The Silence of Your Absence

“She tears the hole up, even wider, lets all the darkness, up inside her.”

-Hole, “Garbadge Man"

So, full disclosure time-I haven’t been doing so well, emotionally speaking, and by not doing so well, I mean I’ve been doing terribly. Things had been steadfastly falling apart and royally sucking for a while, but, this week it all came to a proverbial head. Everything just sort of…collapsed at once. 

I had a whole other post planned, but, my heart just wasn’t in it. I feel scalded right now, as though my soul were covered in third degree burns. It’s so hard to write when you feel like an emotional burn victim. This time of year is very hard for me, and every other hardship that comes my way just amplifies my shitty feelings. 

I still work, but, it’s difficult to be sexy, or try to be sexy, when you feel the way that I do right now. The hard ons of strangers interest me even less now , which is a tragedy of proportions no one would be interested in quantifying. My hustle and flow are rickety at best.

Yesterday, the phone rang , and it was someone calling on the “submissive” line. His name was Michael.

He was one of those people who, when he talked, you couldn’t help but check out mentally. He was just so boring, it was like my brain needed to block my ability to hear in order to survive the conversation with him. 

“ I’m gonna guess that you’re a bit of a wallflower,” I said to him.

“Yeah, I guess…” he said , in that somnambulant voice of his. He had all the inflection of a dial tone. 

I had thought that he had called for me to dominate him, but, it turns out he wanted to talk to another submissive person. This was a first. Two submissives kinda cancel each other out, sexually., there is no real dynamic…you just kind of end up asking each other what they wanna do and nothing gets going.

The submissive thing isn’t an act for me, I should note. In the parlance of BDSM practices, I’m what you would call a “switch”, a person who likes to be both dominant and submissive, depending on the situation, I’m also into both men and women. Being a bisexual switch might make me seem indecisive, or even greedy, but, I figure, why pick a side when you can be MVP for all the teams?

Anyways, eventually, Michael told me what was up. He had been in a 24/7 BDSM relationship for 4 years with a woman , who was the dominant. They broke up 6 months ago, and she moved to another state. He was calling me because he wanted to talk to another submissive to figure out what he had done wrong, to figure out what he had done to make her leave.

“Did it ever occur to you, that maybe you didn’t do anything wrong?” I asked him.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, maybe you didn’t fuck up. Maybe you did everything you could to make her happy. It sounds like you did.”

“Yeah, I mean, I always tried my best…sometimes I even did things for her that I didn’t want to do…but I did them anyways.”

“Well, sometimes people can be unreasonable in their demands. You went above and beyond, you did shit you didn’t really want to do…what more could you have given her? You are allowed to say no, you’re allowed to have limits. You’re allowed to say you don’t feel comfortable.”

“I am?”

“Of course! If you didn’t have limits, then that’s how someone could hurt you really badly, or kill you, even. You need to draw a line. That’s what safety words are for.” 

“ I never thought of it that way.”

“People just do shit, you know, and it so rarely makes any sense, and it so rarely has anything to do with you anyways. Some people just sabotage great things for no good reason, you know? Some people don’t know that the flare gun is supposed to be fired up, towards the stars, not into the hull of their vessel. Some people just can’t help but capsize their own boat.”

“Wow. You seem to know a lot about this stuff.”

“Yeah, not as much as I’d like to.”

When I got off the phone, I went into the living room, and told my roommate about the call.

“You know, how sometimes, when you talk to someone, and you give them advice, you’re actually talking to yourself as well? I think that that’s what just happened with that call.”

“What were you trying to tell yourself?” my roommate asked.

Okay…so, this week marks the 20th anniversary of my dad’s suicide. It’s been heavy, to say the least, and there’s been other factors in my life that have made it all less than peachy.

“I think….,I think I’m always blaming myself, you know? I think that because my dad didn’t consider me when he made his decision, I’ve always sorta felt like maybe I wasn’t good enough…like if I had been, then he would have pulled through, he would have found a reason to live…so, now, I’m always thinking I’m wrong, that I’m not good enough…that it’s my fault people hurt me, or fuck me over, or leave me…”

“So, everything has just been an echo of his death…” said my roommate.

“Exactly” I replied.

In Greek mythology, “Echo” is a nymph who was cursed by Hera to only repeat the last words ever spoken to her. She fell in love with Narcissus, but could not tell him how she felt about him, and had to watch him fall in love with himself, which ultimately killed him.

It’s all weirdly fitting, seeing that suicide is a some what narcissistic action….it takes into account nobody else but you. As if somehow your death won’t extend beyond you, that nobody else could possibly be effected. My father was the first man that I ever loved, and he drowned in his own hideous reflection of himself, distorted as it was by his own troubled mind. My last words to him were, in fact an echo of his last words to me…”I love you.”

He did, however, try to pull back, at the last second…he called his friend to take him to the hospital, but it was too late. So much in my life has been about things being too late. 

When I was a teenager, I went to Montreal and stepped inside a beautiful old cathedral. I’m not a religious person, but, I love religious architecture and art. In that place so holy, where so many lives had passed, I bought a candle to commemorate the life of my father. I lit it, and I let it burn in that sacred place until it went out, just as my memory for him burns always, somewhere deep and sacred within me at all times. 

Today, I bought a candle to light to commemorate him. I’m going to let it burn all day. I didn’t realize it until I brought it home, but the candle has two wicks. I lit them both. 

"Your absence has gone through me, like thread through a needle, everything I do is stitched with it's colour."

-Separation, W.S Merwin.

Take a look to the sky just before you die
It's the last time he will
Blackened roar, massive roar, fills the crumbling sky
Shattered goal fills his soul with a ruthless cry
Stranger now, are his eyes, to this mystery
He hears the silence so loud
Crack of dawn, all is gone except the will to be
Now they see what will be, blinded eyes to see

For whom the bell tolls
Time marches on
For whom the bell tolls

-Metallica, "For Who the Bell Tolls"

I did my friend and erotica author Erin Pim's sex podcast "Bed Post Podcast"...you should listen: http://bedpost.libsyn.com/episode-43-lea-lawrynowicz

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