If you're not on my notify list, you probably haven't seen Pet. (warning, adult and non-work-safe content ahead!)It's a het BDSM story. Consider yourself warned.
I wrote it about four years ago for a friend of mine who I'd been doing a bit of long-distance BDSM with. He died a year and a half ago, and it's only been recently that I've been able to read the story without being overwhelmed by grief. And, if I may say so myself, it's pretty damned good.
I pulled files off my Macintosh this weekend. The files I copied represent about six years of my life, compulsively documented with everything from email archives to poems to agonized letters to lovers.The above-referenced story was among the files I got. I grabbed those first thing, popped them into HTML, and uploaded them to the site.
And then I opened the folder innocently marked 'email'.
Let's see, what's in here? Oooh, look, email from....wow. Mar93, that would be a sentmail file from then. Let's see...there's a file called Mirra, and a file called Jeff, and a file called binder, and, look, five files that start with the word trav....
And I paused.
Did I really....? Let's see.
I opened the first file.
Oh, hell, I did.
Two years of email from this one person. A chronicle of our relationship pretty much from beginning to end.
I started reading. I couldn't stop. I was caught in it, the sticky strands of the past pulling me in closer.
He was amazing writer. We wrote email to each other on a near-daily basis for over a year. We were in the habit of quoting all of the relevant bits of emails to one another when we wrote, so my words are there, too. There is in these emails an unbroken thread of story, a story that I would consider completely unbelievable if it hadn't happened to me.
I have quite a bit of distance from it, now--I remember most of the events, but they're fuzzed out in the this happened to someone else way that most of my memories from that time have. Reading, I had this persistent sense of unreality, as if this were a story that I'd been told long, long ago.
And yet, it was enormously compelling. I remember saving the emails to their own folder after replying to them, thinking as I did so that "I'd better save this, because otherwise nobody is ever going to believe me when I tell them about it."
I have no other relationships so completely documented. And I have no other relationships that were so mythic in proportion. We'd been together in past lives, he was one of the Fallen (the Fallen, in fact), I was awakening to some abilities that I'd not suspected I had. It was a love story that we were writing large in the stars, the entire universe our stage and me believing in it with all of the passion of the converted.
And then there was my exchange with his shadow self that ended with me fleeing the relationship....and after a month hiatus, we were talking again. And again. And things got really weird.
I wish I could just put the letters into HTML and show them to you all. They tell the story much, much better than I could. As source material, they're amazing. I'll probably use snippets of them eventually--my words, not his, since I have a real ethical problem with posting words that others have sent believing that they're going to be private. It's tempting, though.
And reading the files made me remember why I got into the relationship in the first place. I remember the girl I was then, and I love her for her courage and pity her for her pain.
And I remember why I left.
And I know, now, what genuine joy feels like.
It's always a bit unsettling to be plunged into my own past like that. It's immediate and direct confirmation of yes this did happen and it was really fucked up. This is why I save everything I feel might be important--it comes in handy when I'm trying to decide if things are as weird as I think they are.And compared to my college days, I'm very lax in my documentation of my life. I think I found better things to do. This journal is nearly the last vestige of that old habit.
And even then it feels incomplete. There's so much I don't say, because to write it all down would take more time and energy than I have. And now, my memory can almost be relied on to tell me where I've been and maybe where I might be going.
[posted on heinous today]There are dreams I've had recurringly lately. They are simple; I am running home after some sort of accident, a disaster, an unpleasant surprise--and there's my house, I'm inside and I've locked the door. I search for my hat but can't find it. And then I remember that there are people in the house I've forgotten, old friends and new. And they're suddenly there, and I fall bonelessly into them. They surround me and cluck their tongues at me and tell me that it'll be all right.
They set me carefully back on my feet, and I smile gratefully at them.
Then they take my hand and tell me there's work to do. And we go outside, and the air smells like spring.
For the tools, for the weapons, and for the truth--
thank you.
This is especially relevant today, as Catherine has decided to stop doing Naked Eye.There's a time and a space for everything, and Naked Eye filled one of those spaces. It was itself, it was honest, it was vulnerable, and that's why I like it.
I want to write her and say, 'thank you for what you've done' but the email sits, open and empty. How can I say something that isn't going to be said by a hundred other people?
How can I write convey open-mouthed awe and vague handwaving over email?
