Unspoken#2 - Man at Work (M)

By far, this is the most difficult weight to carry. The excitement is so intense, and I must enjoy it in the most private of settings, only when I am alone. At my job I am surrounded by people and because I stand out, I am always noticed. At home, I am most vulnerably exposed to the very person I can not tell -- the man who would be most devastated by the information. He knows me so well and he knows my heart. He reads my every word, my every behavior and my every movement pretty damned precisely.

And so I find myself attempting to learn a skill that I have never before needed with my life-partner (H); I'm generating this world apart from him -- a little pocket just for myself. I'm carving out time and space for the life of ME, that individual I was before I became US. And so thoroughly did I become US, so willing was I to turn away from the world, away from my life outside of US that now I feel I have abandoned that individual altogether. And the biggest fear that I had coming into our relationship was this fate that I'm facing right now: that Individual from my past went in hiding, knowing that one day it would blast its way through this cocoon of safety and would ruin this precious gem that we've been carefully nesting. That I would allow for my selfish desires to pierce through this delicate fabric of untainted, pure love that H and I have been wrapped up in and wound together with... I was aware of this fearful possibility at the very moment we began, and yet I kept on.

Today at work, I found myself in a conversation with M and a couple of other coworkers -- it was a heated philosophical, ethical, and political conversation wrapped up in one. I saw deeper into the world-view that M holds, and found myself even more attracted to him and to the idea of being able to maintain some kind of secret future with this man; I just know he has it in him to follow through with the type of restraint* that is necessary to do it and get away with it. He has a life he won't abandon, and I have a life I won't abandon. It could work. (Or is that me just being hopeful?) Already, I've set up my pieces to fall in place at just the right moment, as I also get the sense that he is moving his pieces, mirroring mine and together we are guiding our separate paths to take us where we both want to be... just a little bit closer to the other. I feel like an artist with a new project. Scoping. Vying for all the angles. Searching for solutions to get what I want. That's exactly it, isn't it? I always get what I want. And here I am presented for the first time with something I want that everyone in the world tells me I can't have. I don't have the rights. I would be in the wrong.

The one person who wants to give me license is the very man who would benefit from me taking that which I want, and giving the world, and all the world's judgments a big fat Fuck You. He is daring me with every look that says: come on, let's go have some fun; and with every innuendo disguised within innocuous terms that says: really, you know you want to. He espouses personal freedom on a daily basis and tempts me with the bait of his charm and wit. This desire is monstrous -- it has the potential to raze my marriage to the ground, and that in itself presents another face of appeal -- I want to seize the beast of desire, to empower it, and put it to use for my benefit.

*about restraint: here is the irony that applies to this situation -- in order to maintain the lustrous love affair between two otherwise married people, which is being sold as an act of pleasure-seeking freedom, the two people must abide by strict limitations in order to "get away with it." To have a lover on the side and still be a good, loving husband, one must regulate where and when emotions enter and exit; time tables must be checked and double-checked; and so such freedom must come only in bursts -- short, powerful fits of interpersonal exchange.