Broken Doll

somehow i’m doubting the accuracy of this “test.” i’ll be the first to admit to a rather insatiable sexual appetite, but “i am the boss”? “the teacher”? not in this plane of reality. partners begging me not to go? i fucking wish.

yeah.  no play last night.  we had A Talk instead.  this really didn’t make me feel any better.

My cat is asleep in the laundry basket on my clean socks. He’s snoring fiercely, and my feelings are complicated.

It’s been a complicated month.

There’s been a lot of raw. After a really intense weekend with David I was left almost entirely adrift for the remainder of the month, and I came down hard. I haven’t been entirely in control of the mess that clouds up my brain. Like an electrical storm in my head.

Last night I read a story called Magdalene and old rawness comes crashing back. You think such things such memories such feelings would remain in the past where they can no longer touch you, but they don’t always. I don’t just remember I relive the pain that comes from putting the words around the things from the distant past that continue to damage the present. All the things I can’t do because of what was done to me. The shame that comes back against my fiercest will. The fear that comes and lives in me but has absolutely no object. What am I afraid of? I don’t know — I’m just afraid.

And his kindness, yes, his gentleness. And my relief, and my doubt. He says he can handle this and he’s willing. And I’m thinking do you really have any idea what you’re in for?

My brain has fogged and blurred the old events but not the feelings, I mostly can’t remember what exactly happened but I remember all the tellings about them. I have to tell you that… You may find me more timid than you’re used to… I can’t do that, I’m sorry…

So sorry. Always sorry. All things from my childhood pushing me, pulling me, shaping me into the thing that could fall into the black pit at 18 and take six months to figure out how the hell to get out. I can’t even describe the manipulation. “You’d do it if you loved me” but far, far more insidious.

Little girl, little girl, the things I can’t remember. He’d push just a little too far and I’d lose it, I’d fall out of time, and all I can remember is a curtain of fire between my eyes and my brain, the fear, and the crying. Then I’d look at a clock and the 20 minutes that ticked away in my head turns out to really be four hours. And all I know is what he told me: I cried and begged and whimpered like I was five years old.

It’s a big puzzle, and I can’t make out the picture. I can only see that there are pieces missing.

And all this strange, cold timing. All this comes to roost less than four weeks from this intensely beautiful weekend, which brought a flashback of a different sort.

When I was down under your hands, love, it felt like it did when we were still together. And goddess — I can’t say a word.

Monday I hosted a Full Moon ritual, a small part of which was a meditation where we called to Diana and asked her to sit with us a spell, and give us a few words of wisdom if any were especially appropriate. She said to me, “You can weather this storm” — not too thrilled but not too surprised to hear of a storm coming. I made jokes — nice to know that I can weather the storm, but really I’d rather there not be a storm to weather in the first place…

I assumed I knew what storm she spoke of. After last weekend, it being so intense, I figured on needing some major debriefing with David which may get too intense to be comfortable. But days pass and he’s not returning my calls, and this conversation in my head morphed into a it-hurts-me-when-you-cut-me-off kind of conversation. And I couldn’t really figure out how to fit both of these things into the same conversation without having it completely blow up in my face. Either one of them alone was capable of doing that.

And it was a week full of petty frustrations — the cold, the ice on the sidewalk making it virtually impossible to walk to the train without getting hurt, corporate stupidity at work. Add in a major case of sub-drop early in the week and most days there was at least one point where I was very close to tears.

But then Friday comes and I am handed a storm of an entirely different sort. Late in the afternoon my co-worker pokes his head in my cube and asks “Did you hear about the shooting?” And I think in that sort of abstract way, how horrible, what makes people do that?

The address didn’t register. It wasn’t until the corporate admin department sent a company-wide email warning that train service at the Ogilvy Transportation Center was shut down due to the shooting that I realized what it meant.

It’s the building where David works.

I can’t really describe what that kind of panic feels like. All those stupid clichés — blood running cold, heart dropping — are true and more. And worse. For a moment there was no ground under me to hold me up.

I jump to my phone and he answers and I breathe again. He’s okay, he says, eighteen floors away from the shooting, and the ground is back under my feet. He makes a joke about really needing to go to the bathroom, since they’ve been in lockdown for over an hour and no one can enter or leave their suite. I worry, not knowing if the gunman was still wandering around looking for someone to hurt.  I tell him to take care of himself and that I’d call back in a little while.

He’s fine and he handled the whole thing with near-perfect aplomb. He went home that night and worked. I went home that night and tried to chase away all the “what ifs” running through my head with a run.

My early-week complaints now seem ridiculously petty — almost selfish. I thought I would have one or both of those conversations with him when next I saw him, but all I said, all I wanted to say, was that he’s not allowed, ever, to get shot.

And at the same time it leaves me wondering if I shouldn’t be saying the things I’ve been keeping to myself. I’ve been telling myself that I shouldn’t push him, that we have time to get to it later, and now that feels a lot less certain.