Page 22 of Baby Girl

Something in me clicked when I read it, like the flip of a switch. All my education, intelligence, people skills, training, understanding, experience, and knowledge were tossed aside. I sat, with an empty mind, and absorbed what I had read. One other part of the book made me think. It was a more difficult part to come to terms with, but an easy part to comprehend and understand.

“Marc, you don’t give someone your love. They take it. Love is taken. And, when someone takes your love, you will know it. Do you understand?” she asked. I did not understand. I nodded. She smiled. We had this discussion often. The taking of love. Last year, she placed her hand on my shoulder. She said nothing. I looked in her eyes. I was seventeen. “Yes,” I said. “Yes what, Marc,” she responded. “Yes, I understand,” I smiled. We embraced. She smiled. It was summer. My mother. My best friend. “Yes, mother, I understand,” I said again. She smiled. Again.

The taking of love. It made sense. We have little, if any, control over what we feel. And, according to the book, there is no wrong way to feel. I believe that. I have always believed that. How do we know when someone takes our love? I thought. I wondered. I tried to recall every woman I had ever encountered and spent any time with. I tried to decide if I had ever actually loved one of them. I decided, quickly, that I had not.

Someone cannot take, easily, what is protected from their grasp. The taking of love--or the taking of one’s heart--could be easy, I supposed, from someone that had minimal effort in place to protect it. Someone that had erected walls to protect their heart from being taken would be less subject to the theft.

Theft.

The act or an instance of stealing; larceny.

I decided as I sat and thought, after the first time I read the book, that I had erected walls to protect what I felt was in need of protection; my heart. Not because I was afraid of theft, afraid of it being taken, or afraid of love - protected because I don’t like feeling pain. Pain from the loss of what it is that we love.

If we don’t love, we don’t feel pain. If we don’t have expectations, we never have disappointment if the expectations aren’t met. My heart was protected to protect me. Like a gladiator’s armor protecting his heart from the lance of his opponent.

It would take a gladiator with a cunning nature, keen skills, considerable strength, ability, diversity, and endurance to have an opportunity to take my heart. To take my love. After I read the book a second time, I felt vulnerable. I felt unprotected. I felt changed. And that change, for me, was uncomfortable in many ways. My armor set aside, I was exposed to the threat of my opponent’s advances.

To believe that, after 36 years of living, a simple book, written by a simple man, could change me. The thought was unnerving. Time passes and things change, yet another quote from the book. Change is as inevitable as the tide. I sat on the edge of my weight bench and thought.

I contemplated lifting weights, as if the strength gained from the workout would provide protection. I felt like a soldier in combat, standing before the opposition, weaponless. I felt weak. I wondered if, for all of these years, I had actually been the person that I was becoming, and it had taken a book of unconventional wisdom to get me to realize it.

My mother, unlike Marc’s mother in the book, was not a woman to discuss things like love and compassion. I suspect, in retrospect, that my mother was hurt from the loss of my father more than she ever let me know. She too was an only child, as was my father. Growing up, I always had her, and I never really took the time to think of what she did or did not have as a support system.

I sat on my weight bench, without protection from harm, and cried. I cried for my mother. I cried because I had lost my father. I cried because I had no siblings. I never got an opportunity to run to a pomegranate tree, rub fruit on my siblings, and get yelled at when I got home. I would, in a sense, now trade anything to have had a father scream at me and call me a dumb fuck.

Wiping a lifetime of tears from my eyes, I stood. I stretched. Although I knew that I would always be dominant in a sexual relationship, somewhat manipulative, and very slow to accept others into my life, I stood…open to the thought of loving someone. I stood sensitive to the thought of that person being Kelli.

Kelli had proven to me that she was everything that I had ever wanted a woman to be. She was willing, able, and so far, had been open-minded enough to consider all that I had exposed her to. I certainly had not exposed her to all that I had intended to, but if her past performance was indicative of what the future held, she would do extremely well.

Excited for what the future may hold, I went to the shower. I stood in the shower like when I was a teen, letting the water run over me until there was no more hot water left. Just standing and letting the water pelt me into a trance.

I got out of the shower and dressed, sitting back on the edge of the weight bench. I compared my feelings to the same type of feeling I received after watching a feel-good movie, or a love story like The Notebook. You leave the theatre full of inspiration, and that feeling, in a few days, fades.

I knew the degree of what I felt would eventually lessen. But how I felt about life, about love, and about the potential of being able to love was real. I have lived a life with walls erected around me and armor protecting my heart. These things, as I read that book, were broken. After reading the book a second time, they had truly crumbled.

The helpless emotional child on the corner of the weight bench was proof of this. Conscious of my vulnerability, I made a decision to tell Kelli nothing. I would proceed with this relationship and see what she felt, and what she made me feel. If she, in fact, captured my heart, or stole my love, I would allow it. In the interim, we would continue a Dominant/submissive relationship of friendship and sex, she being none the wiser of my epiphany.

The thought of any form of progress in this relationship excited and scared me both. We fear what we aren’t certain of, and I had no experience with loving, actual relationships, or commitment. The lack of experience gave me no certainty, and that lack of certainty fed my fear.

My fire of fear fueled with thoughts of Kelli, and her willingness to provide me with whatever I wished of her, I stood from the bench. I had every intent of eventually leaving Kelli when we met. My thoughts, now, of her being in my life caused me discomfort.

We fear the uncertain. That, if nothing else is, is certain.

KELLI. Trying to make sense of what my mind went through on a typical weekend would probably make the best of psychologists go insane. I think all girls are probably the same. We get up on Saturday, and even if we have nothing planned for the day, we struggle with what to wear, what to do with our hair, and what to do for shoes. After trying on everything that I had in the closet for about five seconds, tossing it on the bed, trying something else, and tossing it, and continuing that for a half hour, I would finally settle on something. I did this for years. Only recently had I set limits for myself. If I couldn’t decide in about five minutes, I would default. My default had become shorts, a tee shirt, and Chucks. In the last two years, it had become somewhat of a staple, and my trademark weekend attire.

What I was going to do, and where I was going to go was always a struggle. I felt, for most of my life, as if I needed someone to make decisions for me. Having someone tell me to be at a certain place at a certain time, and to be dressed a certain way was comforting. Some girls looked at it as control, but I looked at it as relief. Relief from making decisions that I normally struggle with. I’m like a duck on the pond; what you see above the water is still and calm, but what is hidden are his little feet that are paddling a hundred miles an hour. On the outside, I appeared to be a calm, intelligent, collected woman. On the inside, my entire life was a huge compressed pile of worry. Worrying what I was doing, if it was what was acceptable, and what people, primarily men, would think.

Until I met Erik, I really did not care, long term, what a man thought about what I wore, and where I was or what I was doing, but I did. I cared about the opinion, and their feelings to a certain extent, by nature. I didn’t so much care about them. There was a part of me that I always wondered about, and never really cared to talk about - the part of me that felt that I had to do whatever I had to do within my power to make a man happy. If the man was disappointed with me, I felt that it was my fault. It literally had the ability to crush me. If a man was satisfied with me, and expressed it, it was like Christmas morning. I would be so happy that he was happy that the feeling would often carry over for weeks.

From time-to-time I would wonder if this was one of the underlying reasons that I had never been in a relationship. If I allowed myself to care for a man, I would feel as if I had to please him, if I had to please him, I couldn’t tell him “no”, and if I couldn’t tell him no, I would be fulfilling his wants, needs, and desires. Making certain that he was always pleased would consume me, and that would allow me to have no life other than to please him. Pleasing him would be my life. I knew enough about myself to know if I cared about a man just a little bit, I would eventually be consumed by my own shortcomings.

To think of it all made my head spin.

Until I met Erik, I never really thought about it. The thoughts, generally speaking, entered my mind. On weekends, when I had idle time, I would think. When I got sick of my mind beating my soul to death, I would consume my day with activities. When I became still, or without tasks to deplete me, back to thinking I would go. The thoughts were always just general thoughts. What if this happens, Kelli? What about that, Kelli. Kelli, you’re fucking up, you need to drop that guy, and he’s getting attached. Kelli, Kelli, Kelli…

Ohmyfcukinggodmyheadisgoingtoexplode.

So, my idle time would be consumed by general thoughts about my desire to please men. With Erik, I was consciously thinking about these things. I was thinking about the fact that I wanted to please him. I was planning what I was going to do to please him. Ultimately, I was slowly becoming what I had feared for my entire life, a woman that is stuck and reliant upon a man.