Follows The Sun

May was here with me for 10 days. He left Tuesday. The week began with KinkForAll Providence, and ended with the NELA FetishFlea, an event which we barely attended and which brought us nothing but pain, in the end. In the meantime there was laughter and closeness, connection and inspiration, tears and anger and terrible, stomach clenching fear. On our last day we were like happy ghosts, lying low in a space between the past and the future, loving each other and worrying and hoping. But it began with KinkForAll.

I cried there first. I cried over the loss of Z and all the things I never was to him. But I also saw friends and accomplices and people I admire brought together, talking and learning and making a good thing happen. I watched the four people who over the last year turned each other’s lives upside down begin to show the people they are turning into, the places they’ve come from, and I was pleased by what I saw.

I gave this talk:

Sensuality: Within and Beyond Sexuality – KinkForAll Providence from Emma Gross on Vimeo.

I talked about sensuality, and pleasure, and joy. I talked about sitting in the sunshine and tasting what you eat and adoring your lovers.

Now a week and a half later, I am looking for words that describe me. Not positive or negative, but true. Words that describe how I relate to myself, to the world around me, to my past and my future and to other people in my life.

I have discovered that I am possessive of those I love most. When I’m feeling emotionally safe, I am seldom jealous, but I am nonetheless possessive. I place a lot of emphasis on strong bonds between two people that are special, different from the bonds they share with anybody else. When my previous partner, Z, was in his pup mode, he was my puppy. He could be a lover, a friend, even perhaps a romantic partner to other people, but he was nobody’s puppy but mine. When we parted, the loss of my pup was one of the hardest parts.

Likewise with May. May was my boy. He belonged to me.  His submission was the greatest gift and honor he could have given me, and I took the best care of him I could. I was in control of the pattern of our sexual lives, the ebb and flow of his desire and denial. What I asked of him, he would do for me, which prompted in me an answering care in what and how and why I asked.

Now May and I must renegotiate our relationship. Neither of us want to, I think, but even with whole of the internet connecting us, and all our good work, the distance between coasts is an impossible gulf. We can bridge it only with a promise of living in the same place in the near future. As he has found his home, I would have to give up mine – a challenge that, for the moment, is insurmountable to me. Something had to give.

I can speak about everything I will miss and mourn, I could enumerate every bit of it, but the thing that  keeps catching at me and making me cry, all through the days, is the knowledge that he will not be my boy anymore. The sense of ownership and responsibility within a bond of love and equality, the certainty that I was paramount no matter what – writing this now hurts nearly as much as the catastrophic, wailing moment when I realized that all that would be gone. May is his own man, unbreakably strong, heart-breakingly sweet, amazingly tender, unusually lovely. He is his own man, and always was and always will be. And I will remember that he once belonged to me.

Through it all, though, through the aching loss and longing, I am finding silver linings and bright sides. Those who have observed me through times of trouble will note that I am optimistic to a fault. I can always make it ok, find a way in which I have been lucky, point out what I have to be grateful for. I am grateful to have my home and my plants and my friends and my family. I am grateful to have a new project on which May and I can work, something we can pour our extra energies into while the rest of the emotional dust settles, while we take stock of what we can keep and what we must pare away. While we come to terms, we can smile at each other over the good thing we are producing, over our strength in not giving up a working partnership that has glorious potential simply because not all of our potential together can immediately be met.

My brain constructs possible futures full of joy, full of getting what I want, and lives in those hopes. They may not be met, in the end, but by the time I realize they will not be I will have drawn enough solidity around me from elsewhere not to need them anymore. I can protect myself with optimism during times of trouble, without suffering loss when all does not turn out the best that it could be.

My talk from KinkForAll, like everything else, is bittersweet. I make allusions to a sexuality I may no longer have access to, to the very possession which I am currently mourning. But I came home from a morning at work the day May left to find him watching it, because even with that loss, it made him smile. And it makes me smile, and I will keep on smiling, and counting my moments of joy and pleasure, and looking with hope into the future.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 18th, 2010 at 11:02 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.