A Place To Draw Blood Laughing

This series has been slowly dancing around two ideas, and I think it’s time to wrap it up.

It’s true that most boys are just boys, and that rarely do any of us fit the fairy tales of our childhood. Not only did I grow up wanting leather-wearing horse-riding nerds to romance me alternately with motorcycle rides and Shakespeare, I also grew up wanting to be a skinny girl in stockings wearing lipstick and a pretty skirt with ruffles. Part of me, the part that buys orange shoes and thin gold chains, is still deeply in love with delicate feminine aesthetics. And part of me is still enthralled by manly men and the accoutrement therein.

But it becomes clearer and clearer that the men I then wanted to date hold the qualities I now want to have, and the women I then wanted to be are the women I now want to date. This means a lot of radical redefinitions, not only of myself but of what I look for in a partner. I’m beginning to realize that I don’t really know what attracts me in any specific way. I haven’t managed to sort out where my identity ends and my lust begins.

The other revelation I have been musing my way toward is that, in a strange and unexpected way, I did end up with an amalgam of a white knight, a rebel, and a nerd.

That my boy is a nerd is an unquestioned fact. Once upon a time we spent the night at a friend’s house. Maymay fell asleep on her lap, and she and I talked into the small hours of the night. I remember her stroking his hair while she said, “He really is a genius. It’s a little scary.”

He really is a genius. It is a little scary.

And although it comes out rarely, curiously, and in unexpected places, Maymay is a gallant man. Gallant enough to take me out to dinner, to buy me flowers on a whim, and to stop himself from laughing when he kicks my ass at air hockey.

But what really started me on this series of posts was that I realized something about Maymay’s rebellion. I realized that he has managed to make the separation I could not, as a child, make: that the strength to embrace deviant ideals does not necessarily translate into sexual strength or dominance. And that making that distinction is, in and of itself, a rebellion.

In my mind he makes images like steel wires running through cupcakes, peaches with pits of stone.