Right now I’m alternating between anger and gratitude - given they’re at the same person for the same action, that’s a pretty weird mix, really.
As I’ve said here before, Artist and I _had_ decided that we were just going to consider each other’s houses one household for the purposes of all this. If anything it was more of a risk to me and the people that live here, given ArtistWife’s job, but I had accepted that and Artist had too. I mean, isolation pods are a thing, or at least that’s what how I thought of it.
And then he panicked yesterday, and decided while he’d still think about seeing me in person he was too scared of either getting the thing elsewhere and passing it to me or vice versa to touch me, and thought that continuing to combine households was too much of a risk of being a vector to the world.
(Did I mention that for a sadist he’s weirdly lawful good / cautious? Like, drives the speed limit etc. This is... not a thing I am.)
So on the one hand I’m _pissed_. He made a decision at least partially based on protecting me without talking to me about it - this is a thing that annoys me enough that I have a phrase for it, spidermanning me (based on a movie ending that still has me ranting like almost 20 years later). It feels like everything I’ve ever said or thought about non hierarchy was window dressing for something where I’m solidly a secondary. That everything I’ve said about our relationship being just as real despite having no logistical entanglements is so easily thrown out the window in the face of crisis. And he just dropped that decision on me as though it was obvious and reasonable and as though it wouldn’t hurt me - I think mostly because he was being practical and not emotional.
And yet.... this thing is fucking scary. So I get that. And I have to wonder whether me being ok with him being an exception was just me not being a grownup, and maybe he was and is being the adult I need him to be right now despite me not wanting him to - and so part of me is grateful for that. ( ::ironic laugh:: somehow my submission doesn’t usually extend outside the bedroom and yet in this moment it is and that feels appropriate somehow)
And yet, and yet, and yet, swinging back and forth on an insane pendulum. I don’t know how to be ok with this choice. There’s this irrational part of me that wants him to just come here for the duration instead, despite the house already not being big enough for the number of people who are in it 24/7. He’d be safer though, we’re so much more isolated than ArtistWife is or can be. Another irrational part that says if he loved me I’d be worth the risk and we should just go on the way we have been.
Rationally I know this is only a few weeks or maybe a month at most - I think even before social distancing officially ends the corner will turn enough that the panic can subside, and while things may take longer for work and school and travel I think the locked in one house will... must... come to an end.
Will I be sane at the end of that? That’s the part I don’t know. I don’t really know how to handle this anger. I don’t know how to believe in love without his hands on me - frankly even with the contact we have usually, sometimes it felt like I was “measur[ing] out my life in
coffee spoons”, waiting far too much to be alive for a few moments of blissful intensity.
There’s a lot that could be said here about kink and trauma bonding and whether cramming so much into these little pockets of joy is healthy.
But those little pockets of joy were the last little tiny bit of normality and he took them away without even really asking me. And I understand final decision is what it is but I don’t understand why it was presented as
a fait accompli. Though he didn’t really know what it would do to my rejection dysphoria, didn’t know that I already spend far more time than I should be five years in scared that something was going to happen and he’d suddenly fall out of love with me, that really only in the past few months - since last summer perhaps? - had I truly, truly managed to believe that this was as permanent as I believe anything is - I mean that’s why the collaring made sense.
He thinks I’m stronger than I am, really. Maybe it’s because I want to be the person he sees me as. And perhaps on some levels I can do anything for a bit ... perhaps if I could hit this with a sword or go shoot it with a gun I would be that strong. But locking myself away from most of the things that make me happy for some undetermined amount of time with the promise that maybe, maybe I’ll be safe? From something that might or might not hurt me as is? I don’t know how to do that.
It doesn’t help that this trap is making me into the world’s worst mother to MiniMe and partner to Knight - MiniMe is lonely and in my face enough I want to scream, and I just ... if I had had to choose which partner to physically distance from it would not have been him. I love him but I don’t need to touch him in the same way - I did once but he didn’t need it and it faded... and now he sees how much I’m hurting and he’s trying so damn hard, so very fucking hard and I still feel like I’m a thousand miles from him despite us being trapped here. I had started being able to process the way that my partners were just different and be ok with it, but now it feels like mockery to hug one partner when I want the other, when my skin fucking hurts just seeing a selfie today of the partner I want in a really soft sweatshirt that I know exactly how his body feels inside it.
And yet Knight is so good at calming my fears and taking care of me when I’m melting about this apocalyptic scenario we’re stuck in, and emotionally maybe he knows me better than Artist does - I wouldn’t have thought that in some ways, given the massive blind spots he’s had about me recently, and yet when I said Artist suggested that we could see each other without touching and I said that sounded more hellish than not seeing each other at all, his response was basically along the lines of “that couldn’t be more clear had you written it on the walls, I have no idea why he didn’t realize that”. And part of it I’m sure is that he heard me worrying back when ArtistWife’s partner left her and things were Weird In The Polycule, so it was more obvious, but... I guess everyone has their blind spots about their own actions.
I’m not really cut out for long distance, or this whole fake long distance thing. And as much as I like having Joan here I’m not really dealing well with her presence when I’ve been cut off like this, either, so that’s another thing.