No relationship is perfect. This one came close:
I have written about my “drama” boyfriend before. This is not about him, but about a time during our first “break” from each other (that I didn’t yet know was a just a “time-out” that would last for 9 months, but thought was a forever break up, complete with heartache. Whatever.) I was nursing my broken heart with keeping busy, writing, going to parties, hanging with friends who let me cry, and tried to hook me up. I was not ready for a “relationship” in my rebound mode. I wanted to be left alone mostly, and give my heart a chance to stop spinning in my head and throat. Loud music and lots of alcohol was the only plan.
And is the case with most times of self discovery, this did not happen. Instead, I was stressed about finishing school work, finding a summer job, paying my rent, sick friends, the guy who lived upstairs with the really loud Persian music played nightly at top volume, and my piece of crap car. It was early April, and I didn’t know if I was pregnant, (Thank god I wasn’t!) (Because remember DramaBoy?) (Yeah, it had been about 3 weeks, and I was late.) (Yes, we were using birth control.) (Stress will make you skip, can we be done now?) and decided that going home to see my parents for a couple days was a good idea. That was a mistake that lasted about 6 hours, and I headed back to my Sacramento apartment probably more stressed than I was before.
To try to shake it (read that as cry hysterically in my car) I stopped at the vista point half way home. I was just getting ready to leave, and a truck blocked my path. And did not move. Like 20 minutes of this.
When I finally got angry enough to risk being raped by some creepy, smelly, Neanderthal truck driver, I met HIM.
For months, through my birthday, his birthday, 4th of July, a screaming hot summer and sensuous autumn, he was my lover. Every Tuesday. Every Friday. 7pm to 5 am. No other part in each other’s lives. What-so-ever.
Sounds strange until I explain. It was Tuesday. We met at the vista point, said good bye. Ended up at the same restaurant 90 miles down road, said good bye again. Walked into the same perfume shop in old town, and laughed. We went for drinks, talked about nothing personal and went to his hotel room. I didn’t know his name, he didn’t know mine. I still didn’t the next morning, and he said he would tell me it if I would meet him on Friday at the perfume shop.
That first Friday was awkward. The conversation was about sex, and love, and desire. I told him I wasn’t ready to trust anyone with my heart. He said he wasn’t in a place to be that person anyway. We made some rules about what we could give, and when. Rules like “Tuesdays and Fridays”. Rules like “out of the hotel by 5 am”. Rules like not knowing each other’s name, or where the other lived, or the other person’s phone number. And nothing at all about what was going on in our real world. In our little ten-hour fantasy world, nothing else existed. We would meet at 7 on the appointed day at the perfume shop, and from that second until 5 the next morning, we belonged to each other. All in.
We agreed to sex as experimental, and fun. We agreed to accept whatever the other person wanted as just a part that was allowed in “our” world. We never argued about who would bring condoms because the answer was that we both would.
We would eat dinner together, get drinks, walk around. We went to the movies a couple times. We snuck in back stage at Music Circus. Mostly, we grabbed take out and headed to the hotel room.
Sometimes the sex was playful. Sometimes it was rough. Sometimes it was painfully needy. Sometimes it was boring or we didn’t have sex at all. Once, I showed up with a fever, he brought me wonton soup from the Chinese restaurant across the street and fed me slowly. Once, he showed up with scrapes all down his side and leg, so I brought him arnica salve and massage oil, and Tylenol and a bottle of Jack Daniels from the drug store around the corner. We cuddled a lot, kissed a lot, gave lots of foot rubs and watched TV or porn. We slept in the same bed. And then we went about our lives. We messed up a few times here and there, and let our real world slip in with anger or sadness, but we always got each other back on track, usually with a really good blow job or some insane new clitoral toy.
From him I learned about the many uses of men’s silk neck ties, and to enjoy certain types of sex neither one of us had tried, and to let go of any expectations. He was not my boyfriend. He was not even a friend in the traditional sense either. I never talked about him to anyone in my everyday life, maybe just out of being selfish to want that part to belong just to me, on my terms, without the pressure of it having to be something else. He was my sex partner, helping me (me helping him?) understand that the world was both bigger and smaller than either of us could control, and that love (yes, I said love) comes in a whole bunch of different packages.
We both knew it would eventually end. We didn’t talk about it beyond the rule “If we go four meetings in a row (basically, two weeks) without seeing each other, without prior scheduling, we are done.” No discussion, no tears (though there were some on my end, eventually, but I don’t regret them) and no holding it against anyone else. As a matter of fact, we both said (in one of the few times we slightly broke the rules) that having Tuesday and Friday, for 10 hours at a time, probably kept us sane in our real world, until we were strong enough to not need it.
In early that November, I got back together with DramaBoy. I stopped going to the perfume shop. I don’t regret.
So why am I writing about this now? Because this week I epically failed at creating this again. I mean, crash and burn. I am nursing a broken heart, and enjoying alcohol and loud music, and I thought that little piece of trustful sex would be awesome. All in, no connection to my real world of work and laundry and children. I wanted it on Wednesday and every other Friday. I just wanted the man to show up and be present for 2-hours and 10-hours respectively and then go back to his real world, to love me (yes, I said love) without reservation or expectation of anything outside of that tiny bit of space. No jealousy, no forever. Rules, but only as they would relate to us, that we would create. But, I couldn’t even get to that part of the conversation, mucking myself up in superficial conversation about movies and other fluff. I had already let my real world creep in instead of just asking for what I wanted. To be fair, he had no clue what I was there for. He already had his own expectations and walls and experiences, and we had a past together that, looking at it from a couple days away, had already doomed it.
I have already let go. Writing blogs is like that for me, thank god. No regrets, for sure, and maybe a little more knowledge of how to help myself. I plan to figure out what is next over a bottle of Jack Daniels this weekend, while my kids are away and I can watch porn. Maybe I will see if my girlfriends wanna come dance with me and talk shit about our exes. And if I meet someone who can be serendipitously amazing, I will know what it looks like. Who’s in?
