Stories from the past - Feb 1998

Quantum Leap

I woke up to the storm, wind blowing curtain and rain hitting the bedroom window. It was already half past ten. He left around 4 in the morning, the last thing I remembered before drifting into to heavy sleep was the way he easily lifted me up, I had my arms around his neck and legs wrapped around his outer thighs, he carried me to bed with such an ease, tucked me in and kissed me on the cheeks, where tears were still present.  "I have to go now, I have to get home before the kids wake up." And  there he was gone, just like he eased out my life years ago.  I lay in bed, gradually senses were coming back, so was reality. Last night was a dream.

 

We must met years ago. He was moving from back east to California. I was constantly on the road doing consulting work.  He was the kind of men women would remember – a manly man, a man who has fully grown up and carried responsibilities for years. I fell for him with a school girl's enthusiasm, and in the end he chose to ease out my life like other men did.

 

It was those small messages on my answering machine kept me up all night. Sometimes from Paris, sometimes from London or some small town in Germany. I’d drive for  three hours to see him for a night before he takes off again. I played Cindy Lauper's CD and only listened to one song - “I drive all night, to get close to you, I drive all night...”

 

I was addicted to the way he embraced me when I showed up to his door. He had strong arms, and seemly genuinely cared about me. There was this intensity and seriousness about the way he made love to me often made me wonder if he could very well be “IT”.

 

And one day, after my last visit, I feared that he’d never call again. And he never did.  Perhaps it was woman’s intuition, perhaps it was all written in his eyes. Perhaps it was simply not meant to be.
 
Few months later I met another men who resembled his looks and his body frame, I felt madly in love with him - perhaps unconsciously seeking for a closure from the suddenly ended affair, only to find it was yet another life long lesson some women forced to go through in life.  Passionate, maybe, intense, maybe, but definitely not healthy.

 

Relationships is all about trial and error. Sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you simply accept the losing card the fate dealt to you, and pick up where you left at and move on.

---

Haunted Soul

When I was about eight I had a dream, in this dream I was kidnapped with a few other childhood playmates, and I did something terrible as a girl, I sacrificed my body to the kidnapper and rescued all of us. At the age of eight, I had no concept about sex but I knew men liked women for a strange reason, they wanted something women held quite precious.

 

A year later a playmate’s father held me down in his bedroom and forced his lips and tongue into me as his son and I were playing hide and seek game. I pushed him off and ran away and never stepped into his house.

 

At ten I was attending a prestigious elementary school. It was very far away and only one public bus took me there. There was an man in his late twenties who seemed to always shared the same bus schedule with me. He got on one stop after mine and every time he got on, he’d sought me out and move himself close to me, occasionally he’d sit down next to me and press his body against me, I could feel him growing between his legs each time and I panicked. It was so gross that I wanted to vomit.

 

Back in the Orient,  sexual assault was a taboo not mentioned in the family or among friends. Women simply try their best to avoid them, but nevertheless they were often found helpless in such a situation, because once they were assaulted, they were considered the dirty blood and unclean bodies. Therefore they were the bad influences to other women.

 

Around the same time as I attended this elementary school,  I had a little girlfriend who took vocal lessons with me in the children’s palace on the weekends. One day she confessed to me, “Our teacher has been putting his figures into my vagina, is that normal?” At age ten I was becoming a veteran in handling men with unclean hands and mouth, I told her to tell her mother and stop coming to vocal lessons. I never saw her again. Even though I missed her dearly I felt quite proud for having saved her life. I was lucky that the teacher never took interest in me, maybe I was too chubby for his taste.

When I was twelve Mom had a student from her Chinese class, sixteen at the time, came to our home one day, with tears dropping like the spring rain (where I was from, it rained continuously all spring) , she claimed that she had been raped multiple times by her forty four years old neighbor and  thought she was getting pregnant. An mandatory abortion was later executed. She lost a lot of blood during the abortion.  She was then four months pregnant. She became rather withdraw and eventually dropped out of the high school just before graduation.  Her father didn’t know what to do with the neighbor.  The family was at lost - they didn’t know how to sue for something like that because they were also convinced it was the way their daughter acted that caused the trouble. She was a very pretty girl with long legs and big eyes. I still wonder till today where she had gone. This neighbor was later discovered a continuous sex offender.

 

At sixteen I met my college boyfriend in America, who later had grown obsessively abusive. One time he had a knife next to my throat and declared that if he saw me with another men, he’d kill us both. It was America and later he was summoned by the police with a restraining order from another woman whom he assaulted. His sister was the sweetest woman I’ve ever met, she later told me that he had molested her when they were young but she couldn’t tell her parents because he was the oldest son from a very traditional Taiwanese family. I stopped dating Asians all together after that experience.

At twenty two I felt in love with some white guy who worked in the intelligence. He swore that he’d love me till death do us apart. Three months later one night he punched me with his fist and knock my front tooth out. He claimed that I wasn’t paying attention to what he was saying. I was in the intense SAP training camp. I lost ten pounds in three weeks. They later found him suffering from some psychological problems.  I never pressed charges. I  thought I loved him.

 

Sometimes I contemplate whether I was actually lesbian, or at least bisexual. Perhaps my luck with woman would change.

 

I love men. I can’t deny that. I strive on intellectual stimulation with men who mentally challenge me.  But at the department of relationship, it has been rather empty shelves one after another.   I was told by one of my boyfriends that I easily gave up.  Somehow I felt relieved when I broke up our relationship. I was bored and simply ran out ways to persuade myself from staying.  I’d rather be reading a book, sipping tea, watching an old movie than being with him. I’d rather be alone.

 

I am also tired of telling my involved girlfriends not to worry about me. They think a woman without a relationship is somewhat delinquent because they were once without boyfriends and they were terribly lonely. A friend of a friend from Australia recently told me, “I don’t understand California girls. They seem just want to get married and have kids. I hang out in Palo Alto a lot and when I tell a woman that I worked in the computing industry, all of sudden their eyes lid up and they want to know if I’d care to have coffee.” He’s strikingly good looking. All of my single girlfriends want to find out if he was gay because he was never seen with a woman. I asked him if indeed he was gay. He laughed. He simply didn’t want a relationship with any particular woman.

 

If my girlfriends tell me - “Don’t worry, you will find someone very special soon.”, I’d say as this Australian man did, “No worries.”  For all I know, this man is probably out there, except he’d live at least thousands of miles away or better yet, in some foreign country with an accented voice, drinking martini, smoking cigar and watching the snow falling at this very moment.

---

Crazy Head

I subscribe Architectural Digest and Information Week all at once. I want a relationship and not want a relationship all at once. I snowboard all day and try to learn how to carve, then I’d be wondering in the city with a book in my hand and coffee in the other, thinking how I wish there is someone to talk about the art, the world and the life. I am constantly living in my head. Where I sleep it doesn’t matter as much as whether I will have access to the internet, or at the bare minimum, a laptop with Microsoft Word installed.

 

On week days I’m trapped in the world of computing, where the syntax of the coding makes a difference in the expected results. Sometimes what seems unexplainable and garbage like to others excites me so much because it is how the machine wants to read it. On week nights I surf the net and dream about retiring at age thirty five to a tropical island and be a writer. I can careless whether I succeeded in the computing field or not, I can use a sun bath and a pina colada just about right now.

 

One night in my favorite spot of the city, sitting down was a friend who I crossed path with many times, “What type of men are you attracted to?” He asked. I answered, “someone who can inspire me”.

 

I hang with my friends. They are the greatest, most reliable people. They take me in when I am down. A  flat in inner Sunset, where I spent days and nights mourning the ending of my relationships with men who I loved once.  They can’t provide the answers I need, they too are singles just like me. I can just sit and  listen to the heavily accented voice, talking casually about their past lives in the East Coast.  They love San Francisco and adopted the city as their own town. They don’t know why I stayed in an abusive, largely sexual but emotionless relationship, or for that matter, why I walked away from a relationship that provided stability and peace.

 

I envision my head. All divided up into different compartments. One longs for a stable family like life – and this one meets a man who can’t spell romance but knows how to fix the garage. One yearns for the intellectual stimulation – and this one meets someone who's three thousands miles away and lives with his a girlfriend. One craves for the glamorous romantic nights in a dark elegant hotel – and this one meets a man who makes her feels like a princess, but only for a night and never calls back. Then there is naive one who meets a man that looks and acts like the dream of her life – and he leaves town and casually slices up the heart on his way out. And this very last one decides to venture out in women, since men are so insanely predictable yet impossible to get close to, perhaps women with similar outlooks in men should all get together and make crazy love in a big soft leopard-looking leather sofa while those men who hurt us get to watch, but not touch.

 

Still, there is another...this one is waiting for the right key to open... I don’t even remember what’s exactly in it, maybe you could be the key smith ...
 
 

This Time - San Francisco Stories # 5 - December 2011

Years ago a young woman fell for a young boy. He was her exact physical type. The short lived infactuation died. This short fiction was established based on the premise that what if years later, this now mid 40s man re-appeared in her life, and the woman is now in her late 30s, and what if they picked up where they left off years ago, and continued to explore the what-ifs? 

I. The Museum

I saw the intensity in his eyes. The way he murmured "baby" when we sat at the empty screening room, watching an art installation in the dark at the museum. He wondered aloud if the workers in the film were actually live or still images.

"They are moving. You can see that guy reading the paper." He observed.

I nestled next to him. It was one of those things where the guy may have noticed, but not a woman who just wanted to cuddle, in the dark. But he was right. I saw another naval shipyard worker slowly turning his head, towards the moving camera, ever so slowly; if you blink you'd have missed it.

In the dark where the film continued to play, I turned my head, found his lips, and kissed him. His lips felt soft and moist. He was always so restrained when he kissed me in public. I instead pressed on. I wanted more of this, from him. If only he knew how much I desired him physically.

He kissed me back, this time; I felt a bit more emotion this time, a bit more strength from his end, as if he was holding less back, as if he was more relaxed and aware of my presence. Then I heard him whispered in my ears, "Baby." He went on to say something else, but I couldn’t hear anything. The sound from the film was drowning out his quiet, controlled voice, but it was unmistakable that he just called me "baby".  It caused a stir in me, a physical ache that was unfamiliar to me. It was an acute sensation, sensation that I would rather suppress, if I knew what was good for me.

II. On Edge - Sexual Fantasies

I often wondered if I could be collected, cool and contemplative about our relationship, but more often I just found myself in a state of sexual frenzy, like a cat in heat, I suspected that I’d eventually make some silly animalistic sound or movement that would wound up on Youtube, some embarrassing video, and he’d never look at me the same way.  

I felt on edge: sitting next to him was a difficult business, I had to focus on things that were not sexual, like the artist’s polka dot dress, a piece of motionless art installation, a still photography, a documentary film, the shadow on the concrete floor casted by the plump and tired museum worker nearby, something that did not remind me of him, his physical presence, that caused me to be in an agitated state, where all I could think of was sex, sex with him.

Sex with him was distinctively different – from when we were together the last time, from other men.

Earlier that month, I had gone to my shrink, and confessed that I had been looking to fulfill some sexual fantasies, to be specific, I wanted to act out these fantasies: to be dominated, to be tied up, to be raped, to be fucked like a whore, to be handcuffed, to wear a collar around my neck, to be suffocated, to be forced to suck him dry. I wanted some S&M activities. Was I insane? Was I normal?

She handed me a bunch of books to read. Conclusion: there was no normalcy in sexual fantasies. I was both relieved and troubled. Relieved that I was not insane, troubled because I had no such partner. Until he came along. He knew what I wanted. He could satisfy my urges. I saw it in his eyes. 

III. Photos – Nudes and Otherwise

I took out my iPhone and started to take candid shots of him. I had asked him to send photos of him, but he had not done that, why not I could not know for sure, other than the fact that he probably thought that he did not have to send them and I'd be OK with it. I was not OK with it. I wanted his images with me, because he’s got mine. So I was snapping photos of him, whether he noticed or not, I was busy clicking away, and all of sudden I had his images in my phone.

Just like that, he was alive in my world. I could look at them, and could imagine what he was like, when I was not with him.

Perhaps that's why he was not as communicative to me as he was when we first started this thing, because he had already lots of photos of me, so he could look at them, he did not have to worry so much about sending me an email when he could just look at those photos. All alone, I imagined, in a hotel room, in his apartment, after his son had gone to sleep, when he was not with me, when he needed relief.  

He was sent nude photos. I had taken them using my new MacAir, not airbrushed, au natural me. Creating those photos was a way for me to connect with him sexually. The experience of taking erotic photos was rather arousing to me.

I envisioned what it was like to fuck him, to be fucked by him. I thought about how much I enjoyed having him in my mouth, how delicious he tasted in my mouth when he came, and how I enjoyed being tied up by those white, firm, nautical ropes that he produced, how he covered my mouth to keep me quiet, and how he entered me from behind, so deep that it hurt. 

It was unexpected, this sexual experience. When I took those photos of myself, in front my computer, I thought about the fantasies that I wanted him to fulfill. The perverse, the filth, and the excitement he could bring to my life. The sexual adventure that I was determined to embark on early in my twenties, but failed to realize, for I did not meet a willing partner before. And now I might have a chance to accomplish my goal, at last. 

Could it really be the case? I had asked myself. Could I be alive in his memories, even when I was not around, he could see me through those photos?”

But now I understood.

I felt grounded now that I had his still images in my world. I could look at them. I liked how happy he looked when he smiled. He seemed genuinely pleased and satisfied. It was the smile you’d see from an ecstatic boy who just got to ride the train twenty times and each time there was a new tunnel to go in and out of it. I hoped that I had partaken in generating that joyfulness that he displayed on my camera.

I liked how he looked in these photos, his back towards me. I took those shots of him while he was walking through the exhibition halls, while he was admiring the art on the walls. In those photos I took of him, he became a piece of art himself: he was erect, his form fitted naturally into the gap between the large mounted photographs, in the evening hours of the museum, when the halls were mostly deserted. He was wearing a dark suit jacket, a pair of dark slacks, black shined shoes, and he was holding my black raffled scarf and coat. 

My longing was curbed somehow, when I was looking at those photos. My lust of him was more muted, like the sepia color I turned his images into, not the throbbing pain I felt the week before, when I was high from just consumed ecstasy and mushroom.

IV. First Time

Sometimes I wondered if my craving, my physical yearning would persist, and if so, for how long. 

He's not a young man. But I was no longer young either. I never felt this way when he was in his thirties and I was in my twenties.

He had reminded me that we first met in the spring of 1998. I recently did the math and I realized that I was twenty-five then, and he must have been thirty-two at the time.  We were babies. Thirteen years had passed.  In between those years, marriage and two children for me, father for him.

It felt a little uncertain, tentative, and strange when we first reconnected. I read a note from him, back in August. He had said that he had always lived in the same place in North Beach, since we first met. I had trouble picturing where he lived, for I had never been to his place, during the brief time we dated.

That note took me back briefly, and I found myself trapped in a wrong kind of looking glass, where the history was clouded by the lack of memory. Years of sleep deprivation and insomnia had caused this, I thought. I had forgotten how we met; I tried hard to recall how I felt about him, or what we did. I remembered vaguely that I had written a story, or two, about him, then. I knew one of the story title contained Vacaville, and the other story took place in Salt Lake City. I was hoping to find the stories I wrote. It was in that disk.

All of my twenties were condensed into one disk; it used to sit in a drawer in my study, the one drawer that I had not opened for years.

V. The Squirrel

There used to be a squirrel that lived in the roof above the study. Every night he'd be chipping away and wandering about. I had thought of many ways to rid of him, including poison and a bb gun. So one night I decided it was time to do some spring-cleaning, thinking the noise would eventually get rid of him.  That’s when I opened the drawer that had not been opened for years, and that’s where I found the disk titled Creative writing. I looked at the disk, without any lingering thoughts, I threw it into the trashcan. I thought that I’d never have any use for it. I thought that I would never write again.

That evening the squirrel was in a particularly active mode. I could hear him stumping, moving about, and hovering, on top of the roof. As it turned out, he was doing some spring-cleaning of his own, because the next day he just left, packed up his nuts, left without a trace. I missed him to this date.

And I missed the disk to this date.

It was the only thing that tied me to my past, now I had nothing left. I had nothing left of him, or us.  I could hardly remember what he looked like back then, and what we did. I remembered a few years ago, perhaps on his Facebook profile, I saw a picture of him. I remembered then that he had flashed a bright smile in that photo of his, and I thought to myself, I knew this man once, intimately.

VI. Gay vs. Straight

In my head, I was convinced that he was a closeted gay. That was the ongoing thought that came across my mind over the past thirteen years, whenever I thought of him.  My flawed logic was that if I liked a man, it was because I either liked him as a person, whom I was not attracted to, or he was gay. Straight men whom I was physically attracted to, were really only meant to be sexual partners, they could not be friends.  After our brief sting as lovers, we remained friends. I liked him and was attracted him. So it must had been that he was gay, I was sure.  The men in my world fit into two categories: fuckable = not friends, not-fuckable = friends.  I formed emotional connection with friends, I formed sexual bond with “not friends”. He did not fit into either category, so my interaction with him became limited, at best. He just did not want to come out, not yet anyway. I would think that to myself. So I waited, waited for him to come out of closet: waited for him to tell the world that he was really in love with men, and women were his beard. 

Until I realized recently that perhaps he was never in the closet, because he was really straight.

I had finally been persuaded, this time: he fucked me hard, the way I wanted to be fucked. The way I had described to my shrink.

VII. In Sync, At Last

Though I might not have remembered what we did when we dated, I did remember how we couldn't really find the rhythm to dance together.  How it was exciting for a while and then the feeling just vanished. He vanished, for a while; and I, moved on.

So thirteen plus years later, we asked ourselves:

“Whatever happened then? Why didn't we continue?"

He couldn't find an answer, neither could I.

"Perhaps we were out of sync then."

"But now we are in sync."

He squeezed my hand, agreed, that night, in the boat.

I looked into his eyes. I found his intensity was hidden behind those framed lenses.

He was not wearing glasses when we first met. He might have been wearing contacts, and I couldn't tell what was hidden behind.

Not that I knew what was hidden behind those glasses now, but I was content with the unknown. There was a sense of peace when I was with him, even the uncertainty of the future, the unorthodox guilt-free relationship I was having with him, was therapeutic and natural to me.  I needed no answer, no reasoning.

VIII. Heart Matters

Regardless what he felt, how he felt, I instinctively knew this world would be all right. Wherever he was, I was there in the same space with him. In that same wildness, the same Great Plains, the same forest, the same ocean, the same shore. I was not far behind. I found the rhythm, this time. I suspected that he found his as well.

When I was with him, paradoxically, I felt both sexually charged and anxious; and, yet, emotionally settled and at ease. I was just myself.  I was never like this with others, through the last nine years of my thirties, or in my more adventurous twenties. I was often inquisitive about the future; I despised the notion of que sera sera. I needed an answer always, often right away, and when the answer was not presented to me, when I couldn’t figure out where things were going, I panicked, retreated, drew a conclusion, and moved on.

I could never settle on one person, at one time. I needed my heart to be in different places, lingering over different people, to feel whole.

But not anymore.  I had grown up, as it turned out, I could, after all these years, learn that you didn’t have to parlay your heart to win your hand. In fact, life did not have to be a gamble; life could be just, life: calm, chaotic, uncertain yet inspiring.  You didn’t have to change yourself, or others. You could be OK with whichever direction this detour would take you.

I appreciated what he had brought into my life: friendship, sexual freedom, adventures, and the unknown future.

Whatever this was, I would be all right, and he would be all right.

This time, it just felt all right. I told him so. Well, not directly to him, but to the still, sepia images of him, the back of him, to be exact, as he walked through the vacant art exhibition halls that evening, at the museum, holding my raffled scarf, and my coat. 

And if he were near, and if he could hear me, I knew that he might just echo me.