Compassion

It's warm and summery, and I am getting over a virus (not swine flu, thankfully) and severe back spasms. A hot rock massage and heavy duty Rx muscle relaxants have helped. But I haven't been good for much, dragging myself to appointments and meetings, and fights with G, a short fun visit with M who popped up for a short few days, and work on trying to create a new consulting business for myself, without enough energy or mental focus left to blog, so my apologies, I am sorry.

G is still not fully moved out, I had to pack her socks and underwear and clear out her closet to keep her from coming over every other day for 3 socks at a time. She was also finding a way of still doing her laundry here. Actually she would start a wash and leave for hours ("I'll be right back") expecting me to wash and fold her clothes and pack them neatly for her pick up. Old habits die hard (I admit I was washing, folding, and neatly bagging), and finally she did come back after 9 hours to find her clothes still wet in the washer. We agreed that she would wash and dry her clothes at her own house share. Her new place is quite nice and larger than this tiny house, so I feel less accommodating when she complains about how little space she has (which is why she hasn't moved all her things).

G did have an outburst in the last mediation/therapy session we had, and it became clear to me (with the help of the gay boy therapist) that her anger is ancient and deep and she can't always tell the difference between the present (where she is reasonable and friendly) and the past (where she is traumatized, vicious, angry, miserable, and cruel). In a perhaps inappropriate professional moment, after G stormed out accusing both gay boy and me of calling her crazy, I looked at him in a familiar and utter bewilderment, and he said levelly "It's okay, it's not you." I know I bear a lot of responsibility for what failed in the relationship but it was reassuring to know that some things really are not rooted in what seemed to be the reality I shared with G. I realized that she has, and has had, her out of control moments when we were alone, never when there was a third party (except for this first time with gay boy present), and I have felt bizarrely disoriented, alone, and stressed during many of our most intense interactions. I understand that G's mother treated her with a drunken cruelty, torture, viciousness, abuse, and sneering neglect, but it's a truth I am still unable to imagine in its full scope. And it breaks my heart.

I am learning to dial back, now, not to try to fix something I cannot, and find my own pleasure and joy in the experience of human consistency with M. I hope life sends G the peace and joy she deserves. I won't expect her to be fair to me, or even be in the present with me when we must interact, she'll just do the best she can, and perhaps in the end this all we can ever expect of each other - from each according to our ability, to each according to our need...perhaps everything ends up balancing out, not with each other, but with the universe of human beings we find in the totality of our lives. Perhaps this falls into life's lessons about love, compassion, and acceptance.

To Mend and Heal and Begin Again

And now it is done. And I can breathe. Twas both a sad day to grieve the end of a long relationship and a day of relief; and now starts the healing, the mending, and the beginning of a new life.

I noticed that I have a little bit of fear of the unknown, the risk of the new, the change that I have chosen. I told M that I felt afraid for the first time in a long time, that sense of being alone, apart, on my own. She said, quite gently, "You're not alone, I am here for you." And this is true, and I am grateful that we are there for each other, despite the geographic distance. She is my anchor.

And it is also true that I just changed my first overhead light bulb in decades by myself. I am both embarrassed and proud of myself - I had to carry the six foot ladder up from the basement and unscrew the glass globe. I had a small audience of the dogs and the cat who all seemed quite intrigued by my behavior. I am ready to be a self-sufficient femme, a strong woman who can take care of a house by myself, change furnace filters (yes, it's still cold here, it flurried last night), drain hot water heaters, mow the lawn, use the gas-powered weed whacker, and run the snow blower when I need to.

A femme friend (and previously straight woman) told me to "find a man"; I laughed as she explained that she meant "find a man to hire" to do all the things your butch can't do, or haven't a butch to do. Since this divorce has hit my finances pretty hard, I plan to learn to do all the things I can't afford to hire a man to do, and do my best. I look forward to M coming to visit me in early May and forever, and teaching me a butch thing or two about how to be handy in the home (she is very handy in her own home). This might be a really great thing for me, to learn to be more confident about fixing things and navigating through the running of the physical aspects of homeownership. I want to be more of an equal contributor in the future to the owning and running of a house. I can be a macho girl!

Any advice on good websites or how-to books or things I should be aware of are all gratefully accepted and appreciated.

Wish me luck!

Duet

I face her, and slide my hand up the inside of her thigh. She is hard, her cock pushing against the skin of her jeans, as I trace her desire with my fingers. She is pleased knowing that I cannot resist her relentless need or my own overwhelming desire for her.

We both know where this will end, the two of us, exhausted and thrilled in this continuous discovery and surprise at our compatibility, this shared happy expression of the growing depths of our emotional commitment and love for each other.

I have oft heard that sex is a form of communication, and for us it is both the bell and the echo, not just the bell or just the echo. When I stroke her cock with my lips, feeling her palm pressing softly on my head, knowing how much she loves to see her cock slip glistening from my mouth before she groans and pushes back in, again and again, it is just the start of this wordless hymn, this poem that I sing for her.

She answers my song as she pulls out and lifts my mouth to hers, and we kiss, mouths wide open trying to take as much of each other in as is physically possible. Her hands squeezing my tits, my erect nipples, my ass, grazing every inch of my skin, as she presses me back onto the bed. She dips her fingers into my pussy, as I moan, and she feels me slick and wet for her.

She watches my face and my body as I lift my hips to urge her in, groaning, begging. I like to feel the weight of her body on mine, to look up and see her smile at me. Her smile is an intense mix of cocky and hungry and loving, and tells me that in a few moments, she will enter me, getting closer to me than I allow anyone else, joined to me physically, as we are joined emotionally.

When she fucks me, it's her song, her music, her rhythm and pacing that we dance to. She leads, and I follow. And it is effortless. Sometimes she fucks me hard and fast, her rigid thick cock pounding and pounding my dripping cunt, and sometimes she fucks me slowly and gently, my pussy aching for her, trying desperately to keep her in deep, I never know which it will be, but I am always transported, freed from the bounds of gravity, to go willingly wherever her body takes me. Sometimes she just teases me with her fingers and her cock and her mouth, until I am on the excruciating brink of orgasm, wet and slick, suffering in the agony of pleasure, until she releases me and allows me come for her, again and again and again.

This is our duet, our paean of love and adoration, a poem of joyous exultation.

The Salamander's Path

Tonight is the first night of Spring that is rainy and over 40 degrees, and thus the night when salamanders wake from their winter burrows driven by lust to travel great distances to bright vernal pools to fuck.

Thursday night the spring peepers and the wood frogs were out, the cacophony of spring in sudden shouting orgy in the vernal pools in the hills. Joined tonight by the salamanders. All driven by lust, by the need to fuck, to mate, and more importantly, the cause to live.

I know what it feels like. To have lived in hibernation, in stasis, in my own deep burrow, going nowhere for 12 years. And then, suddenly, awake, driven by inexplicable desire to do what seems natural, what seems essential, in order to live. To travel far through the mud and the muck, across uncertain terrain, under the threat of predation, to find that clear spring pool, to find that other creature, also driven inexplicably to that same place, to be the end to each others journey, and mate. To be gloriously alive, together.

M is, however, unhappy with me, tonight. She hates G, who inventively and sneakily tries to find ways to engage me, even negative ways, her own form of continuous low-level torture. I told M that G likes to fight like M likes to fuck. Each has her own language of intimacy. Unfortunately for one, I don't like to fight, and fortunately for the other, I do love to fuck.

But M is frustrated with me because I don't stand up to G in ways that M would. M literally threw her last gf out, changed the locks, and got a court order of protection. But I am not M. Perhaps I am just weaker, perhaps I am full of mistakes, perhaps if righteousness required that I simply and unceremoniously tossed G and her things out I would opt for half-righteousness (a cruel joke in my mind between being assed and half-assed, perhaps) - even as I angrily and desperately want G to stop trying to engage me and wish she would let it go. Perhaps I am not hard enough or strong enough to be abrupt, though G would aver that I have been as bitterly abrupt as ending a 12 year relationship is wont to be. I am clearly a disappointment to G, as I see I am now clearly a disappointment to M as well, in this regard. And now I feel as if I have failed twice.

This is hard, this working out how to create a new relationship that is not tainted by the poison of the last. And perhaps this is that great caveat about not starting a new relationship until the last is dead and gone. But like all things in my life, I apparently need to do things in my own way, driven at times by an inexplicable urging, the desire to follow a path that may not be the shortest or the surest, but is my path. I hope M does not give up on me, but I understand if she does. The world, like this night, is filled with hundreds of thousand of salamanders who have found their way to bright vernal pools, and with hundreds of thousands, lost and broken, who have not.

I Love You, M

I love you, my M. In a few hours you will rise before dawn and call me. And we will get to spend yet another few short hours together, before the start of another day.

I miss waking up beside you, feeling your skin, your fingers drawing lines on my body, the rise and fall of your chest as you fall back asleep, with me in your arms.

I am staying at my ex's S, while she and her wife are traveling to warmer climes. I have not been living at my beloved home for weeks now (terribly dislocating & painful), since G cannot be trusted not to hurt me, in ways large and small and always, sadly, underhandedly. And I am learning to be pissed, pissed without pettiness, but with self-respect, and I am now kicking G out of my brainspace she has desperately been trying to occupy (as in W Bush and the Iraq Occupation) as she seeks revenge on me for refusing to continue the horrible game, and for ending the too deep well of my emotional and financial support of her. I remain surprised that she continues to fight bitterly with me over ending a relationship that was manifest daily most often as bitter and relentless fighting.

Much to M's (and all of my friends' worried relief) I have finally realized that I have to let my blind heart give way to my clear mind when the target of G's (perhaps conscious, perhaps unconscious) manipulations. My mind is my only real defense, because G shrewdly realizes I really don't like to fight, I do prefer kindness and seek harmony (my strong desire to remain friends), and she has cravenly sought to appeal to and exploit these traits in me financially and emotionally while she berates and belittles me, but she mistakes my kindness and generosity for stupidity and weakness, and now I am, finally, pissed.

I had hoped that G and I could be friends (as I remained with S), but I now understand it may not be the case for a very long time, and perhaps this is a good thing for now. I hope G finds happiness, somewhere, sometime, with someone who can love her unconditionally; she deserves a good and loving life, but that is not to be with me.

And now, finally, to sleep, so the next sound I hear will be the phone and M's voice welcoming me to the morning.

Finding My Life

M is coming on Tuesday to fetch me, so we can spend 9 days together at her home in the Midwest. Hopefully she will miss the storm that threatens tonight, a major Nor'easter, with snow totals up to 10 inches here.

I am not at home tonight, I am with two lovely friends who have taken me in, because I could not take more of G's outbursts, and I was becoming too stressed, finding myself upset, confused, or crying after being yelled at, scolded, mocked, or belittled. I understand G has a lot of pain and she feels some comfort at being a victim of something, but I can't feed into it anymore. I also can't expect to find rationality and reason in raw emotion, I have to stop trying to find what may not be there, just accepting it and letting it be, instead. So I am staying with friends until M comes, and will return to housesitting two other friends' home when I get back. Hopefully G and I can agree to an exit date certain when we meet again tomorrow in therapy with our gay boy. But I am not holding my breath.

Thank you to fimg, pom, diane, and pbd for your thoughtful, supportive and helpful comments on my last post. They were actually very helpful to me, and were instrumental in getting me to this current evolution. I do appreciate your thoughts and insights. This is a hard journey and it's a hard balancing act, and I am trying to find that middle path that honors what was good about my relationship with G, and maintains my self respect and integrity. G has made it a point to let me know she is not going to tell me anything about anything she does or whom she sees (I have not asked), though she regularly asks me probing questions about my life and whereabouts; I realized that it is not unhealthy to keep a separate and private life from each other, and so I will. I may be slow on the draw but I eventually get there (I hope). I also realized the first and hardest task for me is to get G out of my head. I can't keep letting her live and grow in there and then wonder why it feels like my head is going to explode. I need that room now to face both the great potential and the great challenges of the life I have and of the life I want, in a way that is responsible to and respectful of who I am. It's the grown up way, surprising even for a middle aged lesbian like me, who thought I knew what grown up was. Shows you how wonderful being alive is: life remains full of endless surprises, lessons, joys, and blessings.

Status Report

Life has been incredibly complicated and both a bit tortuous and a bit of a relief. As one might suspect, I am in the throes (hopefully not the Dick Cheney version of unending "last throes") of ending the relationship with G. It is going both better and worse than I had hoped, and M remains my beautiful and loving constant.

G and I are now seeing a third party couples counselor to try to amicably end the relationship; as it turns, G became angry and bitter, despite our previous signed agreement to end the relationship in mid-2008 if nothing had changed, and nothing had changed. But it's one thing to get to that level of finality on your own, another to have someone else so declare. She agrees that the relationship was not healthy and that we were not better together than we are as separate individuals, but it is a familiar hell, and sometimes there is a strong draw to the familiar, even as it destroys you.

G has agreed to move out, and I am happy to keep the little tiny house amidst the woods and fields, but I do empathize with the grief and loss she has in leaving it. It is a wonderful, magical little place. My previous ex (S) and M and the gay boy therapist have all been on me not to try to fix things for G, not to try to make it "better" for her, and this is a hard lesson for me. I am a nurturer by nature and it's hard to see someone else in pain, even as she still has her moments where she is mean or cruel to me; I tend to excuse it as reflexive and not as conscious. M tells me what she feels (she wants to drive up and kick G's ass) but leaves it to me to handle. I am grateful for her patience with me in this winding process, perhaps I am wrong or naive to act as if I can expect the best measure of good grace from G, but I still find I cannot give up hope that we can all change for the better. It's what has kept me going as a political activist, and I see no reason to exclude my personal life from my global views. And I have learned many lessons over my life, perhaps this one will be as interesting as all the others.

What remains most difficult in all of this is that I have decided not to declare my relationship with M. This has been a terrible strain and I feel awful on so many fronts about this. I do agree with M that if G feels I am leaving her for another woman that she will entrench and all hope for any reasoned separation will be gone. But I hate it. I hate it because I love M and I want the world to know it. I hate it because it just causes me to try to live a lie and I am a terrible liar. I won't be in the closet about being queer, but I am now in the closet about being in love for the first time in my life. This may be the most bizarre thing that I have ever done, and I have done some pretty out there things in my lifetime. Let's hope it's only this bizarre for a short time more. If anyone has any thoughts on how to deal with this, I would be eternally grateful for your ideas. Simply "kicking G's ass and throwing her out", as an idea, is already taken by M, so you might want to cross that off your list. I tend to favor more amicable approaches. But I am open to just about anything right now.

Thanks for your patience with the spottiness of my posts lately, life is very complicated. I hope I can enjoy simplicity again, soon.

And yes, I am going back to visit M again soon, this time for a week. How I explain this absence to all those here in my New England is just beyond my reach right now, but I expect I will come up with something soon, since I miss my darling M terribly and long for her each day.

M

Yes! We met! She is all I could have hoped for, and with her I find more happiness than I thought life allowed.

M is gorgeous, beautiful, handsome, sexy, muscular, confident, and quite tender, loving, and attentive. I held her hand in the airport as we walked to her car. She has the most incredible light blue eyes that dance and sparkle and have a whole lifetime of stories for me to discover. We had a 90 minute drive from the airport to her home, we kissed at stoplights and long straightaways. We took a small detour to drive by her parents' home (her childhood home), and then we were off to her very neat and shipshape abode. Where I was welcomed with a lovely glass vase of beautiful fragrant flowers, and cards.

I immediately felt safe and loved with her, and I know that she could read the unabashed adoration and love that I feel for her. Suffice to say that, despite our best plans, I couldn't bear the thought of being away from her long enough to wash away 20 hours of travel. So we made out, we made love, and we fucked like insatiable rabbits if those silly rabbits were lucky enough to be us. We made two pizzas together and the pizza was delicious, the best I have eaten in a long while, and the best I have ever made (well, this was my first time making pizza). Perfect to sustain in between long bouts of energetic and passionate fucking, eating, licking, thrusting, riding, and sucking. We were two lovers bent on sharing our love for each other!

And, yes, we even squeaked in time for visits from her sister and her best friend, and a trip to visit her parents. I am happy to say I did meet her parents. M was a little worried since her mother has been a bit less racially tolerant in the past, but her Mom was exceptionally welcoming and wonderful to me, I couldn't have asked for a better and kinder greeting. M had not told her that I was Asian, and Mom did really well, and has since called me "sweetie" on the phone. Dad took a quick look at me, his face broke in a huge grin, he winked, and jumped out of his chair to give me a great big hug and kiss. I think they like that M finally has an very decidely femme girlfriend who is older than she is. I did thank them for raising such a wonderful daughter, because I am grateful to them for their part in making her who she is. She is perfect.

It was remarkable how well M & I fit together emotionally and physically, how well we meshed. I easily fell asleep with my head on her shoulder, my hand at her waist, her arm around me, as we lay in bed. And she pulled a blanket over me when we cuddled in the living room, saying "Here, put this on, you're cold." I said "How did you know I was cold?" She said "Because you tucked your feet underneath you. I notice all the details about you, my love." She tried her pinkie ring on my ring finger for size, and neither of us wanted to take it off once it was on. We do plan to marry in Massachusetts, whenever I am finally free, and she chooses to ask me. Wearing her ring, even for those brief moments, has had quite a profound and continuing effect on both of us. We are in love.

And for the statistically minded, I came for her 8 times, and she came for me twice (it is her preferred ratio). And we each learned new things about each other and ourselves as we made love. She found out how much she loved having & watching me suck her cock and how much she loved watching her cock slide in and out of my pussy. She gave me my first completely vaginal g-spot orgasm. And it was miraculous. She is my beautiful hard cocky man as I am her open, passionate and responsive woman. Her will joined with my surrender. Happily, we, M and I, are clearly better together than apart. We are simply made for each other.

I love her more and more each day.

******

(Btw, to meet the family, I wore a very nice & expensive pair of casual soft green tencel pants with a black fitted t-shirt and a microfleece black half-zip pullover with a purple/green/black silk scarf, black fabric slipons with a wedge heel, small gold hoop earings, a loose gold bracelet wrist watch, & my mother's Buddhist prayer bracelet from the hospital. I can't tell you how long I fussed over what to pack and wear - not too slobby, not too snobby. phew!)

Finally

The days are quickly slipping away before I leave Hawai'i. I will miss my mother so very much. She is a dear, sweet, kind human being. Simple in her outlook and expectations of life. She has no ulterior motives and I can't seem to find any guile in her. I hope that someday I will find the kind of presentness that she lives. She is a Buddhist, of course.

My life is in such flux. I spent the last two years believing in Change! Who knew that 2008/2009 would be, as well, a time of great personal change for me. I finally made the decision, in mid-November, to stop trying desperately to save a long dissolving and mutually unhappy 12 year relationship. I decided that upon my return from Hawai'i, I would leave G. About a month later, in a moment of full acceptance, I wrote and posted "Hope" about the loss of hope for the continuation of the relationship. During that month's time of self-reflection and searching to gain more insight into why I failed the relationship, I fully faced that an essential and explicit dynamic (butch/femme top/bottom) was missing from my life and that I could never find relationship happiness or satisfaction without it. One day after I posted "Hope" in mid December, I unexpectedly met M (my younger sizzling butch top), and we both fell instantly, completely, and surprisingly in love, for the very first time in both of our lives.

In a world where orderliness is often the prized value, my life is full of disorder, it's messy. Would I have preferred to have broken completely with G before I ever met and fell in love with M? I believe the correct answer is yes, but the real life answer is, after considering my path, I could never have given up the chance to love M or to accept her love for me, no matter how or when it happened. At 50, I am getting too old to wait for happiness. I never thought for a second that I would finally fall in love at this point in my life. Given my genes, I only have about 50 years left to love her. And I'm not wasting a moment of it.

Torture

Today is the last day she will allow me to touch myself. M has decided that she wants me in a state of heightened arousal when we meet a week from today. We will continue to tease each other, but I can't touch myself, I can't come.

M says that the past 6 weeks have taught her that she can go this long in such an aroused state without actually physically fucking pussy. She fucks me on the phone almost every night, at least once. And says she has, newly for her, no interest in any other women, because she is finally and wholly in love for the first time in her life, but she aches to fuck me.

Last night, in an effort to share my experience of phone sex with her, I did something I haven't done before with her or any other previous phone sex partners because it just, oddly, never occurred to me. Instead of keeping the phone by my mouth, by my ear, I placed it almost right on top of my own fingers racing hard on my clit. I love the sound of wet, wet fingers on clit, wet fingers in pussy, wet cock sliding in wet pussy... and since I am aurally, as well as visually stimulated, I wanted her to hear how wet I was, what my rhythm is, to hear what she would hear if she was here. I didn't tell her what I was doing with the phone, I just did it. I could hear her loud groan immediately, as she heard how slickly wet I was, how hot for her I was, as I masturbated to her voice, for her. Hearing her unrestrained groans between my legs set me over the edge and I came for her hard on the spot. I highly recommend!

The next seven days will be utter torture.

And Life Continues

Phone sex. Intense phone sex. We had intense phone sex last night and I came hard. After that I, apparently, started babbling about truckers and socks, and I vaguely remember having a dream about M selling white athletic socks out of the cab of her truck but with the disclaimer that sales would only be made to those with valid proof of age ID (over 18 only), and then I passed out.

A version of sleepwalking runs in my family. It's like sleeptalking. It is sleeptalking. My mother does it all the time. We appear to be awake in bed, our eyes are open, and we can sit up, but we are dead asleep. You can carry on a conversation with me, ask me questions and the like, and I will, I am told, answer you but the answers may be a bit peculiar. G finds this both a way to amuse herself and thinks it's some kind of a lie-detector. It is not a particularly accurate indicator, as I suspect that I (like my sleeptalking mother) am truthful to the reality of my dreams. I sometimes wake up in the middle of talking because I hear a voice and it doesn't make any sense and then I realize it's my voice.

I have found that I am unable to lie or lie through omission with M. I can barely keep a good secret from her. I sent her a card recently (well, several cards and flowers) and I called her up to tell her what the card looked like and what I wrote. She just laughed and said I should save my money and just call her with descriptions of the cards and what I would have written. But real cards are better and I can enclose pics of my life in New England.

She likes the pictures of my house and land. It's a small place by my town's standards, less than 15 acres, mostly woods. An acre or two of lawn. A few outbuildings, including a very small barn. And a very tiny house with a large three season porch and a bank of windows. Perfect for two. I hope that I will be able to keep it in the upcoming divorce, it's the first house I have ever purchased and owned, I got the mortgage when I was making a lot of money, before I decided to give it up to try to make a living as a freelance writer. Freelancing is much spottier financially, and I have temp-ed, as well, but I am happier than when I worked 6+ days a week from 8am until 10 or 11 most evenings. There was a two to three year period when I never saw my home by sunlight except for the very early morning before I left for work and my hour commute or occasionally if I skipped out at 8:30pm and got home to see it in the fading 9:30pm sunset during the long days of summer. Sundays I was usually asleep trying to catch up on rest before the next week's grind, or I was up fretting about negotiations or some other horribly tangled problem or potentially litigious issue.

M likes the ruralness of my home. The fact that the stars are sharp and brilliant at night because there are few competing lights. And the evenings are quiet but for the sounds of coyote or owls or a baying dog or two. Or perhaps the simple clip clopping of a horse and rider out for full moon amble. You can hear the wind as it sweeps softly through my little valley of woods and fields. It is possible to enjoy the silence.

I like to go out to see meteor showers because they can be breathtaking if the weather conditions are right. The last meteor shower I got up for was in the middle of the night. I bundled up in a bright yellow hooded down parka and went out at 2am to view. The best view, it turned out, was from the middle of the asphalt road that runs in front of the house. The best way to view it was by lying down in in the middle of the road and looking up at the heavens. G was asleep because she thinks my meteor shower viewing is rather silly, and the dogs and cat watched me curiously and anxiously from the porch windows. It was spectacular! I watched for a while and then, apparently, dozed off because I woke up and looked at my watch and it was an hour later! One dog and the cat remained at the porch windows (the other two must have bored and gone to bed) and I thought I had better move or I would frighten my neighbor in a few hours (he leaves for work at 5 am) if he came upon this bright yellow down blob asleep in the road. Luckily for the sleeping me, there is no other traffic on the road at that hour and little traffic during daylight. M says she will get up with me to view the meteors, and to make sure I don't fall asleep on town roads again.

M and I will see each other in a week or so. Her sister now insists on meeting me for even a short 10 minutes because M is so in love and is talking about moving to New England to be with me, and so her sister wants to check me out. I am fine with that, I understand and respect that those who love M want to be sure that I can love her well. But M says "I'm not sure when we'll come up for air, because I'm going to be fucking her for most of the few hours we have together" but sister is undeterred. Family is like that. Now I just have to be sure I pack an appropriate outfit in which to meet her sister, because I am only good naked for some things.

And life continues!

Crossing Over

We talk about cock.

M has been cleaning out her closets, and finds her old harness. But it is brittle and breaks, so we must shop for new. A new harness just for me. She wants to be ready for my visit in two weeks. We will have 26 hours together, and we have a lot to do. One is make a pizza together (she can make pizza! and I like the thought of making something together and feeding and eating off of each other) and the other is to talk, and to make love and fuck fuck fuck.

She has decided to throw out her old cock, it was used with an old ex of hers whom I have renamed "anal girl", and M doesn't want to fuck me with it. She wants a new cock just for me.

She wants us to go shopping together, but we don't want to waste any precious time to go out to shop, so we go online while we are on the phone to shop for a new cock and harness for her. I am pretty familiar with the site and we get to toys for lesbians. I tell her I prefer realistic cocks, that purple dolphins with swirling noses are not my first choice. But that I want her to feel she owns her cock, so she needs to feel comfortable with what we look at, that it is she who chooses. If she chooses big, she has to make me open enough to take her, that I must be open enough to take her. So, we pick the harness first.

She selects a handsome leather harness in blue&black. She is intrigued by how turned on I am by harnesses, by how wet I get just by seeing it on the virtual mannequin's body, by imagining it on hers. I love how the straps fit, how the O ring is positioned, how when I see a harness on a woman, it signals desire or capacity, it is a pronouncement of power (even without a cock), and I get wet knowing that a harness means I can get fucked. She likes my hunger.

We then look at compatible cocks. I like one with balls but she wants more depth. She decides that she will pick the one that I can throat and that she can fuck my pussy deep. The one with balls will be our next purchase. She knows I want to feel her balls slapping against me while she fucks me, but that will come later.

She picks her cock and her harness and they will arrive by Tuesday. Enough time for her to wear them and get used to them. I have asked if she would jerk off with it before I come. I hope she will jerk off while I am on the phone with her sometime, I love hearing the sound of stroking wet on cock and I want to hear her voice.

We talk about how much I love cock, how I love to watch cock sliding in and out of my pussy in my favorite face-to-face lap sitting position, to watch her face as she fucks me, to feel consumed by desire and to surrender to her, to her will, to her power.

Earlier in our relationship, after we have talked about fucking, we wander into a conversation about how I am her woman, and I say, uncertain of her response, "I want you to be my man." She pauses for a second, a little surprised, and then says evenly "I am your man. You are my woman and I am your man." My heart jumps. I have so longed for this, someone willing to cross over into that genderfucking territory with me. but I can see that this is new for her to vocalize, new words for her to speak. So we tread slowly.

Today, I say to her, "Do you remember when I asked you to be my man?" She says, "Yes, I remember. I hadn't been able to name that part of me that always felt like a man trapped in a woman's body." I say, "This is why your cock is important to me. That it is yours, I want you to feel the sensation of the back of your cock pulsing against your clit, and feel the sensation of what happens in your brain shooting down directly to your clit..." I tell her that part of my failure with G and with my other longterm partner was that I was unable to understand the difference between lesbians wearing dildos fucking me, and what I crave. I tell her "I want you to fuck me as a man does a woman." I say "I want you to fuck me, making your clit and your cock one. Your cock becomes an extension of your clit, and your clit becomes your cock."

She has been reading Holden's posts (packingvocals.blogspot.com) about being defined by others at a young age, sharing Holden's confusion about the conflict between what you feel and who you are supposed to be, the shame it brings, and how that constricting process of gender tyranny retards the ability to find who you really are, until mid-life. M decides she may, like Holden, find a name for the man inside of her to clearly demarcate his gender identity from her female biology. She adds "I really hope you will be able to control him once you bring him to life." He is clearly very very powerful.

We talk about a friend who is a butch top who wears a cock. It is not clear whether she genderfucks as well, and we discuss how what we feel about ourselves, about each other, about how our dynamic remains still an outlier in relationships between women. Then she has a slight moment where she worries that I might want only cock. I say "I am a lesbian for a reason, I love tits, fingers, hands, clit and pussy. I like to eat pussy, I want to eat your pussy. I want the best in one person, I want your living cock and I want your living clit. And to my great thrill and amazement, you have both." She grins and says "wooooooooooo hoooooooooo!"

Inside the cells that produce sperm and eggs, chromosomes become paired. While they are pressed together, the chromosomes may break, and each may swap a portion of its genetic material for the matching portion from its mate. This form of recombination is called crossing-over. When the chromosomes glue themselves back together and separate, each has picked up new genetic material from the other. The constellation of physical characteristics it determines is now different than before crossing-over.
National Center for Human Genome Research, NIH

The Snail's Shell

I am upset. I am surprisingly jealous. I never get jealous, my lack of jealousy has been an issue in almost all of my relationships, I am never jealous, that's a fact. But I am, with you. It is uncomfortable and feels crazy. It is an uncharted experience and feels childish, ridiculous, irrational, and overwhelming. You are surprised and a little angry that I could ever doubt that you love me and only me. I can feel your irritation in your sparse words. You can read my unwritten distance. Though we have frugally agreed not to speak on the phone until the rate is free (because we talk for hours) the phone rings. It is you. You don't want this to fester, you don't want me to believe that you could do anything, intentionally, that would cause me harm. We talk, and I think I am done, and we hang up so you can sleep and call me in the morning before you go to work. But it eats at me. And I hate it.

You are to call me at about 3:30 am your time (10:30 pm my time), because you have an early pick up two hours north. I am in a funk, and I decide to skip my usual 5 mile walk in the evening. I rarely skip my walk. But I do, and I work out instead at home, and chat with Mom's evening caregiver about girl things and watch a Japanese historical drama with subtitles on tv with Mom & her caregiver. Of course the drama is very typical for Japanese shows of the type and a critical part of the drama is unspoken. For anything to make sense, you have to already well understand the culture to understand the unsaid subtext. It is frustrating and confusing to watch. I do not understand the culture well enough, and Mom cannot explain it. So I give up and decide to go to bed early, to get an hour or two of sleep before M calls.

I check my email and suddenly up you pop. You are happy and cheery and up at 1:45 am (8:45 pm my time) and raring to talk to me. I had considered sending you a chat to skip for the night for the first time in all of our time, but when I see you pop up, all such thoughts begin to fade. I ask if you want to go back to sleep and call me later, but you are up and happy and say "only if you prefer". I don't prefer. And now I am even more confused by my feelings.

You are full of energy and thrilled to be awake and overjoyed to hear my voice. It is hard to sustain distance when you are like this. But you notice the reserve in my voice, immediately. You are confused by what you think has been settled the night before. I am unable to contain my fear and I do what I have always done when I am upset, I withdraw and become quiet and very very polite. For this, I am used to being left alone or angrily reproached. But not you, you won't let me disappear, and you won't be angry. You say, evenly, "Is this what I should expect in the future? When you are upset you withdraw, you snail?" I say "Yes" quietly, "I guess so," waiting for the shoe to drop. "Ah," you say "but you are still here, one little tiny antenna peeking out, still checking, still seeing what's up in the outside world. Still willing to be connected from deep inside your snail's shell." I laugh. "Yes", I say, as I exhale and push out from my shell, "I guess so."

Sometimes, in what feels like a miracle of instantaneous translation, someone can listen past to the unspoken, can read right through, can reach deep within, and make it safe to be connected. Sometimes, it is possible to remember to trust and love, even from far within an old and familiar snail's shell.

Apart

We circle in this constant state of mistrust and blame. Accusing words, the bitterness of silence, and sometimes, horribly, barely concealed contempt mark each phone call, each exchange. We fight about the mundane and the serious. What is surprising is to expect something different in the course of our conversations, to expect them to be different, more civil, less strained, though they have followed exactly the same course for the last 12 years. There is little joy or love left in any of our exchanges, just unrelenting stress. We define the ultimate clash in communication style and in basic values.

I read once that most happy couples have built up a reservoir of good will to keep them through tough times or conflict; that is not us, we seem to have horded missteps, misunderstandings, slights, raised voices, sharp words, insults, and deliberate wounds. We have horded these things to successfully slice away the flesh of whatever few glad moments we find we have left together.

G, we can openly and truthfully face the disappointing reality of our long dissolving relationship, the terrible reality that we each learned precisely how to irreparably damage a dream with our own hands, by failing to nurture it, by expecting each other to be different that who we are. Or we can do this with a blind and furious litany of on-going disappointments, betrayals, scars, broken promises, and blistering rage at a future which will never be. You can start to tote up your lists and I, mine. But you should know that the weight of my list is too much for me to bear, I can't keep adding to it. I can't hang onto disappointment and betrayal and rejection and loss anymore. This is no longer a blueprint for a reasonable life, a fulfilling life, a life I choose.

Your volatile temper has always dominated our relationship. And if you so decide, you can hate me or seek to hurt me to even the score, and there's nothing much I can do to stop you. But what I do know is this: You and I are two good people who somehow turned bitterness, emptiness, disappointment and loss into 12 years together, and we seemed to have forgotten that sometimes two people, however perfect or flawed or hopeful, are not better (for ourselves or each other) together than we you and I are, apart.

She Makes Me Laugh

She makes me laugh. We tease each other and pretend to compete for who loves whom more, until we get to the "I love you a bagillion +1 x infinity" and I weakly concede to her superior superlatives and she is triumphant and says "Yippee! I win!"

We are silly and giddy and thrilled to be happy with each other. To be happy knowing how unlikely we are, unlikely because we are separated by geography, unlikely because we have had such different lives, unlikely in so many ways, until those radically different paths led us to the same place, that one unlikely chance meeting and the start of all of this.

I have forgotten how much fun it is to laugh with your lover. How remarkable it is to hear so much in a laugh, to be able to differentiate the laughs of a single person, to hear thrill and joy in another person's voice. And to be able to find it again in my own.

We are planning to meet in a month. Before I go home to New England. I will stop and see her on one of the many legs of my truncated flight. We are planning to meet, to have her take me to her home, to talk, to laugh, to kiss, to share, to make love, to fuck. To consummate our promise to each other to honor this unexpected and unlikely and miraculous love.

Bedtime Story 1

She likes the way I come for her. She listens to my breathing, soft at first, as she begins to tell me how much she loves me, how much she wants me, how much she wants to fuck me. Her voice soft and soothing at first. She knows how to turn me on. Slowly it builds.

She likes to hear my breathing change, it's how she knows my body responds the way she intends. She tells me she will strip the sheets off of my naked body while I sleep, and surprise me the way I like, grabbing my ankles and pulling me almost off the bed, spreading my legs as she pulls me, so my pussy ends up, wet and open at her hips.

She tells me she is wearing her cock. It bounces as she moves, hard and jutting. She strokes it while she looks down at me. She reaches between my legs to feel my wet soaking her fingers, to put my wet all over her cock which she continues to stroke. She likes the sound of my wet on her cock, sliding slick under her grip.

With one hand she strokes her cock and watches me, with her other hand, she spreads my lips and begins to stroke my clit, in soft lazy circles. She can hear my body lift and twist, my breathing begin to shallow and harden, and the start of my wordless moans. She suddenly bends my knees and rolls my body up so she can easily begin to slide the head of her cock just inside my pussy, a tease. Each stroke infinitesimally deeper. But barely. She listens for my breathing, faster now, hungry. She listens for me to cry out, urgent, pleading, "Oh god, please baby, please, please fuck me".

This is for Butch Boo, who wanted an update on my relationship with M. M and I are now fully in the grip of the phone sex stage.

She Wants to Hear My Voice

This distance strains us. Intimate words appearing in fits and spurts, as crossing lines of dialogue, are not enough. She is afraid that I am a phantom. Though she has my picture, she wants more.

We have agreed not to meet in person or talk on the phone until I have returned home (where we will, instead, be only hundreds versus thousands of miles apart), until I have broken completely with G. We want to be sure that I am making my decisions based on my own desire to leave an unfulfilling relationship, not my lust or desire simply to be with M; to make decisions about G based on G, not on my feelings for M. This seemed to have made sense a week ago for both M and me, but seems less realistic now.

This is all quite a strain on M, and I feel I place a terrible burden on her. She fights her own jealousy that while she makes love to me this way, in a month or two when I return home, G will enjoy the fruit of M's labors by unexpectedly fucking me in person, just to even some score or make me stay.

But it is clearer to me, each day, that M and I are able to share with each other a kind of openness, respect, strength and fragility, trust and care that I haven't shared with anyone else, ever. And I find her hard to refuse. Because I trust she will not ask me to do more than I can, more than I want, more than is safe for me.

She wants to hear my voice.

Her voice is higher than mine, a little giddy, very nervous. She is breathing quickly, her voice is tight and breaks in nervous laughter. She has been like a school boy waiting to call at the agreed upon hour. Practicing what she will say when the phone is answered. I spend 15 minutes picking up the receiver and checking and rechecking to make sure there is a dial tone (there always is) until I realize if she calls the line will be busy. Then I wait and watch two clocks that seem to count the universe at different speeds.

Her voice is serious and formal as she asks if she may speak to me. I answer lightly, breathlessly, "It's me." I am giddy, nervous, my breathing is shallow, I fear losing my ability to speak. We share our obvious nervousness and our joy and we laugh. And then we become ourselves. We find in each others' voices another dimension, another connection to who we are together. We sort through a misunderstanding from the day before in two minutes, she tells me how beautiful and sexy my voice is, I tell her how glad I am to hear her, and then I whisper in her ear "I love you." Whisper, whisper, because the human voice can whisper, can say softly, what these printed words cannot. I can hear her catch on her own heartbeat, and tenderly, softly, sweetly, she whispers "I love you, too."

Note to Self

When taking self-portraits to send to online lover, do previous research to discover that most cyber pics show women in some form of "come hither" or "bedroom" or "I'm a hot tough butch" or "I'm a sweet, cute young thing" or "I'm a lot of fun" look or pose. It's the visual language of online chasing.

One should try not to send a bleak photograph of oneself that looks rather remarkably like the author's pic on the dust jacket of an obscure book of poetry. Pensive, intellectual, serious, mature has not yet become a hot look in internet chasing. Though remember to save that photo for when you finally find a publisher for your book of pensive, intellectual, serious, and mature poetry.

Crazily, the intense, beautifully cocky, sizzling butch top actually manages to find pensive quite quite sexy.

Reasonable Mind

The voice in my ear is my good friend L. We have just reconnected after a long family trip for her. I break the news about my recent and engulfing attraction to M. There is that familiar silence that accompanies the swirl of her mind before the reproach. She is thinking "How can I say this?" She is trying to shorten the pause between the end of the trail of my words and her thoughts without rushing her emotions. Sometimes she wins that battle and sometimes not. Not. "Are you nuts?!" she says trying to say this calmly, her voice rising. "You know I love you, but are you nuts?!"

She knows me well enough not to attribute my behavior to all lesbians though she has her suspicions of all poets. She is older than I am, and an actual happy straight. It must be that we are both femmes, unreasonably optimistic, and share a long-term commitment to volunteer work with the elderly poor. We have been friends for years.

"I'm not going to even tell you why, because you know why, but you have to break it off." For her, the line between the rush of lust and practicality is stronger and more defined than I seem to be able to find, at this moment. "Men and women fall in love with you all the time, though god help me I can't figure out why, and you never notice it or ignore it, because you know better." She knows I can be overwhelmingly, blissfully and sometimes still painfully ignorant of my impact on others. In my silence, she hears me trying to figure out what to say next.

Her voice quiets, "You know what my life is like, I haven't been a saint, but I know you, and if this is meant to be something deeper, it will wait."

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?