The Naked Truth

One day, three separate people said, in different ways, that I allow them to be themselves. I must have been radiating compassionate love and understanding across the universe that day. A while ago I read an article about friendship that seemed to suggest that we value friendships only because our friends are people who allow us to be ourselves. I took issue with it, because I would hope that more than that, friends are people who actively add to the sum of human happiness by being their own unique selves: I would be sad to think that my friends didn’t gain as much from my funny little ways and invaluable insights as I do from theirs.

But the three people who spontaneously burst out with gratefulness are more than friends, and that shifts everything slightly sideways. A lover once asked me if I was more myself with friends or lovers, and I eventually concluded that the answer was lovers, because the nature of clandestine relationships demands a certain amount of unfettered honesty to balance things out. The instigators of clandestine relationships, as well, maybe have more need than others to be seen as themselves, because of necessity they hide or feel they cannot express aspects of themselves, and it must come out somewhere.

It’s easy for me, anyway: all I want is my lovers to be themselves. I don’t need them to prove that they can hold down a job, or make a meal for the kids, or even tidy up after themselves: I just want them to take me somewhere I can’t get by myself. If there’s a danger in long-term relationships of falling into definable roles and being seen in terms of fitting into society, then with me the danger is more that the outside things that define people are the ones I undervalue: how much you earn and how successful you are, and what a sterling job you do as parent or partner are less relevant than how you respond to me and fulfill my needs, which are purely bed and emotion based. I’m not saying that long-term relationships inevitably get bogged down in domestic role-playing, but there is a reason (or a million reasons) that people stray, and it’s generally a need for something that isn’t available at home. It’s quite possible that the reason people stray in my direction is because I offer a lack of responsibility, and a chance to let their annoying, as well as their creative bits out to play.

If you did a quick rundown of the qualities common to my nearest and dearest, then in amongst intelligence and imagination and creativity and (mainly) shared political views, “difficult” would also feature, and I’d lump myself in there too. I have a high tolerance for people’s annoying bits because I’m aware of and expect tolerance for mine. I hate the idea of putting people up on pedestals, if only because when the exalted one inevitably falls off, the cry is always “but he/she is not perfect after all! I’m so disappointed!” rather than “I’m such an idiot for expecting another human being to fulfill all my expectations of perfection.” We’re all flawed – why should we expect other people to be flawless? Perfection is only when the balance tips more towards good than bad. Perhaps it’s because I’m aware of my own feet of clay that I’d rather everyone else has their own on show. Perhaps their feet of clay help to reinforce my belief that however much I love them, I couldn’t take on any of them full time.

In any case, it’s people’s complexities and contradictions that draw me to them: their annoying/baffling/inexplicable qualities and funny little ways keep me interested. But of course I don’t value most my tolerance: I value much more the appreciation of the freedom I offer, and I revel in the idea that I offer a safe berth for creativity. The truth is probably that I am a haven for (mutual) self-indulgence, and a soft landing for lack of responsibility. I can’t help noticing the re-emergence of boys I knew in my youth: there’s an appeal in reconnecting with someone who knew you long before you acquired the many roles and responsibilities of adulthood, and in a woman who doesn’t look to you to provide any of those. And there’s a headiness in the freedom of being returned to a state where the trappings are irrelevant, and all that matters is who, and not what, you are.

I can’t deny, though, that I get off on being the conduit for what would be otherwise unexpressed: it feeds my ego, however much I dress it up in altruism and the role of lover.

It’s all doing, and no reflecting, right now. This doesn’t suit me – I hate not having time to catch my breath, or reflect – but must be endured.

“Maybe that was making love,” he says.

“Honey, it was definitely fucking,” I say. I think about it for a minute. “It was a loving fuck.”

think, laugh, and in the end
cry
feel loved and adored, always (even when I’m a crabby bitch)
feel sexy even when I’m bone-weary and travel-worn and emotionally frazzled
come so hard I don’t forget who I am but remember what I am
reassess and reevaluate and eventually
lower my guard

Things on my mind this morning:

I’m losing my voice, which is probably allergies rather than germs, but it may be a sign.

It’s getting too hot to wear boots. I may be able to drag the boot-wearing out until the end of this week, but after that I suspect it’s all over until the autumn. This is depressing.

I keep wanting to wear my nightdress to work (I HAVE worn my nightdress to work. It’s not really a sleeping-in nightdress, and I do quite often wear it as a slip, and I wore it respectably while relying on my reputation for sartorial quirkiness, but still).

All week I have been confused about what day it is. I think today is Thursday, and that’s good, because I’ve been trying to get here since Tuesday.

I need new underwear. Not just “I neeeeeeeeed” new underwear, but I actually do. Having been labouring under the delusion that my tits are getting bigger, I then remembered that I stuck my bras in a hot wash a while ago. This is depressing, but the thought that I really genuinely need to go shopping for new knickers is cheering.

I have to sort my summer out. I think this also is cheering.

“You look very cute these days. Are you in love again?” one of my colleagues asks in passing. I think, In love? Again? and, Don’t I always look cute? Am I ever in love? Do I tell people these things? Am I more in love, if I’m in love in the first place, than before? What’s more cute these days than was previously cute?

Then I think, Can’t eat, can’t sleep. Maybe there’s an explanation, and it’s not just the heat.

But yesterday I thought it’s none of that, it’s just that I’m happy, in general. Things recently have reminded me that I’m fortunate, and one of the ways in which I’m fortunate is in my awareness that I am loved. I’d rather not forget that, or take it for granted, because it keeps me going when the edges of dark nights of the soul creep in, and when I’m contented anyway it makes it show.

I get up and make coffee and take it back to bed, keeping an eye on the clock to make sure I have enough time for bathing and dressing and getting out the door on time.

“Drink your coffee,” I say, because he never does, and then when I collect the cold cup later I think crossly that if he wasn’t going to drink it then I could have (my early-morning thoughts being pretty much focused on coffee, as a rule (although not to the exclusion of everything else)). He mutters something that could be “Yes, I WILL drink my coffee, every last drop,” or “I really should have got up and made YOU coffee, shouldn’t I?” or “Why don’t you just shut up and drink your coffee?” or even “Why the hell do you have to wake up so early?” and rolls over towards me.

He pulls my legs apart and tugs me down a bit on the bed where I’m propped up on the pillows. I sip my coffee and look down at the top of his head between my thighs, and think: “This is nice”, until the coffee cup starts to lose its allure and I fling it vaguely in the direction of the bedside table and slide down a bit more. The caffeine high kicks in at about the same time as his tongue does.

Some time later I drift downstairs to wait for my ride, and then float into the car. “You look cheerful this morning,” my driver says, and I say yes, I had a particularly good breakfast, and smile all the way to work.

Sometimes, I don’t want to come. Sometimes, I really, really don’t want to come, because it will stop me feeling what I feel: I’ll stop teetering on the edge and go over, when I’d rather teeter indefinitely.
Sometimes, I’m so focused on coming that fucking, for me, seems like nothing more than a question of getting him in the right position and keeping him there indefinitely until I can get to the point where I’m so spent I’ve completely lost interest in what he might like to be doing. Sometimes, I think it’s not going to happen, and then as soon as I think that it does (he might have something to do with this).

This is one of those times. I’m enjoying having my brains fucked out, and quite happy with it not really going anywhere – it can go on indefinitely as far as I’m concerned, and maybe a bit past that – when I begin to feel it might be going somewhere. Clearly he feels the same thing, because he hisses “If you come, I’m going to fuck your ass,” in my ear. And I don’t want to have my ass fucked right now; more than that, I don’t want to not have a choice about having my ass fucked. I can feel myself start to squiggle back from coming, wriggling beneath him so that his pubic bone isn’t driving against my clit and his cock isn’t hitting my (possibly imaginary) g-spot, all of which is quite difficult as I’m not really in a position to move very much at all, neatly folded up as I am. And then there’s a knock at the door and extrication and it passes.

“I didn’t want you to fuck my ass,” I say when the interruption is over. He looks at me in astonishment. “Of course I wouldn’t have done it if you didn’t want me to.” Oh. Well, I know that, now that I’m (semi-)rational again. What scares me is how irrational sex makes me. It disconcerts me that if I’d come and he’d tried to fuck my ass I’d have let him, even though I didn’t want it, just because I’d have accepted the logic of consequential action, because apparently when I fuck I lose my fucking mind. Even though I can see, in retrospect, that there’s nothing in it for him to do something I don’t want, I still know that at the time I accepted unquestioningly what he said: there was no part of me that thought I could refuse, or that maybe he wouldn’t, or that there were options open to me (and it’s not as though I’m scared of saying No when I feel I need to, or as though I don’t know very well that my No will be respected).

In even more retrospect, though, this inability to access rational thought when being fucked does explain quite a lot.

What I intended to say to one of my best friends was less tactful than I had planned, but a lot more tactful than I meant. I planned to say, apropos of the many things it seems to me that she is misinterpreting and my advice: “The thing is, you’re a doer, and I’m an observer…” and then I would lead gently into the glaring truth that maybe she’s so busy trying to make things happen that she doesn’t notice the undercurrents (as someone who can’t really be bothered to make things happen, I have plenty of time for undercurrents, and sound opinions thereof). What I said, somewhat snappishly, was: “I’m a much better judge of character than you, and I’d trust my reading of a situation over yours any day”. What I could have said (and it may still burst out one day) was: “Do you think you’re in the middle of a nervous breakdown? Because we think you’ve completely fucking lost it. Would you like an intervention, because some of us are rapidly getting over our Britishness about such things, and we’re about ready to deliver one?”

And then the same day I had an idea of startlingly brilliant creativity, and expounded upon this to one of the people I needed to make it happen. This then led into a conversation about something I had written that made me mentally write the words WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU? WHY DON’T YOU GET IT? On a mental piece of paper, and place it under another one which said NOT EVERYONE HAS TO GET EVERYTHING YOU WRITE, YOU SELF-OBSESSED FUCKWIT. But I still carried on a mental (I choose my words with care) conversation with myself in which I admitted that he might have had a point and maybe I could push myself a bit harder and also found myself thinking that it was clearly foolish to try to have sensible conversations with people at four o’clock in the morning when they were so addled by sleep they had NO IDEA WHAT THEY WERE SAYING, and ANYWAY he was just saying he loved my writing because he wanted to get into my pants. Even if he was in my pants, and appeared to be saying he didn’t like this particular piece of writing.

The next day when I was recounting this to someone else, leaving out most of my internal ravings, I said I couldn’t understand why he didn’t see that it was about risk, and falling in love, and… “Oh,” she said, “I thought it was about something completely different.”

I’m still pretty sure that it’s all of them, and not me.

I have to hold on to the end of the bed to get the corset laced up at the back. The front fastens with ferocious metal clips, and then the back has to be tightened and fastened in the middle. I guess it’s asking for it, bent over with my ass sticking out, legs splayed and braced in vertiginous heels. Rather than tie the cords at the back in a bow, he seems to have wound them round his fist so that he can yank me back onto his cock.

It’s weirdly objectifying wearing it: not visually, because that’s just powerful (the curves of breast and waist and hip and ass, either held or accentuated; the contrast of white skin and black silk; the straight line that ends at my hips, and the narrow curves of thigh framing what it’s all about), but physically. I feel like a doll: I can bend at the hips but not at the waist, so I have to be maneuvered into position, and I can’t help feeling that he doesn’t mind my lack of autonomy all that much.

When I come I realize how rigidly I’m held, and after a bit I take a deep breath and let every last gasp out, and unclasp the front, so that the next time I come I can wrap myself around him and let my back arch and my muscles flex and feel it running all the way through me, not compressed.

People have died in these woods: killed and left for dead or left here after they were dead, and some of them just died in the all encompassing secrecy of tall trees. But there’s no sign of it, not even on a rain-threatened afternoon. The woods are just spring-green and just there, as they have always been, tranquil and unthreatening, and they let your thoughts drift to the surface and find their way into words and unanswerable questions.

If you could choose pleasure or pain wouldn’t you be insane to choose pain? And if the pain is the price for pleasure, are they quantifiable, so that you can weigh them out and choose the pain hoping that it will be lighter than pleasure? And if you can see the pain staring you in the face like a gaping wound (and one of you is more afraid of it than the other), why still head doggedly for it? It’s not even as though I still think I can’t be blindsided by it any more – I have learnt the hard way that this isn’t true. And why do we so relentlessly pursue pleasure? Why do I crave the feel of his skin on mine, why do I need to feel the breath of his words against my neck, or his body sliding into mine? Why isn’t what I already know enough?

In the woods, it rains briefly and then stops, and the sun shines briefly and stops, and the trees drip steadily. The sky darkens and lightens and the green shifts subtly, but the view going or coming back is the same one of a path through woods, both disorienting and reassuring.

I want that memory, and not just the ones I already have, and somewhere before and after pain that memory will keep me happy until the next time. Pain sears the flesh of your soul but the memory of pleasure works its way deep into your bones and forms the fabric of your soul.

Saturday morning I’m woken at two, and at four, and five (good, not bad awakenings), and although I sleep again, it’s as though some door in my mind has been left slightly ajar and all day I can’t separate myself from my wordy dreams: there’s a blurring of those thoughts that flow slackly and jumbled into my head as I’m falling asleep and the nice clean, precise ones that move me from one place to another, and they are all mixed up with my habitual half-daydreaming state.

There’s something to be said for it: those half-thoughts that would be repressed by awakeness float out and there they are, and even if the response is muffled by drowsiness they still float, refusing to be stored away until they can be picked over and deconstructed.

“Oh no, you wouldn’t!”

Oh yes, I might. But I’ll make him work for it.

(“Why do women all want control?” he asks. Dunno why the rest of them do, honey, but you were the one who taught me never to give it up again).

I have a plane ticket for this weekend, and I probably won’t make a definitive decision as to whether or not I’ll use it until the night before. As it is, I vacillate and dither and decide and doubt and think “Sod it, I’ll go!” and “Fuck it, I’ll stay here!” and lose track of whatever the last definitely-maybe was.

In a way, it’s all quite straightforward, or it would be if human relationships didn’t keep getting in the way. I have somewhere to stay, and I have an event to attend. But I don’t want to stay where I can, and I don’t know if I want to attend the event, and there are other things that may or may not be on offer that I don’t know if I want or not, or maybe just not now.

Part of me would relish just being in the big city alone (“alone” in this case equating to “unless I get bored, in which case I’ll remember I’m surrounded by people I know”). I don’t think I would get bored, though, and there would be such a luxury in just being somewhere full of beautiful places to visit, and bookshops! And art galleries! And people that I don’t already know! I love my little town, but it has neither mystery nor anonymity (and only one, rather lacking, bookshop).

And of course the possibility of an afternoon fuck. Or two. Or not. That doesn’t really sway the odds as much as it should do. I can’t even take the path of least resistance, as both paths would be equally easy to fall into (perhaps they aren’t paths, but ditches). It reminds me a bit of the last time I had a plane ticket, when I had committed myself to something I wasn’t sure I wanted, and was pretty sure it was for all the wrong reasons. And then the relief when it fell through, which made me realise how wrong I was to go against my instincts, particularly when it comes to sex.

God, I hope I make my mind up soon.

I’m so sick of reading whingeing articles in the British press about why fortysomething women are suffering from depression, and why “having it all” is so DIFFICULT and it’s all society’s fault. I’m irritated by a lack of understanding of the nature of depression, which assumes that if you are “successful” you have no reason to get depressed (when the depressing thing about depression is that there generally IS no reason for it). I’m annoyed by the idea that other fortysomething women who write for newspapers constitute “society” in this context, when society is actually too busy wondering if there’s time to buy something for dinner on the way home to cast aspersions on whether or not someone else is managing the work-life balance. I’m surprised that anyone has so little self-esteem that they are willing to write self-pitying articles about how they’re afraid they aren’t a proper mother because they are too busy being successful at their job to bake cupcakes for the bake sale: what the hell is wrong with saying sorry, I’m too busy/don’t bake/can’t be bothered/here’s a nice bought cake and a donation to your worthy cause? Seriously, if you’re afraid of the approbation of the baking mothers who think you’re a crap mother for not baking, doesn’t it make you think that maybe their parenting priorities are a little odd?

I’d be terribly surprised if any of the working mothers I know waltz into work every morning thinking “Woohoo! I’m fulfilling my feminist destiny! This is me, Having it All!” And some of us even bake cupcakes! I can bet my bottom dollar that my great grandmother didn’t consider herself a feminist pioneer when she worked to put food in her children’s mouths, and I very much doubt that her neighbours clucked disapprovingly at her selfish urge to be a woman of independent means and wondered why she didn’t stay at home watching her family starve to death. Most depressed working mothers don’t have the options the whingeing lliterati have: rather than announce they are so depressed they have to give up being successful, they knock a few pills back and get on with it.

Depression is horrible and debilitating, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. I’m just sick of reading that it is all the fault of external pressures dreamt up by a generation who haven’t enough faith in themselves to work out how to live their own lives best, and who need someone to blame when it isn’t all a bed of roses. No one deserves an easy ride by virtue of their education, politics or the fact that they were privileged enough to swallow hook line and sinker the idea that life is easier if you keep looking around you for everyone else’s approval when you make your life choices.

(This should be required reading for the whiners)

“Are you unaware that you just walked past me, or are you just a good actress?… God, you look hot”.

“Unaware”, I text back, and look around, but still can’t see him. I’m standing in front of the postcards when I feel a hand brush against my ass.

There’s a big metal structure like a double container, with a ramp leading up to it. You walk up into unfathomable darkness, and your steps slow unwittingly, even though you can make out the shadowy figures immediately in front of you. And though you know it’s finite, because you’ve walked round it, and though you know it’s a big box in an art gallery, you still walk into it as if into the unknown, even with a known figure standing still slightly to the right, but blocking your way so you must brush past him. You reach the end by reaching it: the darkness is right in front of you, and everyone has stopped, not quite able to believe it’s the end, and they can turn round and walk back into the light. He’s standing next to me. I reach out a hand to touch the coat of the person I’m with, to let him know we’ve reached the end. I stand there between them for a moment, and then the next press of hesitantly approaching people forces us to give way and start back. What if it didn’t end? I think, what if you just kept walking into the unknown, desperately hoping not to lose everyone familiar in the gloom? It’s quite useful, really, having a large metal box to contain your existentialist gloom: everyone is smiling when they walk back down the ramp.

Back in the bookshop I buy a book of drawings of abandoned houses, and choose postcards unmolested. One of them says: YOU MAKE ME and I tuck it onto the mirror opposite my bed. It could apply to a number of people, but mostly me.

“I’m not going to come”, I said in the morning. I didn’t mind; I just meant that he shouldn’t bust a gut trying to make me because it wouldn’t work. I fell asleep afterwards and kept waking myself up with anxiety dreams until I couldn’t pull myself out of sleep, and my coffee and my bath went cold.

After breakfast he bent me over the chair and pulled everything down to my knees as my fingers scrabbled for purchase as I came, and then I couldn’t get enough. Not that it was enough to not just get enough. “You need to really hurt me”, I kept yelling, with some vague idea of perfectly measured pain, perfectly meted out, and of course it was too much – but worked.

Spring has gone on vacation for a week. Today is wet and thundery and makes the inside lamps glow more yellow. Maybe it’s because I’m the only one who dreads the summer heat, I seem to be the only one who remembers that May is always like this, and after each week of rain has passed it will be hotter, and then there will be more rain, and then it will be hotter still, until it’s just hot, and we long for rain for months on end.

I drag my summer clothes out and eye them balefully. I have a sudden vision of walking through the centre of the city, at night. Not in the depths of night, but in the dark evening, when everything is strung with lights, and the air has suddenly cooled, and everywhere is filled with people watching other people, the sweaty reddened tourists and the golden natives. Then that thinness of summer clothes, the way they just lie on your skin for modesty’s sake, will be bliss.

If other years have seemed sometimes like climbing an endlessly steep flight of stairs slowly, then this one is a series of interlinked spiral staircases, and every time one curve ends there’s another. I hate the steepness and love the mysteriousness. I catch my breath and new possibilities while I try not to resent the old ones tumbling down behind me. I hate the never-againess of what I’ll never have again, and balance my baskets of eggs.

Writing makes me more inclined to make myself sound melancholy, and I’m not, apart from isolated piercing incidents. I think it’s some primitive instinct that makes me not want melancholy to slip away altogether, even while I can’t stop myself from turning even bad things into a story to make someone else laugh.

In the meantime (between pauses on the spiral staircase, which may be full of shiny pretty things round the next bend), I go through boxes and cupboards and archives and try to make order out of chaos: I eliminate, I recycle, I fold and put away. I feel as though I want to pare everything down, and then I get bored and pile it all into wherever it was before and leave it, because there should always be something left for next time.

at the back of my mind, always.

I’m sitting writing this dressed in a push-up bra, thong, and heels. That’s how sexbloggers have to be dressed when they write, you know – they excommunicate you if you don’t. Actually, that’s why I went private: they found out I had been posting in my workout clothes. This is the horrible truth about why there are so few male sexbloggers: very few of them enjoy wearing thongs, although several enjoy the bras and heels.

It’s also how you write when you have three cats and you’re just about to go out to dinner, and would prefer to arrive at your destination as uncovered in cathair as possible, but that’s just by the by.