an edit, of sorts

 I think I spoke too soon in my last entry about Nick’s flirting and my imagination.  We had a long talk at the end of last week about trust and keeping secrets.  Nick told me then that it’s something he’s working on, that he doesn’t *want* to do it and didn’t think he was keeping any important secrets from me.  My lack of trust is my own problem to sort out, I get that, but Sunday I gave into temptation and looked at Nick’s old phone.  And there I found flirting gone wild: not just finding clever ways to tell certain female friends how attractive he found them or inquiring as to their current attire, or even mutually reminiscing on playsessions past with Kate, but also some cyberkink in which he and one girl in particular seem to frequently engage.  This obviously eclipsed the knowledge that Nick is apparently planning to purchase a new iPhone for L’s birthday in January and that his father’s birthday is three days earlier than I thought.

A lot of the time  I don’t really emote or think about it, but I don’t think I can adequately describe how crushed I was am.  Not knowing what else to do, and shaking very badly, I made the ten minute walk to BC, where Nick was working, to ask him about it.  He said that Girl was simply satisfying his need to feel attractive outside our relationship/that he *could* be poly if he wanted to, though he still says he doesn’t, and he didn’t know how he could tell her to stop without hurting her feelings, since all of the other guys she knows eventually stop talking to her.  Our conversation was cut short because he had a rehearsal …. I went home, and in an effort to make myself more miserable, went back even further in the chat history to try to understand what the hell has been happening.  It wasn’t until then–over an hour later–that I really came across the virtual kink–role playing involving one of them topping the other– and at that point … 

I sat there and could not stop reading, could not gather the focus to attend to the long list of more worthwhile things to do, could not even summon the interest to read a book or sew.  Nick came home earlier than expected, and we began a very long discussion.  He said he had been thinking for awhile (since my birthday, he says) that he was going to stop flirting, and that he didn’t even enjoy it any more–he did it because people expect it from him, and he wasn’t sure how to say no to Girl.  A part of me still thinks that he did not even recognize what he was doing as crossing a line (something I said several times) until I found out, and I wondered aloud why he hadn’t bothered to mention at ANY TIME BEFORE THAT MOMENT what he was doing with Girl.  So many times he has commented that he’s not sure why I’m so mistrustful of their friendship (me: really? this didn’t occur to you?) …  I told him I felt that I had done as much as I could to help him thus far, but that I’m sort of at the end of the line–I didn’t see anything I could do that would be of more or different help.  

He said he feels like I’m often closed off or withholding information from him (past experience has suggested to me the practicality of attempting to bake ideas past the halfway point … sometimes this takes awhile).  I’m not that aware of my emotions when I have them, and sometimes I just don’t emote at all  (I began crying when he brought this up because I’ve made some serious effort the past few years to address this, apparently to no effect).  A bit later, the matter of our M/s relationship came up.  He’s underfed, I’m waiting around for him to enforce protocol … we’re both bored.  I don’t believe for a second that if I had been more attentive as a slave, he would have curtailed his shenanigans with Girl, even though part of that motivation has turned out to be M/s hunger.  There are two problems: first, being aware of the on-going flirting had discouraged me from being attentive–if it wasn’t going to stop anyway, why bother making so much effort? (It also turns out that flirting+ with Girl has been going on almost the entire time that Nick and I have been together.  So much for being monogamous nearly a year.)  Second, on his end, Nick struggles to ask for/enforce things.  A lot of the time he assumes I’m withdrawn or busy (even though I’ve said before that I want to make time), but he has also been concerned that the more serious the relationship, the greater the risk of losing his partner over a bdsm misstep, which discourages him from playing.  It’s easier for him to top and engage sexually when the possible consequences are negligible, and I’m not sure that the stakes have ever been quite so high.  There was a lot of discussion about what a good idea it would have been to live apart for awhile after Hell on Earth (apparently I’m still the only one of us who thinks this would have been an excellent idea) … Eventually I told him I’d be happy to start following all protocols once he had shown me that he had stopped flirting, etc.  

Monday afternoon he sent me the screen shot of that conversation, and she seemed quite supportive about our decision to source our emotional and sexual needs in-house.  After giving it a bit of thought, I think she may also have been misled a bit–she would sometimes inquire after me, and Nick would usually either tell her I wasn’t home or was already asleep.  I remember making similar inquiries in the past in an effort to not cause harm in someone else’s relationship … maybe this sort of thing is just always a no-win situation.  Anyway … I’ve been doing my best to be a lot more attentive the past few days, and Nick has said he’s genuinely excited about our re-commitment (I hope to Xenu and the highest heavens that deciding to stick around was the right move), and has seemed to be more engaged as well.  

I’m bad at feelings: I’m not sure I’ve ever felt anything like this before.  The knowledge that Nick was playing with someone else while in a relationship with me has completely undercut my own knowledge of my self worth and my place as his slave.  In the intervening days I’ve had trouble focusing, and often realize how uncertain and … and *sad* I am.  Today such a wave of panic came over me during my class that I didn’t see how I could possibly stand to wait the four hours and endure my second class of the day, so I emailed the professor and cancelled.  I was mostly successful at fighting off  the tears on the train (who wants to be the unfortunate soul dealing with tragedy while using public transit?), and came home and sobbed.  I fight the urge to fish out his phone and "just make sure", but sleep is elusive and it’s hard to fight off the feeling of not being ENOUGH when you thought you were doing a fairly decent job.  And even though I keep analyzing and thinking, it’s beyond my lowly and crippled powers of reasoning to discern how I could have bought into his insistence on honesty and trust, how I could have thought all this time that the naughtiest thing he was getting up to behind my back was some harmless flirting. I wonder why I didn’t kick him out, and why he equates his infidelity with my emotional distance, and whether there is any way to knowfor absolutely certain whether he’s truly stopped playing around, and whether I’ll ever be able to trust him completely at the rate we’re going.  

But no answers are forthcoming.

And no knowledge is forthcoming.  

Sleep escapes me; I have lost some part of myself that I cannot even define.

And I wonder whether any of these things will ever again be within my grasp … and whether all worthwhile relationships are as much work as this one.