Respecting the Cock

All this sex writing has me wallowing in the past.

I was a one-girl wrecking machine.  It got so bad that at one point people were buying me t-shirts so as to warn off others.

It’s not that I was a super-hot heartbreaker with a magic snatch. There’s an assumption that “crazy” girls are crazy good in bed, and I was very likely a lousy lay. I just had huge eyes tits and low standards.  I said all the right things to half-ruined boys with delicate constitutions, and they’d get all tangled up in it and trip.

I had enough of a conscious to feel bad about it, but not enough self-esteem to stop once I realized what I was doing.

I wasn’t the only girl in that scene leaving a path of destruction in my wake.

I wasn’t even the best at it.

There was this one girl that had an endless string of fiances, all of which were strung out on her for months. Years even. Two of them committed suicide, and included her in their swan songs. She was a hell of a thing to watch. And, watching was all ever I got to do, because she instantly disliked me. But, so far as I could tell, she was basically without her own personality—one of those people that mimics who ever they are with, like a long, tall gorgeous massage for latent narcissism.

I wasn’t that talented. Or, hapless. Or, cursed.

I don’t really recall the exact point at which I gave it up, or when I started to wonder what I was getting out of it. I had a horrible tendency to, I suppose, target boys who had a particular brand of damage. At a certain point, I got tired of it.

“I am not your therapist.”

“I am not your mother.”

“I am not the girl sent by the fates to help you achieve actualization and self-acceptance.”

Because, really, that’s how you end up the girl in the margins of someone’s life story.  The one that’s always twenty-two in his memory.  The one that cried just so, in a way he associates with a particular type of weather and a stupid song by a band that’s not cool anymore.  The eternally smooth-skinned prop in someone else’s biopic, who hopped off the train at the right stop, but he didn’t know that at the time.

I guess, eventually, I stopped wanting to be that girl. It’s poetic, and it’s hollow.

But, I don’t know.

I don’t know that I am any wiser. I think maybe I just figured out how to emote appropriately, instead of giving the intellectual approximation of emoting (as drawn by a particularly clever and traumatized ape.)  Or at least, I get it all wrong, but with some sense of grown-up boundaries.

I tell myself, I got the boy I deserved, because that was what I was looking for. And, he’s since become a man. This marriage that I am in (my second, ftr) is one of those long term situations. And, really, I can’t tell you why it works. It’s a mystery.  We’ve always been a mystery.

“It works.”

Why it works?

He says it’s because we have complementary levels of fucked up. I can buy that. I can’t partner up with someone normal. I can’t relate. It wouldn’t work.

I think, maybe, there’s an element of having hit the “realizing other people are really people” point at the same time, though.  You can’t treat people like things—toys, masturbatory aides, ego salve, liferafts, mirrors. Or, you can, but it’s dishonest. They’re people.

Don’t use your body as a weapon. Don’t assume “clever” gives you a right to hurt the unsuspecting.

So, I don’t treat dudes like collectibles anymore.

You can’t go around breaking boys like you’re picking the wings off of flies, without eventually turning into something ugly. If you’re not going to really love the boy, you should probably leave his heart alone.

His cock, though? That’s probably okay.