2008-04-28

Clean Up in Aisle 8

One of the things about exploring a relationship where you really like someone a whole lot is that you have to put yourself out in the open.

I'm not necessarily into that scene.
And I get the irony of saying I'm not into sharing while I am BLOGGING.
But I don't really blog, y'all.
I take a little hint of a feeling and then I criss-cross it with lines of exaggeration and word-play.

Plus, even on the days when I write something straight, let's face it, it's easier to type up a bunch of beautifully loaded words than it is to stutter them out while you are sitting across from someone with his eyes trained into yours and you feel like you are going to fuck the fuck up with your next answer.

But that's the thing.
You have to answer.
And if it's okay when you do, and it will be, if he softens or if he doesn't look away or when he smiles at what you've revealed..... it's one little step closer to where you know you want to be, which is a water-tight partnership with a man I can't imagine living without.

Because I have lived so long without though, make no mistake about how hard it is for me to drop my opaque veils of words, to take off the stage make-up and my richly patterened costumes of self-protection. It's ridiculously hard to not think of every thing I say or do as being insanely stupid and ill-received because all of it is coming from the most genuine place that a human can have.

I get that this should seem easy for me - sharing, being honest, not worrying about what some guy will think now that I've said this or worn that. I mean, why would I worry, right?

I am a bad ass. There's no arguing it by now and even if I wanted to be modest about my physicality and ability to take care of myself, it would come off as fake. It's why I can't be coy. I'm self-possessed. I say what I need to say. I call people out and I've fought off two physical attackers which still surprises me, to be honest.

While I am a front-runner for "Most Likely to Stupidly Dog-Fight," my arrogant confidence has an end-point and it's about 3 fleshy layers down. It's rare the new person is provided with excellent directions and a well-drawn map to that dead-end.
I'm much more likely to be Fun! Adorable! Out-spoken! Dominant.
You know, all the things you become when you turn up pieces of your personality to make sure that the more delicate pieces are safe and sound, tucked far into the guts of my heart and hidden away in the expanse of the rolling nothing hills that make up my soul.
I fill all silences with vignettes or questions.
I pose in front of him.
I judge based on me because I am sort of a narcissist and because I've not shared any of me for real; had I spent less time checking the locks on that property's gate, I may have seen more of my previous dates' realities.

But this guy, this one by whom I am completely inexcusably distracted and not even a little apologetic or modest about it?
It's like he's kryptonite to all my self-protection and to my instinct to hide behind my brains and my brawn.

There is nothing I want more than for him to take a four-by-four cross country, tearing deep gashes into up my terrain, leaving ugly massive tire tracks, and seeing who I am way down deep in the parts of me that aren't even physical, in the parts that are nothing more than energy and chemistry and pulsing threads of nothing carrying currents of the intangible magics that give the essence of "each" to each of us.

I want him to grip one hand in my tangled colors of those floes and pull as hard as he can like if he was grasping all the hair at the base of my head and pulling fast and hard until it actually physically hurts me; I want him to see on a silken strand of my dripping soul that the lightest touch of a single finger is needed to stop the barely bloody spot from becoming cystic and rotted.

I want him to see it all; I want it all to be so much more than okay with him. I want it shimmer like a car on a movie highway and then when it becomes apparent that the car is real, real big, real old, and real beat, I want to run him over and watch him be tossed over my hood, landing in a ditch barely breathing and swelling. He wouldn't understand why the only thing he wants to see through his bruising eyeballs are the wheels of the car backing up towards him. But he would know that the only thing he wants to hear is the sound of the motor running, the sound of my footsteps on the gravel, and the sound of my grunting as I heave him over my shoulder to bring him home and clean him up.

What is super-weird is that I don't even know if he thinks I am pretty.
Or smart.
I don't know it for sure anyway, not the way I've known it with so many other men that I've spent time with. Maybe I'm used to having my ass kissed in a perpetually adolescent and mysogenistic way. I dunno.

Well, yeah, I do know. I've not had any shortage of causing diarrheal streams of complimentary commentary or, uh, actual physical obsession. So, for better or for worse, this whole thing is totally different and totally new for me.

What's so fucked up and contradictory to my historical experience of dating is that I find even when I am so totally uncomfortable with having to trust and assume the best and set my own goddamn high expectations of myself, I freaking love it. It makes me want more. I want to see him MORE.
It's so backwards, wanting more and more even though you have no hard information about how that person feels about you.

It's backwards to me to have no real basis for being melted by purely a rare altruistic attraction; meaning, part of attraction is how the object feels about me.
Here, the basis is the trust.
It's so hot but it's admittedly weird for me.

And weird or hard or riddled with statistics stacked against my favor, I still don�t care. I am still so into it, so into standing there for real in front of him and opening my shirt to reveal something bigger than breast, lifting my hands to my hair to lift the lid off my skull, allowing so much light and heat to fill the room.

I am so into it that I am even okay with the naked quiet that happens in the exact split of the second after I reveal myself to someone I powerfully want to love - that second when I stand there all skinless light and heat, bodiless and unsure of the response to your true self.

Yeah. I am still okay with not knowing what will happen. I'll make myself make a little pillow in the historically likely event that any day, the anvil will fall from his sky and crush down on me, sending me several layers into the dusty desert earth.

But mostly, I will keep letting bits of me slip into the rooms we share and watching as they make him smile.

arizonasarah at 10:54 a.m.

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