The place I find myself in...

I love my house. I mean, I'm not exactly house-proud (my untidiness is in fact, legendary) but I love my house because I chose it or it chose me and I'm not sure whether it matters which. It's not perfect, I mean it will be beautiful just as soon as I finish redecorating and improving it, but its getting there, but that isn't why I love it. I love it because it represents freedom, independence and security. I love it because I close the door to the world and it feels like home. I love it because it came along just at the moment I needed it (funny story actually, I was originally buying the house two doors down!) and it cradled me whilst I licked my wounds. We've been growing together ever since. When I look at my freshly painted walls, the woodwork I sanded, the furniture I chose I can start to believe that the beauty I have created on the outside is a reflection of the beauty inside me. I'm no interior designer but I believe in doing a job properly, and that means no papering over the cracks. It means making a mess before you can tidy up, making things worse before they can be improved. I suppose my home is really a metaphor for my soul.

I sleep alone. I used to hate it. Given the choice I would sleep with someone else any time! I don't mean that in a fruity way (!) but I love to feel the presence of another human being when I sleep. Ask any of my boyfriends - they will tell you that I like contact, even if its just a hand on someone's back. I think I've always been fearful of the night time, going back to being quite ill as a child and waking up having difficulty breathing. I have vivid memories calling out in the night because I was having an attack, and of sleeping back to back with my mother, and feeling safe there. As an adult I'm not afraid of being on my own in the night, but intuitively I feel that when I sleep I am vulnerable because I am leaving this plane of consciousness. I guess I feel comforted when there is someone to be there when I return from this journey. I love the warmth of skin to skin contact. I love to hear someone breathing next to me in the night. I have always thought that sleeping alongside another person is almost as deep a kind of intimacy as sex, since when we sleep we are totally defenceless and totally trusting. I feel privileged when anyone shares that with me. When I get to sleep with someone who I am sharing an intimate relationship that feeling is greatly magnified, and I seem to truly be able to relax and let go. I miss that now I sleep alone.

I decided the other day that I would take stock of my relationships with men by making the kind of list that Carrie makes in Four Weddings and a Funeral. Here it is:

1. My first. It was 1997 and I was 21. I will never forget him and I have never regretted choosing him. Sweet, kind, gentle, like an angel. I have never felt more beautiful or emotionally excited. From a sexual point of view though, in retropect, not so great! The first man to ever call me 'beautiful' and I loved him.

2. The largest penis I have ever (and possibly will ever) see. Scarily big. Gave amazing oral (my first experience of that, therefore possibly tainted by nostalgia, but still) but full sex didn't really get off the ground due to compatability issues with my petite frame ;). Sexy sexy man, and I turned him down for the rematch because my friend was staying over. Damn it.

3. He liked 'drum and bass' :). We met in a bar when I was living in Canada on an exchange program and he used to work at a coffee house. He smelled wonderful and he was tall, made of pure lean muscle because he was a kickboxer. We didn't have a relationship but we got along well and had sex a few times. I don't really know what happened to him, it just petered out. He was a gentle but very sexy lover. I felt looked after with him.

4. A Canadian. He wore dungarees. It happened (well kind of) once only - never again, it hurt and was awful and what the hell was I thinking. Yuck.

5. This happened in the Isle of Man! He waited on me at a pizza restaurant and I ended up sleeping with him for about a week, even choosing to stay an extra few days after my friends returned home! I felt really sexy with him and I can remember staring into his eyes as we did it on his sofa, but for some reason he never came even though we did it quite a few times. An interesting but quite dangerous character.

6. At a party. I had some Irish girlfriends and we got extremely drunk. I recall throwing up in the bathroom and being looked after by this man, then I remember being very sleepy and suddenly coming round in my friend's bed to realise he was penetrating me. Thank god he stopped as soon as I told him to, and thank god he used a condom. I could not get out of there fast enough. I was MORTIFIED. Poor guy, he was probably alright really.

7. The least attractive man I have ever slept with, but a real gent and so easy to get on with. We spent two nights together in my tent at V98. He was funny and lovely and had a large cock. He took things slow and liked to give pleasure. A snuggly sleeper too. I'll never forget wearing his hat all weekend! Sex in a tent? For winners I say!

8. My friend set me up on a blind date with him and we were together for almost 12 months. He was damaged emotionally but I didnt realise the extent until after we split up. Sexually, quite pedestrian as we only ever did it in bed or on the sofa. A nice guy, but had a massive chip on his shoulder and his friends never liked me.

7. Russ. I have to use his name because it is just so cool. He was older than me and divorced and we met in Newcastle. I was returning from a weekend in Amsterdam with my girlfriend and we went to the only club which was open on Easter Sunday and ended up tagging along with a stag party of about 20 guys. Good times. Later we went for a dirty weekend in Blackpool, which was wonderful until I got food poisoning from some dodgy prawns and threw up all night on the Sunday. A few months later he called me for a rematch but I had started seeing someone.

9. My fiance. I thought we deserved each other. We fought like cat and dog and I should have seen it earlier. I slept with him after our first date, I was drunk and I remember thinking 'I can't feel this' - my friends told me to dump him but I didn't want to be callous. We were together for about 5 years. He would not do oral but expected me to. On one occasion he had sex with me even though I told him to stop. It was horrible. Sexually, pretty poor.

10. A great lover at first and at the time I felt a huge emotional connection. We lived together for around 18 months. He had a very large penis and was very giving in bed, but ultimately not that good because he was so unresponsive when I took charge. He didn't seem to enjoy letting go, and at the end it just stopped happening completely.

11. Mr K. My most recent conquest, and quite possibly the best. Lovely, lovely, sexy, really sexy man. Hairy and very attractive. Beautiful brown eyes. A generous lover, gentle and giving. He has the best cock I have ever encountered! The perfect size and shape, not too long but a good girth. He knows about giving a woman pleasure in different ways, and he responded so well to my touches. I loved that he lifted his hips to heighten my pleasure when I was on top. Really considerate and passionate. His intensity totally surprised me. God I want to do him again!

So there we are. In the words of Carrie, 'more than the queen, but hopefully less than Madonna'.
Please! Now I think back to how it was with the casual guys, I can kind of see why Mr K is a bit scared that we might turn into a relationship. It certainly feels different to them, there is definitely something else there. Oh dear, I shall feel its a missed opportunity if he doesn't come back for seconds. Oh dear.

I'm left thinking i may have missed someone out. I sincerely hope not, 11 is bad enough!
Off to sleep now, probably to think about Mr K before I do. *sigh*
x

The beginning

Hello world.
Welcome to my blog.

Here I sit, with a cat curled up on my knee, and I ponder the universe.

Like many girls, a lot of my time is taken up with thinking about relationships. Sad I know, but let's face it, it is a bit of a cultural obsession, and anyone who says they don't think about it is quite frankly, lying through their teeth (or to themselves).

Why I did what I did...

Very recently I had an intense sexual experience which seems to have altered my consciousness and restarted my thinking about what it is that I want from my 'love' life. Just to fill you in, I have a relatively varied history when it comes to coupling, culminating in almost getting married in August 2006. That relationship ended after about 5 years because I left him, just three months before the big day. The relationship I went into almost straight away turned out to be (you guessed it) a bit of a 'rebound', although I still say to this day I would not have found the strength to leave my fiance if it hadn't happened the way it did. I still say that telling him it was over was the hardest thing I have ever had to do, but I have never once regretted it, not even for a minute because the day I walked out was the day I started to really live.

That makes me seem a little heartless doesn't it? Maybe that's what we have to be to survive sometimes. It's easy to look at the person who breaks the promises, who cheats, who lies, who leaves, and colour them the villain so that we can sit smugly back and say 'I would never do that', but the truth is we all would, because in many ways we are all the same. What the people who loved me could see was that when I broke his heart, I broke mine too and, I believe, saved us both from the torture of an unhappy union.

I certainly didn't know it then, but that fork in the road changed me forever, and I feel blessed that I woke up in time. I haven't ever regretted leaving, but I have wondered about, even mourned who I would have been if we had stayed together, and that is entirely different. Maybe I would have children now - maybe I would even want children? Because you see I never have. I look at the people around me and I truly see bringing babies into the world as a millstone around their necks. I know all the arguments, I do love children, and I know it sounds like I'm just saying this as an exercise in emotional self-preservation, but I can't help wondering how many willing parents are really just seeking to create another person to fill the void they feel in their hearts. In other words, to create another person whom they can love. I absolutely refuse to do that, now or ever.

We all have emotional pain. We all feel alone, because at the end of each day, when we close our eyes and turn out the light, when we think the last thoughts of the day, that's exactly what we are. Everything else is entirely transitory. The pain comes from running from that. Marianne Williamson says that the pain we feel is not due to the love that others withhold from us, but the love that we withhold from them. I fully believe that. I see so many people trying so hard to be happy by running from themselves, and I weep inside to see it because I know now that 'if we don't go within, we go without' (I borrowed that quote from CwG).

Over the last 12 months I have been single, and I have been travelling in another direction. I have been walking back to myself. I have been stripping away the illusions put forth by my ego and fuelled by fear, and now I am finallly starting to see who I am.

You find me standing in the sunshine and rubbing my eyes.
It is glorious and mesmerising, and I hope to share it with you.