Rolling

So E is interesting.

Nothing like I thought it would be. Most of what I had heard about it (ignoring Kevin's idiotic opinions) was that it makes physical sensations feel amazing, and makes you feel like you love everybody and are very in touch with people around you. Aiden recommended comfy clothes for the adventure, so I put on some sweats and prepared to love everything.

The first thing I noticed was vertigo; I got light-headed and felt like my brain was being squeezed. Then my heart started to race, my adrenaline spiked, and my hands shook. It became difficult to focus on the jewelry project I was doing, as the beads became blurry and the light reflecting off the silver rings distracted me. I gave up on trying to teach Aiden to do chainmaille, as neither of us could see with enough detail to actually close rings.

The three of us moved on to stringing beads, which proved to be much more entertaining. Shelby started pulling finished pieces and flea market finds out of my supply boxes and decking herself out in them. "Have you seen what ravers end up wearing?" Aiden asked, and "furry boot covers" was all I could think of, but apparently that was agreement.

Shelby gestured at the table, which was covered in boxes and beads and rings and scales and tools and wire and every other shiny thing I could imagine, and said, "Look what the high kids did!" I laughed. I asked her if she was also tachycardic, since we're both like that normally, and she said yes and advised me to ignore it, assuring me that there was Ativan on hand if it got too bad.

I was stringing beads and continually noting how I felt like I had drunk an entire pot of coffee, when Shelby suddenly turned to me, grabbed my face, looked at me dreamily for a moment, and then started kissing me sweetly. I kissed back, surprised, and grinned when she let me go.

"Well that was unusual," I said, smiling. "You're not normally that sweet."

"I feel happy," she said, smiling back. "This is probably how you guys feel all the time "- I nodded in agreement -" but I have depressed brain chemistry. I wish I could be like that but I'm just not. This is me with enough serotonin. I'd take an SSRI but they mess up your sex life."

There had been some discussion of fruit earlier in the day, Aiden telling us to make a fruit platter when we went to the grocery store and Shelby explaining that fruit is somehow extremely amazing on E. So we got fruit. Aiden decided to cook some rice and make fruit sushi, so while Shelby and I discussed brain chemistry, he got out the sushi things and started constructing. I went over to watch, and tried a piece of the first roll. It was salty, not fruity at all, slightly fishy, and so sticky it glued my mouth shut.

"Blech," I said, without even thinking. I made a face, spit the sushi out in my hand, and dumped it in the garbage. "What the hell happened? That's awful. I can't eat that. I need to rinse my mouth." After rinsing my mouth, I thought about what I had just said. "I'm sorry," I apologized. "My manners aren't usually that bad. I didn't mean anything personal. But damn, that was just disgusting."

Aiden shrugged, and Shelby laughed. "It'll do that," she said. "You'll just blurt things out and then go, Oh, oh gosh, I'm so sorry I said that." Her description was accompanied with an intensity that I've never seen from her before. She's usually relatively inexpressive when speaking, and to see her lean in and speak with passion was new.

The honesty was a feeling. I said I could tell that if someone asked me a question, I would just spout off without censoring a single word.

Aiden got quiet and "contemplative" - unusual for him. I tried not to be concerned, deliberately keeping an awareness of the fact that his being quiet makes me worry, and just because I'm worrying doesn't mean anything is actually wrong. I restrained my concern to merely asking if he was all right a couple of times.

Shelby and I, on the other hand, couldn't stop talking. I've never in my life been so compelled to expel so many words. I couldn't stop, except to listen to Shelby. Between the two of us, there was no silence for several hours. Everything that entered my brain exited immediately via my mouth, shortcutting the usual judgment circuit.

Aiden had explained the therapeutic part of the effect, where a person can address their problems from an outside perspective without their own emotional baggage in the way, and now I understand what that means. For me, it was like the emotion generator was just unplugged from the rest of the system. We all expressed ourselves with complete and brutal honesty on quite a few topics, and none of us were at all insulted or perturbed. Everything was just interesting in an academic way.

I made a pot of Earl Grey, Shelby seeded a pomegranate, and the three of us had a tea party in the living room. We sat on cushions around a coffee table and talked and talked and talked. I noted that this was way better than acid, and it wasn't what I was expecting but it was great, and I felt like I could do it all night.

There was little in the way of physical effects. My body felt normal except for the slight buzz, which had subsided from "entire twelve-cup pot of coffee in ten minutes" to "maybe three lattes was too many in three hours."

Eventually the tea party ended and we returned to beading. A weird note of bitterness appeared in my head, and I guessed that my emotions were starting to be plugged back in. I was concerned about some things that had been said, but I focused on my beading and kept quiet. The silence was another clue that I was coming back to normal. Shortly after that we went to bed, and I was glad to find sleep waiting not far away.

The next morning, when the alarm went off, Shelby and I were instantaneously wide awake and ready to bounce into the day. Aiden was still logey, barely opening his eyes to our prodding and biting. "I just want you to care," Shelby said, and even that didn't rouse him. I still felt a little buzzy and a little more honest than usual. I wondered how long it would last.

A couple of hours later on, the buzz had disappeared, and over dinner I noted that things were now crossing my mind and only sometimes choosing to exit orally. I also realized that half the time I didn't say things I was thinking, it was because Aiden was already chattering about something.

This morning I woke up tired, having not gotten enough sleep. On my drive to work, I thought about the things that had come up that bothered me, and found myself fighting anxiety and depression. Shelby had warned me that some people get a day or two of depressive after-effect. I messaged Aiden and asked if he had ever found it difficult to process anything that came up, and he said no. But it turned out Shelby and I were both reacting to issues this morning.

Discussion of their having given up pot for me turned into a weight of guilt and panic on me, and discussion of how Shelby abuses her power as the breadwinner when angry with Aiden made her feel like he secretly hated her. We really could have used another day to just hang out and cuddle, but two-day weekends don't allow for two days of recovery. Fortunately this is only a three-day work week, since Thanksgiving is Thursday.

Overall, I'd say that rolling was much more enjoyable than tripping on acid, even accounting for the weird panicky after-effects, and I'd be more inclined to do it again. I do hope that I can eventually experience the other body effects, too, as they sound really entertaining.

Aiden also mentioned "candy-flipping," a name that I don't understand for doing acid and E at the same time. I'm not sure what that would do except possibly give me a heart attack from too many stimulants.

The Deep

The deepest mystery that's ever floated in my own head is why I'm scared of a certain class of things. I'm not even sure they are really a class. I don't know that they actually have a lot to do with each other. Maybe it's just that the fear feels the same, so I'm assuming a relation among the causes.

Or, perhaps, they can be generalized to "altered state of consciousness, not including sleep." I love sleeping. I love dreaming. That's never been a question.

But into the fear category have gone, at various points in time, spirits and seances, Wicca and spell-casting, hypnosis, mind-altering drugs, and That Damn Thing My Ex-Girlfriend Did*. I guess they are related after all.

What am I really afraid of? Is it just that age-old fear of the unknown that I've been told all people naturally have? Meh. Perhaps that's some of it. But I've busted into plenty of other unknowns with nothing worse than a touch of nerves, without experiencing that feeling of someone squeezing my heart in a fist. Drop me into a creepy alley in the middle of the night, and my pulse will race, but I'll march forward and face whatever's there, because I'm pretty sure I can handle it.

So maybe I don't think I can handle...what, exactly? A bad trip? That certainly sounds scary, but I don't think it would be any worse than a really long nightmare (assuming I don't actually encounter a malevolent demon from the abyss, which isn't exactly Concern #1). The Bad Trip explanation makes me nervous, but it doesn't quite reach as far down as the undefinable Panic. Moving on.

The night that Shelby came and stayed with me earlier this fall, I tried to explain to her what it was that made me want to run away screaming from the subject of drugs. I stumbled over my words, replacing some of them with helpless reaching gestures while saying, "I'm afraid of that other person going away. They're there, and I'm here, and we're both 'here' in this room, but I don't know where they actually are. I'm afraid they're going to go away without me." Yes, I'm definitely afraid of being left here alone.

If you're a person that I want to be close to, I want to be WITH you, not just exist in the same space as you. Lying near each other while we each experience something completely different sounds quite unappealing. Adventuring alone is all well and fine, but if I'm going to adventure alone, why would I waste the precious time that I get to spend with you to go off by myself?

That actually explains some of my behavior from the acid trip. I worked hard to get Aiden interested in sex, even though he didn't seem very interested at first, and then we fucked for what felt like hours. I wasn't particularly more turned-on than usual - in fact, I had quite a difficult time coming - but I needed to feel the human connection, to know that he was still there, not wandering lost in some other world. Touch me. Fuck me. Stay here with me.

Simultaneously, it explains why the thought crossed my mind yesterday that the keenest interest I have in drugs is to see how they affect sex.

I'm actually surprised how much that realization feels like the Truth that I was looking for. I was afraid that my ex-girlfriend would go off and do That Damn Thing without me. The "What do you need that for when this world is perfectly interesting?" question that I mentioned last time still feels the same when reworded as, "Why do you want to be over there when I'm right here?" Alcohol doesn't trigger this fear because I know exactly where it goes, and that it doesn't result in anyone mysteriously checking out on me. The thought of someone I love using drugs extensively does scare me, because I picture them ending up permanently changed, in a place where I can no longer reach them.

I spend a lot of time alone. This "don't leave me" discovery seems like an odd contrast to that. I often get overwhelmed and claim that I wish the world would just go away, that all the people would just leave me the hell alone. I guess this is the change when I get attached to someone...this is why certain people are allowed in my introvert bubble...this is why I resist when I find myself getting close to someone new. I won't hand over the power to leave me to just anyone. First I have to trust that you won't.

Being me, of course, I hide that. When I was tiny and my mom dropped me off at school, I envied the kids who held onto their parents' legs and screamed and cried and begged them not to leave. I wanted to do that. That was how I felt, but I knew it wasn't okay to express it. Being needy wasn't approved behavior. So I just let my mom leave and pretended it was fine.

The fear has matured since I was three, of course. I don't panic when someone walks out of a room. I'm not on the verge of tears every Monday morning when I go back to my own town until Friday night. But I can say that when I look back over the patterns that have appeared in my life, the things I've gotten most upset about, the things that trigger my OCD, the things I'm afraid of...they all fit this paradigm perfectly. They're all variations on a theme of Separation Anxiety.


*Something complicated that involved role-playing and visiting a mysterious "elsewhere" that couldn't be experienced by normal people who weren't "awoken."

The Letter E

My relationship with drugs is a strange emotional tangle. I want to understand it, but most days it's a mystery even to me. I keep inspecting the threads, and sometimes I manage to pull one or two out of the knot, and it gets a little smaller. I'm not really sure who dropped the ball of yarn down the stairs, or when, but eventually I will get it all organized. Maybe if I lay out the extant thoughts, it will encourage more. This may be a lot of disorganized rambling, but if so, it would mirror what's in my head on this subject with fair accuracy.

I've already gone over my family history with alcohol. I'm sure that plays a part, but it confuses me that I get far more uptight about drugs than I do about drinking. (When I say "drugs," I'm referencing the recreational use of any non-alcoholic substance, legal or illegal.) Logic would have me with an emotional trigger against alcohol...but no. I've been drinking for years, and I understand it. As long as I and the people around me are using alcohol responsibly, I'm supremely unconcerned about it.

I'm touchy, however, about any other substance. My reactions are part, "I don't understand [empathetically speaking]," part, "Why would you do that?"

I believe that people should be able to do what they want to their own bodies, and at the same time I feel a deep concern about people who want to be high, that gets voiced as, "Aren't you satisfied with the world we've got here? It's amazing! Just look around."

My personal history with drug use is very limited. The first time I tried smoking pot, I was 19, and it did nothing for me. I got some amusement out of watching my friend Mario talk about how pretty the snow was. I tried again a few months later, with a coworker from a strip club, and nothing happened then either, except that I got exceptionally angry about something stupid a couple of hours later, and my then-boyfriend told me it was probably a side effect.

I tried again at 21, on the trip to visit Alejandra that ended up so awkwardly, and got another load of absolutely nothing. At that point I decided that pot was obviously not for me, and pretty much forgot about it. Kevin and I developed a habit of leaving parties when people went to go smoke. It was usually late enough that we had had our good party time anyway, and we were usually the only ones not interested. It was never a "stomp off in a huff" kind of leaving; just an, "Oh, it's that time, I guess we'll go home." The habit stuck with me after I got rid of Kevin.

My next experience was being offered a smoke by Aiden and Shelby when we first got together. I've already gone over that story, so I won't rehash it.

In the category of harder drugs, my experience is even less. Kevin was addicted to a whole lot of things when he was in his teens and twenties, both prescription and non-, and he told me stories about some of the awful things that had happened. By the time we met, he'd been clean for quite a few years, and was proud of that fact. When Aiden came into my life the first time and my relationship with Kevin fell apart, Kevin suggested giving me E as a way of putting it back together.

I wasn't pleased with that suggestion. In fact, it disturbed me deeply, for several reasons. The biggest was that he thought drugs were an okay way to address a relationship problem. The second is that he wasn't going to do the E himself; he was just going to feed it to me. I felt like he was trying to activate sort of cheat code in my brain, to reprogram me to be infatuated with him because he was desperately unsatisfied with reality.

The third issue was that his own experience with E had been a bad one, landing him in an ice bath in the emergency room. When I asked him if that might happen to me, he theorized that because I have weird issues controlling my body temperature anyway, there was a pretty good chance it would.

I took that combination of factors to mean that he was okay with potentially killing me if it meant I might fall in love with him again. False love, mind you. Drug-induced "love," that he assured me would be permanent.

I didn't take the E.

I'd read descriptions of good E trips that sounded like fun, and I'd had enough interest previously to have written a novel based on the results of an unintended E trip. (They say to write what you know, and clearly research was needed.) But after that stupidity, I just put the interest away in a box, along with a few other things I had to accept that I'd never do as long as I stayed with Kevin. (Among the other contents of that box: fuck a hot guy. I distinctly remember the day I sighed and gave up on that one. God I'm glad I took the lid back off my box...)

When Aiden and I were back together again, I remembered that he used to do E. I considered asking about it, then told myself that was a dumb idea if I'd ever had one. We were adults, and I should damn well act like one, not like someone who never grew beyond high school.

One night I activated the Power of Drunk Texting, and thoroughly confused Aiden by asking him something like, "Do you still do the things you used to do?"

He asked me the next morning what I meant, and I winced and told him not to worry about it. Maybe I even claimed I couldn't remember what I meant. But somehow, eventually, it came out that I had been referring to E, and I admitted that I was interested. He said they had something whose street name I no longer remember, but somehow I memorized the chemical: 2,5-dimethoxyphenethylamine. (I got serious about doing my research.) We never did do whatever that was, but one day he asked if my interest extended to "other things." I said please don't hint around, just specify, and he specified acid.

I thought about it and said why not. Shelby asked me during a car ride whether I really wanted to do it or whether I was letting him push me around, and I assured her that I wouldn't let anyone push me around on that particular subject. I was grateful for her check-in.

On a lazy afternoon, we dropped the acid. I baked cookies while we waited for it to hit. We played with a hula hoop. We drank some wine. Nothing happened. Long story short, the doses weren't as strong as Aiden thought they were, and we ended up taking three hits each. Everything was hysterically funny, and I couldn't go to sleep when I was tired...and that's about it. The most spectacular feature was the boredom. I didn't see any dragons, and I finally got to sleep around 5am, mildly annoyed that it couldn't have been earlier.

At some point during the long night, Aiden handed me a glass jar full of ice and smoke and told me inhale it. He explained to my confused look that the ice cools off the smoke so it doesn't burn. I did as he told me, and succeeded only in reminding myself just how disgusting pot smells and tastes. Yuck. Why do people do this again?

A few months after that, there was the Meltdown. Two months further along, I agreed to be a supplier for my mom to ease the suffering brought on by the chemo, then deeply questioned myself for a couple of days. Shelby finally pointed out that I was mixing up the medical and recreational use camps, and I felt much better after that.

Caught up to last weekend, Aiden had procured some E. Shelby and I came home from an afternoon of brewing mead with Eben, and within five minutes of walking in the door, Aiden said to me, "You know what I think we should do tonight? We should roll."

That term was new to me, but I figured it out from context. I didn't say yes or no. When Shelby came downstairs, he said the same thing to her. We sat and ate dinner in relative silence, while a ping-pong ball careened around in my head, knocking against the inside of my skull. Yes, no, yes, no, what the hell, I wasn't prepared for this!

When we finished eating, Aiden went upstairs, and Shelby checked in. "No," I said, knowing that I was a level of freaked out that would lead to bad things. She nodded and said she had sensed that.

Aiden returned with a bottle and said, "So, shall we roll?"

"No," Shelby and I answered in unison, and he looked slightly taken aback, but said that was fine. He said that today had seemed like a good day because we didn't have to be anywhere tomorrow, and I said that while theoretically today was fine, springing the idea on me without warning wasn't going to work. The suddenness of the whole thing somehow triggered panic, and I had a moment of needing to prove that I could still control my own situation by saying no. (What am I, two years old?)

That treatise brings me up to date on the logic and events side of things, but doesn't do much to explain the mess in my head. I think I'll have to go a more poetic and less structured route to express that. To be continued...

On Consent

I have the sort of relationship with Consent that isn't acknowledged by well-intentioned sex-educational materials that say things like, "You have to have explicit consent, every time!" I get where they're going with that, and I don't fault them; I'm as against rape as any human with a heart. Particularly with a new partner whom you don't know well, the line between "fuck yes" and "god no" is often not a line at all, but a foggy field. The safest assumption is obviously to wait for the "yes" before the "fuck."

I'm rarely one to shy toward safety, however. I'll generally choose adventure over being comfortable. And how will I ever know what fun might be hiding in that foggy field if I don't take a step in and a wander around? Fear can be a hot button for me. My wiring is a little crossed, and I don't feel bad about it. Apologizing for who I am is pointless and only leads backward.

Aiden has made it clear that he's uncomfortable pushing the consent boundary. If one of us says we're sleepy, or simply doesn't respond to a neck or a shoulder gripped firmly in his teeth, it doesn't go any farther. Sleep is had, and sex is not.

I respect that. He explained to me a while back what the Trust looks like from the Dom's perspective: the faith that the sub will communicate, that they won't call the cops if something goes wrong in scene, that they won't deliberately mistranslate between the outside world and the private one.

I do respect that caution. But sometimes I don't want to be respected. I trust you to respect me in daily life, and to judiciously lay that respect aside when the moment is right.

Sometimes sleep is necessary; sometimes one of us isn't well (I promise not to eat any more pumpkin bean cake), or has to be up early. I don't say no all that often. But even then, sometimes it's a white lie. It's a challenge. It's a test. It's not really a no. I don't know how to communicate that to you, though.

All I can say is, I have a safe word. It's not "No," and the only experiment that would cause a true rift between us is ignoring its use.

The Edges

We bumped up against that wall again this weekend, the one that pushes him harder than it pushes me, where my boundaries are farther out than he's yet explored. I got annoyed and full of, We just had this conversation - why are we having it again?

He attacked me in the bathroom and we had a bit of a showdown. The entertaining kind that was mostly arm-wrestling and glaring. Then I got in the shower to wash off both the sex and the fight, and he followed me, and kept talking. Unable to get over it while it was still being poured on my head, I shut down and refused to talk, and finally started crying while trying to explain that the shower is not an okay place for this conversation.

Once I was dry and clothed again, I was together enough to thank him for pushing me and for opening up and admitting that he was nervous, and reiterate that it was not the wrong thing to do, it was just the wrong place to do it. He said that we're still learning, which is an attitude that I should use more often myself.

And we are making progress; I shouldn't overlook that fact. On Saturday evening he pinned me to the bed and started biting my side, digging his teeth in and tickling me with his tongue until I was shrieking and flailing. Shelby came in from the shower to see what all the commotion was about. I yelled and gasped and beat the wall until I couldn't deal anymore and yelled for him to stop. And he didn't. He kept right on biting me while I kicked and screamed and laughed, and it felt so good to be ignored.

When we were first falling unexpectedly into a relationship many years ago, he pulled me into an experience of BDSM that I hadn't had before. I'd played with handcuffs and hot wax and what have you, but I'd never felt what I've come to think of as the "real thing" - the power exchange, the intensity, the shift in perspective that comes with trusting someone so completely, even when you're scared of where it all might be going. I don't remember how the subject of BDSM ever came up between us. I don't know how he sensed that it was where I needed to go. I just remember him asking if I wanted to call him Sir, and answering, "Yes, Sir" without hesitation, because there was no other answer.

From that experience I learned to follow him; sexually, at least. He had more experience, and a mysterious but thrilling way of knowing what I wanted even when I didn't. He led me into things, told me how it was going to be, told me his deliciously twisted plans for me, and I ate it up. It was thrilling, and terrifying, and beautiful.

Even after we broke up and didn't speak anymore, I couldn't fill in the hole he had carved for himself in my psyche. Kevin ordered me one time to call him Sir, and I flat-out said no. When he asked why not, clearly sensing a storm behind my refusal, I told him that was Aiden's name. And he apologized, further cementing my knowledge that he wasn't worthy anyway.

When Aiden and I got back in touch last year and and were spending lots of time chatting about this and that, getting to know each other again, he mentioned that I should remember what it looked like when he took the leash off the Dom side of himself. I brushed it off with a demand to know why he would want to remind me of that. From the other side of a computer keyboard, it was easy to feign a screen of disgust over what was actually a powerful wave of, Oh god, yes please.

We've gotten to go many more places, play with many more things, and take our sweet time doing it over the last year, more so than we ever could have the first time around, when both of our lives were in uproar. He's made good on a handful of his threats, and proven that he knows a thing or two about how I work, both physically and mentally.

Apparently we've now explored enough that we're reaching some of his untested boundaries, instead of all of mine. Knowing that's the explanation, the grumpiness is giving way to a desire to hold hands and go exploring. Sometimes even I need to be reminded to look for the silver lining. I do love a good adventure...

Coming Around

I guess I panicked a little more than was necessary about the whole "death of passion" thing...but that's been my experience in the past. The first few weeks or months of a relationship are great, and then it gets boring. I don't ever want to be in a Hallway Sex relationship, where the partners just say "fuck you" as they pass in the hallway. Perhaps wanting to be conscious has led via over-correction to paranoia.

Aiden pointed out to me today that he's a bit new to this too, saying, "The D/s dynamic I have with you is the deepest and most intense one I have ever sustained. And sometimes I get wrapped up in the fuzzy being in love with you."

My first reaction was to point out that I tend to forget that, because it doesn't exactly add to the effectiveness of his Domination if I'm reminding myself that he's new to it.

But after some further consideration, I realized that reminder may have been exactly what I needed. Not to trigger my sympathy or what have you, but because the realization that he doesn't feel he has all the answers already makes me more willing to help find them.

He told me last week that he was enjoying an image in which I sat in front of him, telling him my sexual fantasies, while he slowly ordered the removal of my clothing one piece at a time. That's one of the most terrifying things he's ever said to me, and even though we were sixty miles from each other at the time and he wasn't asking me to do it then, I had a knee-jerk fear reaction.

Talking face-to-face is hard for me. Talking about my fantasies is also hard. The thought of combining those two things made me want to cry. I had an image of myself sitting down, clamming up, trying unsuccessfully to force words out, and then just freaking out and crying shamefully. That's what I did last time someone put me in that position.

A few days later I wrote the I Want entry, partially because it was on my mind and I felt like writing something hot, and partially to head off Aiden's threat. "There's nothing to say - I've already told you everything."

But my thoughts have changed a little. It feels less like a pressuring threat with today's new considerations and more like he's legitimately looking for ideas. So, I have one more that didn't make it into the poetic written record.

Ask me sometime. In person.

...maybe feed me a glass of mead first.