Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Fireworks

I have been walking five miles each night for the past few months. I walk when it is dark and cool and quiet, and I can be alone with my thoughts and with the night. For the last few evenings, there have been loud displays of illegal aerial fireworks in some part of the sky. The fireworks last less than a minute, just long enough for a brilliant and exciting display, and for whomever is setting them off to run away before the cops show up. Kind of an apt metaphor for my own life these past few days.

After I made my last post, I ended up in, dear god, do I say it, a private online chat. I had been conversing for the past few nights with another woman (one assumes a woman), another femme, about art and poetry and the emotional wrack that takes place as you seek publication or exhibition for your work and find mostly rejection. So I popped in, late my time, hoping for a little more art talk.

Well, the first girl never showed up, and I had been there for about 3 minutes and another woman shows up. Butch top. And there was talk. Nice, peaceful talk about life and relationships. Our five hours seemed like five minutes. And it was calm and soothing, and we agreed to meet the next night to talk a little more, and move to a private room.

I wonder if it's a given that private online chats between magnetic opposites invariably lead to talk about fucking. And talk we did. Talked about it for days. The attraction was instantaneous, combustible, powerful. The epitome of what I adore in butch tops, she sees her role as pleasuring her femme. And perhaps as powerfully for her, I see my role as surrendering myself in willing trust to her desires. What pleases her, pleases me. When I am pleased, she is satisfied. And luckily for me, she is not a stone butch, she likes to come both by her femme coming for her and by what I consider the sacred act of clit sucking and cunt eating. Perhaps I'll write more about my thoughts on the joys of giving and receiving oral sex at another time.

Writing and talking for me are intense forms of foreplay. Since I write, I love all the things language can do. Its transformative nature, its ability to move directly from what I think to you, not impeded by physical clues or other physical senses. Of course, sometimes physical clues may be (very) important. But online chats are a very modified form of a monologue. And monologues are, by their structure, very self-indulgent. We can expound and hold sway, we can share our innermost fears, thoughts, and desires. Without the immediacy of judgement.

So I am online getting fucked by this very hot younger, beautifully cocky, butch top with a sizzling desire for me. And I have to say, I adore her. Is it cheating? Is it fantasy cheating?

Being lesbians, however, we don't just do sex, we become emotionally entangled. And being butch/top-femme/bottom the energy is intense. She wants to do to me all the things that I want. I want to do what pleases her, to trust her desire. To push myself, to allow myself to open up to her and to all she desires. And because, as lesbians, this whole interplay has an intense emotional component, this has fallen faster and deeper than my rational mind tells me is sensible. Because, the rational voice says in my head, I am in relationship of many years with G, and we are separated but not separate. Because I love G still, as I love all my exes, and our practical lives are intermeshed - we own a house together. Untangling and separating will not be an easy task, emotionally and logistically. Perhaps M will be more sensible about this than I am, and end this before we get too much farther than the far we seem to have already gone. I confess we have already used the "L" word and if you think I'm talking about "licking" you 'd only be half right.

I suspect some of my behavior in the last few days has been part of my natural preference for "talking out loud" to work problems out. And I have learned a lot about myself in this so far short romance. It becomes clearer to me what I want in my partner. She must identify sexually as a butch top. Because that sexual dynamic, that structure of interplay, allows me to release myself, to be free, in a way that no other type of sexual dynamic does. It remains missing in my current relationship. And I suspect it will never be there. I remain surprised at how essential the butch/femme top/bottom dynamic is for me, not simply as sexual role play but as central to how I seek safety and sanctuary in the world. I feel a little silly that the great fear and great joy of discovering this given about the necessary structural manifestation of intimacy for me, comes in mid-life. But c'est la vie.

Who knows what other fireworks the night will bring, and if I will need to start running?

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