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.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
President Obama
We have a new President. We are on the precipice of a new era. I am proud of my country, of my fellow Americans, we did this, we made this happen. We have gotten us this far.
We face serious and grave challenges ahead, our nation is imperiled by economic threats, environmental dangers, by those who would trade our civil rights for a false security, by two wars, by a griping fear of what lies ahead.
But I believe that each of us can be 'the ones we have been waiting for.' The hard work ahead is ours, it is up to us. We can remake this nation. We have the opportunity to create a more just and equitable nation. If we choose. What do you choose?
At this fateful juncture, this can be the worst time or the best time for our nation. It's up to us. Let's make America great once more. Let us finally realize the great and enduring dream that is the promise of America.
*And on a very personal note, my frail 93 year old mother and I have been closely following Barack Obama since he was rumored to be running over two years ago. He is from our home state of Hawai'i. He is a local boy, and a Punahou alum, as am I. Mom was afraid she wouldn't live long enough to see this day, and she has. She has.
We face serious and grave challenges ahead, our nation is imperiled by economic threats, environmental dangers, by those who would trade our civil rights for a false security, by two wars, by a griping fear of what lies ahead.
But I believe that each of us can be 'the ones we have been waiting for.' The hard work ahead is ours, it is up to us. We can remake this nation. We have the opportunity to create a more just and equitable nation. If we choose. What do you choose?
At this fateful juncture, this can be the worst time or the best time for our nation. It's up to us. Let's make America great once more. Let us finally realize the great and enduring dream that is the promise of America.
*And on a very personal note, my frail 93 year old mother and I have been closely following Barack Obama since he was rumored to be running over two years ago. He is from our home state of Hawai'i. He is a local boy, and a Punahou alum, as am I. Mom was afraid she wouldn't live long enough to see this day, and she has. She has.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
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 thanwe you and I are, apart.
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
Friday, January 9, 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
January 7, 1980
My father died almost 30 years ago today. I was 21 and in college. He was the universe to me. And then it vanished.
I had spoken to my father on that Friday evening. He was at home in Hawai'i and I was living in Chicago. He was aged, ill, and blind, and I worried about him constantly. He was old, I was young, I figured this is what the healthy and the young do, we worry about the sick, the infirm, the elderly.
I called on that Friday to see how he was, and then he said something curious, something that surprised me. He said "Well, you know, your grandmother isn't getting any younger, and I worry about her every day." At that moment, I realized that while I had worried about him for the better part of 21 years, he had spent even longer worrying about his mother. He was someone's child, just like me. And in that instant, I released all my worries for the first time in years. This was the gift of knowledge, perspective, and empathy. A gift he gave me. That worries never start or stop a thing, they are just worries. And that he and I, we are strands of the same thread. Two children, of two different parents, but the same.
On Monday, I went to work. It was a cold January day in Chicago, on the lakefront. The winds skidded and blew gathering dust and trash in lazy verticals. All day long I felt something, but I didn't know what. Suddenly the work day was over, and I walked from the Art Institute to Michigan Ave to catch a northbound bus. The lazy verticals of the morning had turned into small isolated fits of fury, tiny cyclones here and there.
Time seemed to thicken. Every sound, suddenly muted. Everything in slow motion. I got on my bus and looked through the front windscreen and noticed the sky. For the first time all day, I noticed the sky. It was a surreal blue. A calm and other worldly hue. And quiet, the world was quiet.
And I knew he had died.
I had spoken to my father on that Friday evening. He was at home in Hawai'i and I was living in Chicago. He was aged, ill, and blind, and I worried about him constantly. He was old, I was young, I figured this is what the healthy and the young do, we worry about the sick, the infirm, the elderly.
I called on that Friday to see how he was, and then he said something curious, something that surprised me. He said "Well, you know, your grandmother isn't getting any younger, and I worry about her every day." At that moment, I realized that while I had worried about him for the better part of 21 years, he had spent even longer worrying about his mother. He was someone's child, just like me. And in that instant, I released all my worries for the first time in years. This was the gift of knowledge, perspective, and empathy. A gift he gave me. That worries never start or stop a thing, they are just worries. And that he and I, we are strands of the same thread. Two children, of two different parents, but the same.
On Monday, I went to work. It was a cold January day in Chicago, on the lakefront. The winds skidded and blew gathering dust and trash in lazy verticals. All day long I felt something, but I didn't know what. Suddenly the work day was over, and I walked from the Art Institute to Michigan Ave to catch a northbound bus. The lazy verticals of the morning had turned into small isolated fits of fury, tiny cyclones here and there.
Time seemed to thicken. Every sound, suddenly muted. Everything in slow motion. I got on my bus and looked through the front windscreen and noticed the sky. For the first time all day, I noticed the sky. It was a surreal blue. A calm and other worldly hue. And quiet, the world was quiet.
And I knew he had died.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
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 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.
Friday, January 2, 2009
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."
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."
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