write it out

I’m having an emotional meltdown. I’m sitting on my sofa, feeling, every so often, as though red hot pokers are being skewered through my insides. This isn’t apparent to anyone doing the skewering, because no one except the cat is with me. Nevertheless, I’m skewered. One lover flirts with another, and not for the first time, and hubris got me into this.

A post drifts about in my head, unwritten and only confusedly thought of. An image of lying face down on the bed, and feeling, at that moment, that I was an object of pleasure, that even though I was touched, manipulated into a response, observed to feel pleasure, that it was only incidentally for my benefit. At the time, it triggers familiarity, that I love this. But I can’t manage to explain the feeling without running into a wall lacking in vocabulary. I can’t express it without saying I feel used, and that’s not how I feel. This passivity feels very powerful. It’s a kind of submission without dominance: it’s a role that fits.

It’s to do with how I feel about being the not-wife, the luxury. I’m attracted to men with responsibilities, and duties, and by abstracting them from that life for a day or so, I can give them something of the selfish hedonism of my life, where I strive very hard to only do what pleases me.

And meanwhile I not-wrangle, online, with a relationship where sexually I cede control, even though it’s control he takes naturally but wouldn’t take automatically, and where, out of bed, there is no issue of control, except that right now, I may be losing it over myself.

This is the thing: the irony is killing me, not to mention the schizophrenia. Deep down, I do truly believe that only I can manage multiple relationships successfully. Only I am clear-headed enough to balance out what I feel for each individual, and the sometimes complicated complexity of those feelings, in ways that are not detrimental to anyone else… and at the same time, I know that that is not remotely true, and that I am aware of my position within each of those other people’s multiple relationships. But somehow the outrage I feel when anyone questions my right to share my body or emotions seems completely divorced with how I feel about everyone else doing so, even though I would defend to the death their right to do so, and refute absolutely that I had any right to dictate their conduct. All that is owed me, I believe, is respect, and that is not lacking.

My worlds are colliding, though, with a resonant clang.

And somewhere in all of this that I need to find words for (because if I can’t, I can’t make sense of any of it), reading the words of another man, of how he would touch me, I’m brought up short, taken out of the moment, and yet tied down tight to it.

“Fuck, this is hard. I can’t find the words to write how that would make me feel”, I write, and when pressed: “passive, predatory, waiting”. And then I realize it goes back to when I was first sexually active. a kind of: I’m not doing this, you are… but I accept it; maneuvering both parties into a position where I would get what I wanted, without ever asking for it. I don’t tell him till later that he has unwittingly been dragged into my silent mental drama, and both clarified and confused it (because my drama is caused by my hypocrisy).

All of this, and the inner turmoil, swishes fretfully about inside my head until I start to write. Then I can focus on that feeling of passive responsiveness, and a memory of being held like that, and stretching out, and of feeling hands stroke my flexing skin, and being gently pulled back in again, and the freedom I felt to break away, and the place to come back to.

I can’t write it, though, until I’ve gone back to that (or several) memory. All the details my senses collected and stored then, that have been subsequently triggered by all these other outside influences, have to be in sharp focus before I can feel my way into what I write. I write about how I felt with one man, because since another man reminded me of that feeling I have been trying to write it into sense, and it took another’s words to pull it out of me.

Somehow, by writing, by trying to corral my feelings for three separate and not-consecutive lovers, all of whom, it seems right now, know far too much about me and each other, it almost resolves. I don’t feel the post expresses everything I wanted to say, but I am grateful that I managed to grasp some bits of things swimming through my head and fashion something else out of it, that holds its own meaning. And then I only have one more thing to write, but that is not for an audience to interpret, and probably unnecessary, except that I can’t not write it. And sometimes I wonder why I can’t just write about a fuck that begins here, and ends there.