Cracks in the Sky

Last year, I spent the holidays trying to connect with my partners. We’d been having issues since a kink scene in June where, while pretty deep in pup space, I was rather suddenly rejected and abandoned.

I, being the traumatized twit I am, naturally blamed myself for (this feels so idiotic to even admit) not centering their emotional desires, in the first instance of them agreeing to meet some of mine in… well, in our entire relationship.

The three of us were cuddled up on the couch watching something on TV. I had asked one of them to put the collar my wife got me a year or so before on me, the last time she was trying to reaffirm her desire for me (in ways that somehow never needed to manifest in desire actually directed to me, rather than a fear that I’d leave… yes, I see it now thank you).

They, my wife and fiancée, agreed happily, closed the collar around my neck, and freed me to brainlessly flop over next to them and get scratches and affection I’m normally too scared of rejection to openly ask for.

It lasted about 20 minutes.

I’ll admit, I slip into the pup role readily and maybe too easily. People like a puppy, even a filthy mutt (in case you don’t know, yeah, I named my show after the doggirl version of trans girls playfully calling each other faggots or trannies), more consistently than they like the other me, the person with opinions and the research and knowledge to mostly back them up. I don’t even really blame them, she’s kind of a bitch. You should try being her.

That was a long winded way of saying, words are hard in pup space.

When my wife stopped petting, stopped crocheting, stopped even watching whatever was on tv in what looked to me like a dissociative episode, I wanted to help. I tried in the ways I could brain at the time. Offering closeness, warmth, cuddles. And I started trying to pull myself out of pup space. Before I got a chance she pushed me away and ran up stairs. I know she said something, but I won’t pretend I remember or understood what. Our fiancee followed her.

So, I sat there. Alone, after finally asking for the care and grace they’d both spent my entire transition telling me to ask for and expect from them. Trying to deal with the rejection, trying to remember how to person, and trying to remember why I’d even asked. I knew, knew! It was going to go like this, because that’s always how it went when I asked for something. My emotions, my reactions, were always very important, but theirs always took priority. Even now, I know it was, in part, my fault. I haven’t got my own trauma handled well enough to take up that space. To demand the promised equitable treatment.

I can say that and still know, that moment is what shattered the illusion.

Sitting on that couch, alone.

Pulling myself back together, alone.

Holding the great glass shards of my heart, feeling them cut into my palms as I held them, trying to parse how to get them back into a shape that didn’t hurt, that was supposed to be love, alone.

In the coming days, I forbade them from saying “I apologize” over the ordeal until I actually believed they understood what they’d done to me. While I tried, desperately, to remember how to rebuild our love without cutting myself.

I never gave that permission. It didn’t stop either from saying it, repeatedly. Or describing, in detail, how hurt they were I wouldn’t accept their apologies outright.

Maybe those jagged shards, lost, but squirming still within my body were the missing pieces to reassemble our love.

I spent the holidays, our anniversary, thanksgiving, Christmas, new years, trying to find joy in life, in our traditions.

They both forgot our anniversary. Maybe I should have expected that. My wife forgot our first one too… I don’t know if she forgot this year’s, but I didn’t. It’s hard, when she left me surrounded by nearly every anniversary present I’d given her, and the odd void where one would expect the reciprocal gifts she’d given me to go.

Yeah, I have gifting trauma. Can you tell?

I wrote poems Christmas Eve. One I was proud of, playing with lyrics from Christmas songs while looking down the barrel of Trump 2.0.

Another, I’m less proud of. It was an attempt to remember. To find and recapture why I loved these women. I couldn’t find it. And every attempt drove those lost shards of my heart deeper into my flesh. So, I wrote about the superficial trappings, the latkes and french toast we would make on Christmas Eve, trying to downplay the why. I focused on the superficial traits and called them such, trying to imply “the why,” I couldn’t feel was “our love,” our connections to each other.

This year, they’re both gone. One to another state, one is still in town, but elsewhere. She finally asked for the divorce I’ve been half expecting since I first told her I was a girl, when I back-pedaled to “non binary” at the fear I saw in her eyes.

I don’t want to focus on the pain, the hurt, the ways I was treated. I want to focus on the relationships in my life. To build new ones. To be a person with friends and people who care for her, and sometimes, not a person, who is still cared for in its own twisted way.

But, I also don’t think I can get that until I stop contorting myself into new shapes the people who control my life claim will fit better for them, this time. I’m tired of hearing, “I didn’t intend to hurt you,” after every cut.

I’m tired of playing the role of a broken doll who explains, every-time you pull her string, “I know you didn’t, and thank you.”

I don’t even want to scream or cry to the blood besotted heavens, “Then why do you keep fucking doing it?!”

I gave up hoping society would cease to treat women like me as disposable fleshlights when I was a child.

When my father beat me, causing the tinnitus I’ve lived with since I was 5 or 6, because I told him I was a girl.

When he beat me, I understood a bit then, better now, in his own broken, facile way, he thought he was saving me from a worse fate.

Instead, he taught me to never share how I felt. To keep everything bottled because when I speak to my experiences, the people who love and care for me, hurt me.

My hope now is that I can at least stand up for myself and cease allowing those who claim to love or care for me, to treat me like the same utterly disposable sex toy.

Have a pleasant December.

Also, read A Puppygirl for New Years by Elena Abbott. I’ll do a proper review next week if I can help it, but the book’s a dollar and if the title even remotely interests you, I’ll bet you’ll love it.
(Yeah, it might explore themes of disposability and gifting trauma I’ve been feeling, hush!)

ps. Yeah, I couldn’t let it just be my trauma and shit, I needed to end with something good.