When we moved here we did  not buy a mattress. We were budgeting, and we didn’t know how long we’d stay, so we bought a foam pad, thin, soft, and malleable. We figured we could always replace it in the future.

Ten months later, our foam pad has dips carved where our bodies rest in the night, and we still have not replaced it. It is obvious now that we will not. We will only be here two more months; two months and three days, in fact.

Last night I sunk into this feather nest of pale green cotton, and May and I slept like dead and drunken logs. It felt amazing to sleep that way again. It makes it harder to think of sleeping on our foam for the next two months, and then the inevitable bumps of couch surfing and floors and whirlwind unsettlement that await us before we can finally start building our home again. I want to do it right this time. I want to find a place I can paint and push and pull and make just ours, just right. I have not had a chance to do that, yet.

We’re leaving Sydney in early March. We will return to New York, for a while. Long enough to see our friends, our families. Long enough to launch Kink for All. Long enough to arrange the scattered pieces of our lives. Hopefully long enough to get Maymay kidnapped, captured and througly played out.

Why are we leaving here, you ask? It’s time. We’ve been in Sydney long enough to know we won’t be making a home here at this point in our lives. The city’s not quite right for us, right now. (This makes me feel like Goldilocks; too hot, to cold, just right. Too big, too small, just right.)

After some weeks in New York, though, we’re moving on. I know there is some hope that we would once again be residents of NYC, but it isn’t time, just yet. So where are we going?

San Francisco.

Why?

Isn’t it obvious?

I am having some trouble sorting out changes in my perspective upon the world, and myself. And my New York friends, the lot of them, are trouping off to Floating World this weekend, an instance that has produced a welter of nostalgia as I reflect on the truly marvelous experiences of last year.

I am certainly not cut off from the kinky community. Sydney’s scene continues on around me. My internet connection continues unabated. But as I mentioned in my last post, a shared sexuality does not my community make.

So when we get right down to the nitty gritty, the reality is that I am isolated now that I’ve left New York City. I’m isolated from my kinky friends and my favorite spaces and my comfort zones.

My reaction to this is akin to exhaustion. I ask myself how much effort I want to spend on building a life here in Sydney? Aren’t I just going to pick up and move again? I had never envisioned our move here as being long term, and I know how quickly a year or two can pass. But “in an hour, there are many days.” I have great swaths of time I try to fill with work. I’m writing a novel. I could kick myself for being so cliche.

(As a side note, I have been stalwartly resisting the impulse to turn this into a blog about teaching, understanding, and perfecting one’s writing. I don’t think my readers would appreciate the switch. “What is all this nonsense on teaching styles, Eileen? Remember the kinky sex we come here for? Come on, kinky sex!”)

As a result of this general ennui, my kinky identity has been going through something of a hibernation. I can envision the kinky part of myself, curled adorably in a large fluffy blanket somewhere warm, sucking her thumb and cradling a singletail to her chest. I haven’t stopped having sex, I haven’t stopped thinking about sex in masturbatory ways. But I have stopped thinking about sex in community ways, about the connections in, and advantages of, communicating with others like me.

So, seeing this disconnect in my identity coincide with my withdrawal from public spaces, I ask: How much of my kinky identity is based not around what I do in the bedroom, but what I write and say and do in public?

I don’t actually know the answer to that question. Do you?

The kinky community consistently picks words to push back against. We’re cranky like that. Among the list that garners resistance is the word “lifestyle.”

But I don’t buy into that particular resistance. I like the word lifestyle, specifically because it implies that being kinky is not just a matter of freaks in their bedrooms. Being kinky crosses those boundaries; I am kinky all the time. My sexuality is a part of my lifestyle, and affects the decisions I make in multiple contexts, not just when I’m flipping through my porn stash looking for something juicy.

In my observations, one of the best ways in which queer communities have gained acceptance is the acknowledgment of queer identities as being connected to lifestyles. Having gay neighborhoods, gay bars, gay-friendly merchants, gay-friendly medical centers. Acceptance trickles down, slowly but surely, as we begin to insist that we can’t just leave our sexualities at the bedroom door.

So how do I maintain that lifestyle in a healthy way now that I’ve moved away from the community that supported it? And more specifically, how do I do that without spending four hours of my life every day surfing blogs?

Let me break one factor of this change down. Hopefully with some delicacy. I want to talk about money.

Even though I should know it by now, it consistently shocks me how expensive it is to be kinky. Money is one way in which much of the public scene is privileged; there is literally a bar to entry open to a selected few. (Not to mention all the other ways in which much of the scene caters to a particular privilege: age, time, location, race, gender, orientation, able-bodied, to name a few. With a nexus of overlying, unspoken requirements, it’s no wonder the public scene is comparatively tiny.)

Now, I’ve come to realize that the Australian relationship with money as I currently see it is a little different than I’m used to. Namely, they spend more on their pleasures. It’s not just that Sydney is an expensive city, especially with food prices skyrocketed. NYC is also an expensive city; I’m used to this.

Rather, it seems a regular occurrence for the people I hang out with to drop $100 on alcohol in a single night. A weeknight. On a weekend? An American girl I met the other day told me, in hushed tones, that an Australian guy she knows spent $600 last Saturday, between clubs, cabs, and drinks. We stared at each other with our mouths open. $600 is my rent for a month.

So it doesn’t seem like a good enough reason, in this culture, for me to say that something is simply too expensive.

I have spent a lot of money on the weapons and gear of my sexuality of choice. I have spent a lot of money on events like Floating World and Black Rose. Thousands of dollars. Thousands of dollars that I, and others in my economic situation, cannot technically count as disposable income. And as half of a couple who travel together and split our expenses, for every dollar I spend, Maymay spends one too.

If we shall speak very technically, it is not too expensive for me to spend $40 to go to a play party. I do have $40 in my bank account, and it could potentially go toward such a thing. So let me be a little more honest.

Unfortunately for the good people I’ve met here in the scene, some of whom host simply gorgeous parties, I have a hard time getting myself out and putting down cash at the door. This, I should clarify, is not through the fault of their parties. This is because, as I mentioned, the things I want from the scene have changed:

Where I used to consider the possibility of pick-up play, I now play only with established partners and long-term friends.

Where I used to feed from the energy in kinky spaces, I now feel awkward and exposed.

Where I used to be willing to manage the social minefield of not knowing anyone on the room, I now feel more comfortable around at least a few people I’m close to.

And where I used to be able to make friends with people solely upon the common ground of shared sexualities, I now find myself unable to do so. This has unfortunately knocked munches off my list, as well as parties.

So the events are not at fault. But the events are no longer right for me. And the Sydney scene appears to be structured in such a way that these kinds of events are the first point of entry.

So when I say that something is too expensive, I am being a little unfair. What I should say is that I’m not, at this point in my life, willing to pay an entry fee in order to be exposed to a number of kinky people with whom I have a slight chance of becoming friends. Because that’s what these parties have become for me; the vapor of a possibility that one of the other attendees might be someone I want to make friends with.

In the end, having complementary sexualities has almost no value for me in forging new friendships. It comes below a laundry list of other factors that must first align: our humor, our interests, our intellectual inquiries, our attitudes toward society and life and ourselves.

Complementary sexualities become a real factor in maintaining a relationship once sex itself becomes a factor of that relationship. To say that I am more likely to find friends among the kinky is similar to saying that if I were hetero, I would be more likely to find friends among men. Largely illogical, consistently untrue.

I have been reassessing the return on my investments, so to speak. Unfortunately, if I go to a play party that does not yield me any kind of good feeling, friendship, or conversation, I don’t just shrug it off. I get upset at myself, a little depressed. And where I get a little upset, Maymay becomes angrily vicious and bitter. It is not uncommon for us to leave play parties that are unsuccessful (by our standards), go home, fight, and end up miserable and crying. So in many ways, an entry fee is not just an entry fee; it’s a gamble.

And as what I’m looking for diverges further and further from what play parties are designed to deliver, the gamble becomes increasingly bad.

It’s very difficult to recall a presentation once it’s gone from our heads into the ether of collective consciousness. It’s a situation a little like the worst parts of constructive criticism combined: an incredibly tendency toward negative feedback, and absolutely no chance to re-draft. It’s over, it’s done. I’m not satisfied with the outcome, and I have to go off and live with that obsessive perfectionist griping.

I think the makings of a stellar presentation are somewhere in the work I did this weekend, but I didn’t manage to access that this Saturday. I delivered something solid, decent, and raw. Had I been walking into Conversio Virium or a Floating World class, a place I felt comfortable and confident, maybe I could have bridged that gap and really made an excellent show of things.

Unfortunately, I don’t feel comfortable here in the Sydney scene at the moment. For many reasons, most of which are my own: that kink is taking a backseat to my career jumpstarting, that May and I have become increasingly private in our play, that we are focusing on each other almost exclusively. That I still, still, still feel awful and off-balance when I meet new people, that I still feel socially like an actress playing a role that doesn’t fit quite right. That I am lonely. That I miss the community I know and the friends I’m entwined with, and the scene here sometimes makes that worse instead of better. And that I’m having to fight the battles I thought I’d finished long ago, all over again.

I hate going backward in my life. In every other way, this move has been a great leap forward. My career is stronger, my relationship is better, my psyche is thriving. But in social spaces, and especially in scene spaces, I feel like I’ve been knocked back ten steps.

And more frustrating than the feeling of being knocked back is the logical part of my brain that just keeps on asking: Why do I care? Why should I?

I went to a ‘nilla party last night, one train stop away. The party itself was quite fun: I curled up in an armchair with a Dita Von Teese book and an awesome chick I’m trying to trick into being my friend. (I think it’s working.) We made creamy chocolate drinks in the blender and talked about dating men, and dating women, and the differences therein.

I timed my trip back to catch the 12:07 train. At the station I met another girl from the party. We chatted, keeping each other company in the light drizzle. When the train pulled up and we got in the door, we found a group of six or seven young men who immediately started talking to us. “Hey ladies,” they hooted, “how’re you tonight? How about you stay here with us?”

We walked to the other end of the car and sat down, still talking. When my stop came a couple of minutes later I turned to her. “Do you want me to stay on the train with you?” I asked, nodding at the group of men.

“No thanks,” she said. “It’s only more one stop, I should be okay.”

As I got off the train one of the men was hanging from the open door. “Hey girlie, hey, you fucking slag,” he yelled. “Does your friend like to suck dick?”

As I walked up the stairs I looked back at the train windows. One of the men was walking toward her seat. The train slid under the tunnel and out of sight.

I wish I had stayed on the train, and just taken a cab home from her stop. I wish I knew her last name. I wish I had her number. I wish I knew what had happened.

I hope she’s all right.

It is time now to revisit. It is, in fact, insistently necessary.

Many of the comments I recieved during the initial shock commented on my strength, or my rationality, or the capability demonstrated by my reaction. I remain grateful for the support and kindness, although at the time a part of me thought this was all a bit odd. I just did what I had to do, I thought. I did what I needed to do to survive and still be able to look myself in the face at the end of the day.

I commented recently on Under The Boot that although I have more issues than I can shake a stick at, most of them don’t make it to this forum. Most of them sit in a wasteland of stubbed text documents in a folder on my desktop, abandoned. What I didn’t mention in the comment is that even these stubs are an achievement for me. I keep them around long after they become just bits of digital clutter.

My family member and I eventually decided to leave our argument alone, brush it under the rug and go on with our lives, so to speak. Here’s what you have to understand for the rest of this to make sense: this is exactly the way I’ve dealt with every pyschological issue since I was ten years old. It has taken me years, tears, and a lot of wincing at my own stupidity to get me to acknowledge and address issues head on, to write down my musings, to practice self-awareness. Even now I’m not very good at it. I often approach problems sideways, wending my way like a crab.

I moved to Australia, I essentially erased my life and started over, and I thought that would be the end of it. I thought to myself, Damn it, I have dealt with this. Enough is enough. This pain is firmly locked away in a dark part of my mind, if not exorcised completely.

Of course I was lying to myself. Of course that was complete bullshit. Of course it still hurts. Probing the wound is as easy as reading my archives.

I still, occasionally, cry until I’m exhausted enough to sleep. I still find my self-confidence weakened. And I still sometimes want to scream whenever my family member comes to the phone, flush with that initial childish anger: 

I turned 25 last month. I’m just a kid. I’m not supposed to hurt this much. 

It didn’t have to be this way. 

Why did you do this to me?

And because I am brilliantly twisted enough to make even this into a completely personal guilt trip (instead of a partially personal one), I can’t help but think that if I were really as strong as I appear to be, things would be better by now.

This blog has slowed to a trickle, and if the truth be told, it’s not just because I uprooted my life and lost my Internet access. It is also because this forum has undeniably changed, and it’s becoming clearer to me as time passes that the changes are not for the better.

One of the reasons I like blogging is that I like to go back and read what I’ve written. I like to mine my old words for new ideas. I have not read back in several months, because when I try to I cannot get my family member’s face out of my head: their thoughts when they read my words, their concern and outrage. The red carpet of our living room that I stared at while they yelled at me over Thanksgiving weekend. I begin to think that I should just change the blog’s background to a picture of that damned carpet, and give up any hope of ever separating msyelf from that pain again.

What this means is that every time I open a new post and begin to write, the words feel ungainly and weighted. Everything is filtered through the lense of potential pain. The headline flashes: Who Might Be Reading This Time?

I wrote that I would continue to speak out because I recognize that speaking out helps people. I still believe that. I refused to move this blog, find a new place, go to ground and drop from the radar. I figured that doing so would be useless, the damage done.

But I didn’t manage to throw off the hurt and worry and blithely continue. Not just here, but in my entire life, things changed. My fantasies changed. My kinks shifted. Even the way I kiss my boy changed, for a little while. I tried to keep writing, keep teaching, keep fucking and playing, while it became increasingly clear that every time I wrote, taught, fucked, played, I was committing a political act.

I wanted desperately to retreat, to be safe again, to just sweep it all under the rug and get on with things, maybe in a different way, maybe the same. But I didn’t, because politically and personally I don’t believe I should have to retreat and disappear to make things better.

It is cloyingly noble, and it makes me a bit embarrassed. Especially with this next part thrown in.

I have to admit something, and doing so is painful in itself. I was not prepared for how exhausting it is when the only thing that keeps me writing is the uncanny idea that if I don’t keep writing, the sexual terrorists will win. 

The initial explosion didn’t kill me, but the little everyday grinding reminders might yet finish me off.

Perhaps this entire thought process bespeaks of lack of “closure”, but I’m not so sure. I have been told many times over the years that I need to “have it out” with my family member. Have it out over what, I ask, and why? I remain convinced that it is not in my or my family’s interest to force a fight to death or disownment. I think that if I’m going to move forward, I’m going to have to do it on my own.

In the meantime, I don’t know what to do about this blog. Maintaining it is both satisfying and upsetting. I have to work hard to get the joy out, like the whole thing is a vat of olives pressed one too many times. 

Much of this sounds melodramatic and adolescent. I’ve tried to avoid that. It’s hard not to sound adolescent when all you want to do is whine that life is shit and it isn’t fucking fair. But it seems necessary to acknowledge this thing that is still happening to me, six months later. 

The truth is, I feel damaged. I am terrified that the damage may be irreparable.

At the time I was devastated, yet confident. Now I’m just tired. I’m fed up with politics and censorship and bad writing and family drama. I’ve had enough, and I’m pissed that this pain keeps hanging around and making me cry on warm nights.

The party invitation called for “Fetish formal.” Facing our new built-in closet, May wrinkled his nose in frustration. “I hate dress codes,” he repeated, pulling on a transluscent grey tank top that matched his pants. He posed in front of the full length mirror. “Is this okay? It’s not even black.”

“You look great, love,” I said. I enjoyed the way the shirt framed his shoulder muscles.

A party with a fetish formal dress code makes both of us wary. I wondered if there would be play, at what level, if we’d be interested, interesting. What was the age group, what was the space like, what was the ratio? Should we bring our whips, the rope, the knives?

When we met Ms160 and Sol on the corner, we had no large toys with us. I’d stuck my villainelles, tiny hand-made steel points that Switch and Boy so beautifully created, in my purse. We piled into the backseat of their car and drove the few minutes to the party through dark, small streets. We all laughed at Sol’s brilliant parking job in front of a high wooden fence.

Ms 160 led us to a row of nondescript doors. “Damn, I don’t remember which it is.” We stood awkwardly between two buildings, debating the decency or indecency of knocking on some stranger’s door at 10pm in full fetish gear.

Across the street some guys and girls were hanging off a porch, drinking from green bottles. I peered up the stairs behind a screen door that was propped open. A girl, one of their friends I thought, with more green bottles, saw me peeking in. “You’re the next one over,” she smiled, coming down the stairs. “You can knock. They’ve got a doorman.”

“The outfits gave it away, right?” I thanked her.

The doorman, in a tuxedo, ushered us up the stairs into a beautifully done up apartment, decked with candles, pottery, plants, dramatic lighting. I felt distinctly as though I should avoid moving quickly for fear of breaking the place, or burning it down. We dropped our coats, retrieved drinks from the elegantly laid table, and circulated through the building. Ms 160 introduced me and May right and left. Characteristically, names dropped from my head as fast as they entered. I complimented our hostess on her veil, made cleverly of metal wire and rhinestones and glittering like a Mardi Gras mask.

Eventually May, Ms160, Sol and I found ourselves in the dungeon, testing out the frames of the equipment and picking up toys from the rack to slap them against our arms. “They run this as a B&B,” Ms160 said, “So you can rent the whole thing out for a night, close it off and have your own private dungeon.” She pointed out the TV stand with a built in cage. There was another cage under the bed. The floors were hard tile, which I regretted, thinking of the possibility of flinging May against the ground.

At one point my boy ran up to me excitedly. “They have tie points in the shower!”

At another, I chatted in the hallway with a young blonde woman, laughing and enjoying a respite from feeling socially awkward. “I’m assigned to the door,” she said, “so I just try and snag people as they go by and get them to entertain me!” May joined us a moment later.

“This place is really nice,” he said, gesturing toward the dungeon. “It’s very schmantz” -our private word for fancy- “and postmodern.”

“You just called the dungeon postmodern,” I glanced at him.

He wriggled a little. “Yes, so?”

I raised an eyebrow. “You just called the dungeon postmodern.” Our new blonde friend dissolved in laugher.

After a little while we grew to miss our singletails. The boys were sent into the night to fetch them. Ms 160 and I climbed the stairs to the upstairs living room, settled on a couch and watched as a woman in a zippered black latex dress was tied to a beautiful wooden x-cross lacquered in red and hung with silk. In the meantime, Ms160 told me the amusing story of the male dom who had started a fashion trend of wearing leather chaps, thus confusing all of the dominant women at the party, who suddenly found themselves surrounded by dominant men with their bums hanging out.

A lovely boy in just such chaps passed by us occasionally, offering tidbits of food on a tray and occasionally stopping to say hello. Watching him leave, I decided I might very well be warming to the aesthetics of ass-less trousers.

Eventually our boys came back. The whips came with them.

Heads up, the second half of this story will be passworded.

It’s been surprisingly difficult to find the time, the energy, and the inspiration for a big, juicy comeback entry for you all to chew on. Suck on? Is that too dirty?

First, there’s the culture shock I keep holding my breath for, the shock I never got when I moved to New York City, but which I kept expecting for months after I’d moved in. I keep thinking this time I’ll get it, this time I’ll be shaken by the differences.

Though my friends are resembling little aching gaps in my life which hurt dreadfully at times, thus far, culture shocked I am not.

Then there’s the nitty gritty, the thousand-and-one administrative items of moving to a new country. Every day I cross a few off, and every day more come piling on. Bank accounts, cell phones, Internet access, furniture. Where can I get a good cheeseburger at 4am? Does this city even understand the concept of mozzarella sticks?

Then, there’s the psychic weight of everything I’ve missed here online. Would you like to know how loquacious you are, my sexy friends? In the three weeks that I have been primarily offline, you have managed to push 984 new items through my RSS feeds. 984. For bonus points, I’d like to dare you to guess how many of those items belong to Richard.

The concept of catch-up is at this point laughable.

And finally, there’s all that tricky expectation. There’s the nagging thought in the back of my mind that I should manage a piece both delicious and spectacular, that in the months since I’ve seriously written here I should have garnered something that would make for a good re-entrance. I do have plans, to write about Sydney’s Mardi Gras and queer spaces and the visual representations of gender and power (again.) Also about the last play party in New York, the flesh and the screams and the sock monkey pajamas.

I am dreadfully out of practice. My narrative voice has gone all rusty and tangled, leading me down rapid tangents and far too eager to abandon me.

May and I spent the first week and a half here stressed out of our minds. We barely ate. We couldn’t stop fighting. We were staying in a tiny hostel room with bunk beds, going slowly mad from the nightly separation of skin and flesh. Now we’re in another hostel, another tiny room with bugs on the floor and our things in haphazard piles, but with a double bed that is devious and enchanting. I am having trouble waking up in the mornings, some sort of weird jet-lagged throwback.

I get caught up in the nasal reverberation of Australian voices. The coffee is better, the food is too expensive, the wind is warmer, the ocean is closer. The wireless options are pathetic. The grass is amazing.

Sydney is, as I remembered it, a fabulous city. But it’s also a real city, a home. That means it has quirks, disappointments, secrets, tricks that I have yet to master. There is a part of me that thought this move would be easy. Simple. The physical logistics of the adventure have been slow and frustrating, but they’re manageable. They’re working.

That part of me focused on the physical logistics with such ferocity that the all thoughts of emotional health were smudged out. Truth be told, I am a little lost. Perhaps more than a little. Perhaps my life has been through one too many massive upheavals in the past three months.

But lost or found, shocked or not, consider this my self-conscious, rambling, entirely pointless and decidedly undramatic re-entrance. I am online again.