I am a simple girl with simple needs. I like good food, good music, good friends and good people. Art and sports that enjoyable are a lovely compliment but not even always required. Honesty and the pursuit of knowledge are really the only things I think I’d ever require from anyone who wanted to be in my life and yet there’s so much that goes into all of those things. When I was younger and convinced I was falling in love the sheer rapture of them loving me back was enough for me to deal with foolishness that wasn’t in line with anything I really wanted. And as I grew older I recognized that I had deliberately been pursuing men that could not love me in the way that I wanted them to in the end. They were dashing and smart and honest about being dishonest with other people so it felt good that they were honest with me lol. Very flawed logic I know but it made sense in my hard to find but oversized heart. And then I found kink and while I felt there could be love there I didn’t find it initially and got over my first Dom so easily that I was convinced that love would never be part of the equation. RS and GN taught me I was wrong in that regard but then DM and MW messed up my calculations because while I deeply cared about one of them I was stupidly in love with the other. When he stepped out of my life I disengaged from love almost wholesale because it hurt me to my core to think about loving anyone that wasn’t him. I prayed for the feelings to go away, I lit candles and hoped it would convince the universe to take away the intense feelings. Eventually, the lack of contact settled into a numbness that I ignored. Talking to GN and reconnecting with my kink needs has let me remember that I can’t do the vanilla thing again and that the numbness didn’t kill the emotion. Just buried it for a while. I’ve read about how to rid myself of these feelings. Almost did hypnosis to see if they would go away and all I’m thinking would have happened is my brain would have shattered a bit when the emotion came pounding back. My pragmatic brain has no delusions that anyone I used to love will ever return the emotion. A billion years ago I was heavily into astrology. Looking at both my western sun sign and Chinese sign, I came to the conclusion that this was my last shot at finding love in the karmic sense. I was convinced that this life was punishment for being a total jackass in my previous lives and I needed to experience this heartache as a woman in order for me to have a hope for an afterlife that was peaceful or a shot for a less shitty rebirth a la Defending Your Life. Good movie if you haven’t seen it. What I’m thinking now was I needed to understand the depth of love that I could experience and it wouldn’t destroy my life. It would make me more compassionate and understanding and that I would try to find connections to people that were both fruitful and without gain for me. So as I’m sitting here understanding that part of me will always be attached to men I’ve loved and there’s no way to make that diminish it directly, this poem/prayer started dancing in my brain. It’s rough so if it makes no sense I apologize.