A Gift… for my kawaii Cakey
So, basically I’ve spent all my morning waking hours doing this:
The beginning of the rest of my life was a funny thing. For months, I’d been biting my nails, unsure of myself and peeking around every corner, worried about everything. I was worried about making the wrong turn, of getting hurt, of letting myself trust others and I was in near constant pain, trying to compensate for the hole in my heart, a hole left by a wretched monster I had been too kind to not forgive. But it left me a mess, a horrible, broken mess and I had been left to pick up the pieces.
I had nightmares, more often than I cared to admit, about that time happening again, about never finding love and about all my insecurities, stupid as that sounds. I tentatively began to like several people, scared to let myself fall into more than serious attraction lest my heart be broken upon discovering I did not mean the same to the other. It had already happened far too many times to count so why add yet another heart break and so soon after being cornered like an animal? I certainly didn’t see the point.
I can’t currently pinpoint the actual day I began to change but change I did. I grew stronger, around the hurt that had been played to me with the help of so many others. I faced my worst nightmare in a court of law and was slapped with a verdict I neither agreed nor felt entirely comfortable with. But that was the time I think I told myself I had to move on or I would never truly heal. I think internally I knew that I was to carry around this pain for the entirety of my life if I didn’t shut the fuck up and just move forward with myself. And so, tentatively mind you, I began that journey forward.
Luckily for me, I had people along the way to help me out which is more than I can say for a majority of sexual assault victims. As I began to stretch farther and farther outside my comfort zone, I began to make friends in unlikely places. My favorite fan fiction author ended up adding me to a Skype group and I grew fond of her, her boyfriend and various friends there. Granted, these friendships were started over the internet but that doesn’t make them any less real than if they had started at the beginning of the school year in senior English. In fact, I would say meeting over the internet granted a truth and honesty not afforded to most traditional friendships due to the fact that without seeing the other person’s face, you can be perfectly honest without worrying too much about convention. Of course, there is always the threat that the other person is lying through their teeth but I have found over the course of time that generally speaking, humans are kind creatures and have a tendency to be honest over the internet where there is simultaneously everything and nothing to lose.
I was extremely cautious due to an abusive three year relationship that ended on less than friendly terms that had left me distrustful, angry and more than a touch hurt. But slowly, the more I opened up, the more friends I began to make. I certainly didn’t throw caution completely to the wind but I found that the more trusting and open I was, the more I was rewarded with love and kindness and I grew fond of my newfound friends, turning to them for help and guidance in ways previously unavailable to an unpopular scrap like me. Finally, I had friends I could trust and love both in real time as well as across cyberspace, proving to me that not all people are inherently bad.
And then I met somebody very special. Her name is Cake and I began to feel something I hadn’t felt in a while, and certainly never for my same sex. I am polyamorous by nature and tend to have at least two people I like equally well existing at the same time. At the time I began feeling things for her, which was shortly after we met, I had discovered my pansexuality.
This seems like a crazy thing to just simply ‘discover’ but I had been raised by a group of Southern, religious bigots who were convinced anybody with any feelings whatsoever for the same sex was going to burn in hell and that god hated them. In fact, I myself had been trained and raised to both hate and distrust gays as something entirely abominable in nature so it was as if I had been handed a natural suppressant of my true nature. Upon my father’s absence, it was as if a majority of this influence had disappeared with him and I was left free to discover myself and explore in ways not normally permitted. For awhile I thought myself to be bisexual seeing as I felt things for males and females but upon discovering the definition of pansexuality, I could not help but think to myself that that was the label that fit the best.
I would like to take a moment to explain this pansexuality. No, I am not attracted to pans nor am I attracted to anything that walks, crawls, flies or hasn’t been dead more than three days. What pansexual means is that you are attracted to all people despite this fuzzy thing we label gender. Bisexuality tends to either lean more towards heterosexual or homosexual feelings but pansexuality encompasses all possible genders equally. I felt that this fit because I found myself attracted to transgenders, male, female and hell, my one boyfriend had been everything but a transvestite. To me, pansexual fit the best.
I will openly admit I found myself scared to death that I had an attraction to females. Wasn’t I supposed to feel disgust? But upon exploring, the more I looked into the possibility, the more I felt attracted to the soft curves and angelic tresses adorning glowing faces. Women are beautiful in a different way that men are handsome but I find both to be extremely attractive in their own right albeit much differently. And, of course they would be different kinds of attraction because male and female are different but the love felt on the inside was no different. Kind of like how a parent loves their children differently – equally but differently and so it is the same with me with male and female attraction. It’s like loving different significant others for different reasons. Same emotion, roughly the same feeling but different motivations and things that attract you to that person.
Tentatively, as you can imagine, I began to like this Cake more and more. We Skype called each other and videoed via tinychat. We shared more and more of each other and the more I learned, the more I thirsted to know about her and I found myself drawn to the idea of being in a relationship with her, for being there to wipe her tears when she cried and for sharing the joys she was sure to have in life. At first, this attraction scared me as it was entirely new. I mean, I had never had a girlfriend before and I was understandably tentative. But the girl began to grow on me.
One day, I came home from church bawling my eyes out. My brother and mom had shared with me in no uncertain terms their views on homosexuality and they had completely devastated me. I could never ever tell them about my feelings for women if I wished for myself and any significant other I might possibly have to see the light of another day. They would disown me, leave me destitute if they didn’t either kill me or shove me into a mental hospital to recuperate from ‘such a disgusting disease’ as feeling things for the same sex.
Who was there to encourage me and wipe my tears? Certainly all of my friends were but Cake was there for me the most being pansexual herself. We chatted for hours and she made me laugh, a trait I am highly attracted to. She made me feel good about myself again and more than anything I wished she was beside me so I could wrap her in a warm embrace and never ever let go. She made me feel normal, like my family’s opinion wasn’t such a big deal and I began to fall harder.
More and more I found myself wishing to ask to be her girlfriend and I began to kind of snoop around if you will about her personal life. I asked her moirail, Sai, just exactly how she was about falling into serious attraction. I asked if she liked anybody and just how her feelings worked because I was too shy to ask her myself as well as too scared of rejection to dare ask her about it. He informed me that he hadn’t known her to crush or like easily and I found my heart begin to sink to the floor, devastated. I promised myself I wouldn’t allow myself to feel more than attraction towards this girl as a way to save me serious heartache and pain in the long run.
And then, she messed up her computer being silly little Cake. The situation was more than a touch comical and it amused me just how adorable she could be. She disappeared for quite awhile and the longer her absence, the more my heart ached to hear her voice again, to talk to her and see her even if it was on video. I told myself that it was just attraction, it would certainly go away. I convinced myself I would end up breaking my own heart if I didn’t calm the fuck down and get my head out of the clouds. But as the days passed, my heart began to beat steadily for the girl I was certain I could not have.
We began to leave messages to each other on tumblr, no other way of real communication available. Every time I saw a new message in my inbox, my heart pounded almost painfully, hoping against everything it would be something from her even if it was a word or a smiley face. As the days passed, I found myself thinking more and more of her until I just couldn’t get her out of my head. I remembered her laugh, her easy smile and the cute way she moved absentmindedly on camera. I told myself if I didn’t snap the fuck out of my daze soon, I was going to end up with another broken heart.
And then, suddenly, she was on again and I was on the same time she was. We began to talk and I recalled a question a friend had asking if she and I were ‘a thing’ because she had sent me a heart in my inbox and I felt that more than anything, I wanted the two of us to actually be a thing. I was too frightened to come out and say it, though, for fear of rejection. There was simply no way I could ask her. She has always been more than adorable and I… not. I find myself a gigantic lumbering landmass but don’t you dare tell her I said that. She’ll deny it but the truth is she’s the cute one.
We began to chat, kind of dancing around the subject and finally, we discovered ourselves on the same page – we liked each other and longed to be together. After a moment of awkward pussyfooting, we kind of mutually asked each other out. I found myself grinning like a fool, excited as hell.
Needless to say, I would commemorate July 3rd as the start of the rest of my life for many reasons. I had mostly overcome my negative feelings of inadequacy and began to move forward with myself, with my life. For the first time in a long time, I went to bed grinning like a fool and excited to see tomorrow, wishing for internet in ways I hadn’t wished for anything before so I could talk to her whenever I wanted and call her again, falling asleep on video like the dorks that we are.
I’m excited and happy as hell. Of course, my friends are all worried about my parents finding out about the two of us. Hell, I kept a 3 year abusive relationship under the rug, I think I can manage this. And I wanna wake up before her every day while I’m here in the states so I can call her and wish her a good morning but I can’t… yet… due to lacking a proper internet connection.
I just hope to god this lasts awhile and I just wanted to end this with a short little message:
I love you, Cakey. Don’t go changing~
