Over the Pit

Today I told my husband that I could no longer be his wife.

Here we hang, the pair of us, over our own deep pits, wondering what comes next.

I told him I had spent the week thinking about, peeling away, all the doubts, the anger, the blame, the self-recriminations, the despair...all of it...and was left with this: I need to be free to love whom I will...to love freely, joyfully, and fearlessly.

He is leaving, because if I cannot love him, and him alone, then...then nothing.

So here we hang, the pair of us, over our own deep pits, wondering what comes next.

I feel sick.

I Resent Having to Say This

Warning: If you have come to this blog through a link, found it by accident, or were snooping, stop now and consider - this is a repository for every dark, horrible, wistful, depressed, depraved, demented, angry, resentful, sad, and wounded thought in my head. If you can't handle reading it and biting your tongue about the content, that's on you.

You know who you are. Now quit cyber-stalking me and making us both miserable.

Thank you. That is all.

Butterflies

There are butterflies in my stomach. They've been there for days, flying through the anger, the sorrow, the bitterness.

Their wings softly, gently, patiently flutter, dissipating the clouds, making room for...something...something else...perhaps beautiful.

There are butterflies in my chest. They've been there for days, gliding through the cold, unconcerned with anything but their own brilliance.

Their wings softly, gently, patiently flutter, frightening away the loneliness birds that perch on my withered, stone heart.

There are butterflies in my head. They've been there for days, painting the grey into something more to their liking.

Their wings softly, gently, patiently flutter, brushing away the cobwebs, airing out the stillness, opening doors long closed.

The butterflies dance...

Hypothermia

Have you ever been out in the snow?

In a blizzard?

The flakes come at you hard and fast, blinding, and if you don't know where you're going, you can get lost.

Get lost, and you're in trouble - you need shelter, somewhere to keep warm and safe, a haven.

Stay out in it, and you find yourself growing colder, withdrawing inward...until you are overcome by an warm, sweet lassitude, melting into your bones and sapping your strength, your will, until you lie down in the snow and slip away, not even shivering any more.

It's been snowing in my heart, in my mind, for a very long time. Years. I've grown cold, remote, and unable to rise to my own defense, to rouse myself and care, to fight.

I've finally come to a place where I am so chilled, I am warm...and it's a dangerous place. Suddenly, I am floating, drifting through my own life, with no attachment to what is happening around me. I feel limp, weak, lazy, like placing my head on the earth, curling around myself, and drifting off to sleep...

Dangerous. Dangerous place.

And the place I thought was a shelter, a safe haven, a place that was supposed to help me weather these storms?

He's watching TV, oblivious, and I just can't seem to care enough to try and salvage things...

I'd rather just lie here, floating, until I'm gone.

*Edit - after playing around on youTube this evening, I rana cross this, and thought it was apropriate...

Silken Strands, Gentle Hands

So often, I wear it up. My hair. I wear it pulled back or pinned up or braided, hidden away. It's my best feature, the one thing I am proud of, and I hide it away.

I have yearned for gentle hands to pull it loose, carefully, remove the pins and ties and run curious fingers through it, silken strands tumbling down, tangling, clinging.

I have yearned for gentle hands to caress, to stroke, to run underneath, at the nape, where the hair is softest and quiet little shivers wait to run their course.

I touch it myslef, brush it, run my fingers through it, almost but not quite satisfying the want...but it isn't the same...

That Thing You Do

I don't pretend to understand, sir, what it is you do.

I don't mean do as in work, as in polite conversation, what do you do?

I don't mean do as in what you do to thrive, to bring light and lightness of being in to your life.

I don't mean hobbies, pastimes, or how you fix your hair.

I refer to what you do to me.

I mean how you make me want to be...someone...somewhere...else. Better. New.

What is that?

And still I dream of someone who isn't there and wake with an ache that can't filled, calmed, soothed, because you can't caress something with nothing. You can't fill an empty place with dreams, wishes, hope.

Frustrating, sir, frustrating.

Fearful, sir, fearful.

The Angel knows better, she does, than to give way, to stand down, to open, unfold...trust.

The Angel is a fool.

What is that thing you do, sir?

Trembling

I woke trembling this morning, a sort of all-over quake.

It was the dream that did it.

I dreamed I was Kate again, back in her time (whenever it was - I cannot say, there is never a calendar and she doesn't answer when I ask, perhaps because I am a ghost to her, or the faint whisper of a dream she doesn't understand) and in her place (I know this one - Ireland, although not as we know it today).

It was dusk, and she stood with a number of other young women in a circle, surrounded by another circle, men. They were laughing, smiling, the women turning deosil, the men widdershins. In the center, beside the balefire, the High Priest and High Priestess watched, waited, listened to the inner call.

With an unspoken accord, Priest and Priestess made their choices, selected a woman, a man, and led them away into the fields. The two circles slowed, stilled, and each woman faced a man. They joined hands and wandered into the fields, newly furrowed for spring planting.

Odd, how in dreams one may know things the waking mind cannot, will not, does not want to know.

Kate was exuberant, joyful, a sexual woman who was not ashamed of her wantonness, of the pleasure she took from men or the pleasure they took from her. Not taken. Freely given.

I watched, the moon above smiling down on these children of the earth who were performing a ritual as old as agriculture - showing the land how to go, encouraging fertility, feeling their blood run as the sap in the trees, fiery, hot, rushing and roaring to bring forth new life.

I watched, but I also experienced, because I was, after all, once Kate. At least - I think I was. I believe I was. Can't prove it, though. I guess it doesn't matter, because a delusion, to the deluded, is a real as anything.

Dark earth below, loamy, soft, richly perfumed. Moonlit sky above, scattered stars providing soprano counterpoint to the moon's soft alto crooning. Lovers tender, wild, consumed and consuming, caught up in Spring's symphony, chorus of night creatures creating a tapestry of song punctuated by lover's cries. Beautiful.

I woke with the dream's dawn, feeling Kate's release shivering through me, a shadow of her elation still with me, an invisible robe of satiation wrapped around me.

Sometimes I envy Kate - she was so easy in her skin, so content to be who she was, so fearless and unabashed about her sexuality. If she wasn't, isn't, real, I don't care - she's a part of me, a reminder of what I could be, could have, if only I can learn to let go.

Whether from memory or wanting, I cannot say, but some part of me resonates with that dream, the unthinking, the passionate part. All these hours later, I am still shaking, fine tremors in my hand forcing me to retype, correct spelling errors, clean up spilled water, catch dropped things.

I am reminded that I have neglected a part of my life, of my psyche, for too long. I hope it goes away...and I hope it remains.

In It

Up to my ass in alligators, I am.

No, not really.

But it sounds good, sounds busy, sounds so much better than saying I have the blues, or the greens, or the purples, or whatever color says "I am fecking miserable and can't do a damn thing about it but keep breathing in and out and hang on for dear life..."

I wonder if this is what it's like, in the center of a tornado...this eerie calm coupled with the roaring winds and destruction that rends and tears and leaves small things miraculously untouched.

I'm in it, right in the middle, a place I know so well. Breathing in, breathing out, holding on and hoping this isn't the one that carries me away.

Alone in a Dark Room

Someone in my family died on Friday.

We weren't close in any normal sense, but she was family, and an integral part of my childhood. Her children and I share blood, if distantly. She had cancer, fought the good fight, and slipped free of it all only days after deciding to end the medication that hurt more than the disease.

Last night, I went to bed alone and wept. I wept for the woman who died, and for her family, and because I had hoped to see her once more, and maybe also a little because I begged the Goddesses of healing, of life, of compassion to intercede, to make it go away, to let this woman be the one in a million, one in a billion, who lived...and the Goddesses didn't listen, didn't act...

I wept, alone.

Alone in a dark room.

There should have been someone with me...but he wasn't. Even knowing that I mourned, he wasn't there. The race he was watching was more important, it seems. The computer was more interesting, the game more worthy.

How is someone else's death about me?

It isn't, not really...I just felt so empty, alone in a dark room, crying and wishing there was someone there to comfort me.

His sister died of cancer not too long ago, and I drove with him to see her, to be with her, comforted him, stood by him and lent such strength as I had to give...and he left me alone in a dark room last night.

I am not the sort to weep and wail in public, make a spectacle, let slip even one tear where someone else might see and feel obligated to respond...but I would like, just once, to feel that I don't have to be alone in a dark room...that there are two arms to hold me and a voice to reassure me, a presence beyond the Gods who are woefully inadequate when one's body craves physical touch.

How is it about me, her death?

It's not.

I am a selfish ass...and I'm still alone in a dark room.

The Ache

I am not sleeping well. Perhaps it is Summer, heat, humidity, sweat, air heavy with promise and green and wet. Perhaps it is the emptiness I notice so keenly just now. Perhaps it's aliens sucking my brain out my ears when I'm not looking.

I spent today surrounded by several thousand people, and I was alone. I played my part, smiled, chatted, engaged...but I was alone. I made it home from where I was, just...although once or twice I may have drifted close to sleep while I drifted into the next lane a wee. This is so much more than physical exhaustion...

Dear Goddess, I am lonely. Why people seem so alien to me, why I feel as though I am incomplete despite my good life, I cannot say. I suspect you know, Goddess, but you aren't telling.

I am open, though, to what answers may come. Open, and empty, and alone.

Beneath the Bright Moon

The moon is full and I am empty, but not empty. More, I feel empty in a place that was once full, and I am looking for what is lost, or may never have been there in the first place.
~~~~~

Standing by the river, I watch it flow, swift, swollen, dark mysteries silver beneath the bright moon. I am silver beneath the bright moon. Alone and silver.

I wonder where you are, beneath this same bright moon. Are you in the deep wood, dancing with shadows? Or do you glide along pathways of light, beside this same river, across the water where I cannot see?

I miss you, Lord of my Desire, Lord of my Dance, of my Song, of my Inner Fire. From one life to the next have we been together, so where are you in this here and now?

I am waiting here, beneath the bright moon, her cool light against my fevered skin a blessing, a promise, but her whisper soft touch is not what I crave.

I crave you, Lord of my Desire, Lord of my Dance, of my Song, of my Inner Fire. I crave your fingers trailing liquid heat along my flesh, your kisses arousing and chilling me outward from my Center, your warmth along my length as we swim in the river, ardor briefly cooled by the silken caress of the sweet water beneath the bright moon. I crave you sliding along me, slick, wet, fitted to me so perfectly, half made whole beneath the bright moon.

I am lost here, beside the river, lost without you, able only to flounder in the shallows without you, alone and lost beneath the bright moon.

Hurry, Lord of my Desire, Lord of my Dance, of my Song, of my Inner Fire...hurry and find me again.

Love and Melancholia, in parts

"...love lost is the hardest burden to shoulder, and it's one you can never get under..."

Out of context, it doesn't make much sense, but I honestly can't recall the whole of the quote - I wrote it down, along with some thoughts it inspired, but I cannot find where. Still, I recall how I felt the air thicken around me, a syrup of oxygen, carbon dioxide, all the things we breathe, too heavy to draw in, too heavy to expel, stifling, hot, oppressive.

A kick to the gut, a slap to the psyche, a terrible blow to my already shattered heart.

I just don't understand.

I don't mean the quote - oddly enough, I comprehend that to the bone, although what it means to me and what it may mean to you are likely two different things.

I wonder.

If a love is bent, forced, broken into pieces, can it be mended? Can one put it back together, apply some peculiar cosmic adhesive (perhaps the stuff that binds atoms together), and make it almost whole once more?

If a love changes, grows, burns to ash, is carved and chipped away, can it be reformed into something like its old self? Can it again put down roots, blossom, bear fruit?

Should one even try?

A woman I know said "I love my husband, I care about him, but I can't be married to him any more."

It struck me cold, that.
~~~~~~
In another guise, wearing my more public face and writing with my more public voice, I found another blog, wherein I read a post regarding love. I commented the following:

"...Sigh.

When I got married, I told the poor fool that he should have some reason other than love for going beyond shacking up. Love grows, fades, changes, evolves. It's a living thing, is love, and it doesn't hang in stasis.

Sometimes a body needs something more than love to keep going...because sometimes, a body doesn't love their spouse/partner very much, maybe doesn't like them at all, and having that other something to hold onto while they sort themselves out can mean the difference between tempering the blade and shattering it.

I wish he'd listened. Some of us are not easy to love...or, perhaps, easy to love but not to live with. Try forcing a flame to burn always as it was in the first moment you saw it.

I think that loving another doesn't diminish the love one feels/felt for the first. I think sometimes one needs more than a single person can provide...and I don't refer only to sex. Sometimes, one needs spiritual nourishment, emotional nourishment, a love beyond touching. I think that trying to contain love in one box, one bag, one relationship is like trying to grasp a handful of water - the tighter you squeeze, the less you get and the more you find flowing away.

How sad is it that petty jealousies would interfere with that craved for completion? Is it love that cages the bird? Or is it love that flings wide the door and frees the spirit within, trusting that it will return of its own accord?"

I signed it with this parenthetical statement after my name:

"(who knows only too well that love, bound unto suffocation, can so easily turn to anger, resentment, and bitterness until it has burned itself out into a cold emptiness tasting of ash and scorched metal)(Why yes, I'm familiar with hyperbole, why do you ask?)"

I also commented later, regarding another reader's words:

"When the soul hungers, the heart falters, and why is it so wrong to seek blessed rain when one is parched? How did we come to this, this idea that one may love only one, and then it must be forever?

It's a fine notion, in stories, where people do not change, grow, become different beings in their lifetimes, but out here? In the world not on the pages? It's suffocating!

I don't like mushrooms. Some people do, but I don't. I don't think I can find all I need from one love. Some people can, but I cannot. We are all different, with differing wants and needs - so why is it that I can order a meal without mushrooms and no one bats an eye, but I cannot love more than one at a time without raising a ruckus??

Loving isn't owning. I DO wish more people could see that."

And again, after I signed my name:

"(loving, compassionate, lost, and determined to muddle through somehow"
~~~~~
What does it all mean?
~~~~~
I am struggling to breathe, to sing, to break free of...something...but I fear I am mired. I am afraid to look at myself, or anyone else, and I feel I should lock myself away from society until I can force myself to grow as my gardeners would have me...unnatural though it feels.
~~~~~
I have an old, dear friend, one I haven't seen in years. I could go visit this man who was my teacher, who saved my life with his kindness, compassion, and intelligence...but I do not. Because I hate the way I look, and can't see any beauty with which I may show him I was worth the effort.

One day, I would like to believe that I have, within if not without, something lovely. It's not today, though. Today I am slime-molds and rotting things, and could I part company with myself (like the head and body of the King of the Moon), I would do so swifter than a hawk's stoop.
~~~~~
I'm not fishing for compliments. I am simply opening a festering wound and letting the ugliness pour out, hoping that one day, it will be the last time...that I will drain from myself the extent of this dark putrescence and heal. I fear I will be too old, that it will be too late, and the loving I crave, the loving that I know to be within myself, the loving that I want so desperate to twine with another...well, it will sit untouched, unknown, withered and small in a shadowed corner of my soul.

I wish I could have loved freely, openly, with wanton abandon, when I was young.

I wish I could have been a child, with a child's lightness, and let to grow into womanhood without the meddling of evil hands that sought to shape me elsewise.
~~~~~
I am hurting tonight, and have no arms to hold me and sooth, no voice to murmur, no spirit to draw upon for strength, no one to lean upon feeling safe, cherished, despite my shadows, and I am hurting deeply and with familiarity, and I am weary with it.
~~~~~
What am I to do?

What am I to do...?

I Masturbate in Secret

Caution, adult content follows. Read at your own risk, and only if you're mature enough for frank sexual conversation. I don't want to hear any whining about how you were horrified, damaged, scarred for life, and if your kid read this and was traumatized, why the hell weren't you monitoring their net surfing to begin with??

I masturbate in secret.

I masturbate in secret so my husband won't know. So he won't ask me about what I do, or why, and what I am thinking, and so insinuate himself in my thoughts while I masturbate in secret.

I masturbate in secret and don't tell my husband, because I don't want him thinking I want sex. I don't want sex, not with him, so I masturbate in secret.

I masturbate in secret because I don't want someone, anyone, getting excited at the thought that I'm masturbating, and also because I don't want anyone to be disgusted by the idea that I masturbate, even in secret.

I masturbate in secret, sometimes three or four times a day. It's not about sex, at least not always. Sometimes it's about the need for relief, the need to reduce tension in some way, to let go of the anger that threatens to turn to rage but is transformed into a moment of transcendence when I masturbate in secret.

I masturbate in secret and think dark thoughts. I let my mind run rampant. Sometimes I have fantasies about actors, authors, characters in stories. Sometimes I have fantasies about angry, hurtful men. Once, in my fantasy, someone asked me why I was with a man who treats me like shit and I answered that figment "Because I am shit" and I cried while I masturbated in secret.

I masturbate in secret because I want sex with someone, I want to be touched and loved and make love and love someone else with my whole self and I am bound and gagged in this marriage that I should love and nurture but just look at with disgust as I masturbate in secret.

I masturbate in secret, thinking about men I know, and men I don't know, men who are real and men who are not, and I beg their forgiveness for using them that way, when they deserve so much better than me, masturbating in secret.

I masturbate in secret with a toy that buzzes when I ask it to, and a toy that doesn't buzz but is made of Pyrex and can be made hot or cold with tap water and is bigger than the real thing that I married but not so large it's a parody and I pretend it's someone else while I'm masturbating in secret.

I masturbate in secret and weep because I wish someone real was there, kissing me deeply, loving me deeply, touching me without disgust, caring, connecting deeply, and instead I'm masturbating in secret.

I masturbate in secret and hate myself for it, because of what I think, and feel, and how I believe I am abusing the beautiful, powerful, magical things called "sex" and "orgasm" by masturbating in secret.

And so...

I masturbate in secret...