In Which Carnita's Lover Bails Out and Simon's Lover Draws Closer

It is a sad day in Polyland, reader. I'm supposed to still be in another town with my dreamboat. But I'm back in Appalachia, where the humid, mildly overcast and sprinkly day seems to mirror the weather in my head. I woke up after 1:00 pm today after staying up until 5:00 am to write Caleb a very long letter that I now wish I could just copy directly here, but I think I may have to get used to the impermanence--or exceeding permanence, as the case may be--of hand-written letters because I love writing them. It felt so appropriate to have an actual pen in my hand and a very specific audience in mind.

Anyway, I feel like I have a tiny steel steam-powered sigh generator lodged in my chest since I drove away from Caleb's house in Smalltown North Carolina yesterday.

I guess I should at least mention that his meeting with Simon on Monday night went very well. He came over for dinner, and they had a pleasant conversation about nothing in particular, and it all felt so incredibly normal. I tried to leave them well enough alone for short periods of time, walking off to sit on the metal rocking-duck that unaccountably bounces on its spring in our yard. Watching them get along so easily and without my help warmed my slutty heart. I remind you, reader, that this was a first, as was the overnight trip.

An aside: In other news, Simon took the opportunity of my absence for the evening to invite his major love interest over to the house. The re-cap I got of their time together is the one thing that actually made me feel a lot better for a while. They had dinner, posed for some zany photos for our roommate, and then apparently ended up quite naked together in our bed. Things are coming along so well for those two, and I am squealy-little-girl excited for them. Unfortunately, there are a few of our (nosy, gossipy) mutual friends who are positively scandalized by the whole situation; I spent the better part of an hour defending their relationship last night when someone decided to offer me her unsolicited opinion about the matter. I think I did a passing job of explaining why she would do best to mind her own damn business and shut her trap.

Back to Caleb. I arrived in Smalltown on Tuesday night after anticipating this trip for weeks. For a couple of hours, it seemed like Caleb and I were both trying, blushing and awkward, to adjust to the startling aloneness and domesticity of the whole situation. I immediately jumped to cooking dinner, which was, if I may be permitted to say so, absolutely delicious. We hardly touched or made real eye contact for a few hours--we were both apparently very nervous--but finally, as I was chopping a mango, he came behind me and placed his hand in the small of my back. I shuddered, my scalp tingled, and my spine seemed to lose its resolve to stay upright. I turned around to face him, startled again by how tall he is, and he stooped to kiss me. I could hardly breathe for the spasms that kept rolling through my organs and out of my fingers. Yes, the electricity is very real with that one.

Somehow, I finished making dinner, we ate, and we poured drinks. (Actually, he barely drinks alcohol; I believe he was having an iced lemonade. Isn't that cute? ...Le sigh. I am hopeless.) We continued our conversation with him doing most of the talking. The main topics were the anxieties and preoccupations that have typified his last few months' psychological dis-ease, which has caused him to seek professional therapy, and which would be the same thing to cause the tender new bond between us to get warped within the next few hours. I am trying to think of how to efficiently explain his pathology, but I can only seem to think in terms of themes. I'll try to summarize:

Caleb is going through some sort of identity crisis and self-esteem nosedive that causes him to feel extremely anxious and preoccupied with a pervasive sense of inadequacy. Consequently, he is in a very self-involved head space, constantly and rather obsessively questioning the foundations of his identity as a man, as a sexual creature, as a partner, as a father, and practically everything else. He feels extremely self-conscious all the time and has enormous difficulty staying present in the moment.

He says, "I can't ever figure out what to do with my hands, and I'm completely distracted by what other people are thinking about me. It's like I'm surrounded by mirrors all the time."

(I would love to help him figure out what to do with his hands, but no one can really help him with the other thing.)

This episode, which has lasted a few months, seems to have been partially triggered by an experience with a woman whom he had been pursuing for a while. His interaction with this woman, who was in no way over her ex-boyfriend (by her account a very physically powerful, sexually dominant, masculine guy), led Caleb to develop a very unhealthy reflex of constantly comparing himself to this mythical man whom he had never even seen or met.

When he told me about this detail, I must have said something mildly dismissive because he pulled out a little piece of paper to show me as some kind of "proof." I was floored. Scrawled in red marker on this piece of paper was the question, "What do you think HE would be doing right now?" Apparently, Caleb had taken it off of his bedroom wall before I arrived, but now he was showing it to me. I just stared at him slack-jawed for a while, and he seemed to take some kind of weird satisfaction at having driven home the point that he is Extremely Fucked Up. I could have slapped him.

Anyway, Caleb seems to be aware that the problem has nothing really to do with the mythical rock-climber, but this other guy has become the symbol of Caleb's personal failure of self-valuation. Dude With Big Muscles, Huge Cock, and Otherwise Inscrutable Masculinity is just a place-holder, a shape that can give solid form and dimension to the space that had apparently been opening up in Caleb's psyche for just such a crisis. He must have been ripe for a major regeneration.

I hope that he still wants me once he gets through this phase. He said yesterday that he regretted our timing, and I can clearly see why, but I found myself arguing that people seek out the things that they need when they need them and that the timing may not have been an accident at all. I think I actually believe that?

So, conversation went on this way, about CockManDude and other related topics, and we kept pausing intermittently to make out. On maybe the fourth time we shut ourselves up by otherwise occupying our mouths, things progressed to a more sexual place, and he asked in a tone that was suspiciously, not-believably casual, "Do you want to go lay down?"

I wish I had detected that note of forced coolness at the time, but I didn't have enough information right then to consider that he may have reservations about intimacy. (I didn't find that out until the next morning.)

This scenario is an example of one unfortunate effect of the widely shared concepts of masculinity in our culture: the expectation that men should always be ready and willing to have sex. Perhaps if he had not been so influenced by these sorts of expectations of his behavior, he could have found the courage to tell me that although he is very attracted to me, he wishes to slow things down a bit...anyway, that didn't happen, and it may not have changed anything besides. I can't help wondering, though.

The sex was beautiful for me--a culmination of lots of anticipation and desire--and he seemed to be enjoying himself, too. He knows exactly what to do with his mouth and tongue, which are wide and soft--knew me better than I know me, it seemed. His cock is shaped perfectly to tickle that very deep-in place that I know can't be the famed G-spot--it's on the dorsal rather than the ventral plane--but which makes me have to choke back screams of pleasure whenever anything touches it...and with me on top of him, his anatomy is just so that when he is all the way inside me, his cock presses that spot hard. Mrrow. I really, really hope that the first time was not the last time.

I might have to depart the main story for a little aside here about this baffling anatomical detail. I really must figure out what is going on in there that causes one of my favorite sensations in the world. Is my screamy spot an overdeveloped prostate? Is it just a particularly nervy place on the back side of my cervix? I can't really tell, and the feeling can only really be triggered by a very specific shape and size object coming into my vagina at a very specific angle. I am always really excited when I find it, and I usually end up begging my partner to stay right there. It usually happens when I am on top, or when I am on my back with my hips raised and my lover is on his knees.

I mentioned that Caleb is apparently the precise right size and shape, and I should explain that. It seems like the shorter a guy's cock has been, the more likely it was to hit the spot. I had some of the most amazing sex with a lover I had a couple of years ago whom we'll call Max. One of the remarkable things about Max is how exceptionally tiny his erect cock was, but I loved it! It was perfect...it could find my spot, and I could thank it by putting all of it into my mouth! His little dick made me very happy. Caleb's is nowhere near as small as Max's--it's about perfectly average in length, actually--but it is fairly chubby, especially at the base. I have no doubt that I wouldn't be singing these praises for a guy with a nine-inch cock.

Even more digression! So I am not sure if I have ever talked about Oscar here. This was one of two major college boyfriends. He's very sweet and totally attractive--tall and sinewy like a greyhound, with piercing gray eyes and a tendency to always be the most sharply-dressed man in the room. We're still good friends, and have had several joyous little romps since we stopped dating. Nevertheless, even years later, when we found ourselves tangling in my bed after a few beers on my porch, I had to stop him before either of us were finished because his cock is simply too big for me. I remembered that it had been much the same when we had been dating; I was constantly having to ask him to ease up, not go so hard or deep, or even to just stop because I was in too much pain to go on. My poor cervix really just doesn't like to get bruised, and I unequivocally prefer to fuck and to go down on cocks that are on the small side, even though I don't prefer men whose general physiques are on the small side. Lucky for me, there seems to be little correlation between height, weight, and penis size.

Back to sex with Caleb. I keep going back through my memory and trying to find signals that may have indicated that something was off, but everything I can think of is so ambiguous. Mostly I just keep finding images in my head of all these cute facial expressions and sexy little noises he makes in his throat...

As soon as he came, he jumped up and ran off to the bathroom. When he climbed back under the sheets, the thunderstorm that had kicked up in the last few minutes seemed to absorb all of his attention, and I wasn't sure what to do or say. He was completely awake and alert, but clearly avoiding talking to me, and only vaguely responding to any touch. With a different guy, I might have decided that he was just doing the stereotypical "man" thing, emotionally and physically withdrawing after sex. I wouldn't have been pleased by that revelation, and I probably wouldn't sleep with such a fellow ever again. However, I'm pretty sure that Caleb is not built that way. He is more like Simon--very sensitive, affectionate, and accommodating. Maybe I should have realized that if he clams up after sex, something is actually wrong.

Blah blah blah, shoulda coulda woulda. I guess what I really mean to say with all this quibbling over my decisions is that I will now be able to learn from this experience. I can't ever truly regret mistakes that I make, after all. Regret and nostalgia are still some of my most insidious enemies because they both require conscious suspension of so much truth, foregrounding only those aspects of concepts and memories that serve a particular purpose. (Did I just define ideology? And does that make my connections between regret and nostalgia rather more ludicrous or shallow? Eh.)

For the rest of the night, I struggled to sleep. I even got up around 4:00 am to read in the living room and ended up falling asleep for a few hours on the couch. We cuddled a bit in the morning, and when we decided to get up, he made me an impressive breakfast. This is when the topic of sex came up more explicitly--it took until after it had happened, unfortunately--and I mentioned that it doesn't exactly make a girl feel good to be flatly ignored and given the silent treatment after she's been fucked for the first time.

He was sorry and made himself find the words to explain: he had discovered through this experience that he is too self-involved to feel truly present during intimate encounters because he is constantly distracted by performance anxiety. He noted with alarm that when he tries to think about the best sexual experiences he has ever had, they were the instances when he had put on the best "show" for his partner. More mirrors, in other words. By having sex with me, he had only psychically had sex with himself, and he had gotten quiet because he was freaking out on the inside about this.

This is probably tedious to read, so feel free to skip it. I know that later on, if and when I'm feeling really down about losing this guy, I'll appreciate reading a play-by-play that can dispel my memory's self-accusing distortions over time.

Over the course of several hours in the afternoon spent lazing around his house and talking more, I eventually came to the conclusion that I should go home. He had decided that he can't "do this" right now, although he would like to try to shape himself up into a person who can. He said that part more than once in different ways--basically suggesting that he planned to try to do the work on himself that he needs to do in order to be functional in a relationship...and that I would be the first to know when things had changed.

He reiterated that he still wants to see me when he comes to my town, but we'll see if that really ends up being true. Furthermore, I won't know until that situation arises how much I will be willing to tolerate the sensation of never being the one who is in control of what happens between us; anything that happens at this point will be at his behest alone. I may tire of that.

I have to congratulate myself because as bad as I felt and still feel about how things are turning out with him, I behaved in the most graceful, understanding, and supportive manner that anyone could ever ask for. At least I do not have to regret how I behaved. I was a perfect gentlewoman, stirring up no unnecessary drama but still making my feelings for him quite clear. I packed up, hugged him chastely (dammit!), and drove back home.

This post has taken two days to write, and there is still so much that I haven't gotten around to! I wanted to tell you about my time spent in Empathyland, about the gift of sadness, about my little flirtation with a weird artist boy, and about this year's perennial bloom of my ongoing friendship with Andrés. But alas, I have to go pack for a weekend with Simon's family at their lake house. I will try to write more, but that house always feels quite crowded. Meanwhile, I wait yet again to find out whether I have thoroughly freaked Caleb out with my ridiculously long letter. ¡Vaya con Dios!