The Dateable Dork

I had planned on writing about my absolutely awful date tonight, but instead, I received an email in my inbox this afternoon that completely knocked the wind out of me, compelling me to write a different but very meaningful post.  Details of the troll date will have to wait until tomorrow.

As you all know far too well, my relationship with Hot Marine has been somewhat entertaining and distracting at best, and completely toxic, debilitating, and destructive at worst.  My feelings toward him range from lust to desire to adoration to infatuation to hate to loathing and everything in between.  For some inexplicable reason, he possesses a power over me that, so far, no man has been able to match, or even come close for that matter.  Despite my numerous attempts (of highly varying levels of dedication), I can never manage to escape his intoxicating grip and electrifying pull.  I am magnetically drawn to him whether I like it or not, and most of the time, I think I actually like it.  It is strange to me that I enjoy torturing myself like this, but I have accepted it as one of the foundations of my existence, supporting me yet simultaneously threatening to topple my entire world, one unreturned email at a time.

Two years ago, I fell for Hot Marine very hard and very fast, and my intoxication with him grew just about as fast as his boredom with me.  He proceeded to disappear into thin air and I crashed just as hard and fast as I had been swept up in the first place.  Several months of severe depression followed, which I think was the most disturbing period of my entire life, followed closely by my mental breakdown after “the incident” last fall and my year-long withdrawal after the five-year BF and I broke up several years earlier.  Finally he resurfaced, apologized casually without really meaning it, and in a fierce yearning to keep him in my life through any means necessary, we started having occasional casual sex and exchanging sexually explicit emails and photographs.  If I couldn’t make him like me, I could at least make him want me.  And I was ok with that, but the long-outstanding wound from the initial devastation never fully healed, and I admit that my feelings for him remain, often below the surface, to this day.

Lately I’ve been realizing that Hot Marine has a genuinely human side, just like the rest of us, and that perhaps I should stop masking the multitude of intense feelings that I have for him and just put it all out on the table for him to peruse, to soak in, to take or leave as he pleases.  Honestly, how could our completely dysfunctional relationship possibly get any worse?  Perhaps he could appreciate the human side of me, just how I was beginning to see the human side of him.  I see a man who is frustrated with his job, misses his family, wallows in the loneliness of singledom in the throes of a huge city, and takes occasional comfort in the sight of a familiar face and the touch of familiar lips, even if for only a brief moment and accompanied by the need to satisfy his primal sexual desires.  I hear him talk about trust and friendship and life and work, and I decide to tear down the wall and let him see me for who I truly am – for better or for worse.

And so I sent him the text of this post, completely unedited and uncropped, which put my feelings for him out there in the light of day for all to see.  I hesitated in hitting send for quite some time, as my finger hovered perilously over the irreversibly final button, finally closing my eyes, taking a deep breath, and sending it off into his inbox.  And then I waited.  And I wondered if this was the end.  And a little over a day later, he responded with a one-line email that said that my writing was “unbelievably moving, on many levels,” and I took that to be a relatively good sign.  It was a human response.  It was nice to see a glimmer of emotion in his tone – a rarity.  And I thought and thought about how I wanted to respond, if at all, but before I came to a decision, another email popped up in my inbox this afternoon – a completely unsolicited follow-up to his initial response.  Hesitant again, I opened the message and proceeded to break out in tears at my desk in the office.  It was something that I had long-since accepted that I would never see, but there it was, in black and white, with an underlying emotional tone that completely swept the wind out of me.  It read as follows (slightly edited to remove personal information):

“[DD] – your writing here has been very moving to me.  I honestly never realized this side of you before.  As I reflect, I am even more painfully sorry about hurting you in the past – something I never realized fully.  I know it’s long-gone-water-under-the-bridge, but I wanted to say this to you anyway.”

He apologized.  After two years, he apologized.  A truly heartfelt, emotional, genuine apology.  He apologized once before, several years ago, but it was painfully obvious that he only half-meant it and didn’t really understand what he was apologizing for in the first place.  He was trying to get me into bed – how pathetic that I slept with him anyway.  But it seems now that by finally exposing him to my unedited stream-of-consciousness, he finally realized the magnitude of the impact he had on me, and that perhaps I am a human being with emotional fragility instead of simply a semen receptacle.  What a novel idea. 

This email has had me in a semi-catatonic state ever since I first opened it this afternoon.  It was a long time coming, and I’m beyond floored that it actually arrived in my inbox.  I think I’m still in a state of shock, but at the same time, I’ve already shed countless tears at the knowledge that this finally provides some closure on a long-outstanding wound, closure that I had long-since accepted would forever elude me.  I’m glad that he finally came to the realization that he holds an intense power over me that still lingers all these years later, that surfaces in my fingertips as I explore his body in my bed, that brings a smile to my lips and a tingling to my stomach at the thought of seeing him, smelling him, tasting him.  Part of me wonders why Hot Marine is still a part of my life so long after our brief affair came to a tragic and destructive end, but another part of me doesn’t question the small blessings that simultaneously add joy and pain to my life, for without pain, one could never appreciate the amazingly awe-inspiring joy.

Receiving this email brought joy into my life today – for being treated like a human being, for getting a bit of emotional closure on a scarred, battered relationship, and for being seen in a new, raw, naked light.  Isn’t it ironic that after years of having sex, I feel as if Hot Marine finally saw me naked for the first time.