Press One If You Are On A Ledge, Two If You Are Holding A Pill Bottle…

As the Ex and I drive back from our little vacation (more later), I call Big City Lover and let him know that no, I can’t continue my drive to Midwestern City, I need to go home. Husband needs me, I need to be home. He is, to his credit, totally cool and understanding about this. Mandy Brain is amazed that a guy is OK with her not driving five hours out of her way today to fuck him (he still likes me?!?!), thus again demonstrating the self-esteem of a walnut.

We plan to meet up Friday instead, and I arrange my day and my excuse. It will still be a five-hour drive, but at this point, it would be nice to spend some uncomplicated time with a man as resolutely non-dramatic as Big City Lover.

I wake up with the beginning of a yeast infection.

Determined to soldier on, I apply cream (bought by the ex, anal always spreads things around) and head out to get a new phone. At the phone store, I discover that I need to forward all my saved texts…shit. As I send them from one device to the next, I trace the dissolution of the relationship. I ask the guy behind the counter what to do about my pictures. He grabs the phone to help me, then blushes and hands it back.

“Whoa, maybe you want to do this yourself…”

Um, yeah. Zurich, my breasts, Zurich in a towel, me in the shower, hot shoes, more breasts, the last hotel, and of course, at the bottom, Ex-Lover’s hand in my ass, his cock inside me, facing away.

The photos may not be salvageable. There is a cord to be bought, I’ll make another attempt. My attachment to the photos surprises me – there’s the drag show from the time we spent in the islands, the mermaid I painted, the Mary Magdalene he sent, sunset in Vegas.

I learn how to use the new phone and seek food – I had no breakfast or lunch and have no appetite but maybe that’s why I’m crying over a set of old photos. I call Big City Lover and plan my departure. I don’t want to go. And when I cruise up the street towards my home, the sign for unleaded at $4.18 triggers and the waterworks start.

Google for my last therapist’s number. Voice mail, if this is an emergency call…I feel ridiculous and hang up, then call back and get the number. It’s a holiday weekend, I don’t want to bother her. Still crying.

Pull out of the parking lot and speed dial 3 for Beautiful Girl. Voice mail.

Scrolling through, my main concern is this: I grew up in a state where if you threaten to harm yourself or someone else, you can be involuntarily committed. I can’t face that, I don’t have time to spend peeing in a cup and wearing a cocktail napkin that ties in the back. Two weeks at 15 was more than enough.

Directory Assistance. The hospital please. Yes, I know the ER does not answer medical questions. Hold. Sure, I’ll talk to a social worker. Hold. Yes, they can commit me, but they probably wouldn’t, you don’t have insurance, why don’t you call the hotline?

I leave a message on my therapist’s office voice mail. Still crying.

Text to Big City Lover: Have started crying and cant stop. Probably will not make it after all. V sorry.

Hotline, please hold. Yes, I’d like to talk to a counselor. Hold. Heidi is pleasant and I feel stupid taking up her time when there are probably people with real problems who need the line I’m tying up with my stupid baby life. I can’t face explaining the whole thing from the beginning. She wants my number to follow up, but I’m not able to give it.

Best Friend, five times zones away but she’s a night owl. Answering machine. Mobile. Voice mail.

Tom Paine. Gone, I think I remember from his blog, and gone he is.

Another friend picks up and I realize I can’t tell him, can’t bear to explain enough to make sense. Let me tell you about my website guy, my video girl, the media company that’s working out for me.

Hairline Boy. Voice mail. Secret Scientist is probably having a lovely weekend with his lovely girlfriend, can’t wreck that up.

I call another friend, let her think I called because I’m a good friend who calls for no reason. I’m generally a pretty shitty friend, so at least some good is coming from this.

Beautiful Girl, still no answer.

I call my therapist’s emergency number. Voice mail. I leave a message asking for an appointment, at least it will be something to look forward to.

A few hours later, she rings me, she’s in China, she’ll call Sunday when she’s back. And there’s the lesson, the one I should know from my dedicated devotion to clients in all my professions, the one I should know from short-changing the Ex my attention, the one I should know from skimping on wifely duties.

You get what you pay for.

Officially, Intermittent

I did *try* to write every day. And mostly, I did actually write at least something. And then was felled at the knees by lack of internet, lack of privacy, and much mental time occupied by being The Boss.

So yeah. This is now an intermittent blog. I can't keep letting you down, Gentle Readers, by saying I'm going to do something and then not doing it. So when I do, I'll make it as good as I can. And I'll also not kill myself by saying, oh, don't post that until it's perfect, because that way inaction lies.

Where am I now? In a secret location (let's note that it's a major honeymoon destination), shacked up with the Ex. I know. Dumb, dumb Mandy. So far there's only been minor shortness of breath. And really, who knows? The part of me that says, hmmmm, you're* kind of self-involved and a little bit boring and really, the sex had been going downhill, is strongly considering making this a last hurrah. The part of me that thinks, hey, never know when you'll be hit by a bus, would rather not end without closure. I'm working on having Part A strangle Part B but then the thought of choking just turns me on.

Where will I be Thursday? Possibly in a Midwestern City with Big City Lover. We're texting it out.

Where will I be the first weekend in June? With Fucked-Up Guy, plotting and planning to give my team-members and his fiancee the slip so we can shag intensely and silently in shared lodging.

Where will I be all year? Why, on the road, of course. That big beautiful pond full of fish, maybe one of whom will touch the thing in me that needs it beyond my control...

* * *

Quote of the week: "I never learned in health class that wiping front to back thing, and that's why I got a gall bladder infection that almost killed me..."

Words to live by.

* * *

*note intentionally ambiguous pronoun

Day Nine:

Grief fills the room up…
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me
(King John)


I am mad with grief. I am past caring if I give away my power by telling too much, past caring if I am stupid, enabling, whining, boring, needing to get a life. If I am to believe everything that came before, then what came before was such that I would now have the right to ask, to want, to need.

He says “I can’t hurt her.” The unspoken conclusion, so instead, I will hurt you.

One bad – no, one empty day—

Because when I am working from dawn until past midnight, when the job demands more than I have to give, I can be here now. I do not have to be here now. But in that moment of calm – hiding for lunch in a storage closet where no-one can ask me One More Thing, slipping into a borrowed bed at 6AM after one last load of laundry, Power Girl already unconscious beside me, then it crashes in on me.

I’d rather hurt you.

Husband is sweeter, more kind, more supportive than ever. But I cannot tell him this. I should leave him, because I can’t tell him, and it is not enough.

I have done the texting-because-you-can’t-talk-right-now.

I have done friends.

I have done use me as a badge of your virtue, congratulate yourself every time you look into my face and do not kiss me, every time you hold me in the night and do not fuck me, make another tick under “I was strong and good!”

I am an object. I am “look, I can so be faithful.”

She is an object. She is “really, I can be faithful if I want to.”

She has taken to sending anonymous emails to Husband, phoning me late at night, snarking about my company to her friends. Perhaps he is, after all, hurting her.

For me, the line between here and gone, present and absent, is growing thinner as the icy Dread licks up the beach. The barriers left? I have an event…an appointment…something needs doing. I don’t want to make a mess. Too strong a swimmer, too queasy to cut.

(There were only five pills in Hairline Boy’s cabinet. Not enough to do the trick, just enough to fuck up my day. So I didn’t today.)

Day Seven: Fumbling

I breakfast with Beautiful Girl, two days in a row. Sunshine, patio, internet, business, boyfriends. She knows me. She knows nearly everything. I have written her paeans, she has been my favorite girl to flirt with.

The flirting is gone - we are deeper friends than ever, we can say anything, but we no longer say that. Perhaps it's the way I've shrunk while she's expanded. Maybe it's that we're both wrapped up in Boy Troubles. Maybe it's that I can barely juggle whoring and wifing and dying inside a little every day, let alone adding another orange to the pattern. Mill's Mess, indeed.

The first day, I realize, she is right. I should be moving on. The second day, she sits across from the table and sends me this. Yes. That is how I feel.

I speak to Be-My-Real-Friend. I wonder if he feels left out, that I haven't written yet about our last time together. It's on a napkin, it's in the notebook. Many things are in the notebook. Big City Lover - an hour's pleasure. A musician and a video chat (he's emailed twice, just the sort of thing that makes my ego beat a little faster, I cannot bring myself to answer). Folk Rocker and the writing block and how it passed.

And I lie next to my husband, ostensibly napping, and I wake weeping because I realize this is it, it's not fun any more. Writing isn't fun any more. Whoring isn't fun any more. Fucking isn't fun any more. Even the challenge of thirty days has been mired in work, work, work - it's been 21 days without a day off, 21 days of bed after dawn, wake before noon, manage and boss and lead and take on one more job because running and bossing and struggling and resenting the load are all better than thinking or feeling.

The blog is in its throes. I've no call to write the bits of flesh rubbing together that make everyone happy, give us all a wank. It's tripping sadly down the path of the lame little diary, whining about my life, come and share the pit with me, I can't get out.

Fourth Base

The apartment is cold, I cradle the coffee cup in my hands, my girly mix of half milk and lots of sugar coursing through me while we make small talk about our job. He’s funny, he’s honest, he doesn’t have a deal with his on-again girlfriend and he makes sure I know that.

I like knowing where I stand.

And where I stand right now is on the brink. The Dread’s been coursing through me for some days now, I step to the edge of the dock and step back, step to the edge of the icy water and let it lap my toes. This is what I need.

He says, “So I was hoping maybe we could hook up.”

I say, “That’s why I’m here.”

“Come over here.”

I cross to the other couch, he kisses me, first with the firmness of a confident often-lover (though he’s not, this is the first time he hasn’t fucked it up, if he was more than ten minutes off the highway I’d have thought twice) then wrapping his arms around me and placing my body under him on the couch, kissing my face, my neck, my hair, sometimes my mouth, I use my hands in his hair and he groans and sweeps me up, standing, carrying me to the bedroom, so tall and strong and fit that for once I don’t care how much I weigh in his arms.

The bed is made. Points, I think, and then I’m on my back and he’s on me like a wolf, his hands on my neck, my back, my breasts, under my shirt, my shirt is off and his mouth is on my nipples, sucking hard, biting softly, his other hand squeezing not too hard and then he’s reaching for my zipper. Jeans off, he pauses for a moment to admire my panties (yes, chosen). “Nice,” and then they’re off and his mouth is on my pussy, his fingers fucking me hard in a way that walks up to the edge of pain and observes there, though he’s not trying to hurt me, not like…

And then his fingers are in my ass and this accelerates oral to a whole new place, a place where if I wasn’t shy with new people, wasn’t worried about taking too long, I could come. I nearly do. I can’t ask for more, I’m not in that place, and this is so overwhelming my senses almost shut down. He comes back to kiss me and that taste is me on his lips, so familiar and yet so foreign on a different mouth. His fingers are in me again and if this keeps up the pain will be the wrong pain, the wrong person, so I push him back and take off his shirt, take down his pants, and good grief, new record, his cock nearly as thick as my wrist rising from clean shaven skin, sweet-smelling, sweet-tasting, and I suck him with all my desire to please him. Tongue around the head, wet mouth around him, draw him into my mouth, my throat, only able to go halfway before I gag, draw back, force down again. He’s loud, he likes it, I slide one hand up and down his cock, gently pinch his scrotum, press into his perineum with the other. He pulls me off, rolls me over, slides into me I brought condoms, I’d really prefer… and fucks me hard, the feeling is not pain but intensity so hard tears well up, coming from release of tension, release of waiting, release of The Dread. His sweat drips onto my breasts, I’m loud, he’s loud, high and low-pitched grunts and moans, I can’t tell whose voice.

I roll him over and slow down a little, rubbing my clit on his body in the way that makes me come, knowing I have to come, and when I do – the slow build, the burning in my thighs, the burning in my belly, the burn that starts in the center and spreads out, pushing back for that little pain, forward for the drag of pleasure, back for stretching and spreading around his cock, forward to release a little, catching like a rachet, never slipping back completely – the tears flow down my face, I come hard, opening and burning, shaking and weeping.

He is not freaked out by this. Or at least does not tell me if he is.

We roll over again, back to mish, he pulls my legs over his shoulders and starts to fuck me so hard I know I can only take it for a little while, he’s too big for this to be easy. He comes in me, almost as loud as me, and we roll over and laugh, lie together, warm enough.

He says, “Your body is so young. So smooth and white. I feel like a teenager again.” I’m pleased to be thin and pale, pleased to not worry about a flattering angle when I get up and walk to the bathroom and back. I pinch his nipples, suck on one, move down to his cock and start again, feeling him harden in my mouth. He takes me from behind, first on hands and knees and then pushing me down into the pillows, my legs together, thrusting into me so hard my body checks out to observe for a moment, noting how intense this is, and yet it does not right now register as pain. He pulls out, he’s soft, it’s been awhile for him, too. He’s rueful, wants to fuck me with his fingers, but I’m fine, this is enough. We lie on the bed and tell each other one-liners. We talk about doing this again sometime. The phone rings, his son’s Christmas pageant starts in a few minutes, and I need to get back on the road. We shower. We dress. I am sore, I am content, I am Dread-free for a little while.

Home run, no. But a respectable fourth base.