Making Spaces in My Heart

As promised, I believe it is time to talk about more than sex.  For at least this one post.
As any of you who have been following this space know, or have read the “About Me” page, I have two lovers: one with whom I live, one with whom I play.  I also have a boy on the side, The Brit, a dominant I play with and who is also a close friend, and lately The Fireman, a vanilla guy, came on the scene.  There’s also The New Girl, a wild card in all this, who you all have heard about a time or two.  (She is coming in to town this weekend, and is going out for her first date with The Brit, but staying with us, so maybe I will have some more to talk about on that front soon…mmmm)
In any case.  There is someone else in my life as well.  Someone who has been around for a long time, but who I have only spent one long weekend with over a year ago.  I can’t believe it’s been that long actually…but I distinctly recall sending him a picture of the trees in bloom outside our building when he and I “broke up” last year…and here they are in bloom again.
“Broke up.”  Gah, that sounds so melodramatic.  But it really was that…  We’d spent that weekend together, and it was…important, somehow, to us both.  And not just sex.  For him, it was healing.  For me…maybe it was healing too.  Being the conduit to his healing.  It touched us both in this profound way, a way that has kept us from just saying “screw it” when it got a little hard, when he thought it was too hard and he wanted too much that he couldn’t have, when I had to face that there are parts of me he really can’t live with.  The BDSM part.
It was also fun, and we clicked in this great way, and found we liked each other, though we don’t often agree on many things.  He challenges me, he’s obstinate, he has a bit of a persecution (white-male-of-a-certain-age persecution) complex.  He is complex and can be ornery and opinionated.  We butt heads a lot.  We also laugh and are silly and…like each other. In spite of our differences.
And I love him.  I don’t know why, really.  I just do.
Last year, after that weekend together, we stayed in close touch.  And then one day he got curious about the BDSM.  It wasn’t a part of our dynamic, and I don’t want it to be, but he knows it is part of me.  So…I showed him, just a bit.  Some spanking pictures.  No big deal, or so I thought.
I was wrong.  It set off something inside of him and he lost it…couldn’t deal…called me and broke it off.  I was hurt.  I hadn’t wanted to share that with him. He’d asked me to.  And then to reject me for the very thing he’d wanted to see…  Yeah, it cut pretty sharply.  Gradually, though, over the course of this past year, we have come back together.  I have accepted that there are places we can’t go together, that he doesn’t even want to know about, and he has accepted that what we have may be all we will ever have…if he can’t accept all of me, he can’t have more than just this little bit (he is long distance.)  I won’t change my life to work around a schedule so that he never has to see the aftermath of my life, at least not on a regular basis.
Not on a regular basis doesn’t mean never, though.  This April I am going to go spend four days with him, and as the days grow nearer I find myself missing him, like I haven’t since just after he left before.
He sent me this, after I emailed him about a friend that told me I didn’t know him well enough to miss him:
oh sweetie … i don’t know all there is to know about you, but i know enough to miss being with you because the mundane stuff has never been important to me. i miss the easiness of being around you, the way i can relax and just be me. i miss your non-judgmentalness and your quickness on the uptake. i miss your smile and your disposition. i miss touching you because it makes the intimacy real and it brings to life all those things on my i-miss-you list. i miss holding you because you are as soft on the outside as you are within.
i miss my muse. my friend. my reminder that i don’t need to be alone to be left alone when i feel the need.
i miss your freckles. your kisses and the way we melt together when we share joy in little things. and the way other people notice.
most of all, i miss the way i experience life when i am with my polyanna princess. you open my heart, if only for a moment, and i feel young and free all over again — without the fear.
what more could there be to miss?