...on silence...

She's very good at communicating  She starts to talk and she never stops. Waterfalls cascade from her of information and emotion and I run beside her in one spot to keep up like Alice and the Red queen. I feel like I know everything about her by the end of it and I still want to know more..

But she doesn't always listen. I could wish she listened harder, so she would hear what I was saying, hear what I wasn't saying. But these are the things one requires silence for. Silence is a commodity it is hard to put a price on. It is undervalued and yet is invaluable. For out of silence, out of the small delicate desolate places, comes inspiration and honesty and pain and longing and love.

I hate to be interrupted. It's not that I lose my train of thought. It's that I invariably stop talking when someone else starts and whatever I had to say goes unexpressed. If there was something I had to tell you and you never found out, it's probably because you were trying so hard to talk you forgot to listen to what I was trying to say. And my mind works in roundabout ways. It travels in ellipses. Sometimes it takes me a little while to get there and it requires patience and silence and understanding. I fear to put my thoughts out there for I fear they will be rejected and sometimes that makes me blunt my meaning. Sometimes people take what I say the wrong way. Sometimes I mean them to.

People have all these ideas built in their heads. All these shortcuts. As long as they follow these paths, they don't have to look at experiences that might be new, don't have to take in thoughts that might be different. And we all do it, all the time. We choose to believe that a person is a certain way, because we're that way, because it makes it easier if we just simplify and generalize. And when people tell us we're wrong, we choose to disbelieve them, thinking we know them better than they know themselves. Naivety. Arrogance. Bravado. Simplification. Yet we all do it.

Maybe, if we just listened a little more, we could understand. If we weren't afraid of the silence. if we weren't always looking for a way to fill the empty spaces. If we weren't so scared that no one would hear us that we refused to take the time to hear others.

I don't know why silence disturbs us so much as a species. I just wish we'd get over it.

I'm a little worried.

I'm really new to this whole poly thing. I expected to have some problems with it eventually. I expected I might get jealous or insecure. I expected that I might say or do something really awkward and hurtful and mess things up. I worried that I might not get along with the other girl or that I might end up comparing our relationships too much. None of the things I worried about have happened.

Instead, it's the other girl that seems to be having the issues. And this just...seems wrong. It's wrong that she's the insecure one, that she's so worried about possibly messing things up. It's wrong that she's getting left out. And I really just want to fix it but am not sure how. It's easy enough to say, oh you should do this and that, but I know that things don't work that way.

I tried to make things better today and I'm scared I made them worse instead. I tried to reassure her that she was cared for and it was just a conflict of styles that had brought her to the point of feeling left out. Now I'm worried because I think the guy took what I said to her badly for some reason.

I'm just...I'm not used to NOT fixing things. And I don't understand how I can feel like my own relationship is going so well and hers seems to be so on the rocks. How can we be dealing with the same guy and be getting such different results? This is one of the days I wish someone really was reading this blog. I could use someone to talk to. Or just to know someone is out there.

(NSFW) Having one of those nights...

...when I don't like sex.

Now, I'm a little hard to understand sometimes. Sometimes I don't even understand myself. how is it I can be so gung ho about sex one day and then be wondering if I'm asexual a few days later. I can only blame it on the weirdest most annoying hormones ever, I suppose.

And the fact that I don't like sex. Or to be more clear, I don't really like penetrative sex. Now I'm going to rule out a few things here. It's not because I think it's icky or something. It's not because I have some religious or moral issue with it. It's not... a million reasons. It's maybe because I find it, just the tiniest bit, mechanical.

I love being touched. I love touching and exploring. And I take a lot of pleasure in the pleasure of my partners. But there comes the point where all of this just isn't enough. This point being when the thrusting starts. And it just gets repetitive and mechanical and BORING! And I know I'm not supposed to feel this way but I just do. And it's very hard to make other people understand this fact about me.

Now, to turn this conversation from the theoretical to the practical...I mentioned in my last post I'm starting up with a new relationship. It is awesome and connected and stimulating...and I absolutely love and adore it but tonight it fills me with a strange sort of terror. Because, dear readers, it has been a while. It has been a while since I made these observations firsthand and it has been a while since I allowed myself to get to the point where I might make these observations. Oh, there was a time or two where it got pretty close last year but something held me back.

Which means there's actually two separate things I'm afraid of. One of them is what I've been talking about earlier and the other is...the sex itself. Which I really shouldn't be as it makes no sense. But we'll not touch that pond full of frogs. So back to the first point.

Pretty much everything this guy has done, I've loved. Oh there have been one or two niggling things I haven't been crazy about but they can either be ignored or communicated and fixed. But, by and large, I am hugely emotionally and physically connected here. Which is why I think it might actually be okay. Which is why I'm hoping with all my heart it'll be okay. Which is why I'm terrified that it won't be okay.

Which is why, I finally admit to myself, I'm being juvenile and procrastinating about getting tested. Because as long as I put it off, things are still safe. I don't have to face this huge uncertainty within me. Because having this turn out bad would break my heart.

It's a new year...

So, I am doing a new years post sometime at the end of January and that might seem a little silly but, oh imaginary readers in my head, I have so much to tell you!!!

My life and the way I imagined it has changed so much over the past few weeks that it's hard to even know when to start. Only, it's not. I know exactly where to start.

I start my story at the end of December. I went to a party. It was an awesome party, for many reasons.I met cool new people and reconnected with a friend or two. One of the best memories of that night centers around a friend who had her birthday coming at midnight so I slipped out fifteen minutes before to find possible cake. I did not find cake but I did find baklava which I triumphantly brought back to the party and presented to her at midnight. It was something that made her super happy and I can still see the look of delight on her face. It totally made my evening.

I can't believe more people don't do things like that. It's a sad note, that this tiny gesture of mine so surprised her. I really think the world should be a more considerate place and it constantly shocks and surprises me that it's not. Ah well..

The other best memory...was of a chat I had with someone I've been acquainted with for a long time. I don't know why we had never really sat down and gotten to know each other before. Some of it has to do with my shyness and my desire to not seem a pest to people. Part of it has to do with his business at the time. Part of it has to do with him thinking I was younger than I was, I'm sure. But maybe a lot of it has to do with iv just not being the right time for either of us. For, my darling readers, something special and amazing has grown out of that moment in time. But I'll get to that.

I can't believe we only talked for the short time we did. It couldn't have been much more than half an hour but at the same time it felt like forever and at the same time it felt like no time had passed at all. We were timeless. We talked about tv shows and books and geeky events. We talked about prior relationships and hangups. We even spent a portion of the time discussing bondage. He admitted that he'd been interested in me for a while but hadn't really gotten the courage and the timing together to do anything about it until then. He mentioned the possibility that he might ask me out (I was very tempted to pull a Willow at this point) and I intimated that I might be open to him asking this. Before we knew it, I had to rush out like Cinderella without leaving even a glass slipper behind because I couldn't miss the last skytrain back to Surrey.

He asked me out in a message a few days later. It was a very casual low-key sort of asking and I decided to  sort of take things as they came. I had family visiting at the time (more on that later perhaps) so I was on the busy side but we scheduled a coffee-like thing for later on when I wasn't so swamped. In the meanwhile, we talked a bit online and I saw him at an event we had both showed up to, both of which were enjoyable experiences but didn't prepare me in the slightest for the world that was bubbletea and hanging out with just us.

It was like watching a tumbler lock being decoded. (and yes, I am aware this description is highly unromantic but it is what I will go with.) Click. Click. Click. Things just fell into place one after the other. We discovered similarities at a scarily eerie pace. and everything we discovered seemed to spur us on to find another topic, and another, to see if this was some fluke or if this was really happening. At one point, part of my brain got a little desperate and I started listing things about me that were weird, that some might consider flawed, just to see the reactions and if I could give him pause. It was not meant to be. Feeling like our time had passed by in a flash, we parted ways on a hug, though he admitted later he would have liked to kiss me but had been too shy.

Second meeting. A movie and lunch with friends. Hanging out at the mall. And a kiss.The kind of dramatic scene one finds in movie scripts. Time slows, giving you that extra moment to react. Or maybe I just slowed. I'm sure I slowed. I gave him that extra moment, to stop me before I left, to do what was on his mind. A drawing back to his side and a kiss. Unsure on both our sides but...right. Hanging out the next day at his place and watching Buffy. A laughing and a gentle learning.

I'll spare you, oh readers, of my romantic ruminations and have us move ahead in the story. For now we introduce another character. In all our conversations, in person and online, it had been mentioned that he was polyamorous and there was someone else he was interested in. And, like most people who have only been in monogamous relationships in the past, I wasn't really sure how I felt about this information. I had a notion I should probably feel jealous or insecure but mostly I just felt...curious. Who was this girl who had captured his attention. Was she someone I would like? I hoped she was someone I would like. I mentioned wanting to meet her and, before I knew it, plans were in the offing for me to do so. She found me on facebook and we clicked pretty much immediately, which surprised me a bit and made me feel so much better. I met up with her a few days later for the first time.

Right now I'm just struck by how amazing everything is. A few weeks ago, my life was completely different. It was stagnant with me desperately trying to regain something or the other that I couldn't quite define but knew I had lost the last few months. Now everything is happening and I couldn't be happier. There are these people in my life who I absolutely adore, albeit in different ways. And yes, I am in a poly relationship apparently and it just feels...right. It was mentioned that I may be a natural at this and right now I kind of agree. I'm adapting amazingly well, so well that I sometimes feel like I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. But I've decided to shut that feeling off in the corner where it belongs because I can't let old experiences poison me to new hopes. Apparently this is the year of hope, she tells me. I'll go with that.

I was going to mention some of the relationship worries I've talked about here in the past but right now all those things don't matter. I know I've got some issues and some of them are pretty anathema to having a happy successful relationship but I'm suddenly finding that they matter less and less. All my freakouts about sex and closeness and a million other things seem to matter less because right now I really feel accepted. Like even if I can't be everything he wants, that's still alright. And I find that I do like things I haven't always been big on because it's him. I'm giddy and emotionally swept up and I'm kinda loving it.

On the poly thing...I look over the past year and some of the things I've written and read and feel a little bit like life has been leading me to this. I mentioned a fanfic before that I had been reading where one of the characters is asexual but I didn't mention at the time that the particular character was in a poly relationship. Or that the same author (who is now one of my favourite fanfic authors) had a bunch of stories centering around another poly couple. Or that she turned me onto another author who quickly became a favourite for a series of stories she did based on another one. I've been doing a lot of self-analyzing and discovering this past year and I think life has been dropping me a clue I'm only now sort of figuring out. I look back on what I've enjoyed reading, on my posts on relationships and monogamy and I can see a long line of things leading to where I am in my life right now. It's weird but also very cool.

I've written so much right now and my head still feels full. Still, I think I'll leave it here if I'm to get any sleep. I just wanted to make some room and maybe take another whack at this blog thing again. Hopefully I do better with it this year than I did the one before. Right now it`s all about hope.