Two Five One: Palimpsest

I was trained to do History, and I believe in keeping archives. I have paper journals dating back twenty-odd years, and notebooks that reach back to my undergraduate days. I have correspondence, including love letters, that dates back into the Eighties. And I have chat logs that go back a decade, filled with long exchanges with lovely young companions. I've never thought of purging any of those things. They're my past, my history, and they hold memories of places I've been, adventures I've had, and girls I've loved or desired. History matters, stories matter. I've lived my life through stories, and everything that I am is built up out of stories.

And yet there's something unsettling about going back through my past. My blonde friend down in the Land of the Long White Cloud told me once that she couldn't imagine me ever being hesitant to tell a lover or potential lover about my desires and preferences. That was one of my great skills as a lover, she told me: being willing to be utterly open, being able to show girls that there were so many ways to seek out pleasure and delight. It wasn't so long ago that she told me those things, and they meant a lot. These days, though, I'm starting to feel uncomfortable about that.

My friend down in Aoteoroa exchanged years worth of emails and chats with me. We explored a great many fantasy scenarios and fantasy worlds. We told each other all about our pasts and dreams and adventures and kinks. She'd write me to say that the two of us were able to do and try everything. No shame, no limits--- she'd tell me that all the time. But these days all our exchanges are beginning to worry me.

She's not the only one. Other lovely young companions have spent hours and hours on the phone with me, spinning out worlds and scenarios. Those late nights meant the world to me. We'd be inside each other's dreams and pleasures and desires and I'd feel alive and valued and able to explore whole new sexual and romantic worlds with girls in other cities and other countries. Tonight I have to wonder if I'd do those things now.

Here in the age of the gender wars the idea of having fantasies, let alone sharing them, is increasingly dangerous. I look back on the things lovers and I shared via email or chat or letters and I feel wary and something very close to miserable. Once upon a time, I'd never have been ashamed of any of the things I said or did with young companions. These days I'm deeply worried of being judged and mocked and condemned in ways I'd never have imagined a decade ago.

I look at the chat logs from what my Wellington friend and I talked about for years and what crosses my mind isn't that she felt safe enough and thrilled enough to say No shame, no limits to me, but that someone, somewhere, someday will use them against me. I'm beginning to feel the same way about the letters and emails archived over the years.

I can't decide whether it's all the Zeitgeist or if it's that entropy is winning and that I no longer have the energy to believe in pleasure and adventures. Whichever it is, I find myself not just afraid, but ashamed. Shame, unlike guilt, is external, socially-imposed. I'm becoming ashamed of all the ways lovely young companions and I found pleasure together. I'm becoming ashamed of the things that gave me pleasure. I'm becoming ashamed of having shared those things.  I know that it's that there's been some sea-change in how we view pleasure and adventure, and I look at the things lovers and I said and did and feel...empty. I feel like I'm losing my past, that the age we live in is telling me that everything I desired and felt and enjoyed was wrong, contemptible, shameful. I hate thinking that the girls I shared all those things with now despise me and reject the things we did and said.  I hate that, but there's nothing I can do about it.