limits

I can’t catch up anyways to all that has been going on.

With T always, I have a history. I try to pick him up, but he is like a paperclip connected to magnetized paperclips. He leaves me all a-bramble and a-ramble. I’ve decided to just blather it out disjointedly for as long as it takes.

We hold on to friends we have a history with, like they will help the next day become our past too. Maybe we just value the ones who stand the test of time in some way. A history is not a future though. I have no delusions that way.

Time has passed true, but time has not tested us too much. Like strobe lights we have only caught each other in a few different conformations. Tired. Horny. Quiet. Silly. Who knows what goes on in between?

I’ve written an email to T when I was at my lowest though, let strange thoughts out. I remember I asked him how he was once after a long sickness, and he blurted to me that he had spent the night crying in a ball, feeling empty. Odd confessions here and there, comfort offered but little said. Odd things shared too, goat cheese and bread and rotten mango lunches, watching movies that suck, sitting quietly together with his cat on my lap, him chasing his cat like a maniac, him beating the crap out of me on his racing console game because I am fizzy and fuzzy from fucking (that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it), the math riddles he poses in lieu of pillow talk, playing on his grand piano, listening to him play, listening to favorite songs in his basement, or on my bed with two headphones stuck into a CD player. These are my happy little things, being able to share silly little things I like with people I like always makes me happy.

T asks me on the phone after a cum how I am doing “emotionally”. He asks every month or so, more often at the beginning. I have not forgotten, he says, how are you doing with the relationship, our limits, with us?



‘Our limits’ is what he always calls it. The taste of ‘our limits’ is comfortably sweet but with a vague bitter aftertaste. I have never done well with limits, but I prefer it to the myth of ‘no-strings’. I guess what it comes down to is that I don’t believe in denying ourselves for the sake of any constructed definitions, friend, lover, fuck buddy, whatever. It would be very easy to do so though, I am a little hyper-aware of this sometimes.

He wants to makes sure that I’m not beating my head over him, secretly dreaming of our house and kids, agonizing over why he does not feel the same way. He doesn’t say this, of course, just my own conjecture. You’ve seen me rant about him here, but I think most of my obsession surrounding him has been around our sex. Is that how it begins?

I never ask him how he is doing with us. He has assumed from the beginning the position of control. Maybe the five year age gap thing. Five years isn’t that long a time though.

Still, I never feel quite on equal footing with him. Believe me, this student-mentor way of relating with him sometimes is not so easy to swallow. I mean come on, T as my “mentor”? It all sounds too much like we’re having cross-legged conferences, waxing in, waxing out. ‘You must learn, grasshoppa’. And all that jazz.

I’m as skeptical as the next. I question and doubt him all the time.

But it’s just something we fell naturally into I guess. I can’t help but have respect for him and his experience. He never fully acknowledged it until I did comfortably, I know he feels it’s patronizing. But he sees it too.

It’s a bit of a kink too as I’ve admitted, the dynamic has my cunt twitching even as I roll my eyes.

But I digress. When it comes to denying ourselves, I have only one kind of fuzzy regret about T. One thing I remember a little ruefully.

My first night at T’s house, he announced that he wanted to listen to classical music with me. His own composition. Apparently, he hadn’t listened to it in years. It was something he had never been able to finish. He said it had taken hold a bit, and he had to take a break.

I know of the flat, controlled way we talk about the things that make us lose control, break off, give up. I felt a dark shadow loom suddenly behind that one quiet sentence. I knew not to ask questions, just nodded.

But I feel like listening to it tonight, he told me. I felt strangely honored.

So we went down to his basement and he put it on. It’s a little experimental, he warned.

We sat across from each other. He looked straight ahead, I looked mostly at the ground. The piece was lovely, stirring, guitars and violins dancing, with the kind of romping percussion that makes T… T. My heart couldn’t help but drop and rise with its swell. When it was done, I smiled, happy he shared it with me. Very nice, I murmured. And as I looked up, I was startled to see the look on T’s face. He had the look of a crest-fallen little boy. Raw and vulnerable. The second I caught it, he tried to sloppily fold his expression inwards, looked embarrassed. Sorry, I’m just bummed, I couldn’t.., he trailed. I understand, I said. I got up, gave him a hug, and said thank you. I meant it. He looked uncomfortable still even as we hugged. I backed off.

And then we had sex the next morning, and so we had to discuss what direction this was going to go. He made it very clear he didn’t want a relationship-relationship. Which actually made sense to me. But then he said he had ways of ‘protecting’ me a bit, if we did this. Said that he would make sure not to show his so-called mushy side much. No more classical music, he said, laughing self-consciously.

Oh. That was all I could think in response. My dissapointment in that moment upon hearing that really defines the vague regret left inside me. That he would have to ever force himself to hide a part of him from me. It seemed so.. fake.

I begin to realize though that in T’s case, he hasn’t really been too fake. Nothing's been forced. We’ve both kind of chosen not to share too many of our problems with each other. For me, I just didn’t want him to be my whining board. I knew he could be, but I just didn’t want to set up our dynamic that way.

So I do understand. And I do feel like he’s showed what he felt like sharing, let me do the same. If emotional boundaries weren’t pushed it was because we didn’t feel the need, or didn’t have that level of comfort maybe.

While discussing a possible relationship with N, T confessed he’s never really felt like kissing me. He said he’s not saying that it wouldn’t have gone that way at some point. And maybe we hadn’t seen each other often enough for long enough to really tell. But then I realized that for all the hooplah of my ‘why the no kissing??’ post, I haven’t wanted to either in these past months. We have sex and I am not searching out his mouth. I’m not wanting him that near. I wanted at the beginning, that one time when he saw it on my face and did it quickly and brusquely. But there is something about us that’s never felt like it could be a romance, with everything it entails. We are always just a bit..off.

There is something sad there, some door closed. I will always have mixed feelings about this I think. But it is important to see things for what they are, no more, no less.

The problem will come when one of us wants to push more than the other. I’ve stopped worrying about this. I’m guessing even that it will be me. I feel it coming closer. I will want to grow and expand this. There is so much to know of him. I cannot stay in this spot forever. There is so little time. Life is short, he wrote to me once when he finally asked to meet , I know this is a cliché too. (It was in response to the aforementioned confessional email actually.)

I refused to meet then, but the second time around it was me who asked. Or who just said that I would really like to meet. And I’ll never forget , he asked, only half-jokingly, what made me think I’d be so lucky. I deserved it a bit after my history of running away. It was no game on my part, I had so much on my plate, or rather the act of living felt like a four-course meal in itself. But still, his question was to be expected.

I remember my response too though. Laughed and said, ‘well, I can only let my wishes be known.. how lucky I get is always up to you’.. And sent him a wink. Good answer, he said, like I had passed some test. I thought it was too, for once.

I can always only let my wishes be known. But then of course, this is the hardest part. Elucidating the wish not only to him but to myself.

I’m glad in this case that I asked, and we did meet. It was a time when I was trying to fight fight my phobophobia, my fear of fear, the only thing I have to fear, once and for all . It all goes back to that summer you see, this whole blog will go back to the summer where it began in the end. The summer I tried to shake it all off.

That was the same summer I went to an amusement park with my siblings and made a pact with myself to go on all the rides they did. It seems obvious now, an embarrassingly obvious metaphor. But I didn’t realize at the time what I was trying to fight in all areas of my life. Rollercoasters scared me pallid and I usually left all but the most kiddy ones to others, watched from the ground. That summer, for the first time, I went on THE rollercoaster, the terrifying one where you were strapped on your feet, standing, so your legs dangled and you went headfirst with absolutely nothing in front of you, nothing to hold on to, plummeting over every dip and curve. Waiting in line for that rollercoaster, my toes curled in fright around my sandals, and when the bell signaled our turn to get on, my whole right leg suddenly seized and cramped up. Hurry up, my family urged, thinking I was making excuses. Gnheah, I said. Look at her toes, my sister pointed out, laughing. I could not straighten them out. Starting from my toes up to my waist, I was literally paralyzed in stiff panicky pain. I shook it off, stomping my feet like a maniac to make it go away. Laughing my pain, I hobbled on, screamed my soul off through the whole ride. And it was a double-scream, both from the pain of my constantly cramping right leg and the utter terror of not wanting to die.

(It’s funny, that cramp is left with me still since then. When my legs are wrapped around T, tensing my whole body to cum, it’ll come back, starting with my right big toe, a little ghost remnant I could never shake off.)

I’ve learnt so much from him since then. And it hasn’t only been about helping me open my mind to sex, though that has been the most of it. His open pretenseless passion has been an inspiration for me always, has touched my life more than I can really put to words.

When we first started off, he asked me if I had any questions or concerns about doing this with him. I surprised him by making my first question be about how we would end. I couldn’t help it, I saw this all, that I would be capable of carrying it off, that it would be something that enriched my life . But the summary and conclusion, I could not see. I know we never can, but it just seemed like in this case, the only way such a comfortable arrangement would end is if either one of us broke out, or less probably, both of us broke out in the same direction. But it would have to end. There are limits to limits too. Life is short.

The simple answer to my question is it ends when it stops being satisfying. The amount of pain or joy in this ending is hard to see. For now, I am still happy with this. I have enough to explore. I will hit the walls one of these days though.

Much of this is zooming through my head when he asks me about how I’m doing with ‘our limits’. And then before I can really answer,

‘Mind you. .I say limits.. but we .. I mean we do have. .a bit of history.. the whole time leading up to when we met.... I mean we are kind of..special?.. I mean.. we are .I think ..a good sexual match’

I am glad he says this, because he doesn’t have to. It means we’re on the same page when it comes to not down-playing or exaggerating what is there. It means the interaction I’ve felt is not a fantasy flight on my part.

The rest remains to be seen.


Wow, still lots to catch up with, I didn’t expect to have that much to say, but some of this has been brewing for months and months. I guess I’m just trying once and for all to see if I can describe, in excruciatingly lazy, repetitious and tedious detail, the nature of this relationship. It’s still kind of interesting to me.

Soon, soon I will get to the sex. The much awaited last bout of it which was just…wow.