to mind. "I guess there's no reason you would know this," she'd said, "but it's fairly common for people to have one person who's their lover, and a separate person for inflicting pain.”
I thought about that, and about Richard saying, "A lot of crap comes out when you do this stuff." I considered the maxims that tell us that the opposite of love isn't actually hate, and how much time I'd spent encouraging myself to hate him. Finally, I admitted that the only term I had to cover this depth of emotion was "love"... but that couldn't make it feel like the right word. Then again, it wasn't exactly "hate", either.
He was a demon, an idol. He hardly felt like a person to me.
I didn't vocalize any of this. Coming back from the waterfront, we arrived at the intersection where Richard would go to his apartment and I'd return to mine. An awkward pause ensued: I was leaving in a few days, and wouldn't be alone with him again. Watching him, I wondered if he was thinking about asking me over, or was looking for an excuse not to. I looked away.
"Goodnight," I said. Walking home, I wished I felt strong.
te Ok ok
It was after I left Chicago that I really started piecing myself back together. My anger drained away quickly, as if an infected wound had been lanced. Perhaps I found my strength under the scab. I figured that maybe all this did identify something about my personality, but it didn't tell the whole story. Even now, I could be independent, rational, and feminist, with self-esteem and integrity. Right? Right.
It was impossible to deny that the desires were real -- and when I allowed myself to focus on them, I didn't try. Ruminating on my past, I recalled heart-twisting details that put everything in a certain compelling context. It wasn't just the man who'd gone after me in 2003. Wincing, I remembered childhood fantasies: I'd compulsively written and drawn brutal dreams until, at some confused middle-school point, their horror came home to me and I recoiled. In those long-repressed fictions of slavery and pain, I recognized my newly-acknowledged desires.
One conversation I'd had with an early boyfriend rang in my head. "There's a dark current inside me," I'd told him. Self-consciously, I'd averted my eyes at my own melodrama. "I don't know how to be with you, when I feel it." I hadn't exactly been trying to leave him, but I'd needed something more.
The last dream I remember of Richard didn't involve any pain at all: he just kissed me. Awakening, I felt a melancholy pang. Richard invested a lot of self-conception in being a sadist, and he was so distant -- I couldn't imagine relating to him as a lover. And I knew our relationship (such as it was) would never have started without BDSM as a focus. Previous to that night at the outdoor party, he'd hardly registered on my romantic radar, and we had little in common in terms of how we dealt with relationships.
Still, for a moment I wished -- unreasonably, I knew -- that I could have fallen straightforwardly in love.
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