.. what’s sex got to do with it?

I often worry that I’m good enough to fuck … but not good enough to love. Something I read somewhere once written by someone and for some reason it stuck with me. I accepted it but never understood it. Or felt that it applied to me. Like the time I sat down to talk to a homeless lady that sat outside my office building instead of throwing the change from my latte and realised I could learn so much from her. Or that I didn’t have the answers to all the questions I kept asking myself over and over again. But somehow after feeling so great about myself all afternoon, I found myself in another business class lounge waiting for a flight feeling the worst that I had for months.

After an incredible morning landing the dream job a million girls would kill for, I rewarded myself with a drink at my favourite watering hole. Introductions were made, light conversation with just enough flirting in between was had, and before long I imagined tasting the bourbon he was drinking on his tongue and down my throat. As he lived nearby it seemed logical we’d be heading in that direction. And so we did. 5-hrs passed in the blink of the eye and I needed to get to the airport and he needed to get to the gym. We exchanged numbers and made the casual promises you do.

There’s an intimacy that you can only have with a stranger. Where you can do or say or even think the unthinkable but in the bubble of the moment you imagine all sorts of crazy things like the fact that in my last relationship we didn’t have sex because he wanted to have a more meaningful relationship and here I was having sex with an amazing guy wishing that I could turn it into a relationship. So there we have it: a relationship without sex and sex without a relationship. Which one has a better chance? As I read his text message over and over again saying how great it was to meet me I couldn’t help but wonder which came first: the chicken or the sex?

I got two text messages the following day asking to see me again which can be regarded as something right? The abject misery of meeting the perfect man who is already involved or taking a break or whatever and not being able to have him especially when so much of your life is coming together in ways unimaginable. A month ago I was talking about what I wanted from life. Today I am making it happen. I’ll meet him for coffee and a chat and if a friendship comes from it then I’m the winner at the end of the day. He might not make a perfect boyfriend but a fantastic friend is the perfect consolation prize.

 

… the fuck buddy.

There is was: a text message that beeped on my phone from him. A message, completely unsolicited, meant that he had either just been dumped by someone or he was bored with whomever he was currently fucking. And since we had neither fucked nor spoken to each other for about 2-months BC (before cocooning) my mind started running to what he wanted from me. Even if it was obvious I knew the answer to that question I still willed myself – imagining it was baked cheesecake and totally self-indulgent – to delete it. No point starting something that he couldn’t finish.

We had met a few years back in the most debauched way. After spending some time together – mostly in my bed – I started developing feelings for him. Since I was still young and naive enough to believe that ‘if he fucked me: he loved me’ he was not the dating kind because that would mean coming out to his friends, family and himself so he deleted my number and never called. Almost a year passed and then out of the blue he texted me the usual no-strings double-speak line. And things started up again between us. Usually around midnight when I was drunk, horny and in the neighbourhood after leaving a club nearby I would find myself at his place for uncomplicated no-frills sex and when it was all over being shown the front door.

As infrequent and mind-blowing as it was this fuck-buddy relationship that developed between us led to a friendship of sort. Though we were never monogamous to one another we did have … something that kept each other locked together. Having seen me through at least two of my past multi-month relationships and him through at least three major client flare-ups I found myself wondering what was it that couldn’t make it work between us once again? After all we liked pretty much the same things in bed, we had the same outlook to life and the people around us. Relationships have been built on less.

But no matter what he was adamant one afternoon when I raised the topic as we showered after an afternoon sex that it wouldn’t work out. No reason given so obviously none was required. This led me to question all my past relationships and why none had lasted. I wondered if we were all just victims of conditional responses doomed to repeat the same unconscious relationship patterns or were we all just in fact dating the same person over and over again? After all many of the guys that I dated we pretty much cut from the same cloth. Mid-30’s, devastatingly handsome and total assholes.

Sure most would say that these guys were aberrations. But really I waited for the perfect guy to ask me out on a perfect date and then I project these huge fantasies on him creating these enormous expectations and then when they blow up in my face I wonder why it didn’t work out. The fact that they were in their mid 30’s and single should have been a clue that no one else wanted them long enough. Another would have been their emotional unavailability (since they were already in love with themselves.) To be fair I tended to be in love with the idea more often than in love with them.

So Instead of love I’m left with soy-milk decaffeinated lattes, sleeping until noon on the weekends before heading out to mountain bike alone and an unmistakable feeling … restlessness. A sense of unease that pervades my waking hours knowing that someone like you is looking for someone like me. And that this time I’ll love the man and not the idea of love instead.

 

… words.

Words. I used to be so good at them. Putting them together to create a story that somehow expressed who I was, where I had been, and the people that I had met. Words. Somehow they’ve changed from these cavalier building blocks of day-to-day simplicity to something dangerous and dark. Things that have evolutionary meanings to emotional strangers. Words. How they come back and bite you in the arse when you least expect it.These past few restless weeks of cocooning, a result of immense pressures stemming from work, my desperate need to find someone else so that I didn’t think of the past, and my wanting to be more than I really am. Fortunate, a cocoon protects you from the harsh realities of a world crumbling behind. Forcing you to let go of a childish past and embrace an adult future. Something that takes you from one zone to the next: comfort to battle.In the darkness of a spring Sunday afternoon cocoon, you get a lot of time to reflect on the future and the lessons from the past. I want these new words of honesty to make things right, but it’s the wrongs that make these words come to life. It’s in the living that we realise that maybe … maybe we’re so used to shifting blame to others. In shifting blame to careless words spoken in a carefree way when you know the consequences of them regardless.I wanted so much more for my life.I wanted so much more … and now it’s the time make it. This, being the 3^rd incarnation of what started out as an aimless project, is going to be something more personal than ever before. No pretence. No fore-thought to what people might want to see, want to read, want they imagine that distorts what I want to write. So, getting back to basics in every aspect of my life is what I now crave. First impressions; – experiences; – desires; – for the first time I am going to be me.I might be down, but this is the first round, and you better believe I’m a fighter.