I'm a fool.

Alright folks, I need some help. What the hell should I be for Halloween? My best friend just bought a hot little tiny nurse's outfit today, and I'm still at a loss. I promise to take pictures, I just need a little input! *bats eyelashes*

And that's what they used to do. I have been a casual dater my entire life (if being intimate with people you barely know counts as dating, that is). When things got too tough, or I got bored, I was off to the next new and interesting adventure. I bounced around from boyfriend (or girlfriend) to boyfriend, messed around and moved on. Had some fun, learned a little bit more about myself, counted it as another life lesson and didn't look back.

That is, until this one. Some days I want to slap myself upside the head and say, "Aine, what the fuck?". I don't trust people easily, I barely ever let down my guard. I've survived a long time like this; it's served me well over the years. But now, with Bear, things seem to be turning around.

I'm scared. I don't want to move across the country to a place I barely know with a student's salary and a daughter to support. I don't want to have to make all new friends. I don't want to worry about how we're going to pay bills. I don't want to be married and essentially be alone for three years while he spends 100% of his time and attention on law school. I'm terrified. But this is what love is, what love should be. I guess it's my turn to sacrifice for a few years, then it's his turn. I just hope it works out that way; I hope I'm not making sacrifices for naught. I guess having that ring on my finger will be the indicator that it's not for nothing; that he does indeed want me/us and is working to better himself both for himself AND for us.

To summarize, I'm still getting married in January (I hope!). I'm ready to move into a new stage of life. I'm ready to move to a new location. And I'm scared to death.

This is the raging beast, the monstrous tormenter. And that's his beautiful cock. Our sex life has been slow lately, for academic reasons. When I get aroused, I either browse Literotica (see if you can guess which stories appeal to me the most) or look at pictures from when Bear and I lived together. I love this picture because I see my juices still glistening on him. I see the veins, which remind me that we must have been involved in some sort of bondage session (he gets hard when he fucks me, obviously, but the only thing that brings out the "rock hardness" is when he fucks me and hurts me at the same time). I can almost feel the ridges coursing in and out of me, my cervix almost twinges from the amount of slamming it must have been getting. That cock, boy, how I love it. And how it destroys me.

I've been thinking more about BDSM lately. Namely, can it be incorporated into a relationship in more than a casual sense and still not BE the relationship? Is it possible to have a successful mundane relationship (communication, cooperation, etc.) and still live as master and slave? I want that life, I miss that life... but I'm not sure I'm ready for that to be all there is. I don't even want that as the basis of our relationship. I want to be happy together - able to talk, work as a team, make decisions together - and still know that he's taking care of me and helping me make hard personal decisions (as well as all the sexual side effects of living that way). Any thoughts?

I present "lunch hour strip tease"...










I was bored. :) Anyway, I'm sitting here at my computer. Naked. I just called Bear to ask permission to come (in code, of course. He works at a very corporate business), and he's too tied up to understand what I was talking about. This leaves me in a pickle. I'm trying to be good, but I want to be bad. Oh, the dilemmas. Anyone want to weigh in? I may publish if I get enough response. ;) And with Bear's permission, of course.

I want to get spanked right now. Seriously. Look at my ass in those pictures. It wants it. It NEEDS it. I think this waxing and waning of interest in bondage ties into the lack of time I'm getting to spend with Bear. I have this itch to perform, to be a GOOD girl, and with such little time together I guess I want to live it up. That's unhealthy, huh?

I'm feeling frustrated this evening. I'm annoyed at my inability to get my shit together. It's just so hard for me to clean my apartment, raise my daughter, do my homework, be a good friend, be the perfect lover/girlfriend, be a wonderful employee... HOW do people do it all at the same time?! Why do I allow this to drive me absolutely insane?

Today, I'm bad at cleaning. I'm an alright mother, and I've been fairly studious. I'm an ok friend (I invited my best friend over for dinner tomorrow evening), but I've been lukewarm towards Bear this evening. Work was ok, but there was no passion in it. Overall, I give myself a 5. Definite room for improvement.

"Where is there dignity unless there is honesty?"
--Cicero

I place my fingers on these keys almost every day of the week, dulling the letters a bit more each time I write. Sometimes I write about sex, other times about emotions, some days even about politics. To paraphrase W. Somerset Maugham, I don't write because I want to; I write because I have to.

And yet, I'm afraid of writing. It's not that I'm afraid of showing my body - I don't have any reservations about placing my body on display, even though I don't believe it's worthy of attention and praise. I'm afraid of making myself emotionally naked. I'm afraid of you, any of you, knowing who I really am. I'm mostly anonymous online, and yet I have a hard time telling you the whole truth.

So, I'm about the interrupt the mystery. Here's the real Aine...

I'm not glamourous. I'm a real person, with real issues and real faults. I often don't wear makeup, or even brush my hair. I'm horrible at keeping the house clean, although I cry sometimes because it's such a mess. I'm a hopeless romantic, almost to a fault. I expect both far too much and far too little from people. I cry at Disney movies. I tend to fit into other people's lives instead of insisting they fit into mine. I'm not nearly as smart as I make myself out to be. I'm afraid of seeming silly, immature or stupid. People think they know me, but they usually know skillfully crafted versions of who I wish I was. I'm afraid of being alone, but I'm also afraid of being with someone forever. (I'm afraid I might get bored, I'm afraid they might get bored.) I have the horrific ability to destroy everything good and right in my life, unconsciously. I don't have it all together, but I hope to someday (though I probably never will). I hate myself sometimes, and have never really forgiven myself for anything I've ever done wrong. I tell white lies, and then feel awful about them. I had an affair while my husband was in Iraq, and I'm still ashamed to tell people how I met my soon to be husband. I'm afraid my daughter will turn out exactly like me. I'm still afraid, nearly three years later, that my fiance will stop loving me. I think he loves my pussy more than he loves me.

Life isn't always pretty, but I hope that airing those secrets will allow me to be on a little more level ground (both with myself and with you guys). I've had a lot of people say they envy me, that they envy my strength and ability to express myself. I wish that were so. I'm afraid to tell the truth, afraid that people won't like who I really am. And maybe they won't. But I'm starting to understand that that is REALLY ok! So please, readers, make your own lists. Tell the truth. Air your dirty laundry, tell people who you really are so that they can love and accept you as you and not as a character... I'll be the first to respond.

I believe this is my first official Saturday post. And what a wonderfully lazy Saturday it is! The only thing that could make this any more enjoyable would be if Bear was here. He's at a law class this morning, leaving me alone in his apartment for at least a couple more hours.

And what am I to do with all that extra time?! I've worked out, listened to music, plan on working on some school related projects and, of course there's the old stand-by, masturbation.

In a few minutes, I'm going to get in the shower. I'll lather up, shave, get squeaky clean. I'll get into his bed, roll around in his eighty dollar sheets for a bit, and eventually my fingers will find home. I'll rub myself, thinking of something horribly perverse, and come in a rush of fluids all over his side of the bed.

Oh, I know I should wait. I know it's awfully mean to pleasure myself on my lover's side of the bed while he isn't home to partake in my personal ecstasy. At this moment, when my pussy is throbbing and my hips are wiggling, I can't seem to find the sympathy. Sorry Bear!

"Fall is coming, fall is coming," I keep telling myself. It's almost like my own personal mantra, as though the breaking of autumn will somehow signify the recession of my internal drama. Honestly though, these days I'm pretty mellow. All of my relationships are perfect; right where I want them to be. I'm just hoping, with the onset of cooler weather, things will continue to be exactly as I need them to be.

My sex drive seems to be slower these days, though I'm not sure why. It's not the kink factor, that's still high. Last night we only had sex for about half an hour, but during that time I had both his cock and my new pink friend in my cunt at the same time. I feel a bit stretched out and used this morning, but in a good way. It hurt a bit, especially when the pearls were vibrating on the inside of my mons pubis, but it was very satisfying. If I was feeling a bit more adventurous I would have had him fuck me in the ass with it, but this was sex on a budget. I had to be up early. *wink*

I'm much more content to lie in bed with him and talk. It's weird.

I'm growing tired. Old. It's almost as if I can feel my brain decomposing parts that I once used but that have become dusty and untouched for years now. It's not maturation, it's not "growing up" - it's more of a continual de-evolution of what was into what simply is.

As I often say, I've lived much longer in spirit than my nearly twenty-four years of life may show. I've loved, I've lost (both literally and figuratively), I've both cried and fought back tears, I've won fights and I've been beaten senseless. Somewhere along the gradual path of my current self, I've realized certain truths about my life. I want love. I want all consuming, passionate, can hardly stand it love and I want lazy Sunday morning love. I want stability, but not so much that I can't shake it up and go crazy every once in awhile. I need options - I can't feel backed into a corner. Above all, I need room. Space. My own personal bubble so that I can be either comfortably involved or comfortably uninvolved.

I'm not sure what happened between January and September of this year. On the calendar, that's only eight months. That's only 2.7% of the life I've lived so far. But, I can pin it down. It happened during January and September. The "it," well, I'm not sure how to quantify that. I can say, however, that everything that happened - everything that has changed inside me - was entirely my own doing.

I feel a little weird right now. I feel as though Bear might take this statement and somehow turn it into an "I told you so." "I told you moving out would be the best thing for us," he might say. Almost as if saying, in unspoken words, how the breaking of my heart and the intense stress I was under was a good thing. I'm not saying it wasn't, don't misunderstand me, but I am saying it wasn't only that. There is so much more to the story than a complicated relationship ending simply. A few harsh words, a few jagged insults, a few boxes and a lot of tears.... but it only started there.

What am I trying to say? Even I don't know that just yet. Only that a shift has occurred, for better or worse, and it's about time I start living up to that. Do I want to let something that I've worked so hard for go to waste to appease my desire for temporary interest and pleasure? Do I want to gamble with it, throw the dice, close my eyes and hope for the best? Certainly, a lot in life is like that gamble. But I can choose whether to ante up or back down.

Perhaps that's not the right analogy. Backing down isn't losing; backing down is comfort. Happy comfort. Routine comfort. That lazy Sunday morning love thing I was talking about early. Three years later, he's still here beside me. That's saying something.

I think I have it all figured out, but I'll let those words come when they're ready. For now, I'll simply not act. Not acting is one of the most important tools a person can have. Trust me on that, I've learned the hard way.

So I'm back from my odd, temporary hiatus. Life sometimes just gets in the way; I tend to roll with it more these days and fight it less.

Life has just been hectic, no major events to speak of. We had a mellow holiday weekend - watched Firefly, ate at a few great restaurants, saw three movies and went to the strip club (a friend of mine won $300 bucks at amateur night - extremely deserved!).

I am, however, seemingly at a crossroads. I can choose safety, knowing that I love one man and that I would be able to commit to him for the rest of our lives. I can also proceed down a different path, knowing that things might be done that neither of us could come back from, and possibly forfeit the one healthy, pure relationship I've ever had for something that will probably prove to be momentary.

While I wholeheartedly believe that peoples' sex lives are their own business (unless they include non-consensual behavior or children) and that polyamory is a valid form of relationship, I just don't know if I could go down that road myself. I worry that I just won't be capable of caring that much about more than one person (the closest I came was the emotional romantic involvement I had with my long-distance impossible to describe Eala while living with Bear), that I wouldn't be able to cope with him behaving the same way... lots of thoughts are running through my head.

Of course, there's also that I have no idea if she even likes me.

LIBRA (SEPT. 23-OCT. 22): "If the Angel decides to come it will be because you have convinced her, not by tears but by your humble resolve to be always beginning; to be a beginner." So said the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, as if speaking to your exact needs right now. Let me offer this addendum: The Angel wants to come very badly. She is passionate about offering you the novel assistance she has dreamed up just for you.

All I can say is AMEN.