Tag: beautiful boys taste better

Arkadin Horror

On By BekkiIn Musings & RamblingsLeave a comment

I played this board game recently. One of those really complicated ones that came with two rule books: the “read this first” book and the “actually contains all the rules” book. It also came with a default “I don’t want to look up the freaking rule” rule: in instances of doubt, choose the answer that will make the game harder (and therefore longer).

***

For the past few months I’ve been dating someone who’s poly. Because splitting up with A and leaving the house I thought we would be in for the next twenty years wasn’t hard enough. Because being financially responsible for two households while trying to find a new job that doesn’t require me to travel 1-2 weeks a month wasn’t enough of a challenge. Because sometimes the universe hands you something, something wonderful and precious and rare, and the only possible response is to say thank you.

Poly is hard. One of the hardest things I’ve ever done. It means letting go of most of my social programming, letting go of things imprinted so deeply they seem like fundamental truth. Having multiple, loving relationships makes sense to me in a way that monogamy never has. The reality of a lover who has a wife he’s committed to and in love with is something else entirely.

***

They’re in Australia for a few weeks, my lover and his wife. The week they get back I have to travel for work. The week after that I have Z, making it somewhere between five and six weeks before we see each other again.

I’m terrified of losing him. I’m terrified that the space apart will make him realize what a terrible idea it is to be involved with someone going through a divorce. That the pheromone high will wear off. That the mono archetype will assert itself, that he’ll have enough time with his wife in the next few weeks that he won’t need or want anyone else. That he’ll drift away from me, maybe without even meaning to, so that by the time he comes back there’s nothing left.

***

I tried to end it before he went. Tried to get ahead of the fear and the jealousy by making a break up my decision instead of something inevitable that would happen to me. Tried to tell him not to talk to me while he was gone so that when my phone didn’t light up it was because I’d told him not to instead of because he was having too much fun to say hello.

It didn’t stick. Instead of a clean break I have a lover in the other side of the world and a whole host of insecurities.

***

It’s easy to believe he doesn’t really love me, that I’m just some bright and shiny thing, that distance and time will fade it, that he will come back cold and distant and done. It’s easy to believe that a few weeks with his wife will have him questioning why he around want anything else.

It’s much harder to believe that this is real. That I am loved regardless of time and distance. That I’m not going to be set aside in favor of the real relationship.

***

I am trying to make the harder choice. The one that will prolong the game. It is the most difficult thing I have ever done.

To Ben McCoy, Wherever I May Find Him

On By BekkiIn Pinned PostsLeave a comment

An old friend of mine from summer camp died unexpectedly a few weeks ago.  I found out through Facebook, of course, where his sister had asked people to upload their old photos of him.  It wasn’t until I had all my old summer camp albums stacked on the dining room table that it hit me that he was gone, really gone.

I always thought I’d run into him again.

Sometimes, people come into your life and they change you, indelibly, unexpectedly.  I remember the music, the way it infiltrated those liquid summer nights, spiraling into the warm night air and settling around my shoulders like a hug.  I remember sunlight hitting bleached blond hair, and I remember summer girls in tank tops and denim shorts, and I remember a smile that went on forever, a smile that was yours, always and only.

I remember two questions.  Questions that book-ended the years I knew him.  Questions asked carelessly, in the middle of a crowded room.  Questions that still cut to the heart of who and what I am.  I never answered either.  I didn’t understand, until many years later, that I wasn’t meant to.

You could say I had a crush on him, but that wouldn’t quite be right.  I had a crush on the idea of him.  I was too shy, too awed by his popularity, too afraid of rejection to get to know him.  When I came across him on Facebook a few years ago I friended him, but I left it at that.  I didn’t think there was enough of a connection left for us to have any kind of conversation, for me to try to meet up with him when I passed through Boston.  I wish now that I had tried.

Because most of all, I remember a boy with mischief in his smile, and love enough in his soul that it was yours for the asking.

“How to Talk to Girls at Parties”

On By BekkiIn Musings & RamblingsLeave a comment

Once upon a time, there was a boy who built a snowman.  And in the dead of night, while all the world was sleeping, the snowman came to life and took the boy for a marvelous adventure.

I stayed out much, much past my bedtime last night, at a housewarming party in Brooklyn that was exactly what I thought adult parties should be like when I was a child:  candles burning, mulled wine on the stove, and a group of people clustered around a piano, singing.

If I were writing this in a story, I would pull you into the scene, make you see his fingers flying across the keys, playing Liszt so fast his knuckles and fingertips blurred.  You would know that the room was warm, almost too warm, windows fogged from all the bodies in motion.  You would smell the cloves and cinnamon and orange peels from the wine simmering in the kitchen.  At the end of the party, you, too, would feel a faint regret that the night was winding down, that the magic was beginning to ebb.

If this were a story, you would leave with some handsome young thing you’d found there, still singing to each other as you walked reluctantly toward the L train and the city and the apartment you live in alone.  You might even stop somewhere along the way and kiss, and because this is fiction you will be standing under the streetlight in exactly the spot where the raindrops misting down look like falling stars.

The real world is somewhat more prosaic than the fictional world though, and though I walked out of the party with a handsome young thing, I left him somewhere around Grand Central, setting off in pursuit of a young thing of his own.  I did, however, walk under a series of streetlights on my way from the subway to the apartment, and the raindrops falling through that glow of light looked exactly like falling stars.

“if you believe in fairies”

On By BekkiIn Musings & RamblingsLeave a comment

Found this while I as I was procrastinating by going through my writing folder instead of editing the novel like I should be, and thought it worth putting up.

Peter at 32

2 am – the after
after party – and he’s down
in the Village
with a smile
and a corporate expense account, still dressed
in standard office-wear:
trousers and a Eurotrash
button-down;

“Darling!”
he says
to a girl in a
mini-skirt, air kisses
above
her cheeks, putting
a hand on her ass
and guiding her out to
a cab.  He blanks on the directions to his loft
a moment – third
street to the left? – but the cabbie
has a GPS on the dash.

She will leave before
he wakes up,
and he, head pounding, will lie
back against the pillows
and clap.