Indigo Boy

I've been hesitant to write about this for awhile, but this blog is an exercise in release for me: in finding "liberty"... and also to exorcise the demons that reared their ugly heads these last few weeks. Censorship simply does not have a place here. Warning: this post should not be read by the faint-hearted, the blind, or sexually prude.

For anyone keeping up with my blog, you might be wondering why I haven't written as much as I did in the beginning. Well, a few repairs were being made: my computer, my camera, and then my heart. About a week after I arrived in Liberty, Indigo Boy told me that he had slept with someone else. I knew something was up because he had been spending quite a bit of time with this girl from work the week that I left... I'll call her Scottish Whore. I call her that because I knew she was sketchy from my own experience, but then later I learned she had slept with more than a handful of people from work. That he fucked her came as a shock because Indigo Boy and I had just spent the last week talking on the phone every night, texting throughout the day and exchanging sweet nothings throughout my trip out here.

We agreed to have an open relationship after I left. There was no other alternative to our age difference or the literal distance we would be apart. I asked two things from him, however, before I left: use protection and don't sleep with anyone from work. I had already broken my cardinal rule of not sleeping with anyone from work by getting involved with him and I knew that if he did things would get very, very messy. There is something sacred about the workplace that needs to be honored. Sex just simply doesn't belong in the equation. Lesson learned for me: NEVER sleep with anyone from work!!!!!

Even though we had an open relationship, we were still very much together. We texted and talked everyday. We had spent the last three months practically inseparable. He had been so involved in my life; I wondered how his 24-year old attention span would deal with my absence once I was gone. I knew he was sad. The last picture I saw of him on Facebook taken by a friend of his after I left made my heart break. He looked so dejected. I knew he was lonely. I didn't think anything, at first, of him spending time with Scottish Whore because she claimed to be a lesbian and Indigo Boy insisted that he wasn't attracted to her "in that way." He said they were just hanging out because I was gone and he just wanted to play Wii. I told him that I thought she was seducing him with Wii. He is twenty-four, after all. He laughed and said, "I don't think so!" and I believed what he said to me. How could I not? He sent me a text pic of him kissing me while he was at her house. I told him to tell her "hello" for me while he was hanging out with her and he said "Scottish Whore says 'hello,' too!" Smiley face included or something insidious like that.

So I believed him... and then one night we talked on the phone before he was running out the door to her house again at 11pm. My antennae went on high alert. He said he would text me in the morning. Nothing. He had never done that to me before. He was always so good about checking in with me, doing what he said he would do, coming through for me in a pinch. I called him, left him a few frantic text messages the next day. Nothing again. I was 2000 miles away and I knew he had fucked her.

And then all hell broke loose. I knew this girl from work. I had hung out with her once before about a year ago and then stayed far, far away from her because I got such sketchy vibes. The night I hung out with her, she told me that she had left Scotland because her best friend's boyfriend had killed someone or something crazy like that and then she and her best friend got caught up in it and needed to get out of Scotland. Then she came onto me. And then I said my goodbyes and never looked back. I had a civil working relationship with her after that, but I kept my distance. I thought she was sketchy, needy and unstable. Whenever I saw her at work she was always complaining about this person and that person or how she had been wronged in some way. She looked like a strung-out junkie, too, with her pasty skin and sack of bones that she called a body. She was wretched. And then Indigo Boy slept with her... and I lost my shit.

I know it takes two to tango and I certainly don't hold Scottish Whore solely accountable for the whole thing, but I have very little sympathy for her. She is a lying bitch. She swore she would never have done anything to hurt me and then said she didn't want anything more to do with him after she found out we were together. I told her I wouldn't put it past her to keep sleeping with him. Had I been her, even if she was misled by him, if I found out that the guy I had just slept with was already involved with someone else (especially with someone I knew!), I wouldn't have slept with him again. After one stupid fling? And all the drama that is sure to come after? She's thirty-two years old. Come on woman!

I'm sure he told her he didn't want to be me with me anymore... that he wanted to be with her. Whatever he needed to tell her to keep sleeping with her. And then he just felt guilty for the whole mess and then he was trapped. There were four things at play here: he was lonely and vulnerable, she sank her claws into him, Indigo Boy and I had shit to work out that we never got a chance to and he has a terrible pattern of overlapping his relationships. I think he did the same thing to me after his "best friend" K freaked out on me one night after Indigo Boy and I had been together for a month or so. I thought her reaction was strange because he swore nothing was up between them and that, really, they were just friends. I told him that any girl who reacts that strongly to her "best friend's" new woman clearly has feelings for him and that he better sort that out, but I chalked it up to a 24-something crush. I didn't think he was lying to me. Now that I look back on it, he was probably sleeping with her the whole time, too.

So, I feel duped. Yes, like a "foolish woman" as my mother called me once she found out I was dating a 24-year old guy. I "shouldn't have"... shouldn't have gone there, shouldn't have done it, shouldn't have even bothered. But I couldn't resist. He was so disarmingly sweet. His energy so pure and fresh. How could I resist falling for him: this gorgeous boy with caramel skin, puppy-dog eyes, pillow lips and a body that makes women ravenous; this adoration, this soulful yearning, this love? We spent a full three months doting on each other everyday. We spent my birthday weekend dancing and rolling among the bedsheets, went to Santa Barbara for Valentine's Day, San Francisco for a four-day roadtrip, and did almost everything together. We are both die-hard romantics. Music was one of our connections and, though, we shared many songs, Esthero became our muse. He called me "That Girl." He was my "Indigo Boy." Yes, the sex was hot, but it was our kiss that sealed the deal for me. It was a kiss that I hadn't shared with someone since I was his age. It was the kiss of being twenty-four: a kiss full of belief and hope, rapture, longing, comfort, and desire. We kissed in elevators, among the pillows for hours, whenever we saw each other we kissed and, then, everything was made right in the world. It feels like we spent most of our time kissing. Just kissing. But he's twenty-four. He doesn't want to just kiss! He wants to fuck and experience sex in all forms! I get it... I was twenty-four once.

I guess, these last three weeks have just been a painful wake-up call for me. I knew that things weren't right the last few weeks when I was still in L.A. I was in the midst of transition--quitting the job I had been at for 2-1/2 years, packing up all my things to go, trying to settle my heart as I tried absorbing this separation from Indigo Boy. He, too, was in the midst of transition. He knew I was leaving. He helped me move things around in my parents' basement. We spent as many nights as we could together going out or hanging out at his place. We talked or texted on the phone every day as he went carousing around with his boys or went to practice (he's an amazing dancer, btw... exceptionally talented), but I knew I was cramping his style. I knew he was flirting with girls and we would joke and tease about it. He was so much younger than me. I didn't want to get in the way of his having a good time or doing what 24-year olds do. His flirtations didn't really matter to me, anyway. What mattered was that I knew I was his #1 Girl and that we still communicated everyday or made the time to spend with each other when we could. But the last few weeks before I left were fraught with uncertainty--what would happen to "us" once I was gone? Would we, could we still remain true to each other in our hearts? Would we be able to withstand the pain and difficulty of what would come?

Apparently not. I don't know. I broke up with him last week because he handled things so poorly. I just don't know anymore where the lines of truth and loyalty exist for him anymore. He betrayed me. He strung me along with half-assed attempts at saying sorry, asking me what he could do to possible make it right again between us because he didn't want to throw what we had away and then kept fucking her and telling her only god knows what. Now she's probably hooked on him and embarrassed about the whole thing and acting needy and confused and he's too much of a softy to tell her goodbye. He couldn't say goodbye to me. I asked him after it all happened if he wanted to break up with me--that he should have just done so. He didn't have to kick me in the stomach, too. He insisted, No! No, I don't want to break up with you! I don't want to throw all of this away! But he transferred the feelings he had for me to her because she's there; I'm not. I don't want to be involved in that kind of bullshit. And I got pulled into it for a hot second. And, man, I went there. All my ugly junior high school vitriol came spewing out. My anger, all the hurts that I've already experienced with other men, all the many, many disappointments and betrayals.

I scared him off with the intensity of my anger and pain and probably drove the two of them closer together. But I don't regret doing so. I am learning that my emotions are my emotions and to own them fully and, also, to express them when they need to be released. Anger and pain are especially ugly emotions, but if you don't release them they sit in you and fester and morph into something much uglier and destructive. I've done that for too long--held my emotions in or taken them out on myself. And I don't want to hide my emotions anymore. Or to manipulate my emotions to hold onto something or someone because I am alone. I have learned how to be alone. My challenge is to learn and trust to be with another. I do believe, though that I will recognize my love when a Man can deal with the uncertainty of my pain and discomfort.

I told Indigo Boy once that though our bodies may age, our emotions do not. Each person's emotional world is full of every heartache, betrayal or loss that one may have suffered since childhood. Each person learns to deal with the pain or express it in different ways, but those seeds of pain still exist. I thought, at my age, that I would be able to handle it better once the inevitable came to pass, but I did not. My pain still exists. I am still a little girl lost, a jr. high school bitch, a woman who loves and distrusts men, a mother that has not found her child. I knew he would sleep with someone else or many, many other women. I knew that one would create heartache for the other. One of us would have found someone else at some point. We have different needs at the ages that we are: I want security; he wants to have fun. I just didn't think it would come so soon. I just believed that what we had created together would endure. I thought that what we has shared was sacred and that he would have honored it in some way.

I went there: into the magic and romance of being twenty-four again and I reveled in it. I swam in our love. We learned to swim together--to open ourselves to the uncertainty of the depth we may find, but then to release ourselves into the joy of finding equal amounts of recognition and nourishment. We introduced each other to different worlds. Our friends celebrated our love. We talked about the future--the near future seemed too uncertain, but the faraway future seemed like a distinct possibility. But I was more ready for it than he was. He hasn't been through enough bad relationships yet to know how to recognize something really good when he has it and then what to do to preserve it.

I don't regret "going there" with him. He gave me so much. I know he's a good guy with a beautiful heart. I can give him a reprieve for being twenty-four, but I just hope he knows that if he keeps going for older women, he better be prepared for the Pandora's Box of emotions that comes with it. I can forgive him for his indiscretions, another woman may not be so kind. For me, it took more than a decade to experience the purity and sanctity of the kind of love we shared. For him, he may find it sooner or more often than me. Maybe Indigo Boy will; maybe he won't. I hope he does. I hope he beds many women. I hope he gets his heart broken. I hope he learns all the ups and downs and ins and outs of love. I hope he learns from his mistakes and learns to be a better man.

For me, I would rather have loved and lost than not loved him at all. That Girl will always remember and hold Indigo Boy close to her heart, even as she says goodbye...