Grieving For The Early Days with Hibiscus
Friday night - technically very early Saturday morning:
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I began writing at two-ten in the morning. Hibiscus had gone to bed a while ago. I didn't know exactly when. I'd stopped logging earlier that week.
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"If this is giving up . . . Then I'm giving up . . ." Song lyrics flitted through my consciousness, taunting me. It was his song. I didn't even like that song. Until I'd absorbed so much of him that it resonated with me.
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You've made me you. You've brought me to this despair. Your despair about love. You've passed it on to me.
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Tears began to work their way to the surface. So much to fight through. So much facade. So much blockade. So much between me and my feelings. Between me and my tears.
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But they came at long last. The tears hadn't been able to come earlier, when I held him in the bathroom right before we parted ways for the night.
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An hour before, I thought desperately: I want you to come back to my room. My heart ached. I'd been talking to him for over an hour while he laid quietly beside me, almost asleep at times. It was a start. But a start was all we had. He was leaving on a work trip Sunday morning. This was it. This was all there'd ever be, ever again. Just a start. Here and there. Every couple weeks or so, he'd let me open up a little. But it would just be a crack.
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I needed more time, more acceptance, and more attention to feel truly safe. I want to feel like I did during that week at Rooster's house with Oryx, Hare, and Paladin. The way my consciousness exploded open and my subconscious became something I could touch readily as I never had before. Why can't I have that now? Why can't I have that with Hibiscus?
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An hour or two talking with Hibiscus was such a tease. It made me want more.
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I need to find someone new, I thought. This had been coming to mind since at least February, and here it was July. But the thought pained me.
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I'm so alone inside. I don't have my own company. I need your presence in order to be there for myself. I need your acceptance. His acceptance allowed me to accept myself. His attention allowed me to pay attention to myself.
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"I can't be your alchemist if I'm so closed up," I said.
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"That's fair. You can only reflect back to me what I am doing for you."
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"Unless I find someone else to talk to. You'd get less of me, but you'd get Nuria the alchemist again, like I was in the beginning," I said.
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"And then I'd get to see you excited about someone else," he said. "Like Paladin got back in our beginning."
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I hadn't thought about that. I don't know if it is possible. Fuck. I don't want someone new. I want you.
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I'd been feeling and thinking that about Paladin for years though. I wanted Paladin to have sex with me, to understand me, to be there for me. It was Paladin who I loved, chased, desired and wanted. But Paladin couldn't give me what he couldn't give me . . . And Hibiscus can't give me what he can't give me.
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But Hibiscus had given it to me before. Unlike Paladin, things had been the way I wanted them in the beginning - for months. What changed? What did I do wrong?
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I wanted to stay up together until we were both so exhausted that we'd simply fall asleep upon one another. I want to wake and have his face be the first thing I see in the morning. God, how I miss that!
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I wanted that tonight. I wanted that now. But his shoulder started hurting again, as it always does when I talk to him at night.
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"Love doesn't hurt, so I know I'm not fallin' in love, I'm just fallin' to pieces," the lyrics in my head again. "All my resistance will never be distance enough."
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I hated this song. I hated when he sung it. It hurt. How could he feel that way? How could he carry that vibration?
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You become what you hate. That's what my dad said. I hated it. I fell in love with it. I fell to pieces. Let me rest in pieces. Another song.
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"The light's always red in the rear-view."
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There is no turning back. Driving forward and can't go back. Can't have what we had before. Never again. But I'm "desperately close to a coffin of hope" where I hold myself captive to whims of obsessive adoration. I must somehow earn him. Somehow win back his attentions.
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He's still here for me. And yet I feel so distant, so cold, so lost. I don't even feel like I'm lost in his vibration. I don't blame him anymore. I just see myself. My broken, scattered, ungrateful self. I'm like a spoiled teenager who whines, and can't see oneself in the mirror. I'm always too fat, but never able to figure out why.
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There isn't light coming in from under the door anymore. It's two-thirty in the morning. Paladin has gone to bed. We're supposed to get up early and go to the Farmer's Market, but I just don't give a fuck. We can wait forever in traffic. I can spin away my last day with Hibiscus apart from him. What does it matter? My heart will ache no matter what I do. Even while I think I'm getting peace and fun on the outside, somewhere on the inside I'll be reeling and nobody will catch me.
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Nobody will catch me. And no matter how much I cry now, nobody will come. Nobody is coming.
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. . .
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I sang to music for a while. I cried for a while. I went to the bathroom and noticed the lights were on downstairs. I went downstairs and Paladin was awake.
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"What are you doing?" I asked.
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"Flipping the chia crackers."
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"Oh," I said, startled and pleasantly surprised. "Thank you." They might have spoiled otherwise, since I'd made them too thick.
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He didn't see my distress. It wasn't until we stood in my doorway, and then went to part ways from me, drawing away from the hug, that he saw. The way I stood there, paralyzed. Unable to move as I watched him move away in the dark. The way I was so quiet, so still - he saw.
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"You pretend to love me," I said.
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"Don't be silly," he said softly.
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"You pretend," I insisted. "And you try to invalidate my feelings."
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He didn't call me silly again. He came into my room.
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"I wanted him to stay the night. But I couldn't ask him to. I'd want to talk to him. He'd want to sleep. I'd feel resentful and not be able to sleep. I wanted to wake up beside him." I cried. I sobbed harder than I had in a long time, blowing my nose on my pink tie-dye shirt.
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Paladin nodded into my shoulder and held me tighter.
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"His beautiful blue eyes," I said later. "The way he would pierce me with them and he'd tell me about myself. The way he used to see me. He'll never-" and there I gasped and sobbed for a long time before I said quietly: "He'll never do it again. Never be mine again in that way."
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Paladin held me close. "I'm so sorry," he said, and he cried with me, shaking in my arms. His pain added to mine somehow made the load a little lighter. I'm not alone, I thought.
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I rolled over on the recorder that I couldn't see in the dark in my bed. It began to play. My voice eerily erupted into the room from the device. The words I'd meant for Hibiscus were now being spoken to . . . me. I was talking to myself.
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"You said you'd listen to me. But you won't. You won't. And for that, I'll never forgive you," the recording said. I froze, realizing that that I hadn't been listening to myself. Hence, the ear-infection. My relationship with Hibiscus was mirroring my relationship with myself.
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I laid there, quietly shocked for a while. We untangled the device from the covers and set it aside. I felt haunted. Haunted by myself.
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"This is why polyamorous relationships fail," I said to Paladin a little later. "I cry to you about him. I cry to him about you. I resign myself to him because I have you. I resign myself to you because I have him. Then I wonder why I feel alone."
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Paladin nodded into my shoulder. There was hardly any moonlight through my window. I couldn't see him. I had told him somewhere in there that Hibiscus's eyes always devoured me. That we always had sex in the light. Did you know that? No, he hadn't known that.
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"If I didn't have you," I choked out, "I would go to him. I should do that."
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"You're right," he whispered. Implicitly saying: But I will miss you. But I want you. But I would be with you now in his place.
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"I love you," he said.
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"I believe you," I said. You're not pretending now. You do see me now.
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And so we parted ways and I went into Hibiscus's room.
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He welcomed me into his bed beside him. It was four o'clock in the morning. I nestled myself in beside him. Then I began to sing: "Driving away from the wreck of the day and the light's always red in the rear-view..." He held me. He was sleepy. He wasn't getting it. He didn't see the pain I was in, and it hurt worse.
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And then I began to spill my guts, because it was that or truly give up on love. I cried as I rarely ever was able to cry to Hibiscus. "You were everything I wanted," I said between my shaky breaths. "You saw me as nobody had ever seen me before."
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He had to pee. He took me by the hand and led me into the bathroom, not letting go for a moment, knowing how important his touch and reassurance was.
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He came with me into my room. He let me talk to him until after the sun was up. The outdoors turned from gray to green before my eyes. I touched him, asking the question of whether he'd have sex with me with my hands. He began to get hard under my fingers, but he took my wrist in his hand and pulled my hand up to his stomach. The rejection clouded over me like a darkness suffocating my heart.
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I moved away, agony intense. He asked me what I was feeling.
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"Rejected," I said.
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"Would it help if we napped and then I had sex with you?"
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I thought for a while. No. No, I'll be a different person again when I awaken, and the rejection will have already been seated in the endless saga of rejections.
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I told him as much. I talked of many, many things. He listened and commented here and there.
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"Do you know what I really mean when I ask you to hurt me?" I asked.
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"No, I don't think I do," he said.
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"I mean that I want you to break me open and pull my vulnerability to the surface. I mean that I want you to shock me so completely and thoroughly that I melt before you. I want you to exert your power over me and make it clear that I can not hide from you," I said.
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Somewhere in my ramblings he picked up on how important it was to me that he share his feelings with me.
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"The letter from my parents hurt so much partly because of how much I resonated with it," Hibiscus told me. "That you would ask for things I wasn't willing to give."
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The words cut me, but they were refreshing. He was giving me his authenticity. He was giving me the greatest gift of all: true sight into his feelings. He shared with me a list of the things he'd been feeling resentful about. "I didn't feel like I was allowed to feel resentment," he told me.
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I sucked in a breath. That was my fault. I'd made part of his emotional spectrum off limits. But now he was sharing it with me and I could accept it. Now I would accept him.
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"I'm sorry," I said. "I did imply that, but now . . ."
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"Now you've made it clear that it is more costly to hide it than to show it," he said.
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"Yes," I said.
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I pulled the blankets over our eyes and we went to sleep together on my bed.
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Saturday, July 30th 2016
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It was ten o'clock in the morning when I woke. We talked more. He began touching me in that gentle, teasing sort of way that let me know he was ready to give me the sex I'd asked for last night. I didn't want it nearly as I had. I could still feel the rejection beneath the surface. I'll want him once he's in me. I always do.
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So I put jojoba oil on myself while he grabbed a condom. He fucked me as usual, but I couldn't seem to orgasm, which wasn't usual. I kept seeing my heart as having a hole in it, and this hole he kept trying to fill with his cock but it wasn't what I wanted. It wasn't enough.
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"Hurt me," I said. Remember what I said last night. Break me open, I thought.
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He slapped me across the face. I gasped. God how I liked that. He could use more practice - harder, and further onto my face and less on my ear. The temptation to hit the side of the head was always there, to avoid hitting the eyes. I mentally noted it as something I wanted to make him practice.
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He bit me. He squeezed me. The hot sensations felt like what I'd asked for, and yet also not what I'd asked for. Not quite intense enough. Not quite enough to break down the walls inside me. Somehow not enough to melt the rejection I still felt. Or maybe I just couldn't cum because I didn't have a full enough bladder.
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When he asked if I came, I told him the truth - that I didn't. We talked for a while longer.
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It was around noon when he said, "How can you just lay around in bed all day with me? How can you just set aside whatever plans and desires you have?"
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"You're more important," I said. It was easy for me. Besides, I didn't have a list of obligations like he did. I wasn't the one leaving on a work-trip the following morning. All I needed to do was make it to the farmer's market before three o'clock to pick up our other CSA fruit share. (Yes, we'd bought two.)
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Shortly after that Paladin opened the door and said, "The well-driller is here. He wants to put the well somewhere other than planned."
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Hibiscus was up in an instant, his face livid. "Mother fucker," he said as he charged to his own room.
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I followed him.
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"Not you," he said to me.
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"Of course," I said.
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"The well-driller," he specified anyway.
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As he was getting dressed, he gave me a piece of his anger - he looked at me. He'd never done that before when he was angry. At least, not with that fire. The burning resentment that revolved around his work, Silverstag, and his own sense of self-dissatisfaction. That anger burned so brightly that even his eyes scorched me. It left me trembling - but I liked it.
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"Thank you," I said.
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"For what?" he said bitterly as he buttoned his shirt. Every movement of his hands belying the tension, anger and determined forced within him.
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"Giving me a piece. You never look at me when you're angry."
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His face did the equivalent of a nostril flare - a sort of deepening of tension around his mouth and eyes. He glanced at me again, for a shorter period of time. Didn't quite get when I'd gotten the first time, but the meaning was clear - even in this place where I am so distant from you, I still want to give you your desires. Here. Here is another glimpse if this is what you want.
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My heart was over-flowing. I love this man. I love his expressive face. I love the way he looks at me - every single look.