I needed to write on Sunday and I ended up with that magpie story. It totally wasnt what I was thinking about, and at first I didnt really even know why that was the memory that I came up with that was so important to get out. I sure get it now.
Sunday morning, and for the last couple of weeks, I was thinking (of course) about two things that have been weighing heavily on me in those moments when I let them in to show me their weight. I thought I successfully hid from that black thrash when I spat out the pica story. I realize now that she snuck in. again.
Those things that have been bothering me seem to taint my world as of late, and I really need to address them.
They arent perfectly related, but theres certainly a thread of connection:
The closest to the forefront of my brain is definitely the situation that shouldnt have been one; the night of my birthday. (well, theoretically, it was no longer my birthday as it was after midnight, but thinking in terms of those legalities doesnt really take away the bother.)
The second one is much older. Older in some sci-fi / Egyptian movie sort of way where the thick cracks of the dried surface of the earth near some beautiful desert oasis start to bulge and split.
Now, thanks to Doghouse_Reilly, the sight of those bony knuckles scrambling to the surface is accompanied by a Theremin Hymn
No, wait. No Theremin Hymn. Actually I would imagine more of a David Lynch close up like at the beginning of Blue Velvet where he zoomed in macro on the ants, and the soundtrack is an industrial white noise high in the treble irritation and some far away screeching.
Dried earth cracking and suddenly a painted nail sticking way out of a bony, shriveled fingertip. Red polish fresh on the cracked yellow base, but the flesh is growing full swollen with blood and suddenly young again, the finger becomes a finger as I know it.
Yeah, more like that.
Eventually, against my better judgment, a female form emerges from the dirt.
Wrapped tight from head to toe, corseted in bright white and unrealistically clean cotton, shes a seductive caricature of womanhood. An erotic, anonymous monster, a daytime succubus.
The soundtrack changes as a beautiful Arabic chant is somewhere behind the static. A drum beat starts.
She uncurls her bent spine and stands straight to her full height.
Shes faceless, save for the ridiculously huge blue anime eyes and thick red lips painted onto the cotton mask. Are they crooked? A slight smirk.
Hello again, . a smoky voice.
A maggot wriggles out from between the wraps by what should be her mouth, and the painted lips smile.
The anime eyes blast to fully dilated pupils: black orbs with an ice blue rim.
I imagine I see my reflection in the matte finish of those pupils staring.
One wrapped end of the cotton near the exaggerated curve of her hip comes undone, and suddenly my old best friend is there beside her.
DUDE!! he says, looking over at me, and he drops nude to his knees beside her.
He grabs the loose end of her cotton shroud in his teeth and lashes his head backwards.
She giggles and spins, but her head and those eyes dont stray from that stare.
The air is filled with the scent of coconut, her flesh beneath the unraveling is bronzed and glistening in the sun
..
The night of my birthday is really bothering me.
After giving myself 2 weeks to think about it, I am finding that I am actually somewhat angry.
Trixelfem said a couple of days ago in response to my wish of resolution that she thought the resolution was that she-who-used-to-be-referred-to-as-her just didnt want to talk about it.
I guess I define resolution differently.
Not resolution = the end. more like resolution = RESOLVED
This is SO not resolved.
If it was simply that she didnt want to talk, I would still have a hard time with that. I mean, after 12 years of living together, and lacking any nasty breakup scenario, this angry silence is hard to comprehend. But its so much more than that.
This is not just that there is a person out there that doesnt want to talk to me.
The night of my birthday, after I put in my word that she definitely wouldnt be down there, our group jumped in a cab and headed on down for goth night.
Upon entering, I instantly saw a bunch of people that I knew from back in the days when I used to run that old vancouverotica website, and I saw the couple that used to live in the apartment below us. I did take a cursory scan around the club, and was pretty sure that we were safe there with no her.
I was up talking to the couple that used to live below this apartment, when lavinia came up to me and said your ex is here.
She was upstairs in an area of the club that the regular punters werent allowed into, hanging out with who I assume is her new beau.
Ok, well that sucked. I hadnt seen her since November, and the emotional whirlwind her influence had thrown me into around Christmas time was something I still dont ever want to remember. Nonetheless, she was out of sight somewhere in the rafters, and I hadnt seen her so I decided I would just make the best of it and continue with my birthday fun. At that moment, I did not allow any of the memories of my last 12 birthdays come into the forefront of my brain. I just tried to remain in the same mindset I had arrived in: happy and with my friends. That was a tough sell.
Our SG crew was seated around one large table near the entrance of the club, and I eventually made my way back to where they were.
Then I saw her.
--This is the part I dont get:
Her and her boyfriend parked themselves right beside us at the next table.
I dont know what to say about that. I certainly didnt know how to handle it at the moment.
I can say this:
If it was her birthday, and this same sort of shit between us was going down and I was at a club hanging out with my friends and I saw her show up with her new friends I would probably leave.
I just would have been respectful of her night, her time. Just like her own birthday that passed in July, I was completely cognitive of her event, and I struggled over what my actions should be on that day to be sure that I didnt fuck that day up for her in any way.
Any other night: well, things would be awkward for sure, and I dont know what the answer would be on that night, perhaps we would both stay. But on my birthday (with her knowing how bloody important birthdays are to me), I was thrown into a vortex of confusion as to how to deal with it.
If I was in her position, I would have tried to make his night ok.
But she didnt, and I didnt know what to do, where to put myself, how to react.
I quite honestly wanted to leave immediately. I felt that uncomfortable. She had been treating me with such disdain for so many months as I pushed so hard to never do anything wrong and there she was sitting right there as though she hadnt said any of that shit. As though her mom was still my mom.
I wouldnt allow myself to leave though. I couldnt.
I also couldnt remain sitting near her, and I found myself in some embarrassing circling tour of the club. I couldnt find a place to be comfortable anywhere.
I probably should have just left, but I didnt want to succumb to that. Not that it was a power struggle at all, but it was my birthday and I just wanted to end the night on a good note. Me fleeing the club due to her presence would not have been a good note.
I ended up deep in the darkest corner of the smoking room, alone. I could see all the people I came with sitting up there at that table, but it was like 7 feet from where she sat. Holy fuckin highschool. Ridiculous. I could not bring myself to go back to where they were sitting and join them. It was like her personal bubble was 50 feet wide, and it encompassed my oblivious friends.
I saw myself sitting in that dark corner alone, smoking and wishing I was with my friends wishing this wasnt like this, and suddenly, in a moment of insanity or some equally legally defensible mental illness, I come up with the brilliant idea to just go up there to where she is sitting with her beau to say:
Ok, hey. Can we just forget all this shit?
The need to resolve the scenario overrode any ability to second guess my decision, and I suddenly found myself walking towards her.
I obviously didnt think that out too well. It didnt work the way I planned. At all.
Without rehearsing my lines whatsoever, I suddenly found myself intruding on their personal space. I dont even know her boyfriend, but there I am standing there beside him. She is reeling backwards as though shes superwoman and Im kryptonite, her head turned away from my direction in a painful looking, neck breaking angle. Hes suddenly saying something to me along the lines of not tonight man and another friend of theirs is pushing my shoulder back, pushing me away and I am so not even violent about that I just wanted to end the crap, I didnt even really notice that shove until later recollections.
This is so hard to type.
In the meantime, the whole SGBC crew is sitting at the next table I dont know if they saw that go down or not, but I couldnt go to them for support she had planted herself in their bubble and it just sucked like I cant explain.
It was all just so wrong.
Later, I hear that one of her friends approached lavinia in the washroom to warn her about how much of an asshole I am, and I wonder what I did wrong because I certainly cant come up with anything from my history to account for that.
Please compare both of our actions from the last 6 months and demonstrate how my hole of assness is so great.
Even better, go back 12 years and show me my hole from within that era. Strip out my support of her, my love and my cognitive understanding, her lengthy infidelity, my subsequent indiscretion, and please show me the assness that is different and less real than the shit that went down in both directions.
Show me how Im worse.
-----
Obviously, she is able to do that convincingly, or I would not have found myself so suddenly alone in early November after Gimpy died.
That was when I heard the goodbye of the last of my long time friends, and that goodbye didnt come with an explanation either.
Anyways, thats the end of my birthday story. The embarrassing attempt to communicate to end this tripe.
---
We only had a few close friends over those 12 years, and it pains me to say that I dont have contact with any of them now.
Well, almost. Theres one that I have no regrets over losing, and thats my old guy best friend.
Ive known him since before I even met she-who-used-to-referred-to-as-her. Actually, I met him the second day after I had moved to Vancouver back in 89.
Somehow, I kept tripping across him over the next couple of years, and finally he ended up as my roommate for a brief stint before I moved to the middle east for that year.
When I finally found my way back home, I met her almost immediately upon my return. I was working as a bouncer in a gay bar, and one night this stunningly beautiful woman walked through the door. I was speechless and shy. Later in the evening, she came back to where I stood by the coat check and we started talking, playing idly with candle wax. I ended up going home with her that night and fell in Love very shortly thereafter.
I ran into him sometime after that, and upon mentioning my betrotheds name, he freaked out in that no way!! sort of way, because he knew her from the small town they grew up in. He was in the same grade as her older sister, and in his teens he had spent time at her house.
We ended up hanging out off an on over the next decade, and near the end of the 90s, he would end up over at our place more often than not as R would make some nice dinner and wed watch movies. She loved him like a brother and her and I would laugh every time hed fall asleep on the couch when wed rent a movie. He could never stay awake after one of Rs roast something and gravy dinners.
Him and I would do just about everything together, when I did anything outside of doing stuff with R, that is. But we werent exactly twins.
There was one thing that would bother me about him, and that was his apparent disrespect towards women in general.
Dont get me wrong, of course I totally appreciate the beauty of the female form, but thats the start and end of that. Especially when I am in a relationship sure Ill notice a hot body and a beautiful face, but it ends there. I wont make a big deal of it, because I dont really care past the point of recognizing that that woman takes care of herself.
Him though, he was constantly single. (and even when he wasnt, he acted as though he was) He would consistently be really obvious about his scoping of the chicks. R and I would be out for breakfast with him at Joes on Davie street in the summer time, and we would sorta bug him about how obvious he was in his ogling of the passing women, like it was a joke.
But really, it was no joke.
I totally loved this guy, he was/(is?) really intelligent, he had a great outlook on the world, he understood the shit that was going down with international politics, and he was quite active in the political movement to quash the oppression of the lower class. I totally respected his views on how society has been fuckin the little people etc, and I respected his work in making that stop
It was him that was there at wreck beach the day my naked ass came down off that skimboard and I broke my leg. It was him that drove me home from the hospital when I had the metal rod removed from my other busted leg. It was him that showed up the night I was found almost dead and really naked and covered in blood on the floor of my apartment. I felt a real connection with this guy.
But he was still a mans man, if you know what I mean. He had some fucked up views of women and that would piss me off.
He objectified too readily. If we were alone without R sitting somewhere for coffee, hed be more than obvious about his appreciation of the latest pretty woman to walk by, and I was always embarrassed by it. I would say shit to him sometimes, but hed blow my comments off.
Wed be outside of a laundrymat, waiting for the dryers to finish, soaking up the summer rays suppin coffees, and a woman would walk by that was obviously pretty in that obviously pretty sorta way. I would glance up from my paper and recognize the fact that she was quite attractive, but I wouldnt make a big deal of it, and I would go back to reading the story I was in. Id simply recognize it, appreciate it, and go back to my reading.
He, on the other hand, would punch me in the shoulder. DUDE! hed say, nodding obviously in her direction. The couple that were walking behind her would glance down at us.
And I would be in the awkward position of trying to explain to him that yes, I did see her, and yes she was hot in that typical hotness factor, but damn dre, .
It just bugged me that he was so on that all the time.
The worst part of our friendship was the fact that him and I would go down to wreck beach.
For those that dont know, Wreck Beach is paradise. Its the local nude beach here in Vancouver, and I would miss it so if I ever had to live somewhere else. On a hot summer day, that stretch of treelined sand can hold about 3000 bodies, and the atmosphere there is so different from the regular beaches that are around here. A real community feel. You never have to worry about shit down there, and its such a charger for your life battery when things outside here in the city get to be a bit too much. Theres always wreck.
Its not the fact that there are tons of naked people down there. Not at all. Actually, there is absolutely nothing sexy about that. A quote I saw once makes so much sense to me:
a single nude draped across a divan is erotic. A 100 nudes in line for potato salad is not.
Wreck is not sexy. Usually.
Well this part of the story takes place about 2 years after I took R back after her affair.
I really thought that I had dealt with that, and in one sense I had. I had certainly gotten over the repetitive visualizations of what exactly was going down with her and him on those nights. I had stopped living my life from behind the vivid flesh flashes of her lust with another body, but I dont think I ever got over the trust thing. I definitely felt a piece missing inside of me that grew to a cancerous void. She was the first person I had ever 100% trusted, and that infidelity was world crushing to me. Perhaps I should never have taken her back.
I cant justify this. It is what it is, and what it is is disgusting.
One day down at wreck with my old best buddy, a woman threw down her towel just in front of him and I. Wed been down there for a few hours already, and had already come up with the brilliant idea of eating magic mushroom chocolates. The trees were crazy green against a too blue sky, and the ocean caressed our burning skin with our repetitive saline floats. (Its nice to be high enough to not really care about how small your stuff is when walking around naked on mushrooms.)
She plopped her backpack down on top of the log ahead of us, threw down and straightened out her towel, and began to strip.
I just read my book. Or at least I held my book in front of my sunglassed face as though I was reading it when she finally took off her panties and sat down to apply the sunscreen. She was probably no more than 20 years old, blonde.
After she got settled, she started talking to us. My friend and I had started to play a game of backgammon, and he invited her over. She agreed, pulling up her towel over to our area and the three of us started a game of cards.
R, at the time, was living back in her small town where she grew up, she was there for an 8 month school course. I was living alone in our apartment the bachelor that wasnt.
You see where this is going.
My friend and I take a trip to the ocean, plodding our bare feet down through the hot sand to that water, and once we are out of her range of hearing, the first word out of his mouth is: DUDE!!
Hes catching vibes, and Im not oblivious. Ive caught them too.
Shes from Edmonton, and only in town for the weekend, shes been obvious in her body positioning, her eye contact is loaded, her lips always smiling a bit as she looks our nude bodies over without shame. Maybe it was a smirk.
We take a quick dip, and return to the blankets with 3 fresh and cold beers from a vendor.
Well, the afternoon progressed like this. We drank more and more as the sun started to approach the horizon of that ocean, and eventually it was time to make our departure. Him and I had been to the water quite a few times for our private discussions and he was quite sure hed be getting some from her. He wanted to bring her with us and it was pretty obvious she would come. I was happy for him, as he never really got any, but my drunken high state was not oblivious to the fact that she had been throwing the vibes out in both directions.
On the last trip to the ocean, he says to me that hes thinking that she wants both of us.
no way man. I say.
DUDE! he says, grinning wide and punching me in the shoulder. He wont listen to my denial.
I am battling inside my head. For some sick reason, the idea has purchase over me. I have never gone there before, never been the not a boyfriend. I certainly have never contemplated the idea of being naked in a sexual sence with a third person. Especially a man.
The pain I experienced upon finding out the truth of Rs affair was something I had never ever imagined, and I could never be the cause for that amount of pain. Yet, here is this anonymous woman apparently throwing us the gauntlet.
I side step the idea of being included, and I think I trick myself into believing that I am just going to be the friend that I am facilitating his adventure, and offering the space.
We end up back at the towels, and start to pack up.
R is still out in her small town, she wont be back until sometime late tomorrow afternoon, and we head to my (our) apartment.
Well, this story has the potential to become some long winded erotic escapade, but to me its not.
To me, its the monster story I keep trying to bury. What happened that night is something that has plagued me to my core starting the very next day and it has not stopped being a thought cancer to me. He was there for all of it. Nothing gay went down, but I was definitely unfaithful within the three of us.
She is the fucking zombie scrambling to the surface, and I dont even remember her name.
I was actually quite suicidal after that, and numerous times I would approach my best friend there to try to exorcise this demon of memory. Hed have none of it.
you and your catholic guilt hed say.
Hed berate me every time I would feel strong enough to talk to him about how bad I felt about it, hed remind me of how R did much worse by having a much longer emotional/sexual attachment to that guy and how what I did was really nothing in comparison.
I would get so pissed off at him for not understanding that that didnt matter, that the regret I felt was killing me and that her infidelity was a different thing. I would get so mad that he consistently would push me towards more experiences like that. He was unable to understand my position.
I think it was his reaction to my regret over that that made me start to question how much of a friend this guy really was.
Of course, after I finally allowed myself to leave R (and this experience is perhaps partly responsible for that decision I could not allow myself to be deserving of that relationship with this skeleton in my closet) and he pulled that shit he pulled with her after we broke up
He is not missed.
Of all the people that used to be in my life that arent any more, I hate him and dont miss him.
Good riddance.
However, the story I just related.
I think that perhaps after I ditched him from my life, he may have told her about our threesome. I had hoped that that story was such a secret that even I didnt have to ever remember it, but unfortunately it did happen. I can look at it in a side stepped psychological way and try to understand how I was capable of such a thing, but that doesnt really help me.
I know that I will never ever do anything like it again, but that doesnt really help me either.
If he did lash out at me with her and tell her that story though, it would certainly go to explain a lot.
Oh yeah, my realization of my story being the same:
My magpie story turned out to be a recollection of how I ended up doing something that I found to be on the one hand exciting and attractive, yet as I got into it -- I wanted to stop.
I didn't stop though, and I didn't stop because of the fact that I was too afraid of being berated or looked down upon by somebody I respected and loved. My dad looking up at me, punching me in the shoulder to continue doing what I was doing. What I was doing was terrible and disrespectful, and I knew it.
I didn't think I was writing the same story, but now I see I was.
Sunday morning, and for the last couple of weeks, I was thinking (of course) about two things that have been weighing heavily on me in those moments when I let them in to show me their weight. I thought I successfully hid from that black thrash when I spat out the pica story. I realize now that she snuck in. again.
Those things that have been bothering me seem to taint my world as of late, and I really need to address them.
They arent perfectly related, but theres certainly a thread of connection:
The closest to the forefront of my brain is definitely the situation that shouldnt have been one; the night of my birthday. (well, theoretically, it was no longer my birthday as it was after midnight, but thinking in terms of those legalities doesnt really take away the bother.)
The second one is much older. Older in some sci-fi / Egyptian movie sort of way where the thick cracks of the dried surface of the earth near some beautiful desert oasis start to bulge and split.
Now, thanks to Doghouse_Reilly, the sight of those bony knuckles scrambling to the surface is accompanied by a Theremin Hymn
No, wait. No Theremin Hymn. Actually I would imagine more of a David Lynch close up like at the beginning of Blue Velvet where he zoomed in macro on the ants, and the soundtrack is an industrial white noise high in the treble irritation and some far away screeching.
Dried earth cracking and suddenly a painted nail sticking way out of a bony, shriveled fingertip. Red polish fresh on the cracked yellow base, but the flesh is growing full swollen with blood and suddenly young again, the finger becomes a finger as I know it.
Yeah, more like that.
Eventually, against my better judgment, a female form emerges from the dirt.
Wrapped tight from head to toe, corseted in bright white and unrealistically clean cotton, shes a seductive caricature of womanhood. An erotic, anonymous monster, a daytime succubus.
The soundtrack changes as a beautiful Arabic chant is somewhere behind the static. A drum beat starts.
She uncurls her bent spine and stands straight to her full height.
Shes faceless, save for the ridiculously huge blue anime eyes and thick red lips painted onto the cotton mask. Are they crooked? A slight smirk.
Hello again, . a smoky voice.
A maggot wriggles out from between the wraps by what should be her mouth, and the painted lips smile.
The anime eyes blast to fully dilated pupils: black orbs with an ice blue rim.
I imagine I see my reflection in the matte finish of those pupils staring.
One wrapped end of the cotton near the exaggerated curve of her hip comes undone, and suddenly my old best friend is there beside her.
DUDE!! he says, looking over at me, and he drops nude to his knees beside her.
He grabs the loose end of her cotton shroud in his teeth and lashes his head backwards.
She giggles and spins, but her head and those eyes dont stray from that stare.
The air is filled with the scent of coconut, her flesh beneath the unraveling is bronzed and glistening in the sun
..
The night of my birthday is really bothering me.
After giving myself 2 weeks to think about it, I am finding that I am actually somewhat angry.
Trixelfem said a couple of days ago in response to my wish of resolution that she thought the resolution was that she-who-used-to-be-referred-to-as-her just didnt want to talk about it.
I guess I define resolution differently.
Not resolution = the end. more like resolution = RESOLVED
This is SO not resolved.
If it was simply that she didnt want to talk, I would still have a hard time with that. I mean, after 12 years of living together, and lacking any nasty breakup scenario, this angry silence is hard to comprehend. But its so much more than that.
This is not just that there is a person out there that doesnt want to talk to me.
The night of my birthday, after I put in my word that she definitely wouldnt be down there, our group jumped in a cab and headed on down for goth night.
Upon entering, I instantly saw a bunch of people that I knew from back in the days when I used to run that old vancouverotica website, and I saw the couple that used to live in the apartment below us. I did take a cursory scan around the club, and was pretty sure that we were safe there with no her.
I was up talking to the couple that used to live below this apartment, when lavinia came up to me and said your ex is here.
She was upstairs in an area of the club that the regular punters werent allowed into, hanging out with who I assume is her new beau.
Ok, well that sucked. I hadnt seen her since November, and the emotional whirlwind her influence had thrown me into around Christmas time was something I still dont ever want to remember. Nonetheless, she was out of sight somewhere in the rafters, and I hadnt seen her so I decided I would just make the best of it and continue with my birthday fun. At that moment, I did not allow any of the memories of my last 12 birthdays come into the forefront of my brain. I just tried to remain in the same mindset I had arrived in: happy and with my friends. That was a tough sell.
Our SG crew was seated around one large table near the entrance of the club, and I eventually made my way back to where they were.
Then I saw her.
--This is the part I dont get:
Her and her boyfriend parked themselves right beside us at the next table.
I dont know what to say about that. I certainly didnt know how to handle it at the moment.
I can say this:
If it was her birthday, and this same sort of shit between us was going down and I was at a club hanging out with my friends and I saw her show up with her new friends I would probably leave.
I just would have been respectful of her night, her time. Just like her own birthday that passed in July, I was completely cognitive of her event, and I struggled over what my actions should be on that day to be sure that I didnt fuck that day up for her in any way.
Any other night: well, things would be awkward for sure, and I dont know what the answer would be on that night, perhaps we would both stay. But on my birthday (with her knowing how bloody important birthdays are to me), I was thrown into a vortex of confusion as to how to deal with it.
If I was in her position, I would have tried to make his night ok.
But she didnt, and I didnt know what to do, where to put myself, how to react.
I quite honestly wanted to leave immediately. I felt that uncomfortable. She had been treating me with such disdain for so many months as I pushed so hard to never do anything wrong and there she was sitting right there as though she hadnt said any of that shit. As though her mom was still my mom.
I wouldnt allow myself to leave though. I couldnt.
I also couldnt remain sitting near her, and I found myself in some embarrassing circling tour of the club. I couldnt find a place to be comfortable anywhere.
I probably should have just left, but I didnt want to succumb to that. Not that it was a power struggle at all, but it was my birthday and I just wanted to end the night on a good note. Me fleeing the club due to her presence would not have been a good note.
I ended up deep in the darkest corner of the smoking room, alone. I could see all the people I came with sitting up there at that table, but it was like 7 feet from where she sat. Holy fuckin highschool. Ridiculous. I could not bring myself to go back to where they were sitting and join them. It was like her personal bubble was 50 feet wide, and it encompassed my oblivious friends.
I saw myself sitting in that dark corner alone, smoking and wishing I was with my friends wishing this wasnt like this, and suddenly, in a moment of insanity or some equally legally defensible mental illness, I come up with the brilliant idea to just go up there to where she is sitting with her beau to say:
Ok, hey. Can we just forget all this shit?
The need to resolve the scenario overrode any ability to second guess my decision, and I suddenly found myself walking towards her.
I obviously didnt think that out too well. It didnt work the way I planned. At all.
Without rehearsing my lines whatsoever, I suddenly found myself intruding on their personal space. I dont even know her boyfriend, but there I am standing there beside him. She is reeling backwards as though shes superwoman and Im kryptonite, her head turned away from my direction in a painful looking, neck breaking angle. Hes suddenly saying something to me along the lines of not tonight man and another friend of theirs is pushing my shoulder back, pushing me away and I am so not even violent about that I just wanted to end the crap, I didnt even really notice that shove until later recollections.
This is so hard to type.
In the meantime, the whole SGBC crew is sitting at the next table I dont know if they saw that go down or not, but I couldnt go to them for support she had planted herself in their bubble and it just sucked like I cant explain.
It was all just so wrong.
Later, I hear that one of her friends approached lavinia in the washroom to warn her about how much of an asshole I am, and I wonder what I did wrong because I certainly cant come up with anything from my history to account for that.
Please compare both of our actions from the last 6 months and demonstrate how my hole of assness is so great.
Even better, go back 12 years and show me my hole from within that era. Strip out my support of her, my love and my cognitive understanding, her lengthy infidelity, my subsequent indiscretion, and please show me the assness that is different and less real than the shit that went down in both directions.
Show me how Im worse.
-----
Obviously, she is able to do that convincingly, or I would not have found myself so suddenly alone in early November after Gimpy died.
That was when I heard the goodbye of the last of my long time friends, and that goodbye didnt come with an explanation either.
Anyways, thats the end of my birthday story. The embarrassing attempt to communicate to end this tripe.
---
We only had a few close friends over those 12 years, and it pains me to say that I dont have contact with any of them now.
Well, almost. Theres one that I have no regrets over losing, and thats my old guy best friend.
Ive known him since before I even met she-who-used-to-referred-to-as-her. Actually, I met him the second day after I had moved to Vancouver back in 89.
Somehow, I kept tripping across him over the next couple of years, and finally he ended up as my roommate for a brief stint before I moved to the middle east for that year.
When I finally found my way back home, I met her almost immediately upon my return. I was working as a bouncer in a gay bar, and one night this stunningly beautiful woman walked through the door. I was speechless and shy. Later in the evening, she came back to where I stood by the coat check and we started talking, playing idly with candle wax. I ended up going home with her that night and fell in Love very shortly thereafter.
I ran into him sometime after that, and upon mentioning my betrotheds name, he freaked out in that no way!! sort of way, because he knew her from the small town they grew up in. He was in the same grade as her older sister, and in his teens he had spent time at her house.
We ended up hanging out off an on over the next decade, and near the end of the 90s, he would end up over at our place more often than not as R would make some nice dinner and wed watch movies. She loved him like a brother and her and I would laugh every time hed fall asleep on the couch when wed rent a movie. He could never stay awake after one of Rs roast something and gravy dinners.
Him and I would do just about everything together, when I did anything outside of doing stuff with R, that is. But we werent exactly twins.
There was one thing that would bother me about him, and that was his apparent disrespect towards women in general.
Dont get me wrong, of course I totally appreciate the beauty of the female form, but thats the start and end of that. Especially when I am in a relationship sure Ill notice a hot body and a beautiful face, but it ends there. I wont make a big deal of it, because I dont really care past the point of recognizing that that woman takes care of herself.
Him though, he was constantly single. (and even when he wasnt, he acted as though he was) He would consistently be really obvious about his scoping of the chicks. R and I would be out for breakfast with him at Joes on Davie street in the summer time, and we would sorta bug him about how obvious he was in his ogling of the passing women, like it was a joke.
But really, it was no joke.
I totally loved this guy, he was/(is?) really intelligent, he had a great outlook on the world, he understood the shit that was going down with international politics, and he was quite active in the political movement to quash the oppression of the lower class. I totally respected his views on how society has been fuckin the little people etc, and I respected his work in making that stop
It was him that was there at wreck beach the day my naked ass came down off that skimboard and I broke my leg. It was him that drove me home from the hospital when I had the metal rod removed from my other busted leg. It was him that showed up the night I was found almost dead and really naked and covered in blood on the floor of my apartment. I felt a real connection with this guy.
But he was still a mans man, if you know what I mean. He had some fucked up views of women and that would piss me off.
He objectified too readily. If we were alone without R sitting somewhere for coffee, hed be more than obvious about his appreciation of the latest pretty woman to walk by, and I was always embarrassed by it. I would say shit to him sometimes, but hed blow my comments off.
Wed be outside of a laundrymat, waiting for the dryers to finish, soaking up the summer rays suppin coffees, and a woman would walk by that was obviously pretty in that obviously pretty sorta way. I would glance up from my paper and recognize the fact that she was quite attractive, but I wouldnt make a big deal of it, and I would go back to reading the story I was in. Id simply recognize it, appreciate it, and go back to my reading.
He, on the other hand, would punch me in the shoulder. DUDE! hed say, nodding obviously in her direction. The couple that were walking behind her would glance down at us.
And I would be in the awkward position of trying to explain to him that yes, I did see her, and yes she was hot in that typical hotness factor, but damn dre, .
It just bugged me that he was so on that all the time.
The worst part of our friendship was the fact that him and I would go down to wreck beach.
For those that dont know, Wreck Beach is paradise. Its the local nude beach here in Vancouver, and I would miss it so if I ever had to live somewhere else. On a hot summer day, that stretch of treelined sand can hold about 3000 bodies, and the atmosphere there is so different from the regular beaches that are around here. A real community feel. You never have to worry about shit down there, and its such a charger for your life battery when things outside here in the city get to be a bit too much. Theres always wreck.
Its not the fact that there are tons of naked people down there. Not at all. Actually, there is absolutely nothing sexy about that. A quote I saw once makes so much sense to me:
a single nude draped across a divan is erotic. A 100 nudes in line for potato salad is not.
Wreck is not sexy. Usually.
Well this part of the story takes place about 2 years after I took R back after her affair.
I really thought that I had dealt with that, and in one sense I had. I had certainly gotten over the repetitive visualizations of what exactly was going down with her and him on those nights. I had stopped living my life from behind the vivid flesh flashes of her lust with another body, but I dont think I ever got over the trust thing. I definitely felt a piece missing inside of me that grew to a cancerous void. She was the first person I had ever 100% trusted, and that infidelity was world crushing to me. Perhaps I should never have taken her back.
I cant justify this. It is what it is, and what it is is disgusting.
One day down at wreck with my old best buddy, a woman threw down her towel just in front of him and I. Wed been down there for a few hours already, and had already come up with the brilliant idea of eating magic mushroom chocolates. The trees were crazy green against a too blue sky, and the ocean caressed our burning skin with our repetitive saline floats. (Its nice to be high enough to not really care about how small your stuff is when walking around naked on mushrooms.)
She plopped her backpack down on top of the log ahead of us, threw down and straightened out her towel, and began to strip.
I just read my book. Or at least I held my book in front of my sunglassed face as though I was reading it when she finally took off her panties and sat down to apply the sunscreen. She was probably no more than 20 years old, blonde.
After she got settled, she started talking to us. My friend and I had started to play a game of backgammon, and he invited her over. She agreed, pulling up her towel over to our area and the three of us started a game of cards.
R, at the time, was living back in her small town where she grew up, she was there for an 8 month school course. I was living alone in our apartment the bachelor that wasnt.
You see where this is going.
My friend and I take a trip to the ocean, plodding our bare feet down through the hot sand to that water, and once we are out of her range of hearing, the first word out of his mouth is: DUDE!!
Hes catching vibes, and Im not oblivious. Ive caught them too.
Shes from Edmonton, and only in town for the weekend, shes been obvious in her body positioning, her eye contact is loaded, her lips always smiling a bit as she looks our nude bodies over without shame. Maybe it was a smirk.
We take a quick dip, and return to the blankets with 3 fresh and cold beers from a vendor.
Well, the afternoon progressed like this. We drank more and more as the sun started to approach the horizon of that ocean, and eventually it was time to make our departure. Him and I had been to the water quite a few times for our private discussions and he was quite sure hed be getting some from her. He wanted to bring her with us and it was pretty obvious she would come. I was happy for him, as he never really got any, but my drunken high state was not oblivious to the fact that she had been throwing the vibes out in both directions.
On the last trip to the ocean, he says to me that hes thinking that she wants both of us.
no way man. I say.
DUDE! he says, grinning wide and punching me in the shoulder. He wont listen to my denial.
I am battling inside my head. For some sick reason, the idea has purchase over me. I have never gone there before, never been the not a boyfriend. I certainly have never contemplated the idea of being naked in a sexual sence with a third person. Especially a man.
The pain I experienced upon finding out the truth of Rs affair was something I had never ever imagined, and I could never be the cause for that amount of pain. Yet, here is this anonymous woman apparently throwing us the gauntlet.
I side step the idea of being included, and I think I trick myself into believing that I am just going to be the friend that I am facilitating his adventure, and offering the space.
We end up back at the towels, and start to pack up.
R is still out in her small town, she wont be back until sometime late tomorrow afternoon, and we head to my (our) apartment.
Well, this story has the potential to become some long winded erotic escapade, but to me its not.
To me, its the monster story I keep trying to bury. What happened that night is something that has plagued me to my core starting the very next day and it has not stopped being a thought cancer to me. He was there for all of it. Nothing gay went down, but I was definitely unfaithful within the three of us.
She is the fucking zombie scrambling to the surface, and I dont even remember her name.
I was actually quite suicidal after that, and numerous times I would approach my best friend there to try to exorcise this demon of memory. Hed have none of it.
you and your catholic guilt hed say.
Hed berate me every time I would feel strong enough to talk to him about how bad I felt about it, hed remind me of how R did much worse by having a much longer emotional/sexual attachment to that guy and how what I did was really nothing in comparison.
I would get so pissed off at him for not understanding that that didnt matter, that the regret I felt was killing me and that her infidelity was a different thing. I would get so mad that he consistently would push me towards more experiences like that. He was unable to understand my position.
I think it was his reaction to my regret over that that made me start to question how much of a friend this guy really was.
Of course, after I finally allowed myself to leave R (and this experience is perhaps partly responsible for that decision I could not allow myself to be deserving of that relationship with this skeleton in my closet) and he pulled that shit he pulled with her after we broke up
He is not missed.
Of all the people that used to be in my life that arent any more, I hate him and dont miss him.
Good riddance.
However, the story I just related.
I think that perhaps after I ditched him from my life, he may have told her about our threesome. I had hoped that that story was such a secret that even I didnt have to ever remember it, but unfortunately it did happen. I can look at it in a side stepped psychological way and try to understand how I was capable of such a thing, but that doesnt really help me.
I know that I will never ever do anything like it again, but that doesnt really help me either.
If he did lash out at me with her and tell her that story though, it would certainly go to explain a lot.
Oh yeah, my realization of my story being the same:
My magpie story turned out to be a recollection of how I ended up doing something that I found to be on the one hand exciting and attractive, yet as I got into it -- I wanted to stop.
I didn't stop though, and I didn't stop because of the fact that I was too afraid of being berated or looked down upon by somebody I respected and loved. My dad looking up at me, punching me in the shoulder to continue doing what I was doing. What I was doing was terrible and disrespectful, and I knew it.
I didn't think I was writing the same story, but now I see I was.
VIEW 7 of 7 COMMENTS
I think you're too hard on yourself.
And how I would have loved to have backed you up at Sonar.