Originally I’d gone over due to my heat being off, again, and yesterday the bitter north wind battered my apartment and to avoid the onset of hypothermia I decided to go over to D3’s to warm up and woke up this morning on his futon, with him pinned up behind me so as not to lie on his fresh laundry that lay in a pile behind him – both of us fully clothed, sans boots and socks. With his breath on the back of my neck, which I think is what woke me up, or maybe it was because I had to pee, so cold bare feet on the vinyl floor of the kitchen, passing Sofie curled up on the chair in the kitchen I had vacated the night before, one eye opens as I pass.
Actually, neither of us remember letting her in.
The scrunch, scrunch, scrunch of our boots this bitterly cold morning back to my place, to pick up the pork roast he left in my freezer, reminded him of this program he’d heard on CBC radio the day before about these two Native women who’d been in the sex trade, but who now spent their time going out and delivering clothes to the homeless. That was the background sound to the piece, illustrating the bitter cold of those northern climes, making our measly -14F seem balmy, although I don’t recall if he said where it was, but somewhere up north.
I had been, in spurts, angry with him all this week, at his comments of the previous Saturday. However, I kept quiet about it, not waiting for his apology since with D3 I don’t hold my breath, I’d suffocate.
He poked around, popping in a couple of times, but said nothing, just looked at me strangely. I was rather amused to see how uncomfortable my silence was making him, so I let him stew. Yet, not just for amusement alone, but because some of his words had hit a nerve. I needed to think.
Had not really decided yet what, if anything, I was going to say to him, until last night when he looks down and says, after he’d biked the 6 blocks for beer, with that bitter northerly wind at his face the whole way back, “um, so about last weekend, I’m sorry, but…” Always a ‘but’.
Pft. I said to him in reply, if you would actually listen once and awhile to ALL the words I say, and not just to some of the words, jumping to conclusions, thinking you know everything, maybe you would have understood what I was TRYING to say. But no. You just go off half-cocked on your own little tangent. But, thank you for your apology, and I could have been clearer. However, I wasn’t clear, and honestly, it is hard to say it clearer.
All this was because, again, we were doing the “what are we to each other” waltz. I told him we are just friends, close friends, but, and this is my BUT, you are bigger than that to me. WE are more than whatever convention says, right? Do you understand this? We are MORE!
Yes, yes we are bigger. and his eyes lit up, and I knew he got it. This was our truth. No more of this back and forth, back and forth.
Relationships can be sometimes difficult to navigate, especially the unusual ones, the ones that defy the norm, don’t follow the rules, which I believe is the best sort. And the two of us really do swerve right off into the shrubbery, we would make lousy lovers or lousy constant lovers as I would eventually probably have to strangle him.
I see that at some point this week he had continued on with his cleaning and clearing of the clutter, and now the area to the left as you walked in was devoid of all the crap that had sat there since I’d known him, and such became our dance floor, as we skipped the record on his just hooked up turntable.
We listened the night away, to Paul Simon, Willie Nelson and Leon Russell, and a wonderful album of Brian Setzer (from the Stray Cats), and Bonny Tyler, which is what brought us to our feet. It’s been almost 10 years since I heard the smooth rich velvet sounds of a record. He’d been saying he was going to hook that thing up ever since I met him, which is four years this March I think.
Last night is another reason that I said nothing about last weekend, there is always something up his weirdo sleeve. And that he can be a challenge.
“You’re not pretty” was what he’d said to me, which was THE straw.
So my long-winded tale of, whatever I’d been saying, he didn’t listen to after I said; I’ve been pretty my whole life, so it didn’t matter.
I had been stumbling to explain how I have embraced my crone, my older womanness. Which he completely ignored, and such prompted my quick exit, scrunch, scrunch, scrunch as I stomped home with my virtue and rage. Not pretty?!!! Stomp, stomp, stomp all the way to my door, and almost wiped out on the ice going up my steps.
So, and this didn’t occur to me, he thought I was saying that my being pretty was why I had been so against our little off again, on again, sexual pursuits, not for once thinking, of course, beyond his dingdong.
He said I keep going on about it. Which may be true, but being myself isn’t my natural habitat, and not always clear flying.
He thought I was being all high and mighty, saying that I’m better than him, prettier than him, and therefore why would I want to be intimate with the likes of him?!
So difficult to articulate this when I don’t completely understand yet.
But I tried to explain, how I just have put intimacy, all, not just with him, way up on the shelf – cleaned up the clutter – for now. It’s not something that is paramount to my overall well-being, to what I am, and what I want. It’s generally just got in the way, to be honest. Told him how I truly believe ‘we’, our two weirdo minds, are BIGGER than all this. Silly man, thinking I was just not interested because there was something wrong with HIM, and never considered that it was actually the opposite.
That genie won’t go back in the bottle, and not to say sex is completely off my radar, but it’s just not an essential part. Anywho.
And, part of this decluttering is due to an old girlfriend coming to stay for a bit because her Dad is not well, and I think he’s thinking maybe he can get more than, well anyhow. Which puts my nose a bit out of joint. I admit.
She lives out west, and they dated years ago, and she’d once and awhile drunk call him when I was there, so lately he hasn’t picked up when she called, for almost a year now I think.
Whenever I tell him he’s hoping to get his rocks off, he says: “no I don’t, she’s just an old friend”.
That in fact telling me I wasn’t pretty was exactly my point. Though it did hurt. Somehow I, though clumsily, was also trying to explain that sex sometimes confuses this fragile closeness with the wrong sort of intimacy.
Placid and fragile I am not, which is what I think the word ‘pretty’ basically amounts to, and what it requires it also demeans. I am no longer willing to be defined by someone else’s standards. Couldn’t even imagine when D3 ever did, actually, care that is about what other people thought, and I want some of that freedom for myself.
So we are copacetic.
I find it is difficult to articulate this sense of wanting more, this freedom from the mundane. How to go beyond someone else’s standards for being, past living as if your own life is not really your own, to that promised land of who gives a foo-man-shoo. I do admire his survival instincts, and how he seems to NOT just not care, but not be able to care what others think. He can’t conform. It’s not that he won’t, I really don’t think he can, it’s his oxygen, his spirit is wild. It is rare, and I don’t want to miss a thing.
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