My Polyamorous Heart.

[Guest post by Rowdy]

One of the typical assumptions about monogamy is that the heart is a defined quantity, to love more than one person is to divide it, to find a new love is to push the last completely out, and each person it's given to gets the same thing.

That’s never felt true for me, the way I experience love. When describing my heart, I’ve found this metaphor works pretty well:

I like to think of my polyamorous heart as a house with many rooms. It’s constructed by the people I love, and filled with warmth and memories. It grows as each person I love adds something to my house, maybe a decoration or boardgame, maybe an entire new room.

Many people enter my heart, friends and strangers, and hang around in the common spaces... sometimes just a short while, and sometimes much longer. They wear down the floors and scuff the walls, they throw parties and help me fix the place up.

Each new romantic love builds their own room, an addition onto my house. We work on it together and it grows over time, a special place filled with emotions, experiences, and memories. There is always space to add another room, and build additions onto the rooms already built - it only takes time and energy, the material provided by our lives. No two rooms are alike, each one shaped by the person who built it.

Some of those people may leave my life, but the room they built in my heart stays, like the bedroom of a child moved off to college, a place of growth, accomplishments, and warm memories - saved just for that person who made it their home for a while. Some people leave their room nicely as a place for fond memories, others trash the room on their way out, but the place they built in my heart stays.

They may come by occasionally, or they may make their life in other hearts and never return, but there will always be a place of happiness that they built in my heart, a place they are always welcome to visit.

Sometimes my house is a loud party, sometimes it is lonely and quiet; there are parts of it I visit every day, and others I haven’t visited in ages.

This is my poly heart. A house built by the people who’ve lived there, filled with the warmth of life, love, and memories.

Beautiful Dream.

(Yes, I'm so tired I've been reduced to coming up with post material while asleep. Four shifts to go!)

I dreamed was walking down a busy street, and there was a woman standing by the curb yelling at people as they passed by. Horrible things. Insults of every kind--racial, size-based, sexist--anything about them that was anything, that distinguished them from a department store mannequin in any way, she would pick out and scream at them. People were cringing and shying away, kids started crying. I was horrified and upset.

I stopped just out of her earshot and called the police. "We know about her, ma'am," said the dispatcher, sounding tired. "We can't do anything about it. It's a First Amendment issue."

So I decided that I would stand next to her, and every time someone came by, tell them something good about themselves. I wasn't condescending; I put all of my love into it. As long as she stayed there, I did, screaming at strangers:

"YOU HAVE A BEAUTIFUL FAMILY!"
"I LOVE YOUR HAIR!"
"YOU LOOK SO CONFIDENT!"
"YOU ARE A UNIQUE HUMAN BEING FULL OF POTENTIAL!"
"THOSE ARE FREAKING AWESOME SIDEBURNS!"

I couldn't shut her up, but I could add my voice.

War of the sexes, with pretentious line breaks.

If we are at war

and men lose by falling in love

and women lose by making love

who would ever want to win?

Muscle.

The meat of my pectoralis muscle is hidden under my breasts, but at the top, there's an exposed strip, a sweeping curve running over my ribcage to my shoulder on each side. It's hard, tough, and surprisingly large, and with one hand on my ribs, I can feel it flex. It's a strange strength to find within myself.

The other day at work, an old lady started to lose her balance. She'd had a stroke and one leg was weak but she was trying to walk anyway, and in slow motion she started to wobble and crumple and sink down. And didn't fall. I wrapped my arms around her and picked her up and bodily lifted her back into bed. I put her down all crookedwise and awkward and kind of on the edge, and it took two more people to get her situated properly. When it was just a matter of getting everything all lined up nice, I could barely lift a third of her.

I complained earlier about being bad at being on top during sex. I'm not always. When I fuck Rowdy on top, the motion I use is... like I was fucking him. Like he had a pussy and I was driving a cock into it, hard. All this is obviously the exact opposite of what's going on. But that's how it feels and that's when it works. The mental image of "I'm going to slide my pussy up and down your cock" doesn't mean anything to me. What I want to do is grab his shoulders and fucking slam into him.

Maybe it's cliche to find the sexiest part of a man to be the muscles. Maybe I'm cliche. It's funny, though, I've never been into big showy muscles, six-packs and all that. I just want to feel the muscles, under the surface. To see an arm--clothed, smooth-skinned, average sized, little light hairs, entirely ordinary and civilized-looking--and wrap my hand around it and feel the hard little lump of animal beneath.

I like to fight back sometimes. Submission doesn't always mean serving yourself up on a silver platter, patiently holding every limb out for their convenience so they can tie it just so. Sometimes it means "if you can take me, you can have me." I'm strong enough to put up a fight and not so strong that I have to hold back. Getting hit, or fucked, or both, is a different thing when you're fighting back, With all your muscles working, with your mind and adrenaline racing, with your body poised to act rather than merely receive, sex changes. It transforms from a dynamic of a hard surface against a soft one, to two hardnesses, not in harmony but in delicious tension.

A bittersweet emergency Christmas.

I drove an ambulance for two years. No one ever died in my truck. Not one. Plenty of people were dead when we found them, and a few died before we could load them, and I'm sure many died shortly after we dropped them off.

The one who came closest was D. We picked him up at a nursing home, to take him home to die. When we got there he was already doing that fish-breathing dying people do, those desperate irregular gasps like each breath is a load they can barely lift. His son was by his side, holding his hand.

My partner mouthed to me, "Let's move quick. He's CTD." Circling The Drain. Ha ha! Like in a potty! We are monsters because if we were human we couldn't help people. Have you ever had to pick up human fingers and put them in a bag? It's a lot easier to do if you're a dumb callous jerk.

So we were monsters, and loaded the truck fast, and drove to his home. The whole way there D gasped, on and off, sometimes stopping for a long moment and seeming still but then finding the strength for one more breath. He reacted to nothing in the world, not sound nor sight, but when his son held his hand, D held it back. Weakly. And he held on. For fifteen miles, with my own breath held at every traffic light, he held on. We got to his home. His whole family was there. They were all around him, in his own home where he'd raised his children and played with his grandchildren, when he finally stopped gasping.

We put him in his own bed, and washed his face, and pulled the sheets up nicely. We made him look okay, look comfortable. He'd made it home.

---

M was the very opposite. We came to take her from her home so she could die in a hospice. It was better for her there--she'd get more care, be kept cleaner and medicated more consistently, and the burden would be off the family. It made sense. But it wasn't her home.

M wasn't old, but she had cancer. When we came into the room and saw her, she was, like D, seemingly unaware of anything. She did not look at us, did not move when we said her name. But when we got ready to take her out of her bed, before we had even touched her, she stopped breathing.

I touched her neck. I felt her heart beat a few times, weak and irregular, and then just a thready little thrill, and then nothing. For long enough to be sure, nothing at all. The family looked at me expectantly. "She's gone," I said. It felt like a stupid cliche, but I couldn't think of a better way to say it.

Her husband lost it. He forgot we were there, forgot his own family even. He just crumpled and sobbed. It wasn't dignified in any way; he wailed. He kissed her and kneeled by the bed and bawled until snot ran down his face. We let him be. I went into the living room and made calls to our dispatch, the hospice agency, and the funeral home. We realized we'd left our jump kit in the bedroom, and I snuck back in as unobtrusively as possible behind the husband to grab it. I needn't have bothered. I could have set off a grenade behind him and he wouldn't have known.

She had to die sooner rather than later to do it, but M, like D, didn't die alone and she didn't die in a strange sterile place. Although both of them seemed to know nothing of the world, I think they knew when they were home.

---

R didn't die in front of me. We came on the same mission as M, to take her from her home to a hospice. Her home was nice--not fancy, not big, not in a nice area--but nice. It was clean and calm with art on the walls and her bed was was big and old and looked comfy. The place we were taking her was also clean and calm, but the art was all generic soothing landscapes and the beds had plastic mattresses. This was her last moments in any place that was home.

Her husband, quite elderly and moving slowly, followed us out. He wasn't coming in the ambulance. Presumably he later came and visited her in the hospice, but this was the last time he would be home with her. In the parking lot, before we loaded her into the ambulance, we paused so he could say goodbye to her. He didn't say anything. He bent down, slow and unsteady, and kissed her like no one was watching.

---

We were cleaning a corpse, once, at the ER. Like ya do. The girl helping me clean him was kind of a sensitive type, definitely not a subscriber to the "I'm frivolous and callous because I care" philosophy, but she was holding it together okay. He was on the older side of middle-aged, not really old enough to die, but he'd been obese and a lifelong smoker and heavy drinker and that helps us make it okay in our minds. If someone didn't take perfect care of themselves, you know, that means they sorta deserved it and we shouldn't feel so bad. It's not that we're evil, it's just that we'll believe anything to not feel so bad.

But we took off his shirt and suddenly the girl started sniffling and holding back tears. I looked and I knew why. He had a tattoo that read, "If love could have kept you alive, you never would have died." Underneath was a picture of his daughter.

---

There are two paintings hanging on my wall. They're from a woman I cared for, way back when I worked at an assisted living facility. She had to leave the facility when she broke her hip and her health got worse, and she gave away most of her paintings--there were dozens--to the aides. One of the paintings is from long ago, back when she was healthy. It's an exotic market scene, rendered in blue and gold with wild, abstract brushstrokes, with birds in cages and vaguer figures suggesting hanging fruit and gourds.

The other painting was from after she suffered the brain injury that put her in assisted living. It's clumsy and simple, painted with the brush held in a twisted, contracted fist. But what's more noticeable is that it's an entirely literal, dead-center and unembellished image of some nice flowers in a pot. All of her paintings after the injury were like that.

But she never stopped painting.

Gray Rain.

I didn't go back home after work this morning. I clocked out at 7, drove only as far as Concord, and figured that since I had no particular schedule I'd hang out in Minuteman Park until the rush hour traffic lightened up a bit.

I was still in my scrubs and warmup jacket. It was cold out, but not bitter cold, with a light gray rain falling, enough to feel, not enough to soak. The trees were just starting to turn , still green with only shades and flashes of yellow and red. Old stone walls lined empty fields and dirt paths. I walked a little ways into the park, far enough that I couldn't see roads or another person, and sat on a weathered granite bounder. A squirrel perched on a nearby branch, chattering loudly, staring at me with a level fearless gaze and chirping again before running off on important squirrel business.

I sat and thought. Sometimes I didn't think. Sometimes I meant to think but just looked, just took in the chilly air and the wavering leaves of the trees.

I thought about the two halves of my life. ER and BDSM. They're both characterized by secrets, by powerful sensation and emotion, by the human body. When you deal with people's bodies you deal with their whole lives, and what you see is as funny and sad and strange as people are. And yet in another way, people always hold back. Seeing a person in great pain or great pleasure, seeing them naked literally and metaphorically, shows you things you wouldn't otherwise see--but not everything. There are things people know, things people are, that cannot be wrenched out, that sometimes cannot even be given.

There was a tree with big diamond-shaped leaves across the field from me, its leaves yellowing at the edges but still a brilliant green at their core.

I've written about transcendence before. It's understandably hard to put in words. The closest I get is along the lines of "There's something more than... nnnuh. Than, you know. There's more than this." There's something more to people than bodies, and that's why I am so comfortable with and so fascinated by those bodies. Bodies have parts, they have insides, they're possible to take apart just like any other object. People, less so.

Before I had any experience healthcare or BDSM, I loved gory horror movies. My degree is in film, and I wrote my thesis on trashy horror films, then later worked as set decorator and propmaster on one. As far as I know there isn't a tremendous correlation between kinky people and horror fans, which surprises me. Then again, I haven't watched that much horror lately. I still enjoy it, but when I can get myself tied up and tortured and feel my own body being treated like a piece of meat... I don't crave it. There's comparisons to be made between the ER and horror movies too but I feel wrong making them.

A large brown bird swooped between trees, only a few feet away but without a sound. From the silence, I think it was an owl staying up late. I looked for it in the tree but it had disappeared among the branches. High overhead, from a different tree, I heard the cry of a hawk. Little sparrows flitted around close to the ground.

When I have to take care of a dead person, I always find myself talking to them. Not in a big emotional dramatic way, not offering grief or blessings. But not in a cavalier joking way either. I just talk to them the way I talk to patients, calm and nicey-nice and narrating what I'm doing. "'Scuse me ma'am, I gotta reach across you here for a second, thanks." It's just a habit.

I started to walk back to my car. The rain was still falling gently, the air filled with the cool smell of wet grass.

Sex and BDSM are the restorative factors in my own life. They don't take strength; they give me the strength that I can carry out into difficult situations, or the joy that lets me really enjoy the rest of the world. Life is better with a kiss still lingering on your lips, or a bruise just below the neckline of your scrubs. Life is easier.

Sitting on a rock out in the rain doesn't make life easier, but sometimes it makes it make a little more sense.

Things you should know about my vagina.

Something you should know about my vagina: it is not fragile. It is a big, tough muscle, as capable of stretching and flexing and holding its own as a bicep or a thigh. My vagina can take a hit. Every part is tough, gristly, firmly attached; it would take a very deliberate or completely insane attack to truly damage it. I may be sensitive in this area, my nerves may complain, but mt flesh itself is nowhere near its breaking point.

Something else you should know about my vagina: it's mine. Not idealogically mine like my soul is; literally mine, like my car is. I have a vested interest in keeping my car running and undented, but sometimes I'll do donuts or drive offroad or through puddles that are just a little too deep, because my car is mine to play with.

And one last thing about my vagina: it's temporary. We build things, sometimes, with no clear idea that they will end; companies do not plan to go out of business eventually, houses are not built to only stand for a while, governments do not conduct business keeping in mind that their rule has to end sometime. But they will. And on my vagina the deadline is even more clear: it's got about sixty years left. Maximum. After that, everything I might do to preserve my vagina's pristine and dignified nature becomes an extremely moot point. So... smoke 'em if you got 'em.

I am not am accidental slut. I am a slut by way of philosophical conviction.

Vanilla Life: Three Stories.

Junior year of college, I spend spring break at a "retreat" to a Zen monastery. It's much weirder than I expected--everyone, male and female, sleeps on the floor in a big pile, for about five hours a night. Our days are split between the chores and maintenance of the monastery and hours of meditation. Hours. This is how I discover I am unable to meditate. I kneel, and am quiet, and cannot still my mind. I feel every minute of those hours. I flit through sexual fantasies, recounting the plots of movies in my head, doing math, wondering if everyone besides me is in some state of transcendent bliss while I just wish I had something to read.

I am very uncomfortable and very concerned about being polite. The idea that I could simply leave--either in the sense of catching a ride back to town, or merely stepping outside the meditation hall when I damn well feel like it--does not cross my mind. The monks are harsh as drill sergeants, chastising anyone who moves out of the prescribed position for an instant. My feet fall asleep, so badly once that I can't get up because my foot is completely dead, numb and paralyzed and floppy for a minute before it can bear weight, and they tell me to stop being disruptive. They tell a lactose intolerant student that he will eat cheese or not eat; they tell all of us that the only water we may have with meals is the water we rinse our bowls with, and without complaining we drink warm dishwater. I am consumed with the idea that all my fellow students are deriving great pleasure from this experience and viewing it as a great privilege, and I am the only exception. I must not be taking this in good faith, I must not be trying hard enough.

I never do figure out what to make of this experience. It's not a simple case of "then it all turned out to be an evil cult!" The monks put a lot of effort into us and didn't get an inordinate amount of money or work from us. Most of what they did was accepted Zen practice. Maybe it was me; maybe I was not culturally or psychologically prepared for spiritual self-deprivation, and so it became plain old deprivation. Maybe if I had been able to experience meditation the entire character of the trip would have been changed for me. Maybe Zen practice itself is actually kinda fucked up.

They hit us with a stick. This is called Keisaku, it's a real thing. It's supposed to shock and focus your mind. They hit you only upon request, but they hit quite hard, a gigantic thud across your entire back. I request one every time they come down the line of students with the stick. It's not to clear my mind--I've given up on that--and it's not for some kinky thrill. It's just to get some stimulation.


---





---


Eight years old. I've just read about Harry Houdini. His life sounds so exciting! MAGIC! I get some rope and beg everyone I know to tie me to a chair so I can escape. If I get out, I tell them to do it better. If I can't get out, I don't really mind; in a weird way it's comforting. This is one of my favorite games.

Another one is getting into the cages at the vet's office (where I nominally "volunteer" but mostly just hang out). The other volunteer can only fit in the dog cages, but I'm kind of a tiny kid and can get in the cat cages with effort. I don't come out until I have to.

Any time I watch cartoons, my favorite parts are the ones where the heroes get tortured. The scene in Star Wars where the Emperor electrocutes Luke, or various cartoon shows where the enemies imprison or interrogate their captives using an Ill-Defined Blue Force Field Of Pain, hold a special fascination for me. I masturbate (although I don't know that's what it is at the time; I just touch myself a place that feels good and then there's wet stuff, masturbation is some icky complicated grownup thing) thinking about these scenes. I grind myself on the floor when I reenact them with my action figures.

Pining for apocalypse.

Apocalypse stories area always a little popular, aren't they? Whether it's nuclear war or pandemic or zombies, the upshot is the same: 99% of people are dead, and the story follows the other 1%. Their lives are utterly changed, and utterly refined down to the basics: get food, get shelter, don't get killed. There's something bizarrely appealing about this. Watching Zombieland for instance, the fun part isn't (just) blasting away zombies; the fun part is that the heroes all pile in a car and just go. They leave their homes with nothing and never come back.

I'm frustrated sometimes by the amount of stuff that's attached to me. I'm not just a woman; I'm a woman and a job and a family and a blog and a history and a group of friends and two guinea pigs and a chest of drawers and way too many books. I like all this stuff, but it's a lot to carry around. It takes up almost all my time; almost all my self. I spend half my waking life working at a job to afford the possessions and pursuits that take up the other half. Now, that job contributes an important service to society and those possessions and pursuits give me great value and joy, so it's not a bad deal and I don't intend to ditch it. I just wonder sometimes what it would be like to have a different deal with life.

Now and then I have goofy little fantasies about walking into the wilderness and whatever random spot I ended up at, there I'd be. I would need only food and water, know only trees and dirt, sleep when I was tired and eat when I was hungry. When I moved around I would bring nothing with me. I would exist only as myself. ('Til I starved to death in an abandoned bus.)

The closest I can get to that state, the little taste of apocalyptic wilderness, is sex. In sex I am naked and many things do not matter. I have a tight and sensitive pussy and that matters; what my job is and whether my car needs maintenance do not. Depersonalization, in this way, isn't a degradation but a relief. Sometimes I don't want to be all the complex and beautiful things that make up me. Sometimes I want to be a body.

Human and Animal.

I've always liked animals. I've had pets when I could, bonded with other people's pets when I couldn't, always liked looking at animals and studying them. Animals are wonderful, I think, because they don't understand. You could be a failure at life and a dog would lick your hand. You could be a disappointment to your whole family and a cat would purr if you scratched the right spot.

Animals don't have a big picture. Their world is physical and immediate. My old guinea pig was mortally ill and she still squeaked for joy when I gave her a piece of lettuce, because lettuce is delicious. There is no language, no abstraction, no consideration; life is urge and sensation.

Sometimes I walk down the street and I try to see the ape in people. I look at someone's face and I try to see it not as a personality but as the head of an animal. It's hard with strangers; it's impossible with people I know. And it's worse than impossible with myself. It's terrifying.

I dissected a cadaver once, and I've seen people's insides a couple other times, occupationally. And you know, I honestly don't believe that I have guts. Intellectually of course, but emotionally I can't look at my stomach and imagine a twist of pink-beige intestines curled up in there. It's just... stomach! It's belly button and softness and gurgles, it's aches and hunger and satisfaction, it's not just a thing that anyone with a knife could just take apart. Or, God forbid, a thing that time and fate will take apart.

Sex is when I get closest to resolving this. Because sex is urge and sensation so strong that everything else goes away, during sex--good sex at least, and rough sex much more--I can be animal. There's no words or thoughts for what I feel. The parts of my body aren't abstraction, they're penetrated and used, I'm touched on those insides I forget I have. And if I bleed, if I bruise, if I swell up in welts and spend the next few days watching my skin heal, I can believe that I have guts after all.

I am my body--the thought is a source of Cartesian denial and existential despair during lucid moments. Which is why it's good, sometimes, to have moments that are not lucid at all. When I'm being fucked hard, I am my body is only self-evident.



"What do you want?"
"Oh, I want to be known, I want to be loved, I want to be listened to, I want to learn, I want to make art, I want to go to nursing school and become a nurse practitioner, I want to buy a house, I want to have one or two kids and really treat them right, I want to get published, I want to see the world, I want to live and be healthy far into my old age, and in the end I really don't want to die."


"What do you want?"
"I want it harder, baby!"

The Sex Life of the City Pigeon.

"Have you ever seen birds having sex?" my old roommate asked me.

"Only duck-rape," I said. I used to live next to a duck pond, and in the spring it would get ugly.

"When birds have sex--consensual sex--they get really into it," Roomie said. "It's not like dogs that just hump. There's lots of flapping and squawking. It's a lot like people sex."

I miss Roomie sometimes.

And I thought of that conversation today, watching city pigeons. They live such a marginal existence--scrounging for trash, nesting where they can find a ledge or nook in the concrete, always running from people and dogs and cats, always fighting with the seagulls and crows. It's a rough life. Look at their feet; a city pigeon will more often than not be missing a toe or have an infection or some other deformity.

But there are always more pigeons. Somehow, up in those nooks and ledges, the pigeons are mating. Their lives are full of hunger, fear, and pain, and yet they find the time and the place for sex. Nor is it entirely unromantic; they have a courting ritual and both parents help to warm and guard the eggs. Pigeons huddle together in the cold, gray, hostile, nacho-crumbs-if-you're-lucky world, and they make love. Everywhere. All the time.

Is it a comfort for them? Is it just an instinctive drive? Do they merely scratch an itch, or do they feel pleasure? Do they feel love? Do they--in their limited, pigeony sort of way--forget the world for an instant?

It's endlessly inspiring to me that sex is everywhere. The best goddamn thing I know in the world, and it's happening under our feet and over our heads and all around us. In every crevice and corner of the world there's life, and where there's life there's sex. I can only hope and speculate that where there's sex there's pleasure. Maybe not explosive pleasure, maybe not exquisite sensuality--but even pigeons have to feel a little good when they fuck.

I may not always feel this way when I'm not having sex or I'm having crappy sex or my life in general is crappy, but I am living in a world of pleasure, and that's the most beautiful thing I can imagine.

Sex Versus Death.

I don't know why people talk about infinity as terrifying and unfathomable. It's finity that blows my mind. The idea of something happening for the last time. Ever. I can't wrap my head around that. One day I'll go out in the rain and it'll be the last rain I feel. I'll watch a movie and it'll turn out that it was my last movie ever. The simplest sensations of being alive, the experience of seeing a color or hearing a sound, are things I won't have forever.

And that's why I love to fuck.

Because when I get fucked, and it's good, it's transcendent. When I'm with someone I like and everything's right and I come hard enough... if I can only be alive for so long, that's about as alive as I can be. It's the best thing my mind and body know. It's not just pleasurable, it is pleasure.

This is why anti-sex rhetoric, or the promotion of joyless sex, piss me off so much. Because sex isn't a minor thing; fucking up sex is fucking up joy. Fucking up life.

When Cosmo tells you a stupid sex tip that will ruin your night, when an ad makes you feel too ugly to fuck, when a teacher tells you premarital sex makes you a bad person, it's taking away something you'll never get back. It's a small thing, it's just one bad night out of maybe ten thousand potential sex nights, but ten thousand isn't that much when you consider it's all you'll ever get. There's no ten thousand and one. I want to make it count.

Around the fourth or fifth orgasm, sometimes I get stupid. My head gets fuzzy and my muscles get spazzy. I'm just that happy. I'm just that lucky. Some people die without ever being that happy.

I don't mean to say sex is the only way to get happy, or even the best way, and I don't mean to say that it's always best to have the most sex. Obviously.

What I mean to say is that when you only get so many minutes of life, joy matters. Joy, in one form or another, spiritual or intellectual or altruistic or received directly through the genital nerves, is the only thing that matters. Good sex brings a hell of a lot of joy. And that, ultimately, is why sex matters.

Fucking is a fine thing and worth fighting for.