Iris

Reading John Dryden the other day, I was reminded that I am not the first person in history to have had a deeply dysfunctional relationship.  And that is some consolation.

Fair Iris I love and hourly I die,

But not for a lip nor a languishing eye:

She’s fickle and false, and there I agree;

For I am as false and as fickle as she:

We neither believe what either can say;

And, neither believing, we neither betray.

‘Tis civil to swear and say things, of course;

We mean not the taking for better or worse.

When present we love, when absent agree;

I think not of Iris, nor Iris of me:

The legend of love no couple can find

So easy to part, or so equally join’d.

 

Thanksgiving + Valentine’s Day = ?

Things between Robbie and me have finally come to what seems like a genuine end, right in time for the most ridiculously hyped romantic holiday of the year.  But I’m not feeling sad now.  Instead, I’m feeling like I ought to give thanks.

When Robbie was here over Thanksgiving, we broke up.  We had agreed to spend the week he was here being good to each other and talking, lovingly, about whether we could see ourselves sorting out the major obstacles to our being a couple.  And we did that.  We had a wonderful time, the best time we’d had in months.  We were affectionate and good to each other.  We identified our problems and for many of them, we found solutions.  But by the end of the trip, we’d both started to feel glum about our prospects, and finally, Robbie decided that it was time for us to part.  We said goodbye at the airport, lovingly and well.  And he asked me to spend the next few weeks thinking about all the things between us that were good, rather than recalling all our problems.

I did that then, to some extent, but mainly I put my energies into talking him into getting back together.  We did make up enough for the New Year’s visit, which was pretty disastrous.  And now I find us broken up, again because of Robbie’s decisiveness.  (I think he is probably doing the correct thing for both of us, for which I am not-so-secretly grateful to him.)  This time has been harder, with much more nastiness and hurt than we had at Thanksgiving.

But while we haven’t had the loving conversations, the laughter, the bittersweet tears, and the breathtaking breakup sex that we had over Thanksgiving, I am still trying to think of the good things about us.  It’s actually pretty easy to do.  There are many things I regret about our relationship–including my behavior for much of it–but there are things I will always cherish, and it’s worth putting some of them down, so I don’t forget them.

1.  We laughed, so very much.  I look back at the pages of this blog and I see so many things that were funny, and I realize I’ve captured perhaps .00001% of Robbie’s humor.  When he wanted to be, which was very often, he was lightness and whimsy and joy.  As I’ve said before, his smile was like the sun to me and being part of his circle of laughter was just golden.

2.  I learned what it means to open up to someone, to really share your whole self with him, and to dare to show him all of you.  It took well over a year, but I finally gave Robbie a chance to see the real me, and vice versa.  And that was a wonderful feeling.

3.  I learned what it meant to be loved.  Robbie loved me more than anyone else has.  He not only told me but showed me, again and again.  He followed through on his words at considerable cost to himself, repeatedly.  What was better was that I loved him back as fiercely and as loyally, to the extent that I could.  We helped each other through  many extraordinarily crappy events–some self-inflicted, others wildly and utterly unpredictable.  I was there when his father died, and I took care of two horses, two dogs, and a very rickety house while he and his family buried their dad.  I poured my heart and soul (and a whole lot of sweat) into his garden.  I gave him endless back rubs.  He moved me across the country, packing my boxes himself, and waited for me in hospitals after two life-threatening accidents.  He petted me and held me and cooked for me and pleased me.  We were partners, and we did for each other, and that was good.

4.  I dealt with boatloads of my own crap.  I am a rotten, flawed, imperfect human, as most of us are.  Robbie used to joke that I thought of myself as “Priscilla Perfect,” and it was true.  When we met, I thought I could do no relationship wrong.  After four years, I have the dubious honor of being thankful for the fact that I know I can be a royal bitch: temperamental, reactive, angry, and sometimes punitive.  I don’t want to treat loved ones this way for the rest of my life, and I have miles to go.  At least I’ve started.

5.  I learned about being a good parent from him.  Robbie has kids, and despite what he fears at times, he has been a good father to his kids.  I want kids, and want to be a good parent.  He never refused my many and endless requests to talk about kids or what the right thing to do for kids would be in a given situation; never withheld the benefit of his experience; and never, ever acted like the answers were pat or simple.

6.  I grew up.  This was partly because we spent four years together, and partly because Robbie is older than I am.  When I met Robbie, I was working at a job that had me spending most of my day with teenagers.  I felt very young–I was in my mid-30s but had the mindset of a teen myself.  Now, I feel like an adult, in a good way.  I know I’m not going to live forever and that that means there are opportunities I need to seize now.  I also understand that the one driving the bus of my life is me; no one else is making the decisions, and I’m the only one responsible for the direction I take.  That’s a pretty good thing to know when pushing 40.

7.  Together, we found kink.  Robbie and I had the most deviant, most satisfying, most intimate, wildest, most passionate, most transcendent sex I’ve had in my life.  And he always did tongue-fuck better than anyone else I’ve known.

My take on us, for now, is this: We didn’t break up because we didn’t love each other.  We broke up because we are 600 miles away from each other with no way to relocate right now and different priorities in our respective lives.  That is a tough thing to have happen.  If I could feel it fully it would hurt terribly, and I know it will before it gets better.

But it is good to remember all the good things, all these things and more.  Thank you, my dear, for them.  Always–until the wheel turns round again for us.

 

Relief

After I wrote my ever-so-totally-hysterical post of yesterday, Robbie and I sat down to talk about stuff between us, especially sex.  It was a good, careful, thoughtful conversation.  I managed to explain that it’s not that I don’t want to fuck him; it’s that I’m having some kind of female-impotence equivalent.  (I’m sure there are more medically acceptable ways to say this, like, “a decrease in desire,” but oh well.) 

After the conversation, we walked down to his barn.  He grabbed a cat litter bucket (which are darn handy around a garden), pulled me into the barn’s dark, dank, dungeon-y basement, and plopped me down on the inverted bucket, which made a makeshift stool.  He unzipped his fly and had me suck him off, giving me instructions about pace and approach, which he’s been doing a lot lately (and which I find both helpful and hot).  He came quickly, a few days’ desire pent up inside him, and instead of swallowing his semen as quickly as I can, which I usually do, I held it in my mouth, liking tasting and feeling the volume of his desire. 

So when he bent down to kiss me after he’d extracted himself from my throat, as he invariably does, I impishly flashed him a mouthful of cum instead of proferring him my lips.  He came within an inch of being snowballed.  “Eeew!” he yelled at the last second, rearing his head back just in time.  We both broke up laughing so hard.  (By the way, he’s not super-squeamish, but I totally surprised him.  Since he is the king of effective practical jokes, I was pleased.)

Then last night, we got dressed up and went to a munch with the folks in our local scene, whom I like more and more.  I don’t like munches that much, though, and was dreading things, but we had a great time, drinking beer on the patio of a summery restaurant, listening to live music, flashing our tits, etc.  (Okay, well, I was the only one flashing my tits, but still.)  It was warm and snuggly and loving and good.

Another good talk today and things are feeling fine.  I’d say and write more, but I have a date to go get fisted, right now.  Happy Saturday night . . .

Fun faux-polaroids from The Polaroid Freak Team.

 

Rollercoaster

I have written about 2 dozen drafts in my head the last few weeks, and several on paper or pixels.  As soon as I get a few strands of narrative going, the threads of real life take a new turn, my fine twist breaks, and I can’t connect any of the events I’ve been writing about to the present state of my affairs.  It happened again between the time I started this post, a couple days ago, and now, but I already picked out the illustrations for this one, and so this title is staying.

It has been impossible to write about what’s going on between me and Robbie over the last month, because it’s so hard to capture the rapidly-changing present.  One night on our past visit, Robbie and I would have a deep and much-needed, cathartic talk about what was going on with pain in our BDSM relationship, and I’d be mentally taking notes on the realization we’d reached when the talk would tank into sadness and separate sides of the bed.  Another night, I’d be seething for hours at the thought that he was going to leave me wet and frustrated on our last day together, until he came home at midnight from an unavoidable and important errand to make very tender and emotional love to me until the wee hours.  On a school night, even.  I left his house for home deeply in love but deeply pessimistic.

(There is so much to explain, and I have been not saying so much for so so long–here, and to him.  I don’t know where to start, and so if you want to read, bear with me or ask questions about what doesn’t make sense, and if it’s all too confusing or too raw, I apologize.  But I can’t keep all this bottled up and I can’t keep writing about us if I am not more honest and I can’t be dishonest about us anymore.)

Two weeks ago, we tried to figure out when we would get together this summer, and he could not tell me when he had time to see me.  Around that time, I read an article about babies and found myself sobbing.  Ten days ago, I told him that I had stopped being able to see a way for us to make a future together, and that though I loved him, I wanted a husband and a family and I needed to go look for those things before my clock had fully and finally ticked itself out.  (I am close, closer than most.  I am 37-and-a-half.)

Robbie dealt with all that with some equanimity.  I had told him before I even met him that I wanted a family, and we talked more about it the first weekend we met.

But then I actually met someone I wanted to date–a local Dom who asked me to play–and the emotional shit hit the fan.  Or perhaps that’s not fair to Robbie–I think he would have felt the emotional impact anyway.  But that event made it particularly strong.  And somehow in the middle of this we started talking.  A lot.

We’ve been talking every day for an hour or two and spilling our guts.  Many of the times we talked over the past two years–many of which, in fact, were over email–seem like pale echoes of actual meaningful conversations, now that we are having the latter.  We’ve stopped the incessant fighting.  We are crying and telling each other we love the other and talking about really bad and painful stuff–and good stuff too–and we are so, so vulnerable.  And I did not expect any of this.

I wasn’t (consciously) breaking up with Robbie or dating other people in order to “get him back”; I expected Robbie to let me go without much difficulty because I thought he had already let me go.  And he believed, it turned out, that I had been going for some time, perhaps believed that I didn’t really want to try.

I don’t really know what else to say.  I just am still here and still in love with Robbie.  And I am reeling in good and bad ways from having spent a day playing with someone else.  And all of a sudden it seems that Robbie was right that life is not a dress rehearsal and that he and I are really very necessary to each other and we best stop making a hash of things because we just can’t afford that.  And also, because we don’t have to.

And maybe I can write some of the other two-dozen posts if I let out this rollercoasterish one, and if it all doesn’t have to make sense.  Because it’s not all adding up now but it’s closer to that than it has been in a long, long time, and mostly I don’t feel miserable when I think of Robbie anymore, I just feel full of love and happiness and that is pretty darn nice.

Cool drawings, including a few dominatrixes, by Swedish illustrator Klas Fahlen.  Check out his cute animation, from which I stole the tiny ones (click to make them grow).  Also: more Swedes where he came from, on the same site.

 

Ties to the Land

Robbie owns five acres of stunning farmland, a fact I don’t think I’ve mentioned here before.  His land is so beautiful he often jokes that I’m in the relationship for his property rather than for him.  The joke is funny because we both know it’s a litte too close to the truth.  The first night I met him, he took my hand and led me out to show me the back fields, and the night sky above them, and wrapped me in his arms while I sighed happily.  “Feels like home, doesn’t it?” he murmured into my ear. “It does,” I nodded.

It still does, now more than ever.  He and I have plowed and planted here, buried and raised pets, kissed in virtually every corner.  I’ve written so little this visit because we’re in the midst of laying out a garden that is 2800 sq. feet, or maybe 2900–I forget, or he recalculates.  In fact, there has not been a whole lot of time and energy for things besides eating, working, eating, and sleeping.  (Especially since I sleep 11 hours a day when given the opportunity.) 

Nonetheless, Robbie has done more than his share to facilitate fun in the midst of farming.  A couple of days ago, he had me string a trellis for the 6″ snow peas and snap peas that are eager to climb something, anything.  I wove and tied binder twine (or is it baling twine?) in a zig-zag pattern between two horizontal pieces of clothes-line.  The plan is that at the end of the summer, we can throw pea vines and binder twine directly into the compost bin. 

Robbie had to teach me a few knots in order for me to make the trellis: a square knot, to tie pieces of twine together, an overhand knot, so that I could tie the twine to the wire, and a half-hitch, so I could secure the overhand knot.   Well, he didn’t so much as teach me the knots as teach me the names for them, and make me aware that motions I’d been making rather randomly all my life were distinct and distinguishable.  A half a day spent tying scratchy fibers definitely got my bondage juices flowing, though, and Robbie is more than attuned enough to me to take advantage of any and all juices he notices.

Later that afternoon, I took a shower and asked if there was anything more to do.  He said he had a particular task for me that might give me an idea of what my long-term farming “duties” might be like if I were around the place more often.  It turned out that this involved wearing a chest harness while I raked up a few grass cuttings from the front lawn and put them around some plants as mulch.  When I’d done that comfortably, Robbie tightened the ropes and gave me another job to do–possibly the difficult task of taking a nap.  (After three years, he is getting accustomed to my habits.)  And after one more readjustment of the ropes, I got to set the table, make a salad for dinner, and sit down with him for a bit before my ropes came off. 

I love rope almost as much as I love Robbie and his farm–in honesty, it is sometimes difficult o say which holds pride of place in my heart.  I was thinking about rope today, and about this post, and about how if I wrote it, I might be able to explain how deep and primal my love for rope is.  I thought about two 7-week-old kittens we have on the farm, and how, the other day, their mother plopped herself down in front of us and started to nurse them.  While the kittens pawed and kneaded her belly, the mother cat’s eyes were almost shut from pleasure.  A steady purr rose from the entire group.  Bondage is like that for me–a comforting presence, a steady pull that makes me feel loved and wanted, content and happy.  And luckily for me, the ties that bind me aren’t just literal.

More images from the phenomenal Yuko Shimizu.

 

Meltdown

Robbie has been melting my heart lately.  He has been trying so hard to be considerate and thoughtful that I can’t help but find him amazing.  This is inconvenient, because in some ways I’ve become pretty invested in and inured to the notion of our relationship as inherently dysfunctional and doomed, and it’s scary to let any hope back in.  But the hope is there, anyway, flowering and budding away like the young fruit tree that I gave him for his birthday this year.

I’ve been watching in fascination as Gray Lily over at Journey Into Submission has reinvested herself and devoted herself to her relationship.  Fascination, and a bit of jealousy.  I feel twinges of envy whenever anyone’s love life is going well and mine is not; for some reason, it’s worse when the people involved are kinky.  I think it might be that I feel like everyone else is doing it right, and we’re not.   If you saw us lying, spent and sweaty, in bed together after a raucous fuck, it would probably be hard to identify anything we’re doing wrong, but I still have that nagging sense that well . . . we’re dysfunctional and doomed.

Gray wrote recently about how she can truly be herself in front of her partner in bad times.  This twisted something in me; Robbie finds it hard to deal with my see-sawing emotions, although he is better at handling them than most men (people?) I know.  When I cry or get distressed, he’s often a rock.  Later, though, he tells me frankly that the intensity of my feelings alarms him, and I feel like my confidence in him, and my confidences, get held against me.

So when, earlier tonight, one small work-related issue sent me into a tearful tailspin, I hesitated before dialing his number.  But Robbie has far more professional experience than I, decades of working in and negotiating complex organizations with exacting and rigorous standards.  So I called.

He was amazing.  He listened, he was patient, he let me cry, and he gave me great advice.  He even ignored me when I argued with his attempts to put things in perspective.  I said, “Who’s been sprinkling fairy dust on you lately to make you so fabulous?”

“Me,” he said.  “Now, what do you need to do next?”

I told him that I had to finish a paragraph of a letter I’d spent the whole weekend trying to write.

“Right.  So you can write that now, or you can sink further into your meltdown.  Which are you going to do?”

“Write the paragraph.”

“Right.”  And then he told me that he was going to walk his dog and shut the house up for the evening.  He suggested I finish what I was writing before he called me back, in about an hour.   I did it in three minutes, and then I wrote this.  Nothing like motivation to help get a job done.

Really sexy, fun photos over at fre_nate‘s flickr photostream.

 

Pink Elephants on Parade

I have no idea why, frequently, I think about posting pink elephants on this site.  I realize that pink elephants are associated with hallucinations.  Still, to me, they mean Big Love.

So, as a (belated) Valentine’s Day wish, I am sending pink elephants to the world. 

I also want to send some real elephants, because they are beautiful, because they are intelligent, because they are gentle, and because they bond, deeply, in pairs. 

And because, as Em and Lo point out, even elephants sometimes “love in a, you know, different way”. 

Pink elephants, and other dreamy illustrations, by Andrea Offermann.

 

More Plagiarism: Great Loves

I seem to be writing only about love lately, and lots about it. I promise I have some smut stored up in draft form that I will let issue forth soon. I also have something of my own to say about great loves. But just this moment I came across someone who said some of the things I have been trying to articulate, and so I post a quote:

“The Great Loves in your life will likely be people who keep challenging you long after you initially do not want to be challenged.

The Great Loves in your life will not likely be the people you find who are willing to accept and love you just the way you are. People who accept you “just the way you are” are delightful to have around, and they can be great companions. But great love involves frequent adaptations and improvements, and I estimate that no one, male or female, comes into a long term relationship with all the social skills they will need.

Being a considerate person is about existing in a state of consistently becoming – becoming something “better,” something “more.”

If you want the great love of your life to simply be someone who accepts you with all of your faults, then I wish you well. Honestly, that may be exactly what you need. I sincerely hope you get what you are looking for. You know yourself best, and know what you need possibly better than anyone else might.

But you may find someday you want to be a part of a different kind of love relationship, one that involves regular evaluations, communication of criticisms, and hard changes.

Great love will lead you to move mountains – and most of the mountains you will move will be inside of you.”

~ by OneMoreOption at Sexuality in the Arts.

 

Honey, He Ain’t Worth It

Once upon a time, my best friend and I knew a woman who was going through a difficult time.  Her father had recently been diagnosed with cancer, and the news naturally was hitting her hard.  The three of us saw each other often for drinks and dinners, and one night, around the time all of this was happening, we all got blotto, mind-bogglingly so.

Deep into her cups, our friend poured out her grief for her father.  She got so upset that we all retreated to the ladies’ room, where our friend unleashed both her tears and the contents of her stomach.  As we crouched in the stall with her, trying to comfort her, a fourth woman walked in.  And on witnessing the noise and the hubbub, she gave the best counsel she could: “Honey, he ain’t worth it.”

We laughed.  To the fourth woman’s puzzlement, we laughed long and hard.  And when we had a chance to explain to the fourth woman what was going on, she laughed too.  Gallows humor, perhaps, but what else were we to do?  Our friend’s father was definitely worth her tears, although we agreed that most boyfriends were not.

* * *

Robbie and I were talking about blogs the other day.  He rarely reads them unless I point him to them, but then, of course, he has opinions–ones that I think are incredibly insightful, especially when they jive with my own.

On this particular occasion we were talking about comments, and how at times commentators are really too nice.  I have a penchant for argumentative comments, as I have admitted here before, but it’s as an antidote to commentators who act as a chorus of yes-men for the blogger.  Or perhaps that should be “yes-women.”  I didn’t think of the effusion of support that people in comments often offer as gendered until Robbie pointed it out. “You know,” he said, “everyone in the comments was doing that woman thing–that ‘there, there,’ thing.”

I knew what he meant.  The coffee-klatsch is alive and well in the 21st century, and living in bloggers’ comments.  We get to bitch about our sex lives, our families, our pets, our lovers–and most of the people to whom we bitch offer a sympathetic ear.

But a sympathetic ear is not always what we need, and it’s hard for virtual friends to perform the function of real friends.  When virtual friends say, “there, there,” they sometimes get it wrong; sometimes, their response is as automatic as a generic (but vivid) “Honey, he ain’t worth it.”

This was especially clear to me last week, while reading Gray Lily’s blog.  Like most people, Gray was having some relationship speedbumps.  Unlike most people, Gray wrote about them in a compelling and dramatic way that left her readers upset and concerned for her.  Her many readers wrote in to tell her that the man in question was not worthy of her time or attention.  I understand; it’s “he ain’t worth it”.  Except that sometimes he is worth it, and so is she, and so is the relationship . . . and people need to hear that, too.

I feel like I am not making my point here, or perhaps I am making it and making it again, in an obvious way.  I feel like I am not making my point because, of course, this isn’t a point about my friend, or someone’s comments, or even Gray Lily.  It’s a point about me.  At different times my friends and family have told me that the tears I have shed for Robbie are not worth it.  Heck, Robbie and I have often said to each other that our relationship is not worth the pain it puts us through.

But it’s very hard for outsiders to see what is really going on in a situation, inside that bathroom cubicle where the hurt is.  As my mother always says, “Nobody knows what’s really going on in a relationship except the two people in it.”  It’s hard to know how precious or horrible or fantastic or dull life is for two people who chart a course together–or even two people who share one enchanted evening.

Sometimes, it’s just hard to know.

 

Nightmare

I just woke up from a very bad dream. The short version, without the part where I took off the door of the blue VW Rabbit with my hands and put it into the car trunk: I was competing with a woman for a very handsome man’s attention. The other woman was sometimes my mother and sometimes my sister. (Go, Freud.)

The man came for dinner and I went into the bathroom to put on makeup. I looked in the mirror and I had sprouted a smattering of hairs, small and unattractive as blackheads, between my usually decently-maintained brows. My face was ruddy and breakouts threatened everywhere. My eyes, which are fairly large, were small and piggy, and when I went to put on makeup, I found they were puffy and red-lined, as if I had been crying. No matter what I did, I couldn’t seem to put together a face to meet the faces that you meet.

And then a man who was either my father or my Dominant (yes, Sigmund) came in and lectured me sternly. He said that I had wrongly set my cap on my sister’s suitor. He told me clearly that I had better stop flirting with my sister’s fiance and adjust my attitude. I should realize that happiness doesn’t depend on one person; once I found another fellow to fixate on, I would feel the same as I did for the man in the living room.

I bit my tongue; you don’t tell your Dominant (or your Father) that he’s wrong, certainly not in dreams. But I knew that this man who had come to see my sister was the one for me, and that there wasn’t another like him. And so I finished making up a face and went out to see them . . .

A nightmare.

Photos by Guy Bourdin, via Pony Express.

 

Come on, Tuesday!

I have been percolating a bunch of my usual serious, navel-gazing posts. But I am a bit too busy to get them down on pixels, because I’m getting ready for a rare visit from Robbie. He’s coming tomorrow. He’s staying five days and five delicious nights. And we have all kinds of very perverted activities planned, some of them with some new friends.

So that is cause to be happy and thankful indeed, and Robbie in particular is over the moon. In part because he has decided to be optimistic about us, and in part because he loves it when we play with other people. He likey that.

He is showering me with email and attention, which is the best kind of positive feedback a girl could want. And I just woke up to a hilarious cartoon of a fifties kinda guy staring at a bound woman’s ass. He had captioned it “Come on, Tuesday!” I couldn’t help but laugh and I thought I would share some of his infectious enthusiasm, as well as a peek at a nice ass.

I think we’re a little excited.

From Kelly Hsiao’s cute collection of pin-ups.

 

Locks, Greater and Lesser

Kasia at Beautiful and Depraved has been writing some wonderful posts about beauty–how it’s found in odd places, how it can be earned.

A month or two ago, she wrote about a time her then-lover ordered her to cut her long hair. From reading her account, it seemed to me she found the experience terrifying but liberating. She felt ugly for weeks after she had cut her tresses, and then she found she was beautiful in ways that she hadn’t ever noticed before–especially that she was beautiful to women.

The same thing happened to me, but in reverse. When Robbie and I first met, I had a jaw length, jaunty haircut. It made me look cute, and young, and sometimes sexy, and my eyes sparkled through it.

One of the very first things Robbie asked was that I not cut my hair. I went for something like 18 months without letting scissors touch it. My mother despaired. She had always loved my short hair, and she always thought that long hair hung in my face and hid my eyes. After the first few months of nagging me about it, though, she started to get the picture. “I know,” she’d say, after gazing at my hair for a long moment. “Robbie likes it like that.” Now she doesn’t say anything, which is better. I’ve cut my hair two or three times in the thirty-three months Robbie and I have known each other.

While Kasia had always had long hair, I had always had short hair. From 5 to 15, I had the same Dorothy Hamill haircut. I was so skinny, with such straight, short hair, that people often called me a boy when I was a kid. Having long, feminine hair seemed to me silly, extravagant, excessive, wasteful, even. I had grown it out just twice–my sophomore year of college, and my very last year of grad school. Both were times I was working with tremendous diligence. It wasn’t that I didn’t have time to take care of my hair. It was that I didn’t have time to take care of the rest of me. I felt fat and full of junk food and miserable, and long hair was an easy way to hide it. I never associated long hair with beauty.

But this time around, being told to grow my hair, things were different. The first year of having long hair was a revelation. People–men–reacted to me completely differently. With a smile and a shake of my locks, I could get anything, it seemed. My hair is beautiful–it’s long and shiny and naturally curly. The mother of one of my childhood friends always said it was my “best feature,” which I found a particularly backhanded compliment. I’m not as sure it’s as simple as short hair attracting pussy and long hair attracting cock, but it wouldn’t be far off from my experience.

My hair is still growing, though, and the last time we discussed the subject–over the summer–Robbie said that he would almost always have me have long hair. “For one thing, it gives me something to hang onto when I drag you around or have you blow me,” he said, a half-snarl, half-smile on his lips. “For another, I have always preferred women with long hair. And third, I particularly like the way you look with long hair. I think it’s very flattering for you.” He must have snarled that way about a dozen more times during the conversation, telling me what he’d have me do to my hair, and when.

Like many things about D/s, the rules about my hair can produce mixed feelings depending on how I’m doing, overall. When I feel happy and joyous, I delight in my hair, taking care of it, putting it up or swinging it around. When my mood is low, it shows in my pelt, I think. My hair is tangled and dry. At my lowest, when I am angry at Robbie and myself, I imagine hacking it off, at home, one of the more drastic acts of rebellious and self-destructive acts I can conjure.

But I haven’t and won’t. Whatever my hair is now is what I am, and I have earned it.

Photographs by David Bergman.

 

Everything’s Gonna Be Alright

Lately I have felt like writing, but not like posting. Partly it’s increasingly tough to find the time to find pictures. 😉 And partly it’s that I have a lot to say but I’d like to say it, mostly, to me. And to Robbie.

So I’ve been writing things down and talking to him. And sometimes I write them down, let them sit, and then think, well, it’s okay to post this now, it’s not too raw–we are cool and it is cool, and it would be good to have this record of where we have been. Someday we may want it.

This is from a few weeks ago.

* * *

One of the hazards of writing about your love life is that your lover reads it and doesn’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. I don’t say my problem is new, and I’m not complaining. I’m the one who insists on scribbling away here.

But last night, in the midst of one of our incredibly rare disagreements, Robbie mentioned that one of the differences between us, as he understood it, was that I wanted always to believe everything was going to work out, that our relationship would last. And that I wanted him to act like that was true, even if things were far from good. After all, hadn’t I said it?

(For those too lazy (read: wise) to click, I quote myself:)

I want him to tell me he loves me, and I want him to tell me it’s all going to be alright. I want him to repeat these, as often as necessary, even when he’s not sure they’re true.)

When I heard him draw this distinction between us, I huffed the huff of the unjustifiably outraged. I was feeling mizundastood.

What I meant when I wrote that was not that I wanted false assurances about our relationship–God forbid. I don’t want him to lie to me about how he’s feeling, what’s going on with him. That would be a sham of a relationship.

I want him to tell me what’s not even really a lie . . . I want him to tell me “everything’s going to be alright”–in the Bob Marley sense, in the Christian “have faith” sense, in the Julian of Norwich “all shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well” sense, in the Zen “nothing really matters” sense–or is that the Madonna “nothing really matters” sense?

I worry. He is one of my worries, but mostly, I just worry. And the best way to have my worry go away, I find, is to have someone I love say “it’s going to be okay, you’ll find a way.” Not even “we’ll find a way”, though that can be very good–but “it will turn out okay, you’re still here, it’s fine.”

And as for that incredibly rare fight? We worked it out. Everything’s gonna be alright.

Image from Madonna’s video for “Nothing Really Matters”

 

So Close . . .

Things have been quiet here because there has been lots going on with me and Robbie in real life. We are doing that communication thing; what’s more, we’re doing it really well. This is thrilling but also a little surreal; we’re doing it so consciously that it’s as if we’ve moved to another level of relating. Here’s something I read the other day over at Sex Geek that puts it better than I could.

[T]he degree of deliberate, explicit and concerted effort that I put into my D/s relationships is way beyond anything else I’ve ever experienced in a non-D/s context. It’s actually an enormous amount of work. The payoff happens to be spectacular and it is to my taste—I wouldn’t be willing to invest this amount of myself if it weren’t, and I can totally see how if the payoff wasn’t your thing, this type of relationship would hold no real allure.

(Go read the whole post; I think it’s worth it, and so does Joscelin Verreuil, who is the one I heard about it from. Thanks Jos!)

At any rate, Robbie and I are talking to each other in deep detail about our fantasies of late. The desires are not new–what has changed is the willingness to listen, to believe, to refrain from judging, and to help the other person live out dreams.

And the result is the deepening of intimacy already far more intense than any I have ever felt.

(He likes to pull my lips, and stick his fingers in my mouth, and explore it, as if he owned all of me. Which he does. And that is how I sense and comprehend his ownership of me.)

 

Against Emotional Masochism; or, In Which I Steal Other People’s Ideas, Quite a Lot

I just read a synapse-stretching post by Matisse. In it, she answers a reader’s letter. Usually I very much dislike it when she does this, because her general attitude is a riff on one or more of the following: *sigh*-*you dimwit*-*I don’t know and I don’t care*-*how can you not know*-*how can you not know that I don’t care*-*sigh*. But since my own overwhelming response to the internet lately has been profound irritation, and since in this case, her bafflement seems quite justified, I repost her comment here.

Her reader asked her to explain his kink to him. Trouble is, his kink seemed to be to get nothing from friendships with women to whom he was attracted but who were not at all interested in him. I can identify. For years I went through long patches of platonic “relationships” in which I imagined myself in love and went to great lengths for the other person, and my other half mostly ignored me and my needs. It takes a lot of hard work and far more talking than I would ever have expected to do in any relationship, but Robbie meets my needs. MINE.

And I do try to meet his . . . though there is always more to do, I know.

Here’s Matisse:

You’re only 25, so nip this in the bud now and learn how to have real relationships, because whether you’re vanilla or kinky or somewhere in between, being attracted to unavailability is a recipe for frustration and unhappiness.

There are many different motivations to be a submissive, and I’m not one to say “Your motives are valid – but you over there, yours are not.” But I think a spell of good talk therapy would teach you a lot about yourself that you need to know, and then you can make a better decision about whether you really want to be controlled by another person.

There are many different motivations for being submissive. Exorcising and reveling in “bad” feelings that we shouldn’t enjoy–degradation, humiliation, pain–these all are routes to an emotional and erotic thrill that comes from (almost) being harmed. They can be cathartic, allowing those strong feelings, and the reactions to them, to take place in a safe and loving place.

But too often I read things written by women who sound like emotional masochists. As if they feel lucky that the Doms they are with grace them with their presence, their sexuality, the right to share them with other women, the right to be *nothing* to them. Literally nothing. I want to scream and hit the screen when I read this. That kind of weakness, that kind of submission, does not impress me, and I want to deny that I am submissive at all. Of course, that’s not the right reaction either. I read a wonderful thing Bitchy Jones wrote the other day about truly owning your own desires. (Well, actually it was about cock, but part of it was about desire, too.):

. . . understanding and acting on your desires can never be weak. And saying that it does doesn’t actually have anything to do with real feminism. Or any kind of equality. Having desire and acting on it is strength. Knowing your desires is to know yourself, is strength, fulfilling your desires is to acknowledge your strength.

It may well be–and must be, given the way the world works–that there are equal numbers of male submissives who lack this confidence. And I dare say that there are Doms out there (I know one or two) who have their own insecurities, their own soft spots and vulnerable places, the missing scales in their dragon-armor.

I’m not thinking of anyone or specifically when I say this. I’ve been glad to watch over the past two years and see internet and real life acquaintances grow, see Robbie and I get more comfortable and confident with each other and our own desires. But I am glad to read people say repetitively and outright what Robbie used to tell me often at the start of our relationship: “Unrequited love’s a bore.” Amen to that, baby.

Moderately assertive pics from le Chagrin and Darker Sights and Sounds, respectively.

 

Two Years Collared

Photograph by Marcello Aquilio

Robbie and I have been together for over two and a half years now; I have been wearing his collar for almost two years. As I type this, I feel, on one level, that I have no idea how long we will be together; I frequently feel that. At the same time, the longer I wear his collar, the more a part of me it feels, and the more difficulty I have imagining my life without it and without him.

I thought it might be appropriate to spend some time reflecting on what being collared to him actually means to me. I often read other bloggers writing about what it means to them to be owned, to be a slave, to belong to someone, and I don’t feel that that applies to me. I don’t think of myself that way; I balk at many of those terms.

At the same time, every morning, when I look at myself in the mirror, my eye goes immediately to my collar. When I catch sight of myself in a window walking down the street, I see my long hair–the hair that Robbie had me grow long, for him–trailing behind me, and I think of him. When I put on makeup, when I dress myself, when I am around others, when I am by myself, I feel what Doms and subs call ownership. Just because I dislike the word doesn’t mean I don’t feel the feeling.

And so I’d like to spend some time “reviewing and renewing”, as sub lyn calls it. I want to start with Robbie’s words to me, almost two years ago, when he gave me my first collar. He made it himself, a twined winding gold wire pendant, grasping a rhinestone, hung from a leather choker. I lost it less than a month after he gave it to me–which I deeply regret–but I still have the poem that he wrote and enclosed with his gift:

Rhinestones

Some hearts don’t have rhinestones

strong and pure themselves

elegance and aching places to fill.

Some hearts a little bent—

‘Original,’ on dit?—like real leather

perfect imperfect pores, driftwood grained

gnarled Neptune’s runnels, gods’ fingermarks

scratched soft down the sand flats

where the wind and seabirds grow.

Hearts cannot, are not to be

tied and trained, teased, bound or chained

or sent splashing against the wall for release

surging, shuddering, spent—for more.

hearts are not but flesh is; some flesh

and some hearts demand it.

November 21, 2006

 

Too Special Not to Share

I think it’s clear by now that I’m an incurable romantic. At least, I do hope I am incurable.

Luckily, there are a few people in the world who pander to folks like me. Here’s something by one of ’em:

A SHORT LOVE STORY IN STOP MOTION from Carlos Lascano on Vimeo.

Gracias to unspeakableaxe for the film.

 

Lie to Me

I have only really ever wanted two things from the person I’m with.

I want him to tell me he loves me, and I want him to tell me it’s all going to be alright.  I want him to repeat these, as often as necessary, even when he’s not sure they’re true.

If you ever lie to me, lie to me about this.

Photograph via le Chagrin.

 

Color Commentary

I was talking to Robbie about the Opening Ceremonies of the Olympics, and I mentioned how good one of the color commentators for NBC was. “What?” he said.

“The color commentator was really . . .”

“The what commentator?”

I took a breath and launched into an explanation. “It’s the guy who . . .”

Robbie suppressed a growl. He finds my innate inability to give him the answer to the question he’s actually asking, rather than the information I know he wants, profoundly irritating. “What’s the word you’re saying before ‘commentator?'”

“Color.”

“What’s a color commentator?”

My turn to not-growl. “He’s the guy who’s not the main commentator, but who adds little interesting facts to the commentary.”

“Oh. Okay, go on . . . “

Most of the time we converse this elliptically. I guess we like each other so much we are willing to slog through thigh-high verbal slush on a minute-by-minute basis. And despite the slog, we had great talks this visit, a great, kinky time, and very few fights.

“God, you’re an argumentative bitch”–said with a wicked smile before kissing me and bending me over to fuck me–doesn’t count as a fight. That’s just colorful commentary.

Images by Swedish photographer Knotan, courtesy, once more, of Sex in Art.

 

Floating

In the comments to my “Straight Flush” post, merlin17 asked: “I’m wondering whether, over time, you have become more comfortable navigating that ocean of Robbie’s lust.”

I think that overall this is the case. I’m posting something I wrote in my journal over a year ago, and then sent to Robbie at a time when he especially was having doubts about what I wanted sexually, whether I really wanted to submit. Submitting to him, when things are just between the two of us, felt a bit like learning to float, as I wrote:

I had the most striking image for submission the other day. At the beginning of things I was so worried that I was out of control. I was very worried that I’d get pushed into doing things I didn’t want to do–that this whole idea of consent was a slippery notion–that his desires were becoming mine and I couldn’t tell what I wanted anymore–that I was becoming “indoctrinated”; “brainwashed”–worst of all, that somehow all my female-positive beliefs were being subverted by misogynist fantasies.

I still worry sometimes about the last thing, and it will always, I think, be complicated for me. But when I look back at the route we’ve travelled, I see Robbie respecting my “no”, spoken or not, again and again. Sometimes he pushed a little bit to make sure I was clear on what I wanted. In a few areas, at the beginning, he pushed a lot. He also seems to think my submission–well–He also seems to think my submission is something he can engineer or elicit. It’s possible he can. I still prefer Midori’s description. His role is really to entice and seduce me into doing things he wants me to do–and I hope to do the same with him (that’s the truth.) Whether I top him or beg him to top me, it’s the same thing (not totally)–but I want to seduce and etice and lure and allure him. Tempt him. And I feel he wants to do the same thing.

I fear submission less and less. During each given occasion there are things that go wrong–but that’s just like when you accidentally kick the other person while having sex, or the timing of your simultaneous orgasm is slightly off, or something. Nothing is perfect–no work of art, date, sexual encounter. If perfect, it would be boring. Sometimes the pleasure comes from the unplanned, the imperfection. That’s why the postmortems about what went wrong and what went right seem off to me. We know if we had a great night, and on those nights we should celebrate. We know if we had a bummer of a night–and on those nights it’s best to be gentle, perhaps try to figure out what we need to, or not if it’s obvious. There might be more to communicate; we’ll see; we’ll learn more. I certainly hope so. Robbie is getting both gentler and bolder in his domination–maybe he’s always been that way. And I’m trusting it more.

I’ve thought about it lately as learning to swim. Remember how one of the very first things you learn is how to float? And at first, you float with someone’s hands supporting you, and that’s a challenge?

And then suddenly, they take their hands away–and if you’re scared you flail and gulp water and feel you’re going to drown and you start over. But when the moment finally comes when you are relaxed enough, they take away their hands, and you are . . . floating . . . free . . . weightless . . . gazing up at the sky. And it so profound, amazing, and wondrous. You feel in your element–that most ancient element, the water we came from. That is sub-space. It can only happen if you trust enough to let go. And you should only let go with someone you know will stay by you, watch you, catch you if or when your nerves and fears kick in again and you begin to flail in the water, having forgotten that free-floating feeling. But in those few moments together, submission IS a gift–a wonderful gift a Dom gives to a sub. And like teaching someone to swim, it feels in some ways like a lesson. (Perhaps that explains the praise that goes with it.) There are so many things going on in the interaction, but that letting go is essential and awesome.

When I sent Robbie the bit from my journal, I added:

I know it is hard and confusing for you and for me at times but that’s what we signed on for in order to be ourselves. I’m not saying what you’re feeling is no big deal. I believe you when you say it’s confusing. I just feel we don’t have to figure out the exact line in advance–we can guess about where it is and it emerges between us. It would be like trying to script a conversation in advance. There’s only so much you can do . . . ;o)

I’m steering as true to what I kno wit to be and I trust you enough to believe you’re doing the same.

With much love and verbiage,

Yours

sera

More photos from Autumn Sonnichsen, this time from her “Swimming Lessons” gallery.