Playing Games

This is what men I’ve been involved with will tell you about me: I know what I want, and I don’t play games (They’ll tell you other things too, but this isn’t a post about how fabulous I am, or how annoying, it’s about how confused I am).

I smile graciously when this is said to me, (by a variety of people, over a variety of years) and commend myself for my strong-mindedness. I can tell it’s a compliment, so I’m flattered. But one day it gets to me.

“OK, so what are these games I don’t play?” “Oh, you know. The games other women play before you can get them into bed”. “Um… like what?” By the end of the conversation, things aren’t all that much clearer to me. “So what you’re saying is that you don’t have to buy me dinner before you fuck me?” “Well, no, that’s not really it. Though I didn’t. But I did offer”. “And you don’t have to tell me how wonderful and special I am all the time?” “Well…” “Because don’t think you can drop all that now”. “But I don’t HAVE to tell you, I tell you because you ARE wonderful and special. And have an amazing brain. And a gorgeous body”. “Yes… go on…” “Oh, for God’s sake!” “And if I know what I want, why are you always going on about how indecisive I am?” “Wanna fuck?” “Yes, please”. “See? You aren’t indecisive about the big things”.

At least now I know there apparently are games I could have been playing, but I’m still pretty vague about what they are, and meanwhile have rather deflated the image of myself nobly eschewing them:
it never crossed my mind they were there to play. There’s always playing hard to get, I suppose, but what’s the point? If someone ever played hard to get with me, I’d never know: I’d have given up long before. It’s fairly simple, as far as I’m concerned: if you aren’t my type, there’s no way in hell you’ve got a chance, and if you are my type, then why are we wasting time hanging around? This is provided you play the telling me how wonderful and special I am game, though, and I’m very strict about the rules. None of that sycophantic ass-licking, no generic compliments. I want specifics, and I want authenticity. I completely believe the man who told me there are no better fucks than me, not so much because of my overweening ego, but because he then tactlessly added that there may well be better cocksuckers.

But yes, there are things I know that I want and don’t want, and I don’t mind stating them. And I can see how that can be refreshing… until it’s annoying. There’s something unforgiving about my unwillingness to change, something mean about my controlled emotions. My much admired strength seems coldly unyielding, and my tender underbelly, pressed firmly to the floor, looks more alluringly soft than anything else on offer.

Here’s the thing though: I’m still not playing games. I still haven’t worked what the fucking games are, far less all the rules and regulations. There’s no point in prodding me with a stick to get a reaction, because if i do react it’ll be somewhere inside my head. You can hurt me, but you won’t see the wound until I’ve licked it better. I don’t withold my emotions, I just keep them close to me. This is the way I work, and it’s what gives me my strength, and why I don’t know how to play games. The time I spend in my head has taught me what I want, as has all the time I spent finding it out through trial and error. I’m not being mean, I’m being me.

Rewind

Apparently there are still subscribers to this blog. I was going to let it die, but I've changed my mind. It'll just be my other place. Like writing in the dark.

Ennui

Oh, ennui. What a crashing bore you are.

I’m too fat for my clothes (I’m not too fat. But my clothes were bought when I was thinner, and I don’t fit them anymore) (and I wrote cloche instead of clothes. I’d like to state right now that I do not own a cloche. But maybe it’s a manifestation of my bluestocking fantasies. Either that or I am slightly deranged by no carbs and a surfeit of tuna salad).

Job… boring me. It’s not the job’s fault. But seven years doing the same thing, seeing the same people… yeah, all getting to me, much as I love them all. And the blogosphere was beginning to seem like work. Check in, smile and wave, slack off.

It’s weird thing, writing about intimacy, once you feel as though you’re sitting in a spotlight doing it. A self-inflicted spotlight, let’s not fool ourselves. Not one of those here-I-am-sitting-in-the-dark-just-doing-my-thing and all of a sudden someone comes along and notices me spotlights, but an I’ll-just-sit-here-under-this-nice-bright-shiny-spotlight spotlights. But the thing is, I lead from the back. I don’t like being up at the front, and when I am my instinct is to back off. And OK, I may be getting a little carried away here – it’s not as though the entire internetted world is sitting gazing anxiously at their screens waiting for me to utter. And yes, it pisses me off that more is known about me than I would choose to divulge, but when I look at my stats, the proportion of people who know anything at all is pretty miniscule. But it still feels like too many.
I’m very private. I state this frequently, publicly. But it’s a fact. I expertly straddle extreme reserve and total straightforwardness. Ask me a question, and I’ll answer it immediately – but think twice if you want to ask another. Unless I’m drunk, of course, in which case I’m pretty much convinced that you should and must hear my innermost secrets. Having a blog has been a bit like being on a year-long drunk, and maybe the hangover is beginning to kick in, and now I need to sleep it off for a while.

So there we are. And I’m still bored at work, and Jesus Christ, I’m hungry.

Cuckoos

Muse:.... so he's going to come and live with us.
Muse's Mother: Oh, OK. You'll both have to pay rent then.
Muse: How can we pay RENT*? If we could pay rent we'd get a place of our own. I'm STUDYING! You WANT me to study! I can't study and WORK!
MM: How is it that you had to inherit my lack of work ethic, and not my antisocial leanings and nice placid temperament?
Muse: Why didn't I get the blue eyes? WHY?? I'll never forgive you for not giving me blue eyes. It's so unfair.
MM: You got a waist instead. Much healthier. But anyway: no rent, no moving in**.
Muse: But he HAS to. He can't live at home. His mother is being UNBEARABLE. And why do you need rent? You never pay bills or the mortgage anyway.
MM: Well, that's true. But I do have to every so often, or they cut everything off, and they'll take the apartment. This is why I feebly suggest you should get a job every so often, my petal.
Muse: Yeah, yeah, whatever. Say yes, though. I'll keep the house clean.
MM: Will you darling? Why don't you start with a practice run, and see if you can find where I hide the vacuum?
Muse: Don't be silly, you'd have to do it first. And you can't walk around with your boobs falling out of that nightdress when he moves in. Or your ass falling out of those jeans. You'll have to stop being so vulgar all the time. And we'd have to have actual food in the house. That you'd have to cook. You know, at mealtimes.
MM: Why, sweetie?
Muse: BecAUSE. You. Are. The MothAIR. That's what you're supposed to do.
MM: Mmmm. Right.
Muse: Everyone else's mother does those things. AND the laundry. And they clean the house.
MM: Wow. Really?
Muse: Yes! Every single mother of every single person I know behaves like a proper mother.
MM: Including the steady stream of them who have taken up residence with us over the years?
Muse: Yes, of course.
MM: OK, so everyone you know has these paragons for mothers, and yet they're all desperate to leave home and move in here. And you have your vulgar slatternly mother who is slowly starving you to death, and not only do you refuse to move out of home, but everyone else wants to move in here?
Muse: Er... yes.
MM: Where the fuck did I go wrong? What's wrong with you? Haven't you grasped the concept of benign neglect yet? Why don't you want to move out? What else can I do to make things more uncomfortable? I might as well go back to cooking and cleaning and doing your laundry for all the good living in squalor is doing me!
Muse: Yes, I wondered when you'd work that one out. And please stop fucking swearing all the time when he moves in.
MM: (lots of swear words as she realizes yet again that she is NEVER going to have to face up to the longed-for empty nest syndrome, and may have also tacitly agreed to do some housekeeping).

* Yes, she does talk in capital letters all the time. In two languages. All the time.
** As far as I was aware he'd moved in months ago. If it's not him I have no idea who the boxer shorts in the laundry basket belong to.

A Continuum in Notebooks

Yesterday I bought two new, very beautiful, properly bound notebooks because the two I was using are full (always two – one for home and one in my bag). I love that feeling of opening a new notebook, with its pristine pages full of anticipation, and dread writing the first word in it – the bursting of the bubble of illusion (delusion?) that this notebook will have nothing but deep thoughts and deathless prose in it (so that it will be the one in the museum, obviously - every page filled with heart-rending beauty and harsh reality, all transcribed in my best handwriting. That'll be after I've written my magnum opus and all its minors, which will be just as soon as I've managed to come up with the plot I've been seeking for most of my life, and can manage to write more than a maximum of 500 words at a time. I'll probably have got hold of a bit of self-discipline by then, too (don't hold your breath, in other words)).

The notebooks have a pocket in the back. I transferred from one of the old ones to one of the new ones a poem I was sent not long after I started this blog: Bukowski’s so you want to be a writer? I take it out and read it at odd moments, and tell myself to abandon whatever I’m writing that doesn’t want to come out, or to excuse things that appear to want to be written down despite having no apparent merit.

The new notebooks made me remember an old one, dropped down the back of my radiator years ago. It’s a small Moleskine with a purple silk cover; smaller than I find comfortable to write in, but I used it partly as a journal for a while. I fished it out from its dusty hiding place, repatriating generations of dust bunnies in the process, and read it for the first time in years.

I started it in October 2002, and the last entry is March 2003. Reading about the two men I was emotionally involved with then is strange. Of the one of whom I said: “…but I also see that he uses what he knows of me to manipulate me. He can be a bastard… but not in other ways. He’s got a loving soul. Maybe that’s what redeems him”, I also said “It’s not as though it’s going to be a long-term thing, and then I suppose we’ll just go back to being friends”. Of the other one I said: “Can’t really work out where it’s going. Don’t know if it is all less thrilling now, or if it’s just settling down into a normal rhythm. Hate the lack of control, tired of feeling alternately neglected and euphoric, with hardly any time lapse in between”, and later: “I don’t know if I miss him, or the whole thing, or if it’s just that it’s unfinished business”.

I’ve learnt patience in the past five years. I’ve learnt that there are some uncertainties I can bear, and that there are some that torment me. I’ve learnt not to think about where anything is going, or to need to see any direction at all. I’ve learnt that a loving soul trumps much else, and that euphoria is better served by happiness. I've learnt that long-term is relative, and unfinished business can be a beginning. And that the next two notebooks will probably be as full of analysis and random thoughts about the same two men as the last ones were, and the ones before that.

Tough Enough

The miner says: “Why would a pretty girl like you want to look such a fucking mess?” and “You think you’re really tough, don’t you?” and “Buy the lady a fucking drink when she asks you to”, though he doesn’t say that to me, but to the man I used to live with, who thinks he should pay me the money he owes me in drinks, but only when he’s good and ready. The man I used to live with slams my drinks in front of me, and tries to elbow me in the ribs, and hisses in my ear that he’s sick of me getting people to threaten him, even though I didn’t. I think some of them have just been waiting for an excuse, and I’m gratified and grateful that they’re taking it.

Last time I gave in to the urge to punch a man I got a black eye in return, so I smile nicely, and tell the miner I’m not so pretty when I’m not a fucking mess, and yes, I do think I’m really tough - though I don’t tell him the feeling I get in the pit of my stomach when I see the man I used to live with sometimes makes me doubt it. I thank the miner for the drinks, even the ones he didn’t pay for, and we find common ground in hating the government and the country where I grew up and he once worked.

We end up outside before closing time when the pub is raided by the police. The miner asks where I live, and says he’ll walk me home. Two of his friends move closer and I see people watching me. The miners come to town once a month when they get paid, and drink their wages in a weekend, before they rape and pillage, and leave the burning ruins of the town behind them when they return to the mines on Monday. Or something along those lines, at least. Tonight we thrill with dread, because those of us not convinced we’re really tough dearly love our heroes and villians, and to be terrified with the excitement of incipient violence.

The man I used to live with is yelling at me from the doorway of the pub now that the police have left, but I’m telling the miner I can make my own way home, and stepping back from the looming presence of the others, moving closer. I look at the miner, and he tells them he’ll take me home, and the landlord of the pub shouts my name, in a voice that makes me start instinctively towards them, even though I should know better.

The door slams behing me as soon as I’m in, and he’s yelling at me, about what a fool I am, how I could have been raped, how lucky I am to have him looking out for me. But he’s yelling it in my face with his hand twisted in my hair, and I’d rather be outside, taking my chances with the devil I don’t know. The landlord tells him to let go of me, and me that he’s right, but he opens the door when I start yelling back.

Outside the pub further down the road, where neither the police nor the miners like to venture, my ex-boyfriend's psychotic brother, is sitting outside. I get inside before the man I used to live with catches up with me, but as soon as he does he has me by the wrist, pulling me back into the wood partition. He’ll take me home, he’ll take care of me. It’s obvious I can’t take of myself. The partition thumps on either side of me as my ex boyfriend and his best friend flank us. How am I? Where have I been? Am I OK? Am I sure about that? They address me and look at him, and he releases the hold he has on my arm twisted behind my back. They move away when he leaves, and I stand where I am and think about the miner. I doubt he’d have wanted to rape me. He probably would have wanted to fuck me. I didn’t want to fuck him, but I wouldn’t have put up much of a fight. If you can’t take care of yourself, the best you can do is cause yourself the least damage possible.

Apparently I put that thought out of my mind when I decide that if I need protection I’ll choose my own. I walk out of the pub and stand in front of my ex-boyfriend’s brother until he raises his mad eyes to mine. I think I think, in my own mad way, that the best way to prove myself is to pit myself against the scariest fucker any of us know. “Take me home,” I tell him, and I tell myself I know what I'm doing.

The Ghost of Sex

When you and I undress each other, our ghosts stand by, already naked, stripped to their gleaming bones. The skeleton ghost is the blueprint we bring to the bed, or bend over the table, the faint inked plan of whatever edifice we construct to interpret it, casting its shadow where our bodies meet.

It’s not the fucking our bodies do that defines us, but how much ghost bone we reveal, or glimpse unshown. The responses we have learnt, the party tricks we have been taught, the things we are driven to do in order to feel – they all adjust minutely to what we sense, and recreate themselves in familiar phrases formed with a new vocabulary. There are responses and initiatives your body dictates to mine, that your mind intructs mine in; ways in which your mind alone can seduce my body, and that my body can lure your mind. This is the flesh on the bones of my skeleton sex, and what other men have given and taken away is what I clothe them in.

These pristine ghosts don’t bear the scar tissue we do, they have not been twisted and molded by experience the way we have. They have no memory of all the other bodies that taught us what we crave and what we fear. Your cock, my cunt, your balls, my breasts, have left their imprint in liquid DNA on others’skin, but not enough to mark these invisible bones, or dent the rattling chains that can bind us or unlock us.

You kiss me, turn me over and fuck me, with all the skill you've learned, and all my words you've heard, and everything my body tells you in the way it answers all you ask of it. I fuck you back, fighting through all I know for the taste of your replies to me. In the dark my skeletal ghost sex kisses yours, and learns the shape its flesh must take, and how to dress to please you.

X Marks the Spot

The waters all are charted, where I am is clearly marked. There is no map. I never said there was one, just that I'd land you on the shore. It's simple, but I never said it was easy. You're on your own, here, though I'll keep you company. Count on nothing, and obey your instincts.

There's always buried treasure here, but it may not be where you think it is, and it may not be what you think it is; it might be yours, not mine. I don't even know if it's where I believe it to be, or if I'll recognize it if you don't find it. Under the surface there's seismic movement; what looks safe may be quicksand, and what appears most delicate could be iron to the core. I couldn't tell you if you can divine it, or if it will follow your magnetic progress, serpentine and invisible behind the miraged facade.

You have to read what's in front of you, feel your way with your fingertips, detect the shift in scent and taste. You have to hack away the obstacles, smooth the rough, dig deeper, and don't discount the obvious. You have to listen for the faintest change, and sound me out for warmth and chill.

Don't rely on footprints, trails of crumbs or planted flags. Those were left by others, and what they found is taken, or misplaced, or broken and discarded, though it might be repaired, and some of it is simply moved.

I brought you here, but you chose to come. I wouldn't keep you against your will, and I have to trust you to not break what you might find. You have to make your own deductions, and make no assumptions, however familiar the terrain. I'll watch you drown if I have to, but you can make me want to keep you safe.

This is only the promised land if that's what you need to believe it to be; I make no promises.

Slow Burn

Uncurl my sleep-packed limbs, wake them slowly with one tiny little pinpoint of sensation that flushes through my blood. Add another, and another, placed delicately on the scales to keep them on the edge of nearly enough but not quite, not yet; a tracery of pleasure on my skin. Blur the boundaries between deliberate and accidental fuel for the fire, while the flames lick slowly, gradually taking hold.

My mind anticipates and my cool skin responds, warming from the glowing core, and the heated circle turns, slowly tightening with pleasure both vicarious and felt. Let me think I follow my own dictates, while every muscle stretches and flexes, and second-guess me with pure mindlessness; provoke the animal response with perfectly measured pressure that wipes out conscious thought.

Closer to the tipping edge it all slows, pared down and reduced to its essence, and all the excess falls away. And then stripped of the superfluous, of everything beyond my body now, there is nothing to impede the last fast licking flame, nothing to hold me back or block my way, and I can only let it consume me.

I long for you. When I'm falling asleep and when I wake up, and when I least expect it.

The Spinning Circle

Clearing out my inbox, and various chats and conversations, I came across one from the Lover in Chief in which he claimed (not entirely seriously)that he was submissive to me. Because I’ve been pondering the nature of D/s relationships, in an attempt to understand them better, and to get a grip on what bothers me about them, (not in the abstract, but as related to me! me! me!), and also because of a comment Dee made on a post of mine recently (not one about the LiC), and one he made to me privately about a post written about him a while ago (in which he objected that I had made him appear too dominant), I’ve also been pondering spin in how I present what I write about.

I’ve long found Richard and Amy’s blog about their relationship to be illuminating - particularly the posts where they both write about the same experience from their different points of view, and right now I’m finding Eileen and Maymay’s blogs to be equally enlightening from the opposite side of the D/s fence (I found them through the brilliant Bitchy Jones – as an aside, why is it, in general, that female Ds and male ss seem to manage to write so much more entertainingly and self-analytically and so less smugly than the other way round (with a few honorable exceptions)? There is a great deal to say about the marginalisation of some types of sexuality but probably here isn’t the place to say it)*.

As for spin, it’s not conscious, but it’s undeniably there - spin is in the details that are omitted. “He threw me across the bed but that was OK because it was as per our agreement and then he yanked my legs open, while still retaining utmost respect for my mind. "Shut up," he growled, fully cognisant of the fact that if he had said that in a non-consensual sexual setting I'd have had him strung up by the balls in no short order...” Um, yeah. It may be accurate, but loses something in, you know, sexiness, I suspect.

I could write about sex with the Lover in Chief in such a way that it would undoubtedly prove that he was submissive to me. To an extent, my sexuality dictates our sexual relationship; I could quote him, and I could describe what he does in bed, and I could ennumerate concessions he makes to me, and he would definitely come across as my submissive pleasure slave. By the same token, I could write about the same instance in ways that would make it very clear that I was his submissive little fucktoy. Both would have equal truth, and be equally innaccurate.

I don’t actually believe that there is any D/s element in this this particular relationship, sexual or otherwise, but sexually there is a strong element of control. Non-sexually, there is no power exchange outside of the one dictated by circumstance: he’s a bossy bastard, and I’m a bossy bitch, and we’re well-matched. Sexually, out of bed I’m winning on points on the I-don’t-really-want-to-do-that-but-I’ll-do-it-for-you scale. In bed, he’s the top and I’m the bottom: the control element has evolved naturally, and is at a level that both parties are comfortable with – and he has it. When the bedroom door shuts, he sets the pace and he calls the shots; he decides when and how we fuck, and when and how I come; he likes to tease and I like to be teased, and he is far more patient than me (plus, he has a delayed gratification kink, and I have a masochistic streak).

In any relationship, there is an exchange of power, whether it’s recognised or not. I could argue that the power exchange in a vanilla relationship is exactly the same as that in a D/s one – it’s just that the ratio of power exchanged is different. And there’s a difference between power and control. I'm naturally reactive, not proactive, and I'm more than happy for my body to be worshiped, but I don't give up control that easily. I've been with too many men who have interpreted my non-proactiveness as an invitation to fling me over their shoulder and charge across the finishing line of my limits, so I have learnt to keep a close eye on anyone attempting to step over the line. Giving up control is liberating, but it's scary at the same time, and I have tended not to do it because there's such a fine line between relinquishing it and having it taken away from you. There's a difference between having your limits tested, and having them ignored.

He and I have found a balance between what he's comfortable with taking, and what I'm comfortable with giving up. I can let him have control without feeling either powerless or submissive, neither of which I am remotely OK with. It works for me because I have the luxury of knowing I will get what I want, but not when I'm going to get it (and knowing it'll all be good), so I can just let myself go into this haze of sensuality that is utter, utter bliss (it is possibly, in some ways, the closest to submission I will get, and it isn't necessarily what makes the relationship or the sex great, or necessarily what I need or want in other relationships: it's just part of the dynamic of this one). He may be getting off on turning me into a screaming, quivering, pool of come because of all the pleasure he is selflessly giving me, but he's also getting off big-time on his own power trip; and I think he's more consciously aware of the power he has over me than I am of any I have over him. Even the agreement to do what one partner wants and the other doesn't (and there are, obviously, limits to that as well) isn't a case of suffering for the sake of someone else's kink, because it is part of the whole delicately balanced spinning circle of mutual arousal, where what is initially unappealing becomes appealing in the context of a relationship and the gratification of the other's sexual gratification.

And it is that balance, at the root of any relationship, that really fascinates me, whether it's reading about how it is handled in other people's relationships, or exploring it in my own.

*Name checking some other blogs that have made me think, and examine my own preconceptions, lately: Elizabeth, Calico, and Tom Allen.