My period started on Monday afternoon and I kinda got brought down to my last $60, which in Trinidad means precious little.
I was feeling a little needy …. my father`s sisters had decimated the house of food during the annual settlement on the ancestral place. I was crampy, hungry and broke.
I called up Sweet Thing and asked him if he could bring me something to eat. He explained that he didn`t have anyone to watch his son and suggested that I order in some food. I was seriously hesitant about doing that. I mean, that`s like more than half of my money gone… but I knew I was not up to walking and standing in line to get food, or cooking.
You know me, I thought he might have been good for a favour. He said, okay he was on his way home, he’d call me when he got there and then he would see what could be done. That was minutes to 7 o’clock.
Sometime around a quarter past nine, I was now ravenous and I realised that again, Sweet Thing had forgotten me and so I was forced to call and order the food. More broke than ever now!
I can’t help but be bewildered. Do friends treat each other this way?
Yesterday when I got up, I felt so alone; the sense that there were possibilities with Sweet Thing that initially bouyed me are gone. I feel as though for him, I am something he’s so unsure of, that he can’t seem to find a way to tell me he’s not really interested in pursuing a relationship at all.
At least, when I ask him, he says he’s confused and that he’s cautious and that he doesn’t throw himself into relationships anymore. He tells me that he has to come to a decision about things and that he hopes his decision won’t hurt me.
But he’s already hurt me; his retreat has hurt, but no matter how scared I am, I have to pay attention to my feelings.
When he told me that he had wanted me for years and he still wanted me, I was so taken aback I made my first mistake…. I took what he said at face value. He seemed to me, to be expressing deep feelings for me, a kind of regard for me that I had rarely experienced in a man before. In a very passive aggressive way, once he realised I was paying attention to him as a man, he pursued me.
He brought me food and chastely sat at the foot of my bed, exuding sexual energy but left with nothing more than a hug. We stayed up night after night following the initial expression of ‘deep feelings’ talking about everything that mattered and a great deal that didn’t. This was someone I had known a long time. This was someone I had trusted with my deepest feelings and fears and he had cared enough then not to act on his feelings at a time when I simply couldn’t handle it. I was flabbergasted. I don’t think I had ever met a man who had sacrificed his feelings for mine before.
He repeated himself, over and over. He’s a nice, trustworthy guy with my best interest at heart and everything about him in my past, led me to believe him.
So without even really understanding that it was happening, I allowed my feelings for him to find fertile ground. So when I went up to Yemoja’s doorway — the abode of our Great Mother Yemaya, the mother of the Fishes, Yemoja Olukun — I let him into my body as a woman in need, and was utterly laid bare by his ability to climb into my soul and pull out all it had to give.
I let him into my heart. I thought he was doing the same.
Then the first silence came down and you know, I just didn’t understand the disappearance.
Didn’t he feel the same sort of intensity of emotion that I had. I mean, wasn’t he as moved by me as I was by him?
My insides were blasted open by what we did together. #160I want more. I want a lot more.
I want to talk the way we always have… openly and honestly and with respect for each other’s opinion.
I want to go on trusting him with my secrets, my life. I want him to do the same with me.
Fast forward: We’re online — messaging — and he told me he is still trying to come to grips with the fact that we got it on. He tells me he lost his gig…. he tells me he doesn’t know what he wants to do … I mean about us… he tells me he can’t speed up his emotional process for me.
I wonder what else he can’t do for me.
I told him I wanted to withdraw…. ay least that is what my head is telling me to do, just to leave this situation and give him whatever ‘space’ (I HATE THAT FUCKING WORD IN THIS SITUATION) that I think we now both need.
GOD! I don’t know why it isn’t so easy in this situation.
He’s been giving me some shit about being just friends. I hate the way this is going right now… Maybe I am a fool for rushing in.
The thing is right now I am in almost the exact same position I was in with KSS two years ago. The amazing similarities between the two situations strike me as significant. It’s as if they’re reminding me to remember what I learned.
I re-read a lot of my journal entries around that time an the similarities are as striking as the differences.
Mostly I want to acknowledge that as long as I have known him, I don’t really know him all the way through. So in a lot of ways he is as new and as foreign as any new man in my life.
Even at the same time, he has this aching, deep familiarity in my life that I can’t ignore. Don’t think I can ignore. Don’t want to.
He has touched and opened a place inside of me I never thought another human being could. A door opened at moment I did not expect and into the last place I would expect to be, to find the last person I would expect waiting there all along. That is both reassuring and frightening at the same time.
Right now, in my deepest self… the place my ori talks and I listen, knows me and directs me, because the last time I cast and asked a question, this is what came through — I need some space.
My feelings are coming too fast and too furious.. I need to deal with what my real feelings are and balance myself. Otherwise, if this man is my husband, I’ll never be the kind of wife I want to be; if he is my friend, then I’ll never be the kind of friend we need each other to be over the long term.
I want to be a reed in the wind. Let the wind pass over me and still maintain the roots of myself. This is the only way I can survive this.
I don’t love him yet … and I think I can let go now and still feel like I can maintain a certain amount of self-control.
Maybe I just know the only way I can keep him in my life is to let him go. I guess it’s really as simple as that.
I am not calling him! He is going to have to come to me. I just really not about the chase. I hate, hate, hate, hate fucking hate it. But I’ll fucking do it.!!
I really am sorry this is giving him so much trouble.
What is it about a relationship with me that simply fucks guys around the twist? They think sex with me is awesome, but they just can’t seem to know how to relate to me… am I really that deep, that beautiful, that scary?
I don’t know what I am saying or why…. I’m just pouring it out so I don’t have to walk around with the weight of it.
I am remembering some Yorouba wisdom, “Bit by bit Oshun bites off the head of the rat.” He said it meant to take things slowly, because you connect with someone now doesn’t mean you can love and be happy with that person three months, six months a year down the road.
So true. The last time I cast, I was told Sweet Thing and I were going to spend some time apart.
I just called him a few minutes ago. I feel like such a punk for doing it.
I just wish I had seen this one coming. When he said he had a thing for me, I just took it for granted that he could handle the reality of something actually happening….. I never thought he would freak out on me.
Now I wish… no I don’t wish I could take it back. I can’t regret such pleasure, I can’t regret him. No regrets.
I think whatever happens will be for the best, no matter what I do or don’t do, whatever he does or doesn’t do.
I kinda miss him. I keep thinking I should feel guilty because I don’t miss RRB(Bim). I don think Sweet Thing and I need some breathing room… for all the good possibilities between us to grow. I went to see one of my Goddess Mothers to start seeing about going to make my Sea Quest…. go to see Yemoja Olukun. She was there with me when I went to dance and sing for Oya and she was there with me that night when he and I made love on her doorstep, her voice whispered to me in the sea.
I still feel like a punk for calling him tonight, especially since he didn’t call me back.
:sigh:
UNPERFECTED TORCH LIST 3/19/2003:
Lifetime — Maxwell
My Heart Belongs to You — Jodeci
How Come You Don’t Call Me — Alicia Keys
Feenin’ — Jodeci
Feelin’ Love — Paula Cole
Something to Save — George Michael
What About Us — Jodeci
U Got It Bad — Usher
Just The Man For You — Mint Condition
Crusin’ — D’Angelo
I’ll Be Your Water — Sweet Honey In The Rock
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