dirty to any paid sex worker, but it takes a certain amount of closeness to know what it feels like to wake up next to a person in the early morning and gently nudge them awake just to excitedly kiss them on the nose.  For me, intimacy comes in enjoying the small, mundane pleasures of having and sharing this human existence with someone.

Aside from sexual stuff, here are some things I know I do to build intimacy.

-Calling when I feel sad, happy, excited.  Trusting that someone will share emotional states with me.

-Admitting that I’m wrong, or even allow my judgement to be questioned.

-Asking them out on dates to meet people that are important to me.  If I just wanted sex I wouldn’t involve anyone else in it.  By including my community in a relationship I am asking a person into my life in ways that I feel are deeper.  And, if the relationship ends, I’m not the only one that feels the impact, so does my whole community.

-Eating/making food with/for someone.

-Doing something to make someone else happy, not cause I really want to do it.

-Saying stupid and logically questionable statements.

-Singing.

-Dancing.

-Acing foolish.

-Allowing myself to be seen as clumsy, including spilling food and knocking things over, and not feeling ashamed about that (goes along with being silly).

-Sharing my failures and insecurities.

-Sharimg my successes and joys.

-Giving things freely.

I am proud of myself for this last relationship, because I practiced all of the things listed above.  After stepping away, I left feeling like I knew nothing about the other person at all.  I had rationalized their hesitance to share intimate details with me, and since I was doing a lot of work that was scary for me, I didn’t even notice that this was happening.

I’m still doing this thing where I’m tricking myself into thinking that men like me, like as a person they actually want to be with longterm, when they don’t.  It’s dangerous because I want to give of myself sexually to someone who wants to be with me longterm, but it takes time to figure this out, so how do I know when and when not to have sex?  This is very confusing, especially because I didn’t have sex with this last person right away.  I took my time.

In this era of the sexually empowered woman, where drunken hookups have instigated many of my long term relationships, when I take my time, I’ve noticed that men sometimes take this as a free pass to find sex somewhere else.  It is assumed that the relationship must just be a friendship so it’s okay to find other options.  I don’t necessarily disagree, I just think these things could be talked through to avoid confusion.  This has happened to me on several occasions.  I am a slow mover, not by design, but by choice.  Because drunken hookups have led to some of my worst relationship decisions.  I now avoid drunk sex until I feel comfortable and trust a person.

My new solution to this is to say something along the lines of, “I like you and am interested in you sexually, but it is going to take me time to know if I want to open up to you in that way, so if you don’t think you can wait then you might as well move on now.”  It’s crazy to me that I have to think about and say things like this, but city boys play dirty.  They are like wild animals!  No regard, no consideration, no empathy.  I’m learning that everything has to be stated plainly.  I’m saying this right from the start from now on, cause I can’t tolerate any more men making friend zone rationalizations, and using gray area as wiggle room.

I also felt good about this last one because I stated my intentions clearly throughout the course of the relationship, although I now doubt that anything I said was heard.  I felt at the end of everything that this person had cherry picked information to his liking, and had ignored the rest.  For example, I feel like if I were to tell a normal, not hearing only what they want to hear person,”I have a hard time trusting men because I’ve been cheated on before,”  then they would know that one of their causes in our relationship is to be honest and forthright about whether or not they could be monogamous.

Our words always have deeper meanings, and as conscious adults it is our responsibility to tease those things out.  I was especially surprised by this last guy’s inability to do that, especially based on the close relationship he has with words.  Words aren’t just words, they reference our desires, hopes, dreams, preoccupations, and expectations.  And although I do believe that mind reading is inappropriate, using common sense and intuition are perfectly fine.  I’ve definitely broken things off with guys (even after just one date) because I could tell they were more into me than I would ever be into them.  Why get someone’s hopes up for a few stolen moments of disingenuous pleasure?  It’s not worth it to me, at least.

I am upset with myself about this relationship because I didn’t confront him on the things he said as much as I should have.  Words tip us off to each other’s states of mind, and it took me  two weeks to completely accept that he was probably being a bit shady.  First he admitted to cheating on a pinball game that we were playing to make it look like I’d won when I hadn’t.  Dishonest.  Another time I overheard him saying, “If you’re nice to a girl you can get away with anything.”  Manipulative.   And the third and final thing that should have tipped me off was that he proclaimed that an album with the title “Cheater” was one of his favorites from a particular artist.  To you these things might seem insignificant.  To me they are huge.

After telling him I’d accept nothing less than monogamy, he’d admitted that he’d been seeing at least one other person at the same time as me, and hoped that we could just continue to have  what he thought was “awesome sex.” At my rejection of continuing a physical relationship (insert witty comment about how sex wasn’t that good.  Read: I am hurt and disappointed.) he asked if we could hang out regularly still.  Nope.  I am having a hard time with this part, on some level I would like to have at least one past lover that successfully turns into a close friendship, but this one ain’t it.

Love and Enjoy.

Between·the·Sheets |American Boys – Part 6|

I moved to San Francisco for one real reason: to distance myself from someone who did to my heart what Rick James did to Eddie Murphy’s couch.  After a five year relationship, which included one yearlong breakup and a failed attempt at long distance,  I found it impossible to stay in the same town as this person.  I had to walk my own path to reclaim my identity as an individual.  The connections in Charlottesville ran too deep for me to find an authentic version of myself.

These changes have been positive.  I’ve found many of my own passions because of this loss.  I’ve reconnected with myself, discovered the benefits of independence, and have found a way to form true friendships with men and women who both like and respect me.

However, I still have moments when I wonder what the hell went wrong.  Moments where I place blame and am unkind to myself about past failures.

I’d written this ex a few times over the years, on his birthday and the like, but got nothing.  Radio silence.  That changed Sunday, when an unexpected response from an email I sent almost two years ago arrived in my inbox.  This wasn’t the first time I’d recieved a letter well after the point that it could have been useful (see Between the Sheets: Part 5).

I hope y’all enjoy the letter he sent me, and the response that I painstakingly wrote but will never send.  I asked him if he’d looked at any of my work (this blog/my website) over the past few years and he admitted that he hadn’t, so I’m not too worried about his eyes making it to these pages.

Begin correspondence:

When I think back to the STORY OF US.  I usually start at the beginning, retracing the events of our shared life, pinpointing moments to piece the roadmap together.

The day that stands out to me is at the storage unit…. I think you were moving into Wertland (?) with your stuff in storage up on 29.  Somehow it trickled down that I would assist you in the gold truck and off we went.  I remember recognizing then that you were a little different.  First off: doing some adult shit (schooling across country in racist-ass Virginia), having a storage unit (I partially blame you for further romanticizing moving/storage for me), and also being tough (and cute) while loading a box TV.Of course we had met before this; First year dorms, borrowing video game controllers at IVY rd apartments, some college party?  But all of this was merely foreshadowing…Regardless of when I moved you that time in the truck, AT SOME POINT you lived at Wertland.  And everybody was chill and played dr. Mario and complained about the New Yorker.

You were dating D____ at the time and we would all spend a fair amount of time in your room listening to your old iTunes (david bowie, flaming lips, brazzaville) and smoking pot.  I guess I thought you were cool then, huh?  And, of course, you were off limits (since you were still with D____) so PERFECT for me.  But I wanted to keep hanging out, and was just sort of always over there (I know, right?).And then one night you were on the hood of his car in the middle of the street screaming at him, and I thought, Oh my God, I really care about this woman!I’m not sure if it was the paramedic in me taking over, but I think it was stronger than that.  I really had grown to like you very much.  And not only did I think you should get down off the car, I hoped you would get over D_____.

So, after you two broke up…maybe Christmas of ’03…then there was the birthday party, then there was foxfield, then there were some other blurry nights, and then you graduated in 05.  I met your family and I remember feeling pretty nervous.  We went to your Kente Cloth ceremony with C_____, S_____, and D____ (maybe A_____ as well).  Your dad, broke the silence with THAT voice:

WHAT ARE YOUR INTENTIONS WITH MY DAUGHTER?

I swallowed nervously and blurted out some drivel about treating you with respect and trying to make you happy.  Which he graciously (and unexpectedly) accepted, in a normal tone.  And at that point I remember feeling strangely comfortable with the whole situation.  Going to the ceremony, eating at Milan, hanging out on the porch at Wertland.

But then something happened.  You stuck around with me.  You stayed while I graduated even though you were ready to move back to California.  This is the part of the story that gets still more blurry.  We had our “upstairs apartment” on Valley, I was finishing school.  I just remember pins and hair.  Oh you’re hair (it deserves its own tale)!  And the crazy landlady, and BICE and getting closer and closer.And then we had the hot hot summer.

Moving over to old ivy rd, burning up all night, taking cool swims in the pool.  I remember you saying once that you thought this was your favorite part of our life together…the harsh conditions stripped us to our elemental cores perhaps?  That was wild and then we had Grady.

I realize that I am mostly just telling events and not explaining my emotional development through this time.  That’s because I don’t know what the hell that means.  In many want I feel like I have had the same approach with adults/adult life/the world in general as I did when I was twelve.   I wanted to treat people fairly and be treated fairly.  But I always felt pressured by the “box of society” which is so prevalent in a place like conservative, rural, upper-middle class Virginia.  I want to make the world a better place but I can’t overcome my sneaking dread of the other shoe dropping.  And now I’ve replaced much of my emotional needs with self-medication, stunting me further.

So we sweated out the summer, moved to Grady.  Rearranged.  Rearranged.  Rearranged.  CIRCA began for me and you were wasting away at the VABC.  What the hell did I want to stick around for so bad?  You were lucky to get out, and im glad you did now.  But I was hurt.  I was low and we had put Darwin [my pet tortoise] in the ground.  The thing was buried.

You went to Utah and for some reason I felt I couldn’t go with you.  Stubbornness, unhealthy tethering to family, emotional crippled-ness were probably all factors.  I preferred to live in a basement and move furniture and avoid adventure.

That was the worst summer of my life, which is honestly pretty good in the relative rankings of BAD TIMES.  But I didn’t ask for help.  My parents were relieved you were gone (I’ve always suspected this) so there wasn’t much guidance coming from them.  When everything happened in those first weeks at cedar city, I turned to J______ (and K___ H_____) for support, and they consulted me not to go.  And I made the mistake of listening.

SO NOW WE FAST FORWARD TO 2009

I think we broke up the first time because, again, I wouldn’t talk about things.  I was just content to go through the motions of living together, but I guess not showing enough forward ambition to be really captivating or loving.  I’m sorry for this Leslie.  I remember we had those horrible screaming matches over nothing.  Because I was a pothead?  Because I resented you for resenting me (in my fool mind)? Because I could never grow up?  Because playing house sucks? I think I wasn’t doing enough to make a happy life.

The 2nd half of our relationship was marked by a concentration of our selves.  You had had twoish years to build your resolve, to consolidate, to improve.  I had bounced back with fresh relationships and discovering Bike and Build, a truly incredible summer.  If nothing else, for me it meant I had two months to focus my mind and body on a singular task.  Perhaps even a noble one.  Nobler than most things I was choosing at the time.  It meant I was not smoking pot everyday.  And then to find out that YOU were on the other end when I returned.  What fortune!

And I think we tried to fall in love for a second time.

Because I hadn’t gotten over you.  You still occupied a rarified space in my heart.  You lodged yourself in my idle consciousness.  I couldn’t escape you.  Partly because I surrounded myself with your memory—I tried to make it impossible to let you go.  Whether it was the boxes in my room at Plateau Rd after the Grady move-out or thinking of you when training for my 10-miler, I was setting up physical and mental cues to remember you.  I never wanted to lose the image of you, hair glowing, face bright, laughing.  Not caring at all for what anyone else thought.

So I tortured myself.  It was why I never told N___ I loved her until she basically was pleading with me to hear it.  It’s why I did a similar thing to C________.  Why not tell the person you love that you LOVE THEM.  What is wrong with me?  I feel like we made it so easy to say I LOVE YOU to each other when we were together that it almost diluted the word.  If I told you a 1000 times that I loved you and we were still broken up then what is the power of saying I LOVE YOU.  I have been crippled.  Ive crippled myself.  And when you push the world away you’re left alone.

So there we were.  You living in your tiny room on Altamont.  Me living on Rugby Ave with B_____.  I remember the first time I saw you (since seeing you in UTAH last?) and you met me in front of the Bodos and you were wearing that black and white striped dress (is this right or have I conjured up something more sensational?) and we just walked and talked like old friends…because we were at that moment.

And then we went skinny-dipping, and rode bikes, and smoked rolled cigarettes, and walked downtown, and played with the kids, and did all sorts of great things back together.  The vacuum of Charlottesville preserving some semblance of happy times.

But had we changed?  Had I changed?  You most certainly had, you were bright and inspired.  But the city dragged you down.  The velvet rut is not known for its fairness.  And it pained me to watch you struggle again.  Why had you come back? Were you giving me a second chance—am I that naïve?  Am I that selfish?  I hoped you were.

And then I went with B____ to Minnesota.  Then I went to New York and screwed up.  Then I went to Philadelphia to break your heart.  I didn’t intend for it to end like that.  I don’t know what I thought. Were we in an open relationship?  Had we communicated? Was I bitter about B______?  Was I JUST THAT SELFISH?  I guess so.

But I shouldn’t have torn you down.  We had rebounded.  We were back.  You were turning me into a goddamn Buddhist!  And I squandered it for a few selfish, stolen moments of pleasure.

And then that broke.  And you had your cysts [tumors actually...5 of them], and your recovery.  And all I wanted was to rededicate myself to you.  And the months went by and then you left again.  And somehow I was there with your remains in a box.  I’ve been a curator of my own memory.

Over these years we shared and were apart, I fell in love with you many times.  Again:  your hair, your smile, your clothes, your voice…I just liked you on an emotional/physical/biological level.  You are the single most stunning woman I’ve ever been with.  Beyond your appearance, you are smart, caring, FUNNY, insightful, wise.  This is what I saw in you and hoped others would.  The other thing I loved was that no matter how staunch I could be in a position (food, energy conservation, manners, appropriate dinner conversation, etc) based on years of rigorous training, you could supply and totally different answer with matching (or exceeding) results.  I loved that we could GO OUT TOGETHER and turn heads and ruffle feathers.

And I think back to visiting California with you…holding baby L______, visiting your old middle school, seeing your grandma and hearing stories over photo-albums while the vinyl scratched in the background.  And I guess we were not really together at that point, but we CERTAINLY WERE TOGETHER, right?  We had suspended reality just long enough to LIVE and LOVE.

And I remember going to the art museum where you “met” Vivian Westwood fully and we lied out in the grass, I loved you very much then and I think you felt the same at that moment.But even that trip was tarnished and divided.  For what?I’m sorry if I made it seem like I wasn’t serious about being with you (I read this in an old letter) in the long term based on “irrevocable differences.”  Apparently this is a problem I have in relationships.  I loved you Leslie.  I would have made a family with you in an instant.  I think we would have been great parents.  We had a joyful love one time.

But do I understand love?  I guess not because while I sure do feel like I’m passing it out, I don’t feel a lot coming back in right now.  But I think I’m confusing love for general acts of kindness.  And acts of kindness aren’t transferred when they are done out or resentment or passive-aggressive self-deprecation.  I know talking and exploring feelings will help with some of this.

I think we should all love each other but we can’t force our love on each other in an oppressive or selfish way.  Love needs time and space to grow.

I love you Leslie and I hope this letter/missive finds you well. I’m sorry it has taken me this long to write you.  I’ve been pretty drunk (only half-not kidding).  I am embarrassed to think about how we have dropped off.  I’ve never even heard how your yearlong costuming project worked out.  Secretly Yall is taking over Richmond, but you know that.

I’m proud of the legacy you have created for yourself and I’m glad that we had time to share some of it together and, maybe, grow.

Take care and feel free to reply, call or ignore this forever.

love, ______

Because I did’t know my ex’s intentions and because he’s betrayed women in the past (me), I didn’t want to respond to him over email.  Email communication has often led to some of the worst misunderstandings I’ve had.  I refriended him on Facebook, observed his activity for a day, and then decided to call and have a conversation with him.  I prefaced the conversation with a very clear text.

“I want to talk to you just once.  Your letter is funny.”

Our conversation was pleasant and I actually felt relieved to talk to him after all of this time.  For all of his faults, and there are many, I still wish him the best in life.  Also, I am mostly terrible at keeping grudges.

I ask that anyone reading my response see it as a highly personal, reactive yet humorous take on a situation I did not quite know how to respond to.  I always thought it might be wonderful to get a declaration of affection in the mail from a long lost lover, but now I think it’s weird. I want to be sentimental, in earnest, but I resist because there really isn’t anything to be sentimental about.

He was a shitty boyfriend, he never talked, he was high on weed through most of it, he rarely considered my feelings or our future, he cheated, he immediately got a new girlfriend after I told him we needed to do couples therapy to stay together, and then he ignored me for two years.  Even his decision to contact me was selfish (as you’ll see in my response below).  Also, during our phone conversation he admitted that he consciously decided  to ignore me for that extended period of time, trying to make me pay for something I said back in 2006!  Ooooof!

Here is my imaginary response:

Dear _______,

Ignoring forever is really not my style.  In fact, I spent most of Sunday figuring out how to respond to this unexpected information.  I hope that in my haste, I do not misspeak. I’ve been known to act quickly.  Usually things work out okay for me, but the people around me tend to get all choked up or blinded by the dust I’ve kicked up.

Saturday around 4pm pst I started to have back pain, lower back pain.  It started in the above the butt muscle and then radiated out through my obliques to my lower abdomen.  This is a fairly unusual bodily sensation for me.  I immediately started thinking of all the reasons I might experiencing this.

Saturday afternoon I’d eaten a two to four week old piece of walnut cake I’d stashed in a cabinet, under some felt squares.  Maybe it had been growing mold and I’d missed the fuzzy green patches while attending to my persistent and frequent hunger.  Sounds like something I might do these days.  City living requires that I refuel frequently, and sometimes I get so hungry I eat whatever’s in front of me.  I’ve also been neglecting the duty of exercising my body…figuring that life and it’s demands, the many miles I walk a day, make up for conscious concerted effort to strengthen specific muscle groups.  I went to bed with a make-shift heating pad Saturday night, warming an old sock filled with rye berries in the microwave.  I missed the party/concert a bunch of my housemates were having.  I slept.

It would silly for me to dismiss these bodily messages.  I see them as indications that you were perhaps, thinking of me.  Maybe you were composing this very letter.  We’ve had these kinds of “psychic” connections with each other in the past.  I did think of you last night as I lay in bed.  You were the one in our relationship who had back pain.  I thought about you and about your moving company and then I woke up Sunday morning feeling fine, only to find this letter.  Coincidence?  Probably.  I bet it was the walnut bread…and gas.

I am glad that you have finally written me!  It’s been two years.  That’s a long time, you know?  I recognize the amount of courage it must have taken you to write these words, to express yourself plainly to me, to highlight your mistakes and shortcomings, to reflect on the relationship and life we had together.  My heart is open to you, but I am glad that distance provides an appropriate boundary.  Also, you are kind of douche bag.  This ain’t no stupid Proust novel.  In real life we don’t wait two years and then attempt to reconcile neglect with a few choice words and a smattering of capitalized phrases.

We show a person over time that we are trustworthy by putting in consistent work and effort.  I haven’t always followed this rule, but I see now why it works.  I also see this as further evidence of your selfishness, choosing to respond when it’s convenient to you.  Again it’s never been about us finding a middle ground…it’s always been about you.  TWO FUCKING YEARS, DUDE!

I can only imagine what reasons you have for writing me after all this time.  What I imagine is that you have just ended or are preparing to end whatever relationship with whatever woman you’ve been torturing and you are afraid of being alone [I confirmed that this is in fact what happened during our telephone conversation.  ZING! ].

In any case your letter made me extremely happy.  I’m happy to know that you’re alive, happy to know that you’re well, happy to know that maybe these last few years have been just as hard on you as they’ve been on me, that maybe you’ve been growing as much as I’ve been growing.  When things ended two years ago, all I wanted to know was that our experiences hadn’t gone to waste.  That the almost ten-ish years (five of relationship plus five of acquaintanceship) that we’d known each other and shared friends, families, and stories had been useful for the both of us.  That we had both gotten something out of it, but all I got was silence.

So much silence.

We become women and men, who we truly are, by acting decisively and practicing what we preach no matter who it might hurt, no matter what we might lose.  If the rewards are unknown then nothing is actually lost.  Mistakes are inevitable.  Intention is what counts.  We become men and women by ignoring stupid advice, going with our own guts, no matter what anyone else thinks.  We become strong by facing our fears.

I only go towards people who let my light shine.  My light is very bright.

I’ve been met with so much silence that I’ve had to fill the spaces with my own music.  It’s been difficult to find a beat.  I haven’t dated anyone for more than a few weeks over the past two years.  I’ve been on a journey to find myself, also, the wounds caused by our relationship left me with a deep mistrust of people, with a deep mistrust of myself.  I proceed with extreme caution.  I am not so carefree right now.  I take that back, I’m not so stupid anymore.  I am not so easy anymore.  Life told me that it was time to stop being easy.  It was no longer fun for me.

I’ve been alone.  Surrounded by people in a crowded city, even with new friends that I know love and care for me deeply, I’ve been alone.  I’ve needed to be alone.  I love to be alone.  It’s less complicated this way.  I needed the space given by your two year silence.

Love, oh love.  What’s love got to do with it?  The words in this letter flatter my ears, but my heart remains unmoved.  People will do all kinds of crazy things in the name of love, but what love is can’t be put into words alone.  People do throw the word around carelessly.  Love takes time, but we sense it in an instant.  Love is words, both spoken and unspoken.  Love is actions, both done and avoided.  I am skeptical that perhaps our frequent use of the word may have had some bearing on your ability to know love and to express it to other women in your life.  I have never had that problem.  The words I LOVE YOU have no power themselves unless matched with action, intention, and belief.  The power of love is in the combination of these elements.

I have been made nauseous by the many twists and turns of my life.  I am still unsure if I know exactly what love is, but I think that my ability to respond to your letter, to openly accept your apology and perspectives is a good sign that I still have a lot of it.  And I want you to know that you are loved also, because that is what makes life good!  Loving and being loved.

I do, however, feel confused about you saying that you still love me.  It’s been two years and I’ve heard it all before.  But I accept your reality as your truth, and will write your feelings into my catalogue of amazingly wonderful life experiences…the experience of being unexpectedly loved by someone who has been admittedly half-drunk and ignoring me for two years.  What a fucking honor.  The experience of being randomly informed, not based on my own actions or desires, that I am loved.  In some ways this is really beautiful, I want to accept what you say, but really it’s not right.

I would also like to suggest that maybe what you’re in love with is the idea of me, because that is all I am to you at this point.  That is all any of us are to each other now.  I never knew you and you never knew me and that’s it.  We had the opportunity to know each other, possibly to create something meaningful, but we didn’t.  So that’s it.  Not every sketch becomes a masterpiece.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts and feelings with me.  It is easy for us to delude ourselves.  I think you have deluded yourself.  Your letter, if sent two years ago, may have been taken as credible.  At this point it’s a joke.  The letter seems little more than a string of random meaningless events and blurriness (synonym for being high or drunk), which somehow leads to love.

If I have one wish for you, it is that you know the beauty and power of loving yourself (I say this without for sure knowing if I’ve done it myself), and of accepting and forgiving yourself and others, flaws and all (I also say this without knowing for sure if I’ve done it myself).

I still sew, yes.  And I still have wild hair, yes.  But I am more than hair, and pins, and smiles, and a laugh.  I am all those things, plus the darker parts too.  The darker parts that your parents probably didn’t like to much.  You can’t just decide to be in love with certain parts of me, the parts you like to remember.  You have to love all of me.  And being in love with me means recognizing and acknowledging everything that my black body represents!  You never did this.  You also thought that you were blackish because you smoked blunts and drank 40 oz.  I am ashamed that we dated.

I believed for most of the two years since we last saw each other that you did not love me.  I don’t feel that way anymore.  I KNOW that you did not love me, despite your proclamations.  I am just another girl who you’ve fit into your life story, the ideas you have about yourself.  You wrong me and it gives you reason to continue to feel sorry for yourself.  It doesn’t matter.  I don’t matter.  I am a character that you invented to play a role that’s been cast over and over again.  My feelings aren’t hurt by this anymore.  It doesn’t matter.

I am in great danger of repeating your mistakes, of casting a character to fill your role, because I was very close to you, and I very much wanted things to work out.  I always want it to work out, each time, with every lover.  I gave our relationship a second chance because I had changed and I thought that maybe my changes could change everything.  I struggle everyday with men because of that mistake, because of the second chance I gave.  I struggle to see something other than you.  Most day’s it’s impossible.  I’ve all but given up.  I rely on a tiny chamber in my heart that has been reserved for love, one that I pretend to forget.

I made mistakes too.  I didn’t know how to communicate my true feelings.  I didn’t know who I was.  I clung onto relationships that were less than healthy because I was afraid of what would happen without them.  In coming to terms with myself I’ve learned that I was completely hiding because in this new life I am entirely too blunt.  I do not care for niceties and sugar coatings at times.  I will sometimes step on toes and break backs if it means I accomplish what I need to accomplish.

Also, I’m not always so kind, or funny, or wise, or caring (especially when I notice or feel that someone is beginning to take advantage).  Sometimes I’m awful, and angry, and moody, and paranoid.  I’ll even tell people I want to punch them in the face.  And then I laugh about it.  Muwhahahaha!

I am not easily so easily handled.  Not so easily convinced that love is what people say it is. I search for it in graffiti and tattoos, messages scrawled on bits of paper.  I look to the poets, I search advertisements, handbags, earrings, street signs, anything really.  I write down these messages.  I keep looking because I want to believe that it exists.  I’m quite sure I will find it in a place that I’d never think to look.  I also think I’m very close to it, despite my doubtful musings.

I have nothing to fucking lose except the hold that your so-called often spoken, now unspeakable, two years of silence,  love used to have on me.  You can stand on your pillar of upper-middle class, rural Virginia whiteness and continue to fear what it means to actually have your own opinion about something, to follow your own heart, and to live your life to the rhythm of it’s drum.  You can continue to try and impress those who are themselves, unimpressive.  You can keep trying to do what other people this is right.  And your mustache is stupid.

I cared for you.  I’m not sure if I loved you then, and I’m certain I don’t love you now.  In a general sense, we are all worthy of respect and love, just by virtue of being alive, of being human brothers and sisters, and I love and loved you in this sense.

I wished that I could have told you that I wasn’t in love with you.  Then maybe we could have gotten back to the business of being friends sooner.  You were in love with a woman who you felt needed saving [hence the paramedic in you coming out], and who happened to be fighting for her right to be seen as a person, more than something for some dude to stick his dick in.  I still fight for this, to be seen as a capable person who is worthy of love and respect in her own right, not because of any gender imposed handicaps.

Because of you I’m not afraid of being the bitchy girlfriend, if I ever find someone worthy and consent to being a girlfriend again.  I might need to be that way to let someone know that I care about them and that their actions DO directly affect me ( I have a great standup routine that I’ve been perfecting about having been a “cool” girlfriend).  I was lazy, expecting you to know what to do without giving you clear instructions.  Trusting that you would “do the right thing.”  Naive of me.  This is where expectations fail and I see that now.  The problem is not in having them, it’s having them and not stating clearly what they are.

Our breakup forced me to figure out how to make a better life for myself, I have an amazing art practice.  Out of the loneliness and questioning came an expressive search for answers.

I can offer you my support, unconditionally.  I offer this to all of the ghosts who meander around the periphery (a term I use for people whose page has turned in the book of my life, but who still pop up every now and then).  Although it may be redirected, no love is ever lost.

I am now focused on making the experiences, stories, and desires of women of color a part of the fashion landscape.  We have so much natural style.  Unbleached, unaltered, and unyielding beauty.  This has been my love since we ended.

I spent the better part of my twenties focusing on matters of the heart.  Fortunately there are other things worth living for.  It’s time for me to give those things a chance.

Thanks for taking some time to reflect, and to write about what we had.  I’d almost forgotten.  I wanted to forget.  I have been hating all men (not even half kidding at all about this) because of our mistakes for a long time now.

Know that your actions have had direct bearing on how I am able to love in the future.  I wish that weren’t the case, that I could have sung”I Will Survive,” at the disco all night with shiny pants and perfect hair.  I wish that could have made me forget.  That I could have just fucked the pain away.  Or drunk it away, or anything really.  I’ve had to live with it.  I’ve had to deal with it and it’s effect on my life.

Remember to follow your dreams steadfastly.  Remember to never compromise.  I hope that your life continues to grow and change.  I hope that I hear sparkling updates from you and yours in the future.  I hope that you, at some point in your life, get the fuck outta Virginia.  Enjoy all that life has to offer.

With love, care, and respect

Leslie

Between·the·Sheets | Empty Hearted |

May 29th, 2012 was a bitch ass day.  Not only was my friend Robert hit while riding his bicycle – an accident that left him with major head injuries, which led to his death the following Friday, the last man I tried to love penned the letter I’m posting below.  I imagine these two events occurring simultaneously.  I can see it perfectly in my mind.

I had asked this man, after our second meeting over a two or three month period, if maybe he was interested in loving me back, at which point he stopped communicating with me.  He didn’t contact me for 60 days.  That’s one sixth of a year.

Here is the letter I received yesterday:

29 May 2012 (he had accidentally dated it 2011, but the second one has a two over it.)

Dear Leslie,

First of all, I do apologize for having taken two months to write.  Despite what you may believe I really am insanely busy.  Four days are occupied by about 35 hours of farm work the two others by outside paid work.  My days generally start at 7am, and I try to be in bed by 10 to be fresh for the next day’s labor.  I’ve assumed the role of farm carpenter/handyman, which is really stimulating.  I’ve so far built a greenhouse, designed and built homes/shelters for most our our 300 animals’ and designed/installed loads of general farm and barn infrastructure stuff, like storage, shelving, drawers, etc.  Animal chores and cleaning/kitchen chores are on top of all that, too.

The community around here is great as well.  Just in the last two months I’ve gotten to know several super cool folks around here, an have strengthened relationships with others from before. I also fell in love with a woman here, not long after returning.  Combined with time, space, and technological inconveniences and limitations, I’ve chosen to put my relationships with most folks outside Anderson Valley on hold for now.

So I am sorry for hurting you with my prolonged silence.  I suppose that when I said, ” I’m as asshole, can’t have nice things, etc.”  I probably ought to have said, “This won’t work out, but maybe we could have fun, casual sex once in a while.”  It takes me a while, generally to open up emotionally, and if things move too fast, I tend to inwardly freak out and hide.  Sometimes, that just the way it is with me.  It was never my intention to lead you on or make promises that I wouldn’t keep.

You are an amazing woman and truly unlike anyone I’ve ever known.  I admire your drive with your art, design, and needlework; your drive for success and stability; your passion for life and love; and your emotional courage and frankness – things I ought to work on.  I think of our tryst fondly and hope you don’t hold any ill will against me.  I hope that in the future, we could be kind and cordial in happenstance of an encounter.  I’m sorry that it didn’t work out.

Yours truly,

G****

I wanted to yell and scream and hit someone after reading this, but all I could do was cry.  Between losing a friend, and the verbal confirmation that I had lost a lover, I was filled with emptiness.  The fastest way a man can get rid of my is by telling me that he has a girlfriend.  It’s been happening a lot lately – and all with glowing affirmations, which I resent.  “Leslie, you’re awesome, but not awesome enough for me.”  That’s what I’ve been hearing from almost every relationship I’ve attempted to approach since last summer.  I suppose I just need to accept that different people want different things, and even though I’m great, it doesn’t mean things are going to work out all the time.

So I’m gong to use this space to write a letter back to G****.  I’m not going to actually send him anything, because well, it’s not worth it [and because I can't.  I deleted all of his contact information from my phone/address book, defriended him of Facebook, and tore up the piece of paper that has his return address on it after he failed to contact me - I like to be thorough].  But I do have some things to say.

Dear G****,

I want you to know that I got this letter the morning after one of my friends passed away.  The double blow was awful, I almost wish you never wrote me.  I imagined that you’d traveled to some far off place and in doing so had fallen off of the side of the earth.  I was beginning to feel happy about that being true.  I really don’t appreciate it that you wrote me only when you found it convenient, popping into my life at, yet again, another inopportune moment.  Fuck you.  I accept none of your apologies.

Also, I don’t care about your farm work, about how busy you are.  We are all busy.  Do you think I ever sleep?  On a good night I get six hours.  I generally wake up around 7am, but typically go to bed at midnight, most nights later.  How exactly do you think I get all my work done?  My blogging, my sewing, my work for money – it all takes time.  In your letter you say you go to bed at 10pm to wake up at 7am.  That means you get 9 hours a night.  I haven’t gotten nine hours in at least three years.  I’m not trying to discredit your work, just saying that your statements are unremarkable, and fail to arouse my sympathies.

We are all grown ups trying to figure out how to take care of ourselves, trying to find our place in this very crowded world.  This takes and an incredible amount of work, for everyone, not just you.  You aren’t special.  The need to work hard doesn’t excuse you from acting like a decent, caring, and feeling human being.  In fact, being a decent, caring, and feeling human being should be everyone’s main work.  I know it’s mine.  I work, and I work, and I work, and the only reward seems to be more work.  That’s just the way it is.  We are lucky to have gotten this far.  We were lucky to have had the opportunity to love each other.

Perhaps we want different things out of life.  I can honestly say that I am, 85% of the time, overwhelmed by the number of people that I am around.  City life is intense and noisy.  It’s smelly and crowded, and filled with pain and movement.  Yes, I have to work hard for what I have.  Yes, my monthly rent is just about as much as my father’s mortgage.  Yes, my room has no windows.  The benefit is that I get to love deep, and hard, and loud.  I get to meet people like Robert, who don’t seem to have a racist bone in their bodies.  People who are, like me, traveling off of the beaten path or trying to create new ones.  People who accept me for who I am.  That makes it worth the struggle.

I am going to challenge some of the things you wrote, because they are inconsistent.  And I realize that you 1. are still putting up some big walls (your letter pretty much reads like an emotional brick.  Sinking, sinking, sinking, dead.  You never once say how you felt about me.  How did you feel about me?  Did you feel anything at all?  Do you feel anything at all?) 2. may not be telling me the whole story, which is your prerogative.  In your letter you said, “It takes me a while, generally to open up emotionally, and if things move too fast, I tend to inwardly freak out and hide.”  Okay, I get it.  But, then you also said, “I also fell in love with a woman here, not long after returning.”  So, what was going on with me was “too fast,” even though we’ve “known” each other somewhere between 8 and 10 years, and had been communicating on and off since January.

If my calculations are right, you’ve been back in Boonville for two months, and you’re already in love?  What kind of love?  Is there emotion involved in this new love?  I’m guessing yes, so it can’t be a matter of time, and “fastness,” can it?  Seems like proximity is more the issue, and a lack of interest in modern methods of communication.  And really none of those things would matter if there were a connection between us.  The real issue is  a lack of interest in me and the things that I stand for.  That’s okay.

I do wish you would have told me that what you wanted was fun, casual sex at any point over the last four months, cause I would have know with clarity what I was getting myself into.  I made it very clear to you that my feelings were involved.  What did you expect?  I do not enjoy casual sex.  I can’t even say I understand it.  Sex for fun, sex for self-gratification, sex as recreation -  I don’t get any of this right now.  Sex is a creative act, if not in the literal sense of making new life, in the sense that its an opportunity for two people to join and do something that they couldn’t do alone.  It’s regenerative, it restores us to wholeness.  Casual sex is not fun for me.  It does not keep me whole. I live life with my whole heart, and so when I let some one into my vagina/studio/home/life I am also letting them into my heart.  I’ve tried to keep from feeling this way, but then sex (life) isn’t good or worth having (living).  Every time I’ve tried to have casual sex, I’ve also ended up feeling like a human blow up doll.

So to have enjoyable sex I have to use my heart, and to use my heart means it’s not casual.  I genuinely want to connect with another human being, and what happened between you and me was very disturbing.  I wish you had stopped to look at my (he)art.  You would have figured that out very quickly if you had.  I finally felt something, and then I learned, through your actions not your words, that it didn’t mean and could never mean the same thing to you as it did to me.  Even if we couldn’t be together, there are better ways of treating and respecting relationships than the path you took – detached disengagement.  This disrespects love and sex.  It makes them empty acts.  And that’s how I feel about you now, empty hearted.  Fully empty.

I send a wish of good luck and patience to your new lover, and hope that you are at least approaching the relationship with honesty and kindness, fierce and unrelenting courage, a spirit of acceptance and compassion, humor, affection, creativity, and the dream of a shared, harmonious future.  Our time on this planet is not guaranteed, so anything less would be a waste of time.

There is not really a salutation that’s appropriate for this letter, so I’ll just say goodbye.

Leslie

p.s.  I don’t hold anything against you, in fact, I do hope to forget you.  I hope that if we do run into each other I question where or how I met you, never quite able to put my finger on it.   That you disappear into the anonymous sea of people that have come, like waves to and away from me.  That in a moment of hesitation, I fail to approach you, and that you get swept away in the rising tide of forgotten strangers.  I don’t think our paths will cross anytime soon.  You can have the pigs, I’m headed for the stars.

Between·the·Sheets |American Boys – Part 5|

It’s a full moon, and I’m hours away from installing my first contribution to the art world at Million Fishes’ annual group show.  I am beyond excited.  I am also trying to stretch these good feeling, so I’ve decided to write about a recent romantic escapade.  Really, I’m procrastinating.  I need to clean my room and getting ready for what I think will be one of the most memorable moments of my life, but I want to take some time to reflect on a few recent events.

Two months ago, I had an amazing tryst with a person I considered a casual acquaintance.  I wrote about him in the final vignette of a post about the ambiguity that can sometimes surround friendships, especially when you mix in a little attraction.

If you read the post, you’ll remember that I liked the physical chemistry we had.  Please believe me, the sex was good (and I’ll get into that later), but it was the smaller moments of physical intimacy that I valued.  These had been so hard to approach while internet dating, and the mere mention of such activities made several of the men I interacted with, self-conscious.  Conversely, I was not into sharing such moments with all the people I went out with.

I liked doing these activities with this person who, for the purposes of this post, I’ll refer to as Farm Boy.  I felt comfortable and natural with him.  I’m hesitant to say that I know this man, but we’ve been acquainted for quite some time and his movements have always been on the periphery of discussions in my friend group.

Here is a little list of physically intimate activities I liked doing with Farm Boy.

1. Holding his arm while we walked down the street

2.  Trying to tickle him even after he declared it couldn’t be done

3.  Elbow fights

4.  Toe wrestling

5.  Leg locking competitions (hard to explain but fun to do)

6.  Putting my hand on his leg while sitting at a bar

7.  Massages

8. The way his chin dug into my shoulder when we spooned.

9.  Kissing him in public.

10.  Sharing things with him.

I felt very comfortable.  I had not experienced this since August, when I hooked up with that cute French boy.

I see what the two experiences have in common, both of these men were in the midst of traveling.  Traveling sometimes makes people feel open in ways they wouldn’t be if they were bound by familiar spaces.  It helps us live in the moment, and encourages us to see different perspectives.  Traveling is wonderful, and I realize I am really attracted to the adventurous and open spirit of travelers, for better or for worse.  I have had some of my best sexual experiences right before, during, or after either me or my partner return from some kind of trip.  Distance and loss can create intense moments of desire.

Travel has given me  a unique perspective, one that I have been trying to cultivating in my daily life with the people I’m surrounded by.

The traveler wastes no opportunity.  Any person could be the key that opens the door to your next exciting adventure, your next meal, or the place where you’ll lay your head.  The traveler takes nothing for granted.

Traveling encouraged some of the habits that have allowed me to pursue my artistic dreams.  Mainly, traveling helped me divorce my sense of identity from the stuff I owned.  A good itinerant packs light.  Traveling helped me develop my sense of fearlessness.  I am not intimidated by new people and new places, and I like taking safe risks.

When I was traveling a fair amount I was great at living in the moment.  I made friends instantly because I loved talking with strangers.  I put myself in situations that created intense bonds with people because that’s what you need to do when you’re traveling.  You have to learn to cultivate relationships quickly, and you have to be okay with shaking off those bonds at any time.  I got really good at this.  I didn’t even miss people anymore.  I didn’t see the importance of long-term relationships.  I was always on the hunt for the new and the exciting.  It was a habit.

As a seasoned travel fiend, I knew the risks of being with some one like Farm Boy, someone who was still milking the emotional highs and lows that result from the continual process of creation and destruction.  Still, I welcomed him into my life.   I thought I saw some potential.  This is not an unusual experience for me.  I am always seeing the hidden possibilities.  Maybe it comes from my artist’s brain.  Things are never as they appear, and most times you find beauty and love in places you least expect them.  All I can say is that I liked the idea of us.

Over the two month period that bridged his visits he spent time working on the farm that he calls home, and then spent about six weeks abroad.  He sent me several messages updating me about his whereabouts.  I even got a really strange phone call from him at 4am one day.  I was glad to hear his voice and felt happy that he had thought to call me, even if he had woken me up.

While he was gone my mind reeled with far off fantasies.  I always make up nicknames for the boys I’m dating and this time was no exception.  I called him Farm Boy when I was talking to my girlfriends about him, and at some point my mind rambled to this scene from The Princess Bride.

Girlish hopes.  Too bad love can often be more like this:

He messaged me several days before he arrived, saying that his trip had included lounging on the beach, drinking beer, and eating lots of red meat.  I was the last stop on a journey that took him to Costa Rica, Nicuragua, and Austin.  He seemed glad to be coming to visit me.  I am not a heavy drinker or an excessive eater of red meats, so he knew he could get a break from some of those activities while in my company.

We met around 10pm at The Attic, a dive bar on 24th street that has an amazing $3 happy hour.  He entered carrying a large backpack and a broken guitar.  We had a few drinks and then returned to my house.

That day had already been a heavy one for me.  My father has been closely monitoring his PSA levels for the past several years, and recently got the news that confirmed the presence of prostate cancer.  Knowing that this disease is both very common and rarely fatal was still not very comforting for me.  Having lost one parent already means that my mind spiraled, and I saw myself on the fast track to becoming a real life orphan.

It’s a sad thought to think that my future partners and any future children I might have may not ever meet my parents.  This feels highly unusual.

Farm Boy came into town the same day that my dad had uncharacteristically shown up at my job to take me out to lunch and deliver the news.

I’d done a bit to prepare for his visit.  I cleaned my room and took time off from work just so we could spend the day together.  Taking a day off from work for a person is an important gesture.  I restructured my life in a major way to accommodate him.  In the past few years I have never once missed a day of work because I wanted to spend time with a boy.  One of my coworkers insisted that I shouldn’t have done this, but I have no pride when it comes to love anymore.  Love is fleeting, and I take it when and where I can find it.  I’m not about playing hard to get.  Perhaps I’m misguided.

In total, he stayed for 3 nights.  Over that period of time we must have had sex close to a dozen times.  Maybe I’m exaggerating, I can’t really think of how many times we had sex cause I wasn’t counting.  All I know is that my sex box was filled with condoms when he got here, and now there’s just the one.  I can honestly say that it was some of the best sex I’ve had in recent memory because I wasn’t afraid of getting hurt.

I mean this both emotionally and physically.  It has been rare for me to have sex that is pain free.  I think it’s an anatomical consideration, something about the shape and size of my vaginal canal.  In any case, I was excited to realize that I had met someone that I could have sex with all day without my lady bits feeling chapped or sore or chafed or broken or raw or irritated or any of the other unpleasant sensations that can go along with having the parts that I do.  I am also totally willing to accept that maybe for the first time in my life I was with a man who actually knew how to use what he’d been given to please a woman, instead of just pleasing himself.

The next day at work someone commented on how relaxed I looked, and I had to tell them in very blunt terms why I felt on top of the world.  She looked at me through the tiny slits that her eyes quickly became.  I’ve consciously unlearned shame as it relates to sex, but not everyone around me has.  I’ll have to remember this in the future.

Other pleasant things that happened during the visit were, a leisurely walk to the grocery store, where we bought food and made a meal together.  I swear the only way to my heart is through my stomach.  The man who I fall in love with next will like feeding me.  I’m not much of a cook these days since I spend the majority of my creative efforts on visual art…and this blog.

One night he met me at the Bart station after work and we went out for a few drinks, before setting on a place to have dinner.  It was really nice to have the company of someone I wanted to be around.  Really nice.  Also, we watched a few movies together, cuddled up in my bed.  I rarely watch movies by myself.  There was a really nice moment where he read a book as I sewed.  To be engaged in separate activities of personal interest while being around someone I cared about felt amazing.  I don’t think that has ever happened to me before.

He met one of my childhood best friends one night, and she, fortunately, broached the question I’d been wanting to ask all day when she inquired about the length of his stay.  He gave some vague answer, but at least I knew he’d be here for another day, so that was comforting.

Wednesday night is when things started to get weird.  It’s when he started his, “I’m an asshole,” talk.  He began trying to convince me of this in many ways.  He told me about a friend of his that is several years older than us that he identified with.  They both live the vagrant life.  “We both pretend to be hippies, but were really just dicks from the east coast.”  In a previous conversation he told me that his camera broke, so I offered to give him my old point and shoot, a camera that I don’t use much since being gifted a much nicer model.  He refused my generosity saying, “I can’t have nice things, I break nice things.”

I had been very vocal about how much I liked having him around.  Partially because he wasn’t being chatty, and someone had to say something, but mostly because I did like having him around.  His presence allowed me to explore parts of myself that I haven’t been familiar with in a long time.  We woke up Thursday morning and I asked him what his plans were for the day.  “I’m leaving.”  I was immediately angry, but I didn’t say anything.  I uncomfortably pinned my body on top of his.

We had sex three times that morning.  During the last session I decide to say what I had to, when he couldn’t go anywhere.  I’m sure other women have used this strategy.  It’s quite satisfying.  I told him that I thought all of this moving stuff was bullshitty, I told him that if he wanted to love me he could, I told him that he could do what he wanted here in San Francisco.  He asked me if we could have the conversation later, but I wasn’t interested in having it later.  It wouldn’t stop him from leaving.

After, we got dressed and made breakfast.  Made breakfast.  So amazing.  It was the most complete morning meal I’d had in years:  egg, toast, fruit, kefir, cheese, cured meat product.  He walked me to the Bart, and I went to work.  By 2:30 he was gone.  I playfully texted him once that day, but got no response.  When I returned home I found a note on the stairs leading up to my loft.

In the letter he thanked me for my generosity and explained that his heart wasn’t that fast to move.  He told me not to waste any emotional or physical energy on him.  He asked me to be patient and he told me that he would see me again soon without being able to give me any specifics like under what circumstances or when.  He lives in the fucking middle of nowhere, which turns out to be a hard place to get to and away from.

My initial reaction was to send him a text and tell him that I understood.  I think I was holding out hope that he was being honest and that he would see my soon and that everything would work itself out.  Yeah….it took me about two days to work through those delusions.

I finally sent him this message after much deliberation:

I keep writing you texts and deleting them because I want to respect your boundaries, but I can’t hold myself back.  I don’t believe in that anymore.  I’m sorry.  I can’t do what you asked me to do.  I can’t not devote energy to thinking about you.  Does that even make sense?  That stuff you wrote in the letter.  I can’t do that.  And I’ll be sad if that ruins my chances (turns out I’m not that sad) but it is what it is.  I’ll try to explain it in Farm Boy terms.  If you don’t water a plant, weed around it, and make sure it gets lots of sunlight, it dies.  Living things require attention.  So what does this mean?  I don’t know, but I wanted to that.  Ok.  Bye.

I keep going back to the metaphor of a garden when I think about how I want to live my life and how I want others to treat me.  I realized I couldn’t do what he was asking me to do, and feel emotionally stable.

1.  I didn’t want to have to not think about him.  I want to water my loving heart.  Love only exists in the mind, and it takes practice and work to cultivate a loving perspective.  He was asking me to repress my feelings, starve out my need to feel love, and undo all the work I’ve been putting my energy into for the past year or so.  That’s fucked up.  Also, if I followed his instructions then I would become trapped in a game of whenever he pops up in my life I drop all my plans to cater to his needs, which I was not about to agree to.

2.  Life does not reward inaction.  You pick fruits when they’re ripe, else they’re bitter and they make your sick, or they rot and they make you sick.  I was ripe for him, the appropriate response would have been to pick me.

A few more days passed and I realized, from a very disorganized trip to the grocery store, that I had other things I needed to say to him before I could move on.  I ran home with tears in my eyes (the grocery store is right around the corner so it wasn’t that long of a blurry walk).  I instinctively checked facebook, and found that one of my aunts had posted a picture of my mother climbing a mountain.  I sobbed over my keyboard, and knew that what I had to do was tell this Farm Boy exactly how I felt.  It wasn’t as hard as climbing a mountain in a disabled body.  This was easy in comparison to her struggles.

This is what I composed and sent:

I’ve had a hard time figuring how to write this letter. Do I do it as a friend or as a potential romantic interest? How would these letters be different? I am biased. I have an agenda. I acknowledge that. I want my feelings reciprocated. I will also give a head nod to the fact that there is some emotional stuff I’m dealing with since learning of my father’s illness. You have every right to tell me to eat your dust. There is a good chance I should be paying attention to other things/am focusing on this area of my life because I want to avoid other parts. Also, your life is none of my fucking business.

I realize that there is the distinct possibility that the things I write in this letter will go in one ear and out the other. Fall on deaf ears, as it were. But this is all I can do in this situation, and writing helps relieve my anxieties. Just getting it down is good enough for me. Where my words land is always an unknown.

I lied. I can’t be patient. I don’t know why I told you that. I suppose I wanted to make you happy, but it doesn’t make me happy. It isn’t what I want. Perhaps I’m being too hasty, but in my opinion there is no glory in waiting. Thanks for bringing that point home for me.

I very much enjoyed the time we spent together, both times. I hope you will remember them as fondly as I do. I saw beautiful potentials.

I love that you cook and love food. This compliments my own weaknesses well, since food tends to take a back seat to other priorities in my life. I like how affectionate you are. I meet very few people who like physical contact as much as I do. The ease I feel around you was nice too. I like your sense of humor, and I like that you don’t mind being made fun of (crusty bellybutton). And finally, I like that you have a sense of adventure. Oh, and I like your eyes. I really like your eyes. The color is really nice.

I have the very specific dream of building a life with someone who is happy to share theirs with me – someone who is not withholding, who knows where they are going and wants to weave me into their story. Someone who sees and likes the beautiful potentials too. I don’t want to be an accessory or a pit stop. I want to be an integral component.

I’ll tell you what my dad told me about a year ago. I was making plans to complete this project, and was telling him how frustrated I felt because I didn’t have a studio. Without a space this project could not happen. We were in Santa Monica, having dinner at an expensive restaurant on the pier. “You have to stop leaving,” he told me. “I was about to remodel the garage into a studio for you, and then you left. You went back to Virginia. I was going to pay for it, all you had to do was put the work in.”

My dad’s girlfriend chimed in, “Stay somewhere, anywhere. Just for five years. Try it. See what happens.” She told me that she had spent her youth traveling the world, crisscrossing borders and partying. Only working here and there when she had to. She loved to dance, so she moved to Brazil.  She fell in love, always with musicians. One of them was a junkie. He stole from her.

I hated her for giving me advice. She wasn’t my fucking mom, she was a lady my dad was banging. She lived off of her parents, who had made a shit ton of money running their own dressmaking company in the 1940′s and 50′s. They made millions of dollars after getting exclusive rights to a fabric that was both easy to care for and aesthetically pleasing. They sold their dresses in Macy’s stores across the country and until the recent death of her mother, lived in a penthouse in downtown LA. Rachel, my dad’s girlfriend, never worried about her future because of the wealth that she grew up with.

The words they’d said infuriated me. It was the first time in my life that anyone had explained things to me in those terms. I didn’t want to hear it. It wasn’t my fault. I tried to explain this, but every corner I rounded, every excuse I made came up empty. My words were hollow and I’d run out of corners to hide in. I cried throughout the entire meal. I shoveled food in my mouth, chewing through sobs, only tasting the saltiness of my own tears. The quality of the meal was lost on me.

It was nighttime, and as we left the restaurant I headed for the beach, shedding my clothes as I ran. The water was cold, and my naked skin turned into goose-flesh in the southern California tide.

When I got back to the car, my dad and his girlfriend were waiting for me. They didn’t ask me any questions. “I had to go swimming,” was all I said.

I probably don’t have the right to tell you any of this, but I strongly encourage you to explore what you might be able to accomplish by staying still. Doesn’t matter where it is. Just try it out. Maybe? I’m willing to admit that I may be wrong about all of this. We are different people. What lights your fire is most likely different from what lights mine. But I had to say it. I would have thought myself both a bad friend and lover if I didn’t.

I have no idea how truthful you are when you talk to me, but some of the comments you made gave me the idea that maybe you’d benefit by being gentler on yourself. “I break nice things.” “I’m an asshole.” “Give your necklace to someone who is nice.” “I’m a hater.” None of these statements made me want to be patient and wait for you to make up your mind about whether on not you like me. Why would I wait for a self-proclaimed asshole? That’s just silly. Perhaps this was your intention, yes? It worked wonderfully then.

But still, I’m grateful. Thank you for the orgasms, and the tiger balm, and the delicious meal we made together, and the laughs, and for meeting me at bart, and for meeting my friend (who thought you were funny), and for the ice cream, and for holding my arm as we walked down the street, and for having what I believe is a good heart.

Ok, time for me to do other work. I have a show next weekend that I’m so not prepared for.

Hope that you’re settling in nicely. Feel free to write if you ever feel inclined. You know where to find me.

With warmth,

Leslie

p.s. My roommate Marilyn asked about you, said she met you as you were leaving. She called you beautiful and when I told her your story she said I should try to get you back here. ha.

This is a strange story to tell because I have none of his perspectives to add in.  In fact he’s been so silent about all of this I wonder if he’s living some secret double life as an assassin or something.  I wish that were true, but I think I know what’s gong down.  I’m dealing with a person who is either emotionally unaware or emotionally unwilling.  My guess is the latter.  I am a pretty emotionally sensitive individual and I highly doubt I would be attracted to someone who was completely unaware.  He has no desire for emotional connectedness with me, which is okay.

On Monday, a week after he arrived, he sent me this picture:

And the accompanying text:  Please accept this picture of piglets as apology for my emotional vagueness.

I told him that I accepted, but that doesn’t mean I think he’s sorry.  The apology in itself is vague.  And if he were really sorry he do something about it to stop feeling so damn sorry for himself.

And so, I add vagrants to the list of men that I consider not partner worthy.  So far musicians are the only other group on this list, but they are occupational vagrants, so really the list only includes one type of man – the wanderer.  Be it by occupation or independent choice, I will no longer romantically pursue men whose choice to wander affects their ability to make emotional connections and keeps them from living a richly fulfilling life.  Cause that is the real truth.  I cultivate emotional relationships with people because it makes my life more rich and satisfying.

The Farm Boy is still set on traveling, but I think he’s missed one of the most important lessons, the one about quantity versus quality.

Isn’t it weird that the thing you like most about a person can often be the thing that is worst about them?  Why have I only realized this now?  And why do our hearts allow us to love people that cannot return our feelings?

I think this song might answer that last question.

Even a mean old man

Needs love

Is there a man out there that has the traveler’s spirit, who has a sense of adventure and openness, who is also brave enough to want to be with me for more than a few days?  I hope I get a chance to live out the answer to that last question.

Love and enjoy.

Between·the·Sheets |Dear Mom|

I posted this entry last week without ever writing it.  I have a habit of scheduling and planning what I will write several weeks in advance.  This usually insures that I post regularly and that I stay connected to my writing practice.  Every now and then I get off track.  Practices take practice, and one of the hardest things for me to master has been getting back on the wagon after I’ve fallen off.  I felt a bit discouraged after posting this empty entry, like I let the viewers that excitedly checked this post expecting to read a revealing story about my sexual discoveries down.  I felt like never coming back to this place.

A well-timed tweet from bell hooks saved me from drowning in the shallow pool of self-pity I’ve been wading in for the last few days.  I have a twitter account, but I haven’t quite mastered that form of communication yet.  I will openly admit that it still confuses me.  I’m not quite sure what I should be tweeting about, I worry that my tweets will be inane and uninteresting, and I haven’t quite learned the #vernacular.  That didn’t keep me from finding this from Ms. hooks today:

If you write everyday,

sooner or later you will have a book.

Write!

How inspiring and how timely.  I decided to press on with this practice because it truly brings me joy, and I realize that there is always room for improvement.  There is, however, no room for giving up.

A few months ago I attended an art opening at the Center for Sex and Culture.  Two of my worlds collided that day.  The featured artist was my housemate Finley Coyl, and I had been getting familiar with the folks at CSC over the past several months.  It was amazing.  I got to hang out with two different groups of friends at the same time.  I love it when life shows me the overlaps.

Somehow the group I was chatting with stumbled across the topic of masturbation, and I mentioned to Robert and Carol, the founders of CSC, that I hadn’t been able to ever forgive my mother for something she’d done to me when I was a very small, very sexually curious human.   Carol came up with a brilliant idea.  She suggested that I write a letter to my mother, describing my experiences.  Robert had some other ideas, which I will divulge later.

I initially wrote this in a journal while hanging out at Hollister in the Westfield Mall.  I was killing time in between work and socializing and I needed a pen.  I found one behind their unguarded cash register.  Even thought it’s SoCal themed, the decor in that store reminds me to stay focused on my goal of making it to the Caribbean sometime soon.  I crave sunshine.  San Francisco rarely allows me to bear my shoulders and feel warm.  Hot summers are one of the few things I miss about The South.

Anyhow, you’ll find the letter I wrote to my mother below.  Enjoy!

Dear Mom,

I never got to talk to you about this.  I am angry at you.  You and Jesus tried to take something from me, something that is an always has been very important to me.  Why would you do that?  Kind of a bitch move.

For a time I never know the thrills of self-pleasure without pangs of guilt.  My little hands quivered.  My mind raced.  I made promises to stop.  Every year I would make another goal.  “By the time I’m 7 I will stop doing this.” “I’m so bad.”  “This will be the last time.”  But I couldn’t stop.  I couldn’t help it.  I didn’t care if god was watching.  I decided he must have been a perv.  Didn’t he have better things to do?  I loved doing it, and I hated myself for it.

I can’t really remember when I began masturbating – tickling the taco, petting my poodle, beatin’ the beaver.   From what I can figure, I’ve been doing it since I realized I had hands…but that’s not right.  I didn’t figure out how to give myself an orgasm with my hands till I was much, much older.  I probably started around the age of 3 or 4.  In those days I would just rub my mound against something soft.  In fact, rubbing myself against a pillow or a partner is still my favorite way to get off.  There is no better sex toy than a firm thigh.

Do you remember that you made my first sex toy?  You did.  Remember those anatomically correct dolls you sewed for my older siblings?  There were two of them, one for each of the boys in our family.  They were made from fabric and thread (no wonder I love fabric).  They had little, brown penises.  They were stuffed with plush down, and they were just my size.  Three feet tall, with brown yarn for hair.  The perfect humping doll.  These were my first loves.  I was convinced they had been made specifically for my pleasure.  They were perfect.  They didn’t say anything.  They just waited patiently, without saying a word.  They didn’t demand orgasms from me, like a few of my human partners have.  When I was done they doubled as body pillows.  They were the best boyfriends I’ve had to date.  You hid them after you figured out what I was doing with them.  That was also a bitch move.

Fortunately, I have always been creative.  After my boyfriends disappeared  I had to find substitutes.  Any soft good reminded me of them.  Arm rests on couches, the giant pillow in the papasan chair, and the army drab-colored, down sleeping bags that you and dad had from your college days, these places and items became my new comforters.  And that’s what masturbation was about for me in those days.  It was comforting and soothing, it also happened to feel amazing.  Why do you think I liked making forts, or as I thought of them, “masturbation caves,” so often?  I would fill them with every pillow I could find.  Those were the glory days.

Things would have worked out fine if not for two factors.  First off, I shared a room with one of my brothers who was 7 years older than me.  He was 11 when I was 4, so he was probably starting to blossom sexually and I think having a kinky kid sister was bothersome.  I can’t blame the dude.  I probably would have felt uncomfortable as well.  Also, I’d  developed a fetish for photographs.  We had tons of photo albums, and I would regularly sneak into them, take a picture of a man or woman I liked out, and rub that against myself.  I can’t explain why I did it.  What can I say, I also used to eat chalk.  Now I know why I’m drawn to photograph.  Geeez, sex explains a lot.

One day you caught me as I tried to put a picture back into place, between a layer of paper and a plastic sleeve.  You asked if you could smell my hands and after inspection you declared that they smelled like vagina.  Duh.  What did you expect?  I’d been masturbating.

Since you and dad had decided to raise us kids as Christians, eventually you asked Our Lord Jesus to help you solve the problem of your frisky daughter.  I remember sitting on your lap and you reading some quotes to me from the bible.  I remember crying because I felt ashamed, I didn’t understand any of the words in the bible.  I remember continuing to masturbate, only now with a new feeling, guilt.

But I never stopped pleasuring myself completely, and I’m so glad for that.  I have always been familiar with the sensations I can create by gyrating of my hips, and pressing myself against a supple surface.  I learned new methods when needed.  The reason I love hot tubs is all too clear to me now.  I learned to masturbate with the jets in the tub around the age of 10.  Eventually hands came into play, and then I found that vibrating back massager you had.  One of the stranger objects I used was a role of wrapping paper.  I do love presents. Ha.

I cherish the discoveries I made in childhood, and after losing touch with them for a time I guard my orgasms with a ferocity that may or may not be healthy.  They’re not something I’m willing to let a lot of people help me with.  Partners can watch me do it to myself,  but helping is limited to kissing and cuddling.  I don’t trust them to take care of them like I do, like I have my whole life.  This is something I want to get over.  It’s a control issue.  I’m orgasmically retentive.  I’m afraid of giving them away and loosing a connection to myself again after working so hard to find sex positivity in an environment that so actively discouraged it.

I was having sex with someone recently and realized how scared and vulnerable I felt as I neared climax.  I didn’t let them have it.  One of my biggest violations happened earlier in the year when I told a guy I wasn’t ready to come, even though I was close, and he forced me to.  He stole my orgasm.  Fucking punk.

Anyway, I thought you might like to know these things.

Oh, and I have one last thing to do.  I’m off to your grave, where I’ve been instructed t masturbate in front of it with a bible in hand.  This was Robert’s suggestion.

I hope that wherever you are, you are loving and enjoying!

Lolli

Between·the·Sheets |Frustrated Flo|

The past few weeks of Fem Sex Comm have been intense.  We’ve covered a variety of topics related to female anatomy, gender and gender expression, and body image.  Most nights I leave with a pounding headache.

For tomorrow’s meeting we were asked to write down memories related to our first menses.

I was floored by how easy it was for me to dig up this memory.  There was no digging, in fact.  It was all right there on the surface, like sea foam.  Just had to skim it off.  I am unsure of how accurate this memory is.  I get the feeling my brain has combined two or more events into one, but it accurately captures the sentiments I have surrounding my cycle rather than it being a fully linear description of events.  The events described below all happened, I’m just not sure if the order is correct.  It’s how I remember things and that makes it as real as any fiction.

As I wrote, I realized that my memory might in some way relate to the host of problems I’ve had with my reproductive system.  I’ve dealt with painful periods, uncontrollable, heavy bleeding, and irregular cycle lengths.  Last year I had had 5 fibroid tumors removed from my uterus and while they were cleaning things up they discovered Endometriosis,  in my surgeon’s words, “it was a mess.”  The surgery lasted 2 hours longer than planned.  They also operated on my right ovary.  Endometriosis affects the uterine lining.  My uterus had been shedding it’s lining into my abdominal cavity, causing severe pain and discomfort.  Since the surgery my symptoms have been manageable, but I don’t feel completely out of the woods when it comes to my reproductive system.  None of my maternal aunts had reproductive problems, but both of my grandmothers had some type of reproductive surgery.

It was during the time that I was recovering from this surgery that I decided to dissolve my old life and consciously pursue a creative lifestyle.  Baby making might be out of the question for me. “Give it a shot and see how it goes,” was the doctor’s reply to my inquiry.  In reality the odds that I will be able to have children are probably pretty good.  Plenty of women with both conditions have been able to conceive.  In fact, having a baby is probably what I should be doing to regain my reproductive health.  Many healthcare providers have noticed that baby making sometimes “resets” a woman’s hormonal system for the better – especially in cases where Endometriosis is the problem.  Also women who’ve had children earlier in life suffer from the kinds of conditions I’ve had less frequently.  From the last report at least one ovary is in good condition and the fallopian tubes were thankfully free from harm.

For now, I am my own baby.  My own mother, my own father, my own brothers, my own sister.  I think about myself as a baby most often.  Pretty baby.  Messy baby.  Sleepy baby.  Angry baby.  This insures that I am gentle with myself, and also respectful of my needs.  I listen to my internal screaming baby as much as possible.  It helps that in the past five years my family has added four new souls.  I’ve gotten to see close up how much attention and love babies need.  They deserve it, and they’re not afraid to demand it.  Adults could stand to learn a lot from babies.  Reminds me of this song:

So after a long introduction, here is what I remember about my first menses:

There were ants in my hamper.  I followed a long line ants from the basin of the bathroom sink, to the floor, around the the corner of my doorway, over the trash can, and to the back wall of my room where my hamper sat.  I wondered what they were after.

What seemed like hundreds of tiny, black ants had gathered on the crotch of my panties.  How did they know?  They were eating or taking or doing whatever it is that ants do with the once thick, now dry, white crust that had been left on the inside of my underwear.  A space that, up until a few weeks earlier, had been free of panty waste (save the occasional skid mark).  A sticky substance had been coming out from me for months.

I tried to get rid of them.  I shook them off, hid the underwear at the bottom of my hamper, and through a fresh pile of clean clothes on top to throw them off track.  Their internal radar systems were too accurate.  They always returned.

I didn’t want anyone to know.  So I kept my laundry in my room, refusing to throw it the laundry room with the rest of the dirty clothes.

Eventually I ran out of underwear.

“Leslie, it’s time to go to school!” I heard.  I was in the sixth grade and it was few months before my 12^th birthday.  “Leslie, hurry up!”

“I can’t go to school today!”

“You have to go to school!”

“I can’t…I….I…I don’t have any underwear!”

My dad burst into the room.  “Don’t have any underwear?”

“They’re all dirty…I can’t go.”

I stood mortified as I watched my father dig through my hamper.  He grabbed a pair of antie panties and marched me over to the bathroom sink.  I watched as he turned the faucet on and poured a bit of hand soap over the crotch.

“You can always wash them like this and let them dry overnight if you’re running out.”  “Put these on for now.”

They were damp, but so was I, so what difference did it make?

I can’t remember if I cried on the outside, but part of me most definitely was.  The last few months had been torture.

My body had been growing in strange ways, attracting attention, a different kind of attention, from the neighborhood boys, boys who I’d been steady beating in foot races and scaring the shit our of during our nighttime hide and go seek games.  Boys I loved to tease.  Boys who had to hold the other side of the jump rope so me and Jamilah could double dutch together.  Boys who had been forcibly made to wear makeup during my weekly fashion dress up parties, held ceremoniously on the front lawn for everyone to see.

They started with whistles, and then with words.  I went from being a stick-ish tomboy to someone they could call “thick,” overnight.  They had found their revenge, and it was enacted on my body.

The women at church talked about my rear end in front of me, like I didn’t exist.  Like I didn’t have ears.  The hushed whispers and the giggles from my girlfriends still waiting to get their periods didn’t help.  My brothers told me my butt needed it’s own area code.  Clever motherfuckers.  One of their friends started calling me Pele, after telling a group of boys that my but looked like a soccer ball.  I wanted to morph into a pill bug and hid away until all of this had passed.  I wish I had a hard shell like they did.

I remember my first period like it was yesterday.  It is one of the most traumatic memories I have.  Maybe that’s why I still bleed irregularly, hesitantly even.  Maybe that’s why my uterus spontaneously sheds itself, why it grows in places it’s not supposed to, why it harbored and nurtured 5 tumors, why the last “normal” period I had required that I get a shot of morphine.  It knows if I had a choice, I would give it back.  I would give all my womanhood back.  I traded sexual invisibility, freedom, and fun for attention, ridicule, and pain.  My uterus knows that it has to sneak it’s process up on me, because I have yet to accept what it did to me.  Keep track of my period?  I don’t even want it.  I didn’t ask for this.

The day I started bleeding happen to coincide with a scheduled play date.  My mom had invited a tomboy friend, named Stephanie, over to keep my company. I didn’t particularly like Stephanie.  I also had no interest in playing.  My insides were killing me and a think brown mud was now coming from the place that had been gushing milkyish fluid just a few week’s before.  I was in pain, my insides were churning, something was twisting, being wrung out.  My mother paid no attention to me, instead she insisted that I entertain my guest.  I had no interest in playing with the cars that Steph had brought over.  I was changing.

She completely ignored my body’s physical needs for care and affection.  At one point during the play date I lay on the floor behind the couch, crying.  I was in pain.  I needed some attention and comfort.  I decided to confront my mother, tell her how her how I felt.  Stephanie was gone by now and we were alone in the house.  “You acted like Stephanie is more important to you than I am!” It was my angsty pre-teen way of teller her that I needed her love and care still.  Her eyes were strange.  And then she struck me with all the force she had left in her partially crippled body.  She hit me.  This caught me off guard.

My mother had been a wheelchair for about four years by this time, and she had stopped regularly spanking her children a few years earlier.  Probably because she didn’t have any energy left.  Thank god.  There was so much anger inside of that woman, if she were able bodied I can’t imagine what kind of damage she could have inflicted on me.  I managed to escape physical punishment for the majority of my life by being sneaky and keeping quiet.  My brother had not fared the same fortune as I.  He was regularly spanked throughout childhood.  My parents did the best they could, but they had a hard time adjusting their discipline methods for my brother, who was not motivated to change in the face of physical abuses.

I still applaud my brother for his courage, for challenging what I consider a fucked up way of dealing with children.  I’m glad, although I’m not sure he is, that he never gave in, never caved under their authoritarian methods.  Children are free and should be appreciated for this.  My parents had a different viewpoint.  “Children should be seen and not heard,” was a favorite expression of the household.  I definitely lived by that motto, and it worked, until I decided I wanted to be heard.

She slapped me, and pushed me against the wall.  I crumpled, and curled myself up tight ball, awaiting the next blow.  I’m still not sure how she did all this from a wheelchair.  I remember pulling myself off of the floor and touching my face.  Now my nose and my vagina were bleeding.  “I never had cramps,” she hissed.  I don’t know what happened after that.  I don’t’ think I ever genuinely hugged, touched, or spoke to my mother after that day.  Her health declined too rapidly, and I grew too fast.  It’s one of those things that other women who’ve lost their mother’s in early adulthood understand.

I’ve met many women who’ve lost their mothers around the age of 1, and I find that we are all in a similar boat, trying to grapple with the things we were taught or told without having anyone on the other side to respond.  There’s no going back, no asking why.  It’s a strange position to be in, to not have the female that raised you around to remind you of who you were, to validate your concerns, to talk to about love and relationships, to apologize to and to forgive for past offenses.  It’s hard for me to tell where she ends and where I begin because she is gone.  So I do what I do.  I share my experiences, animate them, give them a voice and hope that by some miraculous coincidence of life, I am able to feel some closure, some kind of resolution.

I spoke to a family friend recently, we talked for a few hours about my sewing and the such.  We’d never had a real conversation before that.  She knew my family before I was a moment of pleasure in my parents genitals, and she briefly reflected on my adolescent disposition.  “You didn’t talk at all as a kid.  Hahahaha!  And remember when you started your period?  Your mother told everyone!”  I felt pangs in my solar plexus at her lighthearted comment.

I had asked my mother not to tell anyone about me starting my period.  I was the first out of my close female friends, and I didn’t want anyone to know.

My mother told everyone.  She told the parents of all of my friends.  I didn’t find this out until people started bringing flowers and candy over.  I was mortified.  I wasn’t ashamed of having a period, I just didn’t see why it was such a big deal.  I didn’t want it to be a big deal, but it was.  I had two male friends at the time, and my mother forbade me from seeing them.  I cried for weeks over this, I wanted to hang out with my friends.  I wanted to bake cookies with Maurice, and keep working on the treehouse I started with Lorenzo.  I didn’t understand.

I have primarily thought of my period as a punishment, although I’m still not sure what my crime was.  I think it’s time I make peace with my uterus.  We’re still warring and it’s time for peace.  Maybe I’m afraid of getting slapped down, bloodied and bruised for growing as humans grow, for wanting to express myself as humans do.  Good thing that bitch is dead.  It’s safe now.

And life worked some magic for me, as it always does.  I wrote the majority of this post early Saturday morning, before going to work.  During my walk to the bus station my aunt, my mother’s sister, texted, asking me to join her for dinner that evening.  I was estranged from my of my family for the majority of my childhood.  Being raised Jehovah’s Witness meant that we didn’t celebrate any holidays (primary reason families get together) and we weren’t supposed to associate with people not in the religion.  It wasn’t till my mother passed and my father was kicked out of the organization that I began to cultivate relationships with the rest of my family.  It’s been a slow but good process.

On the ride home, I casually started talking about sex, like I do.  I’m not even sure which of my stories/questions triggered it, but my aunt told me a something about my grandmother that I had never heard before.

She asked my grandmother, just a few weeks beforehand, where they had lived when her family moved from West Virginia to Philadelphia.  As they reminisced, my grandmother mentioned that they were poor and didn’t have much when they first relocated.  My grandfather was a big band leader, and musicians then, as most musicians now, didn’t make much.

Their apartment shared a common outside staircase with another apartment.  A few boys lived in that house, and Grandma Dolores and her brother would often play with these boys.  One day one of the older boys took my grandmother to his room and raped her.  She was 9 years old.  She will be celebrating her 86th birthday this May.  She had never told anyone this story before a few weeks ago.

And things start to fall into place.  Piece by piece.  Stitch by stitch.

My grandmother was a fox.  She was the first Ms. Sepia Philadelphia.  She was a beauty queen.

She married the prettiest boy in the neighborhood.

I have those same thighs!

They moved to San Jose eventually, and had three daughters.  Their life was picture perfect.

My mother is the one in the middle.  The other two are my aunts, Cyd and Donne.  She probably made them both wear those black leotards so she could be perfectly framed.  That’s so my mom.

Sometimes I get tired of digging through the mud and muck.  Tired of searching, asking, rifling, figuring.  It’s exhausting, but it’s worth it.

I dedicate this post to my grandmother, because she dealt with her pain silently for so long.  Because she didn’t get to choose who she gave her sexuality to that first time.  Because she wasn’t even close to being a woman.  Because her friends in high school thought she was loose, when she was probably just hurting or trying to understand or trying to forget.  Because no one ever asked.  Because everyone just thought she was a shallow beauty queen.

Every surface is deep.

Did my grandmother tell this story to her firstborn daughter, my mother?  My aunt said that Dolores never talked about sex.  Ever.  Did she in some way communicate to her daughters that sexuality was something to be feared?  Probably.  Do we pay for the unresolved pain of our ancestors, for the unspoken horrors that they’ve experienced?  My answer is yes, we most certainly do.  That’s why I’m desperately trying to unearth as much as possible.  I’ve paid enough.

Love and Enjoy.

Between·the·Sheets |FemSexComm|

A few weeks ago I applied to participate in a female sexuality workshop called FemSexComm.  The course originated in Universities and has spread to communities across the United States.

From their website:

FemSexComm, a modified version of the long-running and popular female sexuality workshop at UC Berkeley and Brown University, was held for the first time in Fall 2011 in San Francisco. It will be held again in Spring 2012 in the Bay Area.

OUR MISSION :

FemSexComm provides a safe space for exploration, encourages honest dialogue, and facilitates collective learning.  It engages and grapples with the social forces that inform individual experiences, and seeks to build allyship.

The Female Sexuality Workshop for the Community (FemSexComm) is a 15-week workshop that aims to create a mindful, respectful, and open environment for participants to validate their experiences, challenge their ideas, and learn with and from others.  Evolving from the long-running, student-led courses at UC Berkeley and Brown University, FemSexComm seeks to bring the values of empowerment, diversity, and community to a space outside of the university setting.  

FemSexComm encourages exploration of identities, boundaries, desires, experiences, power and privilege. Through group discussions, activities, and individual assignments, the workshop explores what it means to take ownership of one’s own body, pleasure, language, and education. Peer facilitators foster introspection and encourage participants to develop empowered, informed relationships with themselves and build ally relationships with others. FemSexComm promotes intentionality, agency, informed decision-making, and consent in all areas of life. Themes include pleasure, health, gender, consent, boundaries, privilege, power, body image, communication, race, class, orgasms, masturbation, sex, kink, and sexual identities.

TOPICS AND WORKSHOP STRUCTURE:
The workshop topics include: female sexual health, anatomy and physiology, orgasms, masturbation, partnered sex, erotica, sex work, sexual diversity, cultural influences, race, class, power, privilege, communication and consent, boundary violations, and community building.  The workshop utilizes group activities, discussion of analytical readings, self-exploratory assignments, and guest speakers.

I was excited to receive this email last week:

Congratulations!

You’ve been accepted into FemSexComm as a Spring 2012 Participant! It was an honor to read your application and we are so excited to have you as part of the workshop.

For the next 14 weeks I will be diving headfirst into my sexuality.  I imagine that this will be one of the most interesting and difficult legs of the process thus far.  I am feeling confident about it since I’ve spent a good amount of time detailing my sexual escapades both on this blog and with friends and family.  There are dark sides that I haven’t gotten into much on this blog that I’m sure I’ll be sharing soon.

We had our first meeting on Monday the 6th of February.  The best way to describe the experience was unfettered joy and excitement with splashes of teeth chattering anxiety.  The session started out with a go round of Nags and Brags, which gave everyone an opportunity to bitch about something that was annoying in their life and celebrate something going well.  Then we did a 10 minute round of speed dating with the other participants where we had to answer questions about ourselves and listen to our partners responses.

We did an activity where we were encouraged to talk about group expectations the formation of our safe space.  One of the things that stood out to me was the expectation for confidentiality, which I promise to maintain while still attempting to comment on my experiences.  It is my intention to provide commentary about this experience from my perspective and not comment on specific participants.

After a long talk about general guidelines, brainstormed words commonly associated with female reproductive organs (a really fun thing to do if you ever have any spare time), and discussed how these words made us feel.  I found striking similarities between the other participants responses to some of the more offensive words and my response to the n-word.  Like the n-word, opinions among members of the group varied widely.  I was reminded of the importance of context.

We ended the class with a go round of, “What would your cunt wear to a party?”  Mine told me it wants to wear rhinestones.  High maintanence laaaadaaay.

I’ve decided to use the Between the Sheets posts to discuss the meetings as well as complete the weekly workshop assignments.

We were asked to create an identity map and answer a number of questions related to our identities.

Here is my map:

I got to cheat a little bit, cause the tag cloud for this blog is very close to what I consider the most salient features of my identity.  I made this cloud using a free site called tagcrowd, just in case you want to make your own.

Now it’s time for the reflection questions.

1.  Which identities are most important to you?

Being an artist is the most important identity I claim.  Probably because it’s been the hardest one for me to accept and use.  There are so many negative connotations that are associated with the word.  Being a black woman is important also, because it influences my perspective and the way I move in the world.  The third most important is being an American.  I feel the history of being part of a group that was denied citizenship rights daily.  I choose to say that I am an American and that I have a right to be here and given the same things every American expects.  Seamstress is a pretty important one too.  This is the physical manifestation of my spirit in the world of objects.

2.  How do your identities impact your world view and the things you care about?

I don’t really feel like I even need to answer this question.  The answers seem so obvious.  As an artist I care about being able to express myself in a thoughtful way while discussing and touching on socially significant issues.  As a black woman I am concerned with finding spaces where I can love and enjoy life without the constant threats that being a black woman in this country has often meant.  As an American citizen I care about supporting the right of everyone who chooses to come here, be it of their own will or not, in their specific journey, their right to expression, and their right to pursue the things that are important to them (given they do not unnesesarily harm others).  And as as seamstress, well, I care about cutting things up and putting them back together again, applying a little heat and pressure, and making something that was better than what was there before.

3.  Which identities are targeted/marginalized by society and which are advantaged/privileged? Some may be neither or both.

Marginalized: Artist, Black

Privileged: American

Both: Woman

4.  Which are fixed and which can change across your lifetime?

We are lucky as Americans.  We can choose whatever we want.  Some feel more fixed, but I don’t know how true that is.  My initial reaction was to say that the only thing that is fixed is that I’m black, but the meaning of black has changed over the years.  I looked at a census report from members of my family and at different decades in history they were seen as white, colored, and black.  All have different connotations, and are reflective of the general attitudes about race during any given point of history.

Also, most non-whites don’t see me as exclusively black.  People of color generally understand, accept, and assume that there can be various cultural heritages within one person even if your skin is dark.  Among people of color my looks identify me with people all over the world.  I’ve been asked if I’m Jamaican, Argentinian, Indian, Jewish, Ethiopian, French, Zanzibarian (pretty sure that’s not a word, but how else do you say from Zanzibar?), part Samoan, I’ve literally heard everything.  I’ve even had people approach me speaking Arabic.  This used to make me feel all funny inside, but now I understand that a multiplicity of people can see themselves within me, which is really a great compliment.  Doesn’t take away from the fact that in mainstream culture this is not understood.  It’s more like this secret privilege that I live with.

Fixed:  I don’t believe any are fixed, though some appear to be so.

Changeable: The only real truth in life is that things change.

5. Which are chose by you and which by society?

It’s a mix.  Society give us the rubric and we decide how closely we’re going to follow it.  I choose to identify as black, I choose to identify with women (I haven’t always), I chose my occupation.

6.  Being black is very visible, as is being a woman.  My sexual orientation is pretty invisible (people regularly think that I’m a lesbian, sometimes I even wonder), as is my occupation…I think.  I totally got called out the other day.  A complete stranger looked at me and shouted, “You’re an artist!  I know it!”  Still there is lots of confusion when it comes to identity (as explained above).  The truth is that I’ve chosen not to let most of my physical characteristics define me, cause when it comes down to it they’re not all that representative of who I am.  Who I am is deep inside me.  It comes out when I make art, when I’m in love with someone, when I let myself live in the moment.  Sometimes I have to hide it to keep it from getting injured.

7.  How is the way others see you different or the same as you see yourself?

I have no idea and I don’t care.  I had to stop caring so I could start living the life I want.  People are going to see what they want, just like I see what I want in other people to keep my story going.  Things change all the time.  What I want changes, what I see in myself changes.  I just hope that people understand this and treat everyone with kindness.

8.  Are any in conflict with each other?  What would it take to bring them into congruence?

I don’t feel any strong identity conflicts right now.  I present what I am and I am honest with myself and those around me.  I make mistakes and try to correct them when I can, which is most times.  I’m open with everyone around me, when they’re making me happy and when they’re pissing me off.  I’m moody and I’m proud of that.  I’m kind and I’m proud of that too.

9.  Given what is within your power, what would you like your identity to look like in the future?  What are some things you can do today to move in that diretion?

I would like to maintain all of aspects of my current identity.  I would like to have more money so I can do more of what I love and share those things with as many people as possible.  I hope that the money only impacts my identity in positive ways.  Money is worthless except that it is a means to an end.  I am trying to start my own apparel business, been filing papers with the city and giving them lots of my cash, been making shit.  I still need to find my market and figure out how to reduce production costs.  I could use an investor or two to help me get things rolling.  Also, I would love to be self-employed or have a job that is more in line with my preferred skill set.  I want to be more rooted so I can feel more confident when I go out and explore the world.

In terms of my sexual identity, I’ve always been really happy with being straight.  Am I open to other experiences?  Always.  I think I’m like 75% straight.

Next, choose a couple contexts from below and consider now your identities are impacted for and within each.  Write a “+” on identities that feel positive  and a “-” on identities that feel negative, and a line across identities that are left out in that context.  Neutral identities can be left blank.

With my friends and family: +woman, +black, +artist, +seamstress, american, straight

At work/school: +woman, +black, +artist, +seamstress, american, +straight

In a store: +woman, -black, +artist, +seamstress, american, straight

During solitude: +woman, +black, +artist, seamstress, +american, +straight

When applying for a position of power/prestige: -woman, -black, -artist, seamstress, american, straight

In relation to social institutions: -woman, -black, -artist, -seamstress, +american, straight

That’s all for now, but get ready for a big one next Monday.  We have a cunt coloring assignment that I’m about to blow out of the water.  Get ready.

Love and Enjoy!