Thing 1 and Thing 2, I.E. there is now a T1 and a T2.  The done and dusted once weres that still managed to hold some part of me and who both get to me in that deep, dark, dirty, nasty place I have to believe all have sexually but so many people ignore and deny.  I wish I knew what it was about them so I could make it happen with other people, I would know what to look for. 

Biting is part of it.  They both bite in a way that leaves marks and there is something I like about seeing those little bruises the next day.  There is the openness to experimentation, to having fun, not being so bloody serious.  T2 growls, it is lovely.  T1 knows just exactly where to touch me, what I like, he knew before we ever slept together because we talked about sex so much just as friends.  There wasn’t the time with T2 but there is still a comfort level that I have with him that I want him around, want to be able to talk to him about sex, to just talk to him.  I usually can’t wait to get rid of someone when things are done. 

T2 sent pictures that I deleted all but one, I keep it around for crucial moments when nothing else is working and I have to close the deal, I pull it up and it reminds me of everything I liked about him sexually.   I told him that today, testing the waters to see if it is going to wig him out, or if he is going to be able to stay around.  I am not sure.  He wants me to do all the work – to tell him everything without doing anything – it doesn’t work that way for me – I have to have reciprocation - I need to know what he is thinking, what his opinions are but the trust between us is interesting.  I don’t know what if anything can come of our continued connection, but I want to find out.  He amuses me so much.  I just know his trust of what my motives are isn’t solid. 

I dream about them, they are who my mind turns to when it thinks of sex.  I have dreamt of K, but not in that way.  I am not sure how that is going to play out.  It worries me, there are things I need, a roughness I need that I won’t ever ask for because it has to just be there – it has to be natural or it doesn’t do anything for me.  If it isn’t there to begin with – it never will be.

When I think of my grandparents, I think of a closed circle.  They are everything I would have ever wanted for myself in a relationship – they not only love one another – they like each other.  They eloped when my grandfather was 22, my grandmother 17.  They have been married for 71 years. 

They raised 3 children, had 5 granddaughters, 1 grandson, 5 great grandsons, and 1 great granddaughter.  This is their legacy.  This is what there their circle has grown to encompass. 

My grandfather just turned 94.  He did so in a hospital bed on the oncology floor at the hospital I work for.  He was diagnosed with metastatic bone cancer.  He had been in a lot of pain and his gallbladder was failing but they didn’t want to do surgery as at his age with his heart condition, the doctors were not certain he could withstand the surgery.  The pain was overwhelming and he ended up in the ER twice, the last time, they did the bone scan.  It is in his spine, shoulder, ribs, neck. 

He is being eaten alive.  He and my grandmother are being eaten alive because she experiences what he does.  I cannot even think of what I am losing because it is so overwhelming dwarfed by what she is losing.

I am an oddity even to myself.  I have someone in my life who says he loves me, wants to build a life with me and in the abstract I am all for it.  I just balk at the reality of it.  I like being on my own.  I like being by myself…a lot.  I am afraid to live with someone.  I shudder at the thought of trying to find a way to incorporate someone into my space.  I don’t know how to be in a relationship and I don’t know if I am capable of it. 

I miss the boy, which is strange because I am not sure what about him wasn’t fiction – so how do you miss someone you never really knew?  The thing I believe is at his core, he is a decent person and I hate to admit it but once I found out this is who he is, it wasn’t something he did to me individually – it is what he does period – I was…amused.  I can’t help myself.  His intent was not to cause me harm, he really wanted to be able to draw me out and he did. 

He drew me out and I found K and the two are linked in my mind that way.  If not for one, there would not be the other.  I love K, I have love for the boy.  I am fond of him.  I feel protective of him.  I don’t have to protect K.  I feel like I do the boy.  An oddity, I am.

I have been doing a lot of thinking…okay…I have been doing a lot of overanalyzing about relationships as of late.  I am sort of in one now and it may just turn out to be the healthiest one I have ever attempted but that does not keep the furry little creatures from spinning along the habitrails of my mind.   

I have had roommates in the past.  I have always done better cohabitating with men than women save for one instance.  The only time I ever actually ‘lived with’ someone was my ex husband and we were only together a month before I realized I would happily kill him in his sleep.  

I have to admit, I don’t know how to do this.  I don’t know how to allow room in my life, in my home for someone, to actually build a life with someone, not just co-exist in a designated space.  

How does one open themselves up so completely to another to allow for ‘me’ and ‘I’ to naturally become, in a none matching sweatshirts kind of way, ‘we’ and ‘us’?   How does my house become our home?  How do I get over my OCD like control issue of ‘my space’?  

I think of someone being here, not just occasionally but daily.  I think of them moving their things in, moving my stuff around, fixing things, having an opinion about how things should be done and I cringe.  I am so used to being alone, of doing for myself, of answering to no one that I am not sure how to change.

The usual way I deal with the ending of something once I have gained perspective and humor is to write about it detailing the absurdity.  As this last one takes on epic weirdness and I don’t really feel like giving it anymore time or energy, I am going to skip that. 

There were some things that came about from this last one that I do find noteworthy.  I was inspired to feel again and the things I felt I attributed to the person I was with.  I was incorrect.  I know this because I feel all those things and more for someone else now.  The reason I was capable of feeling the desire for intimacy not sex and being ready to do the work required to truly love someone was because of where I am at in my life and who I am right now.

Had I not been forced out of my comfortable little cocoon I would never have been at the exact right place at the exact right time to find K.  Instead of insecurity, distrust, and a general uneasy feeling that something is wrong, I feel like being with him is what everything I have ever been through has been for.  Every crappy thing, every mistake made me who I am and made me ready to be here, in this place having a real relationship with someone who cares about me, not what I can do for him, not what he get from me.

For two weeks in a row, he got me flowers.  They were sweet and wonderful and I loved them but I am a bigger fan of ‘found’ objects.  Shells, rocks, things that don’t wilt and I can’t kill.  He and I had been discussing this and when I got home from work this weekend, there was a bowling ball sized rock sitting on my back deck stairs.  It is from Saylorville Dam.  I know this because he wrote on it in black sharpee.  It is my dam rock. 

I called him, laughing, and thanked him for my dam rock.  He said he had just been sitting at river, thinking about me and decided if I liked rocks so much, he would find me the biggest one he could get away with taking.  My hands have been giving me trouble so I wasn’t able to lift it to bring it inside but I will eventually and while I am not sure what I am going to do with it, it is something that makes me smile every time I see it.

I have been working a lot of hours the last week or so.  The overtime is nice to have at the moment as I was needing to pick up a few things for the house. 

Dad got thru the weekend and is much better now the meds have been expelled from his system.  He was able to cook which is something he loves to do this past week so even though he is in more pain, he is kind of back to himself. 

I have been talking a lot to Little Brother and K.  Little Brother is back in Sioux City doing what he needs to do and being miserable in the process.  We talk every few days so he doesn’t get sunk into feeling alone.  I think he will be back for good by the end of the summer and he is looking forward to harrassing me more about getting out of the house or letting other people in.

K and I spent several hours on the phone the other night/day.  He is of great comfort to me.  After the first one, I didn’t date until after I graduated high school and moved.  I didn’t ever want to date someone I would have to see all of the time if and when things went bad.  Talking to K is like slipping on your favorite pair of jeans.  We have the same background, the same frames of reference.  I don’t have to explain to him who people are because he already knows them. 

I talked to him until around 8am and I was only able to get a few hours of sleep before I had to be at work.  We talked for a moment or two while I was at work and arranged to talk later that night when I got home.  I had a few errands to run and when I got home, there was bundle of flowers at my back door.  It is honestly the nicest thing anyone has done for me in years. 

I have never been able to accept kindness with grace.  It makes me uncomfortable, embarrassed.  So finding the flowers and the little card forced me to just appreciate them without a lot of other emotions intruding.  I brought them in, cut the stems down and placed them in a vase.  He called and I thanked him immediately.  He said he just wanted to brighten my night.  He was never sure about doing things like that but he hoped I liked them.  I did, I do.

These last few weeks have changed me.  I am altered by the events and I am not sure…not sure if these are lasting changes or if I will eventually find my way back to me.

I am reminded of two quotes.  One is from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.  “I was benevolent and good – misery has made me a fiend.”  This is the anger I carry in me.  I don’t like anger.  It is not something I wear well.  I struggle under the weight of it like a too heavy cloak. 

The other is from Jane Austen’s Persuasion.  “All the privlege I claim for my own sex, (it is not a very enviable one, you need not covet it) is that of loving longest when existence or when hope is gone.”  This is my nature.  To care beyond the point of rational thought, to always carry a piece of the person who has touched me, like a scar or more apt for me, like a tattoo. 

I do not wish either condition for myself.  To be consumed with anger so much so that I want to strike out, and I don’t want to have the added burden of caring.  I think if this is who he is now, by the time he gets back from overseas, he will be but a husk of the person I initially met – all the spark will be gone and this causes me pain. 

I have had enough pain from this source.  I have lost enough in the last few weeks without thinking of what he may lose. 

I started talking to one of his brothers before I told him about the miscarriage.  I sought him out because I wanted to know if he had always been this way.  Upon writing that question and sending it off into the abyss, I immediately wished it back and wrote another email, asking to be ignored. 

He wrote me back, offering his counsel, I had only to tell him what had happened or to ask what I wanted.  I cannot.  If I ask the questions I want, I violate everything I am.  I don’t repeat what has been said to me.  I don’t betray a confidence.  It doesn’t matter how mad I am, it doesn’t matter whether I believe it all to be fiction, I cannot do it. 

The thing that bothers me most is, family regardless of whether you get along with them or not, should rally ’round each other.  He should not be so eager to have me vent about his brother, he should tell me to take a flying fucking leap.  For most of my upbringing, I hated my brother for what he did to me, but I would fight anyone for him, protect him.  He was my brother. 

It just adds to the mix of conflicting emotions I have.  I want to punch him dead in the face, and protect him all in the same moment.  I want to be back to me.  I don’t want to dwell on the truth of who he may or may not be and I don’t want to feel so conflicted about someone who feels nothing, less than nothing for me.

After a few days, I did end up speaking to the brother again.  I learned a lot.  In finding out he is far worse than I had even imagined, it helped me some how.  It no longer felt so personal when I found out he is just this way, he is someone different with everyone, telling them different things, fanciful tales and exaggerations.  I am left without so much anger and with a profound sense of sadness.  I am sad for him. 

I ended up telling the brother everything piece by piece as I learned more and more and I am glad I did because I learned I needed to go back to my doctor for more tests.  I couldn’t have miscarried because he is sterile.  So, the elevated horomones were caused by something else and maybe it is nothing to worry about, but that is for her to decide.

I got off work this morning and it was absolutely beautiful out.  It is cooler than it was yesterday, the birds were singing loudly, and people were already starting their days. 

I drove around for awhile enjoying the silence and when I got home, there was an open house sign in my back yard.  In the white space where you write the address, it had a message from my Little Brother and K.  They have been kidding me that I should have house warming party since things are getting back to normal.  I said given the last person I let in – I wasn’t going to be letting anyone in again for quite some time.  Goofballs.

I am home briefly.  My dad is not doing well and I am stuck here doing the thing I do to keep a roof over my head.  I talked to K and to Little Brother several times yesterday.  Gave mom K’s number so that if my dad gets especially fun, she can call for back up.  I think it is so nice of K to care enough to take an interest. 

The rain has stopped, the temperature is nice and all the way home there were people doing all the things I should be doing instead of trying to unwind so I can go to sleep for a few hours. 

Garage sales are in full swing, people are walking all over.  I saw a guy in a gorilla suit riding on a vintage Harley.  Bicyclists are everywhere.  Flowers are blooming and the air is full of dandeloin fluff.  I know I should hate that, weeds in the yard, but I don’t.  I love all the creeping charlie with it’s pretty, delicate purple blooms, the violets that volunteer in my yard – both white and blue.

I can hear the mowers going all around me.  The smell of fresh cut grass mixing with the smell of the oil/gas mixture in the mowers.  The pine tree out back has soft, gooey looking wads of what will turn out to be cones.  I need to get the lawn chairs out and get them on the deck so I can enjoy more of this weather before I am unable to stand the humidity.

I grew up being taught by my father the only people you can trust are family.   Family is the only constant in your life and they are the only ones that will truly be there for you no matter what.  I never learned to trust, not really.  The impulse is there, but at the first sign of anything that may cause me discomfort or pain, I immediately pull back, and begin defending myself regardless of whether it is called for or not.  There is no such thing as over reaction. 

What if you grew up knowing you couldn’t trust even your family?  What if the people you loved, the people whom you should trust more than any other would happily stab you in the back?  What if everyone you ever trusted or wanted to trust either died or turned on you? 

I am learning some things that change my perspective on the things that have happened over the last few weeks.  It hurts to learn these things, not because it effects me personally, but I care, still.