tidbit

My mood is pretty low right now and it be draggin.

Sentences are draggin. And words are draggin. And spaces are draggin. And so on. I will drag out whatever comes to me, the way I guess I always do.

But your comments and e-mails were heaven-sent really. I've answered back below and I hope to get back to you privately soon too. Thank you again. It makes me feel so lucky to have you. I do not have too many I could share this with otherwise.

I meant to post again sooner, because I didn’t want anyone to come out of reading the last post thinking that an ASCUS diagnosis after a pap smear is some horrible calamity. It isn’t. It really, really isn’t. In the whole schema of life thingies, it is actually quite a minor life thingy. An itty bitty thingy even. But a thingy nonetheless.

(It is harder than I thought to write about life thingies as they are happening. That I used ‘thingy’ in four sentences right now should attest to that.)

I also meant to write up a short summary of cited facts I gathered about ASCUS and HPV, but I really don’t feel up for it now. I probably will later because I want to make a small contribution in this way for anyone who hits my site through a search engine. I’m discouraged by the ignorance I’ve encountered. Some from people I have tried to trust too: my doctor, the nurses, T.

Many of my angsty antics surrounding this are just me. It is just the same inner hell I take the steps down to, every so often, like a dutiful Dante. This has just been the lastlastlastlast straw in a general year-round feeling of coming close to something and then never reaching it. Of picking up and then losing it.

I am not really worried for my health because there is only so much I can do for it at this point. Cancer development from HPV, if that is what I have, is typically very slow, from 5-10 years. The most I can do is take better care of myself, eat a varied diet, exercise, keep stress levels down, continue getting my cervical cells monitored.

I am not doing a very good job of the low-stress thing right now. But it has begun to inspire me to do better in this respect. I have started to see a counselor again. There is a doctor I will see. I have changed my project to one I like better and though the lost time is stressful for me, I feel hopeful that it will be better, and it will get done. I have thought a lot about teaching and the more I think of it, the more it has excited me as a future career.

I have always known what a risky business this living, fucking, eating, drinkin thang is. My aunt from my mom’s side has struggled with breast cancer for years. People have died in accidents. Heart attacks and brain strokes. Floods and earthquakes. It’s all out there, I cannot pretend to fully understand why. Well I will get to that later.

No, what bugs me, and I know it is short-sighted of me, is T and I. I want to fuck him. The way the news came, right before a plan to meet him, has me caught up badly. I want to fuck him. I don’t want to talk about. I don’t want to weigh risks. I want to fuck him. I want this to continue for me. I want it. Want. Want. Want. I’ve wanted like this past the point where I can feel normal about it. I cannot even wax poetic-like about it anymore.

I’ve had to push this all back and give him the facts, and in my attempts not to sway him one way, especially the way I want, I’ve had to grit my teeth and not leave a thing out. I hate to say it, but it has really tested my morals in a strong way. I've done my best, I've told him over and over to go read about it himself.

I’ve had to ignore the voice in the back of my head that laughs at how I had to cancel plans with T once before the doctor’s call. How we could have fucked then but didn’t. How I probably got it from him anyways. How he probably has it anyways because it is so common. How he cannot get tested for it. How other girls before me might not have bothered to tell him about something like this. How even my doctor told me I had no obligation to tell him of it. How I had to research and ask about getting an actual DNA test done to confirm whether or not I have HPV at this current point in time, and how the doctor knew nothing of such a test. How he was staunchly against my taking it, since, in his words, it would open up a whole can of worms needlessly. How he also told me not to take on the responsibility of the world. How I've wished I hadn’t fucked N because it would have simplified my decisions. How I had to ask N about his partners and, as luck would have it, how he mentioned someone in his past who had a history with dysplasia. How even if I got it from my two times with N, T and I have already fucked once after that and he might have caught it already then.

I know these are irrelevant. I will be taking the test this week I think. I have to pay for it and I can ill-afford it right now. Then again, I can live off of my pantry for a while. It's been done before. Knowing for sure is a scary thing. That ASCUS can be caused by other things and is over-diagnosed is annoying. That a good chunk of the infected population will never have to know whether they have it or not- since they will not get the symptoms and healthcare does not screen for it- is annoying. But it does not change what I feel I should do, in light of this shadow of doubt. I feel obliged to inform him the best way I can. Since HPV is thought to often clear up on its own within 6 months to two years, I would probably get the test again in 6 months to see if this has been the case.

We were not sure whether to wait for the results or not for a while, in view of how common and usually harmless it is. He has a whole stretch of two weeks completely free, which happens to be exactly how long getting the results of the test will take. After that, he will only be free for a couple of hours here and there.

But talking to him this morning I felt that I want to wait. I would feel weird not to. We would at least know exactly what we we are dealing with. What kind of strain it is if it is present. And there is still a significant chance that I am clear, and that too would be good to know.

He admitted too that though a part of him wants to just forget about it, he knows it will still be hard to completely look past.

So we are still working out what to do after the test, if it comes back positive.

In a talk, he fucks my mouth, deep-throating me, keeping his fingers in my cunt. It is hot. His domination of me is very complete in that moment. I mewl and sigh and gasp as he drags it out, describing it down to the last detail. I am taken over once again in the sketch of his words, in the heat of his growing arousal. He keeps me at edge until his cum runs down the back of my throat. I scream when I cum, a high-pitched yelp, so edgy and frantic am I from waiting for him.

But later I wonder if this is the possibly less risky option he is thinking of, if I am tested positive. I wonder if he will ever fuck my cunt again. I wonder how long we can keep this up, with the thought of this risk in our minds. I wonder how I would feel if, Chaos forbid, something came up in his life related to this. How much of the responsibility I would feel, how much I should feel.

The decision to have sex had been a newly established one, but something that made me happy. Now we have to reexamine it, look again at where we stand. This too, I guess I will talk more of later.

I have felt horny and sexy, but then from time to time, when I am tired of trying to figure this out, I have wanted to give it all up. Sex seems pointless. It’s a bother. I am afraid of wanting something that I might not get for a long stretch of time. I wonder if I should move on. I think maybe this is just a direction my life needs to take for a while. Celibacy. Scary. Interesting. Scary.

But I miss fucking him so badly. I miss everything. I miss writing to him in a frenzy of lust. I miss feeling clean and excited and clapping and happy about this.

The most of what I felt in the hours after I found about it was a huge anger. Looking back on things I’ve written here, I realize I mention this kind of anger a lot. It surprises me that I haven’t noticed this fully. It turns out that I’m an angry girl. I don’t look it, I don’t act it. But I am.

I throw tantrums in my mind. Childish, whiny, useless ones. Fuckin world just fuckin work the fuckin way I want it to. I am angry because I’ve been trying to do my own thing, and I’ve been trying to fight a lifetime of sexual oppression , and there is a part of me inside that churlishly demand I be ‘rewarded’ for my efforts. That it be easy. That I be right. That I not be ‘punished’. I know the way this Chaos works, or rather I don’t, but sometimes I just want to be Master of it.
I am angry because it seems I have been fed great truths with little lies mixed in, and great lies with little truths in them, and the result has been one great big lie I am always having to unbraid and try to extricate reality from with shaky, uncertain tweezers.

I am angry because even knowing this, I cannot shake the "I told you so"s that taunt me always in the back of my mind.

A lifetime of sexual oppression is a cliché perhaps, and though I have not suffered any great harm to myself, it is still not something I can say with any levity.

I grew up in a country where, if not completely segregated, boys and girls had to sit on opposite sides of the classroom, where the principal peered from the classroom window and motioned for the gap in between the two sides to be opened just a little more, where the discipline supervisor questioned you if you sat alone talking with a boy for too long. Where some families did not let their daughters ride bikes for fear of tearing their hymens. Where you couldn’t walk down the street alone without being followed and taunted, usually by rich, privileged boys in their flashy four-wheel drives, who would not be tried no matter what they tried. Where being gawked at and leered at wherever you went was a matter of fact to be put up with, no matter who you were, no matter how you looked. Where rape was quite simply never mentioned in the papers. Where nipples on breast examination pamphlets and art books got slashed out with permanent black markers. Where the government blocked internet sites about how the female body worked. Where my male biology teacher smirked in the one class where sex did actually come up briefly. Where french kisses got cut out of movies.

(Picture, for your amusement, a Sound of Music where the Captain and Maria can't kiss; they look at each other all fuzzy-camera like under the moonlit tree and you feel tight inside and Maria has never been further from being a nun and then they do an odd shudder and it is over and you know what they've done and you are still tight inside and you will vaguely and wondefully imagine all that went on in this lapse as they go on to sing, "...perhaps I had a wicked childhood, perhaps I had a miserable youth, but somewhere in my wicked, miserable past, I must have had a moment of good...")

The way I sometimes like to put it to people who have grown up here is that I am a woman in her 20s who grew up in the 50s.

I’ve got to where I am by trying to do what’s moral to me and what's natural to me and what makes sense to me. I have tried to stay kind and keep an open mind. I hate that where I am is this.

You see, I haven’t wanted to write of this, my struggle right now with a sexually-transmitted infection, because I guess I already had a story in my head about how me and T would go and it was goddamn beautiful. Righteous even.

When that word comes up is when I know I must step back and start again. Look at the world, take the facts first, form a tentative belief, look for negations, reform the belief accordingly. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. There is of course a heart of belief you must start with first, and that is my question always to the world. What should I believe in first? What will send me the right way?

I have had thoughts on this but they are too convoluted for me to make full sense of. I thought I had a real inkling in a manic mind-torpedo of thought the first night after I found out. It started with whether viruses are alive or not, and just grew from there. I started looking up terms and ideas, and things began to connect from unanticpated directions until I wanted to throw up with excitement. I knew-- even that crazed night-- that I could never quite piece it together, but somehow or the other, something did emerge and it made me feel quite okay.

I must have worked myself into quite a frenzy, whatever it was. I was worn out and content when I went to bed that night. In my dream, I was in T’s arms. He held me to him gently. He was kissing me but it was in a flurry of comforting affection, rather than the passion of want. He wasn’t even kissing my face anyways, just the side of my shoulder where he held me tightly, big, sheltering, smacking kisses, muah, muah. Maybe later, he kept saying, maybe later. Overwhelmed with this shower of affection, just this wrapping weight of his regard and comfort, I beamed with gratitiude, my whole body relaxing. I woke up.

I woke up and it was morning and it was all lost. I had no such T. (Though he has comforted me somewhat since. As have greatly your comments.) But when I woke up then, I just had the paper where I had scribbled all the thoughts that had come my way the night before. I could not make head or tail of it. I felt hopeless and dejected again.

I still can’t understand really. Well, I can a little, but it doesn’t quite come together. Maybe I will bring up some of it later on.

But all that is important for now is that I realize I cannot pretty-up or ugly-down sex for you or for myself. I know those of you who read here are mostly my friends. I am glad for it. It is just the audience in my head I cannot shake off that jeers at me sometimes, the social conflicts that keeps me wanting to fight . I have to keep remembering. I don’t want to be anyone’s poster child. I am not an example. I am not a cause. I have no agenda but to learn.

It’s just a story. My story. If it does add to the overall puzzle, it’s not in as pat as a way as some might think.

Rant over.

How’s that for a tidbit?

and back

I’ve missed writing here. Well, I’ve missed the desire to write here.

I told myself I wouldn’t come back to write here until I went ahead and got at least three things done on my important-things-to-do-if-I’m-going-to-make-it-in-this-world list. I’ve done five, though one of them was not so significant. It was just doing my laundry.

Yeah I know. And there is still much more to go. But I did something productive at least. Five things even.

Still, getting back here is difficult.

Talk to me three weeks back and you would have talked to someone who felt, for a moment, cautiously happy. I had begun to figure out how I could sort my masters out. My family was all gone. T was on holiday but he had left me a promising and exciting message about how much he looked forward to his return. We had made clear our desire to meet and fuck once he got back. I was excited.

It’s been nearly six months since I’ve had sex. With plans on the horizon, the anticpation seemed a sweet pain in my life once again. Time seemed to come alive and stuff. I sang yearny songs. I hummed while naked in the mirror. I got the occasional body shiver. I smiled to myself. I waited.

A week later I got a call from the doctor. The pap smear from my physical had come back mildly abnormal. ASCUS to be precise. Atypical Squamous Cells of Undetermined Significance. Meaning: we haven’t the faintiest, but come back in six months and we’ll try and tell you.

ASCUS. These five letters have turned my plans-- and for some reason, my world in general-- topsy-turvy.

I have been through hell and back in these past two weeks. I mean both the hell and the back part. I have lost hope. I have felt filled with optimism. I have cried until my nose and lungs begged for reprieve. I have then blown my nose, taken a deep breath, paused for a moment thinking I’m done, and then gone right on crying. I have researched until my brain was black and blue with the constant punches of information from every corner. I have felt staunch and fine and calm and ready to deal with all that comes my way. I’ve wanted to do the right thing. I’ve wanted to weasel out and flake. I’ve been philosophical, I’ve been whiny. I’ve been mature and logical, and then I have wanted to be held in someone’s arms like a baby and scream. I have thought several times that I have come to major decisions in my life and views, and then they have seemed to all vaporize in the next moment’s caprice. You get the idea.

I have gone through these cycles sometimes over a couple of days, sometimes over a day, sometimes a couple of times over a day, sometimes within an hour.

I am not completely sure why this has elicited such a wide range of strong, rapidly fluctuating responses from me.

I’ve a lot to say on this, much to get out, to explain just why I’ve been so all over the place. But for now I just wanted to touch base again. I think I will feel less overwhelmed if I just let it out in as many tidbits as I need, whenever I can.

If anyone's still around, good thoughts are welcome.