I’ve started writing this a hundred times in my head, trying
to frame it. In the end, it comes down
to this. It’s short, and it’s painful,
but it’s true.
I’m saying goodbye to the relationship that we had.
And I’m saying goodbye to the relationship that I thought we
would have.
DW and I separated when we left the last apartment we lived
in together. Not out of not wanting the
relationship to work, and not out of not caring for each other, but because we
reached a point where we needed to make life decisions independent of one
another. I moved to one state, he moved
to another. And we called the
relationship ended because we never wanted long-distance.
I’ve never experienced it.
He’s experienced too much of it.
The hardest part to accept in all of this is the way we
never successfully built the D/s dynamic that we thought was there. It was so easy to believe in it, at the
beginning. But I could never explain—or really
figure out, truthfully—what I wanted out of being a submissive. I could never successfully reconcile it with
my need to feel like I was on equal footing; like I was a functional,
independent adult; like I was worthy of respect. It came back again and again to trying to get
me to pin it down, come up with some cohesive vision of what this all meant to
me, of what I wanted. And I didn’t know,
I didn’t know, I didn’t know. I became
afraid of giving the wrong answer. I
became convinced that whatever I tried to convey about it wouldn’t be
enough. I suppose I stopped trying. I felt judged, even if that wasn’t the truth
of things.
When I say goodbye to this thing we never quite had, I
wonder if we could have ever successfully made the compromises that we would
have needed to make to each other. I
wonder if I could have tried harder to dig through my feelings and my
ideologies. I wonder if he could have
brought pieces of what he wanted down to my level and been at all happy. I wonder if we could have found a place where
we understood each other and could share some pieces of the world we stood at
the fringes of.
And I wonder how things would have been different if we had
been happier in our lives. If we had
both had jobs that we enjoyed and got some satisfaction out of more often than
not. If we had friends who we were ever
able to spend time with outside of each other.
If there were other people to talk to.
If we hadn’t grown further and further into hating the town that we
lived in. If there had been something,
anything, to inspire me. Everything
around us had stagnated into a sort of blur, though I can only confidently say
this about the way I felt about my days.
Perhaps it was different for him.
I loved the time that we spent together.
I loved him. I think I still
do. I loved his arms around me. But it felt like we lacked the drive or the
energy to really try to make the relationship better than it was. Fix the places that were cracked, if we
wanted to. It was almost entirely
non-sexual by the end of things, and sometimes I felt so safe and comfortable
in that and sometimes I wanted to scream because I felt like there was
something wrong with me.
I felt safe.
I felt like something was broken and I wasn’t going to get
it back.
After over a month on my own, it’s getting easier to imagine
that things really could have been different.
I think this might be a comfortable lie that I tell myself, and that if
we ever got back together we would try and once again fail to build this
dynamic into something that we could both feel whole in. But it’s harder to tell, with distance. I can fool myself. I can feel the rope on my skin and his hands
on my wrists and think that it was always possible. That it should have been possible. That things really could have been better
than they were.
I’m saying goodbye to this thing that we wanted. That I wanted. That he wanted.
I’m saying goodbye and it still hurts.
Posts
