Who are you?

Think I have you figured out, solved you like a puzzle. Each piece a long hunt and a slow fit.  Some of the pieces I have somehow been unwilling to accept until now as they were mixed amongst your sweetness. Like ants stuck in honey, small enough they could nearly be ignored and swallowed whole. At least some of the pieces, took awhile. I never would have described myself as naive. I guess everyone is in certain corners of their life. I can haggle bitterly for the right price and quality of a grass roof. Standing my own strong and savvy against balinese men sporting long pinky nails and batik sarongs flowing in the wind as they try to swindle me with every slippery trick in the book, but dating, well I guess that is uncharted waters. I am adrift in the dark until suddenly things are illuminated as they are now.  I feel gutted as your sweet kiwi self would say.  A feeling that slowly sinks into my stomache as this new light shines plainly on what is and has only been hiding undiscovered in plain sight since I met you. 

All of my new found dating life has been an interesting series of experiments that I don't totally regret, but won't repeat. Sadly with each experience my heart closes just a bit. collapses in grief and looses the will to give itself to another, not sure it will survive much more. With each wound the scab grows thicker. 

A friend said that after you get used to dating awhile you can pick the different types of people out a mile away and you don't let them in emotionally again. 

So next time I can at least say, oh you. I know you, married, serial lier with an internet sex addiction, sweet as apple pie with icecream on a hot summer day, hard not to be tempted, but ya gonna pass. After all I was the one that let this happen. I said oh you lied to me and are married. Oh and yeah as a bonus you didn't share the fact that you have been for years on fling-finder looking for randoms to feed your lust like a cocaine addiction. This addiction that requires the selling of the family jewels piece by piece to fuel your will to secretly snort white powder up your nose. But instead of cocaine your drug of choice is giving yourself orgasms on your family's sofa as your wife and child sleep in the other room. One could argue, I knew this, sensed it but I was too high myself on this oxytocin laden frenzy to say no to the cocaine pusher, so I said oh never mind lets have an affair. I was allready knee deep in mud at that point, just didn't realize that I was sinking. I guess I was under a spell. Isn't that really what love is? just a shared delusion? a magical spell, a cocaine like drug that you would sell your mother into prostitution for?  I think if we were in a real relationship and you meant what you said that sex even with other people was something that you always would share with me, well I would probably trust you to do anything your twisted carnel mind could dream up. We could play games till we were crazy because it would be just us. We could convince that girl that works at H & M that you think is hot to sneak out early from work and join us in some singapore hotel on orchard road to play with us like a toy, but we would let her go quick and spend the night talking and laghing it away. We could make mad love in the jungle wet and muddy while hiking where anyone could see.  I would let you have me like a partner in crime, like a prop in your productions, if only what you said was true that I am always on the inside, in on your secret. But this will never be. 

The thing that I have come to realize is, it isn't shared, its you having solitary experiences one of which is me. This is the hard and cold realisation that I have slowly come to, like the drunkedness from red wine, the fogginess only engulfing your head after the the warm richness of the third glass hits your tongue. Slowly, but then suddenly. The puzzle pieces once put together, paint such an undeniable picture. I looked at you online. spied on you really. last online 8 hours ago. moments after you said work calls, if I count backwards. Who made you cum last night? a stranger in a chat room? Is that what I am to you? someone that just makes you cum? How did she make you feel? Did oxytocin get you? chase you down like a relentless predator? Will you meet her again tomorrow in that dark internet land? 

How can you be cheating on me when I am in real fact your virtual imaginary mistress? In six months we have spent a meager 5 real days together. Amazing days, tangled up escaping shape and form and staring magically into each others eyes. Fireworks, yes there were fireworks and all the magic movies teach us we should be the rightful owners of. Despite these precious moments of skin on skin lust, hardly a day has passed where you have not connected with me across oceans and countries thru our small digital portals into each others realities, whispering I love you in text form after you tell me about your day, about your stress or the child that you love. The swim lesson, the details of the mundane. Its not all sexy GIFs, there was just the one. A cyber gift from me to you. Mostly we support each other thru the trials of daily life and are there in the dark as quiet company. Me alone on a tropical island, you alone in the midst of your busy corporate life we are together as one, day after day, night after night when there is no one else. Your wife, she lays innocently next to you asleep as we talk. She sits across the room even as you text me. You betray her daily with your notes to me even if we stay far away from our imaginary stories of passion. 

So how can you cheat on me? How can you seek this out night after night with strangers online after you have left first her then me to our sleep? Because you are an addict. This is the only conclusion I am left with. Last online 2 hours ago it says on swingershaven. This is you. I must force myself to see it clearly like a cold shower on a winters morning this fresh vision is what is needed to separate the wheat from the chaff. You are not just the sweet man I see. You are an addict. I was once your cocaine. Won't you inhale me again? 

So now I have to come to terms with trust. Can I trust you if you hide your darkness from me too?  You are a thief in the night. You are not what you seem, a shape shifter of ailien form. I can no longer let you linger in in the corners of my mind as a safe passenger. You are nothing but a spy who will only take from me just as you manage to  find more stollen secrets from others. stollen? maybe or simply swindled like cheap grass roofs sold by shady balinese men. It appears you are not capable of full disclosure and complete honesty, you have become too accustomed to hiding your dark bits from those you love. keeping them tucked under mattresses like a teenager's copy of a tattered playboy magazine. Your dark greedy lust is a forbidden relic that no one can see.  

I tried my best to talk honestly about what I was feeling and seeing but you were unwilling to respond with even a single word. "Are you doing ok?" was your neat response to my long emotionally raw note to you. We are way past the casual point where I merely smile at you coyly from across the table. We have passed all points really. like a car facing a road washed out by a storm we are left to stare blankly ahead with no way forward. 

I would have taken you as you are, all of you.  Do you know this? All I ever asked for in return was full disclosure and honesty. I only asked that you willingly dump all the pieces of yourself in my lap to hold and love and sweetly kiss.  Bold naked honesty, that should theoretically suit someone like you favors sex in the wide open. Naked in public. But naked honesty you dress up, put clothes on and hide in plain sight like a muslim woman bearing the brunt of afghani life, but why? You omit the details and walk the lines between truth like you are avoiding cracks in a sidewalk. 

Omission is lying too you know, even if that is the easiest kind for you. You can't fly to Bali to see me and indulge in what you know would be the best of romances on one of the most romantic islands because that feels like lying. You can't have me in clear pools overlooking lush green jungle vistas, because for this distinct pleasure you would have to pay with the cost of looking your wife in the eyes and making up a story a lie. Meeting me in Jakarta on a bussiness trip in the generic beige hotel that your company has booked for the occasion, well this is just an omission. I can be cleanly erased from this scene with a large pink eraser without changing a single detail of your trip.  Omission you have made easy peace with and has fit into your life like the daily subway you take to work. Regular and on time. I have come to believe that despite what you tell me, these omissions to your wife are not something you do just for me, because I am special, but instead are nothing more than a long standing habit. Like coffee in the morning, no thought, just habit. Am I just one of a string of relationships like this for you? My friend (the falanderer who knows this behavior well) has argued all along to me that this is not about me, its a trap set by a spider who knows how to lure women with flattery and desire. Is you giving me what feels like some extreme sport of love and emotional intimacy just part of your sticky cobweb? Is this real for you or just a part of this game? I guess I won't ever know for sure and I have to make peace with that. I have to stop chasing this cold case trail like a detective obsessed with a truth that will never be found. 

I have to take the bits of the puzzle that I have found and turn them over in my hand, This is what I know for sure, this is what is true. I am not ok with all of this and I promised myself after my last relationship with the emotionally unavailable but eternally present aussie that I would not accept masqueraded mistreatment from men even if it felt like a fair trade for good company at times of loneliness. 

Anyway I think you are ready to let go of me too. The constant need for me that showed itself plainly in the stream of messages all day has slowed to a trickle and now barely a drip. like a water starved desert surviver I am sucking desperately at your dripping faucet hoping you will once again release the flow. Even plans to meet in real life have now been canceled too many times to count. I don't think you have any intention of seeing me again but won't tell me this. Our next trip in the beige Jakarta hotel room is always on the horizon like a carrot that keeps moving just out of reach. 

Our last rendezvous in Singapore was canceled at the last minute, my hair already blown dry, me waiting as you told me that your family had food poisoning and you could not see me. So as consolation you met me the next day in the airport and we discussed nurf guns with my twelve year old for 20 minutes, without so much as a kiss. Our relationship has desolved in the last month, we had a good long run but now we have nothing more than a thin thread that even our imagination can barely support, so maybe its time that I stop waiting for your messages. Time that I stop hoping that this is the week you will make time for me in real life. I think I need to say goodbye and cut the emotional thread. I still maintain that I love you. that I fell in love with you. that for me this was not imaginary but real. but I also know that with anyone you have to decide what you will accept regardless of love. You will always have a piece of my heart and as crazy as it sounds for someone who I have only really known online, I love you as fierce as I have ever loved anyone. May we both be blessed with this kind of love again but may it be real and not imaginary and may we get to keep it. I love you. 

theft and other sins of the heart

I have never met you, I have never seen you laugh or heard how your accent sounds. I don't know how you mother and have never witnessed how you behave after your third glass of wine. I can only spy on breadcrumbs of your family photos left public on facebook. I contemplate your choice in earrings and try hard to read the emotion in your eyes.

My intention was to write an apology to you, to the woman I will never meet whose husband I am borrowing for the week. I wanted to say sorry for the pain I would cause you if only you knew. I know this pain myself intimtiately, know its shape and its form like I know the way my cat sleeps curled on my lap. Your ignorance only further sprinkles my guilt with tiney grains of pain. Like salt on a wound, because I know the explosion of hurt that is waiting silently around any corner for you to find. Did you hear my orgasm over skype in the guest room as you slept the other night? Did you notice his smile over coffee as he texted me? 

I wanted to say that I was sorry for wrecking your home, trying even to tear apart your family for my own selfish want. A want that is so great, that I would do almost anything to feed its hunger. 

I intended to say sorry for all that and more but the sad truth is that this appology that you will never actually read, feels like a lie. See I was once you. I was only two short years ago trapped in a marriage whose small amount of love we had conjured at the start had burned out out like a camp fire dwindling slowly in the cold night air. I was once casting daily daggers of bitterness towards the man whose bed I shared nightly. I was once contemplating how it would be possible to cut off my third arm, this appendage that I drug around like dead weight but that none the less had become so firmiliar that its forced amputation felt like it was medically impossible. No you would argue if you only could, I love this man. He is my heart and soal and partner in all things. yes, this too I know. I know how it feels to not live in the world of black and white contrasts where everything seems clear. I know what it feels like to enjoy morning coffee and sweet family moments together and still at least once a week remember why you love him. Its confusing isn't it? 

so I will say I am sorry for my theft but I will still steal anyway. Today at two, the man who belongs to you will knock at my hotel room door. He will kiss me and tell me he loves me. We will makes love, and talk and wrap ourselves up in sheets and then he will return home to you, make dinner and bath your daughter. I will spend the night alone wandering the streets of singapore. But the next day we will get on a plane together and share long intimidate moments for two indulgent nights. 

I want to say I am sorry for stealing, but I want more to ask you, do you want me to steal him from you? Do you want to be freed from the burden of letting him go? 

Truth revealed.

I wanted to take stock of all that we are. I am mad for you, the kind of madness that makes me want to plunge off emotional cliffs for you. I find it hard to make the sum of our parts add up. I find it hard to understand intellectually how it is that I feel I have known you all my life or that I know exactly who you are without you saying a word. Like I can feel your core and it somehow matches mine. But I also know that I am under the influence of powerful drugs. That I can't even see straight right now. That the chemical cloud we are floating on is so thick that you and I may as well be passing our days lounging on low tables puffing pipes in an opium den. We would make love all day amongst the cushions. I know we would. 

So I decided to exercise my left brain and make a list. This is my small list of the tangibles. The stuff that makes us something together. The stuff that we both are. The shared little bits we have in common. The stuff that is beyond the core of just getting and loving your soul, the you inside. 

This is what I have at the moment, I know there is more. Lots more. 

Let's start with food. Good place to start. We both like food, good food. Home made food. We like to cook. We don't know how much yet but both of us have this strong. We like coffee and red wine. I know you prefer craft beer but if we were in France you would drink wine with me. "Il etait une fois". I Saw this written today. You speak some French right? "Once upon a time" it means. This is how our story should start. It's better in French because it translates more to "it was one time" this is our time, our chapter in the book of life. It's a fairytale for me, it really is. And France... We would live there together by the sea. We both love this idea. But we would travel always to strange remote crazy places. We like adventures, even muddy ones. We like babies, babies that grow into amazing kids. We would make them together if only our genetics could find each other in the dark. Curly auburn haired babies with my eyes and your smile. 

We are both optimists, we know that everything is possible, if we can dream it we can do it. We believe in working hard and getting things done. We push past obstacles as if they were just simple rock walls to climb. Imagine if our forces were combined what we could imagine, what we could do? It's part of the reason I am willing to walk down this impossible path with you holding my hand. Because we know all things are possible with faith and hard work. For this reason we have the power to overcome even impossible romances. Mount them like black stallions and ride off into the sunset together. 

We are sensuous dare I say even romantic creatures you and I. We crave nuance and share some sort of taste for unusual passions of the senses. We have so much to share in this, so much to learn and experience  about this part of who we are together. This tangled mass of sex. 

We have some shared interest in biology. I like bugs too you know. You are just smarter about this than me. But I could certainly chat you up about these creatures invisible to the naked eye and their role in the immune system. The only book I own in bali is called "the art of fermentation". I make sauerkraut, you prefer wine but we like this I think for the same reason. This is life, alive before our feet. Science and magic together. 

I feel like there is more, it's not just an opium den we find ourselves in. We are real. Two pieces of a puzzle that have floated out to sea and found each other in the the dark. Found. 

I love you. You are no longer my imaginary boyfriend. I know now you are real.

Imaginary Boyfriend

You are my imaginary boyfriend. We have never met but I know I Love you. You told Me yourself that this was how you felt The other night as you drank one too many beers. That you were falling hopelssly thru the air, nothing to catch your fall. Your breath caught permenantly In your throat. 

You hold my hand as you walk me thru this imaginary world we create together. We are like avatars blue and capable of becoming anything that pleases us. 

"Is this just about sex for us?" I ask you earnestly seeking your answer. 

"No" you tell me and I believe you, but am suspicious that we are the victims of oxytocin's chemical intoxication. Heady And thick like lounging about in an opium den for hours as the smoke fills our lungs And makes the world outside slowly dissapear And feel pointless. 

We need each other. The kind Of need that is thick and sweet like honey. Dripping down My leg need. The kind Of need that makes my belly ache and my mind spin. We thirst for each other, its unquenchable, we keep drinking but It keeps coming. 

You seem to see me thru special glasses, rose colored ones, imagine I am more than I am. Describe me with superlatives that don't match my jean shorts and missmatched tan lines. I have one grey pubic hair, should I tell you this? A super model who is your biggest sexual fantasy. You feel lucky But I know I am. You make lasagne on a sunday For The week ahead you say. Meet me first and look at My frown lines close up I counter. 

But There is something There between us that goes back and forth. I like you. I like you in so many ways. You work hard traveling the world because you love your work. You will tie me up in bed and watch as I make love to another woman, in our minds, together, all befor morning coffee. We laugh, hard and long. I have not enough hours in the day to devour your mind. And then we drink The coffee. You just the right combination of sexy and requisite geek to satisfy my desires for a brain in bed and not just a body. But you are not here in front of me, you are but an apparation. A ghost. You will disapear as quickly as you have arrived. Return to your family and stop being my imaginary boyfriend.

Today I am flying on a plane to you. Crossing oceans and borders just to touch you. RiskingFlying from my island home of Bali to the big sterile city of Singapore. I will arrive at our hotel and change into tight jeans and heels, casual and just sexy enough. I will walk to a small bar and order a glass of red wine, warm and thick and In the perfect round wine glass It will keep me company as I wait for you. 

You are a stranger to Me. I have never kissed your lips nor have I touched your skin, but I know the inside if your mind. You have seen the inside Of mine. An old friend, a lover, that I have never met. 

I am a sure thing that you now get to devour without hesitation, But first you must drink wine with me across the table. Look at me here I am right in front Of you. No longer a screen In the way.