You Can’t Socialize a Dragonfly

I have lived a lot for a 22 year old. I can’t even keep the last four years straight….I have fallen in love so many times that I have lost track of whole chunks of my life.  I think a year in Ashley-time is really like ten years.  I have to strain to remember passionate life altering moments I experienced  just a year ago.  I stumble into old lovers in my mind unexpectedly sometimes.  I let them recite poetry for me.  It makes for dozens of personal tragedies…poor forgotten souls.  I both hate and love thinking that the moments we shared together have been written into their permanent atom…that they cry and smile as they frequently recall them.  In my head they are lucky if they can secure five minutes of airtime in two years.  So sad.

I have given myself spirit, mind, and often body to over thirty men since I graduated high school (five years ago).   Every kind of man under the sun, every astrological sign, every personality type, those from happy secure families, those with haunted pasts, drop dead gorgeous men and not so gorgeous men, loving sensitive attentive men, and apathetic wounded men. Some that wanted to save me and many that I wanted to save.  In these five years I have rescued souls from paths of destruction and dragged others to them. 

An astonishing majority of them have said to me something along the lines of  “I feel like you put a spell on me.”  I did.  We humans are brilliant at recognizing and memorizing patterns.  I feel like my ability to recognize patterns (unconsciously) has totally fucked me.  I know the way relationships are “supposed” to look.  I know the things I am “supposed” to say.  The places to touch and the linger upon.  I have watched millions of women seduce men’s hearts into their love traps…I mean….nests.  They seal the deal with a passionate kiss before and then the credits roll.   

I can help you think that you love me and that no one has understood you so well and loved you as much as I do.  I know that formula.  My head got sucked up into my own game every time, and by the end I would lose myself in the simulation of love that I tried so hard to create.  I always thought there was something wrong with me when after a break up I was never heartbroken for my loss.  I cried, yes, every time, but it was always for them, guilt.  And I have noticed that later when I “miss” them, I’m not really missing them at all; I miss loving them.  Instead of recalling him kissing my forehead or bringing me flowers I dwell on that devastatingly poetic thing I used to say to him that made him feel like a man, or the thing I used to do in bed that he said no one ever did before, that made him cum “like that”. 

But before you start thinking that I am a cold unfeeling bitch, you have to know that I was not always this way.  I have opened myself up completely to a man before, a few, when I was young and naive (or more so).  And there were moments with the others that I left the door open for intimacy.  But there is nothing more painful in this world than being alone, and thoroughly misunderstood.  I would drop bread crumbs for them, and when that didn’t work I would often resort to practically screaming my identity at them.  None of them understood even a small fraction of who I am…not one.  I kept thinking maybe the next one will.  But as I get older I am beginning to think that perhaps it isn’t their personality that has rendered them incapable of knowing me, but the male culture.

Oddly enough people have been telling me just that for years, but I have never really listened to them.  They say things like “well men just aren’t like that.”  I laugh at the fact that what kept me holding on to the dream of an authentic relationship with a man was really what I saw in movies.  These blissfully intimate relationships between a men and a women where he knows her and she knows him and 3/4 of their communication is shared glances.  It is a pretty dream. 

But I feel like I have been robbed.  I haven’t ever felt it….really felt anything with a man.  My heart was always separate from our time together…it was never welcome there anyway.  Call me bitter, but a man doesn’t want a woman’s heart…not really.  He just wants to call her his.  And while I suppose that is somewhat endearing, I don’t want that.

I wish my experience with love was like my experience with sex.  Because I was intentionally sheltered from anything sexual when my peers were diving into sexual socialization.  I just wanted to be good for Jesus, and sex was dirty and wrong.  I literally knew nothing when I moved out on my own.  And while that has caused A LOT of trauma and misfortune in my life it has done one positive thing for me.  I learned it as I went.  I learned first how to hold hands with a man, the things he responded to when I touched him, how to kiss and gaze and eventually how to have sex, and fuck and make love and give head and make him moan.  I didn’t learn that from movies and the media and advertizing and the input of my friends and family members.  But love is something different.  I knew what it was supposed to look like, feel like, I had the mold right in front of me, I just had to figure out a way to squeeze myself into it.  And the residual me that wouldn’t fit would be thrown away…piece by agonizing piece.  

But now I find myself here, falling in love with this perfect stranger, Leah, and knowing nothing about what that is supposed to look like or feel like, and I have never been free before.  I don’t really know how to hold a woman or touch a woman…I have no idea how to make her cum or even how to hold her hand, and I love this.  I feel this.  It is absurd and reckless and absolutely fucking incredible, and…I don’t mind breathing so much anymore.  I have daydreams again….I didn’t realize how empty life is without daydreams until I started having them.  I see us making love, smudging the lines of our bodies together.  I see us shrinking down into dragonflies and moving in that  clumsy love drunk areal mating dance.  And when we fly in front of your face, diving, oblivious to your presence, you will take a mesmerized second look at the genetic fuck up of a bug we are together with eight wings and two electric-blue torsos.