Ruby Stark

First of all, I have the feeling. It’s where you’re vulnerable to your own thoughts of what has happened, but oblivious to the outside. It’s like what is going on inside you expands to fill the world. It’s a feeling that comes the day after a late night with little sleep. It’s a feeling that is massively augmented by sex with a new person. Some other times I’ve had this feeling: the time between getting thrown off the street at one a.m. and going to bed the night after that one, the first time I had sex with Dusk, the Sunday I left Bradford after visiting Matte for the first time after we got back together.

So, my boss arrived at around one p.m. and I changed into my pink and blue cotton dress that shows my shoulders and back and scar and we set off for the brunch place. We bantered and laughed and it was good. We arrived and ate foul German breakfast, all cheese and bread and, for the meat-eaters, speck. We talked in the front room of the pub, a smoky fire making the place smell like a place in a village my Dad used to take me to for roast beef sandwiches and lemonade and lime. We talked with my boss’s friend, Margo, and I used his phone to ssh into my remote server to restart a site I’ve been working on recently.

My boss’s friend rang and invited him for supper and he said he had planned to spend the evening with me and she very kindly said I could come, too. So, we set off for a long, a very long, walk to his private office in the centre of Berlin. We jumped fences and traversed river banks (he said if I fell in, I would have to remove my clothes to avoid drowning and he would finally get to see me naked). He took my hand. I found myself feeling quite tremulous and shivery, rather like I felt when I’d gone for even a short walk after I died. We got to a tram stop and he wrapped me up in his arms. It felt weird. We finally got to his office and he showed me the helicopter and the matrix of smoke generators he is working on.

We set off again and walked to his friend’s house. We arrived with beer and wine and everyone was so warm. There was Victoria, my boss’s friend and our hostess, a nice couple with a sweet baby with whom my boss played which made my heart melt, and Margo. I sat in the kitchen with the women while Victoria told this long story about her demanding friend and, I think, nearly broke down during the telling. They chatted fast and close as they prepared food and I felt like I was in a Woody Allen film, or maybe Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. I tried to remain standing and worried I was going to be sick.

We went into the sitting room with all the raclette things and sat down and cooked the cheese and I ate pickled onions and scoffed down potatoes and a cherry tomato and felt so much better.

The group asked me whether there were any German stereotypes and whether I thought they were true. Treading carefully, I said Germany was known for being ruthlessly well organised, which I found to sometimes be true, like in running orders at gigs. I also said that German people were said to have no sense of humour, but I found that Germans are always laughing and have quite a similar sense of humour to the English. Someone speculated that this stereotype existed because, occasionally, foreigners would come up to Germans and say, Heil Hitler, as some kind of bizarre joke and would receive no laugh in response.

We talked about the German guilt about World War II and the holocaust, and they said that it is only recently that people have begun to make jokes about these things in Germany. Victoria said that she had gone to stay with a French family when she was small, and the father had been in the war. Her parents had warned her to be ultra polite and respectful and not to be insulted if she received a frosty reception. However, she said she was able to translate a letter written to the man by a German soldier and that, afterwards, he had hugged her.

As the supper went on, my boss and I exchanged close glances, and I fell for him more and more. There was a thread of closeness between us in the group, two people revolving around each other in the warmth of a friendship group. When I looked at him, I felt excited, felt proud.

Finally, we had to leave to go to a colleague’s birthday party. We hugged everyone goodbye and then came out onto the street and quickly kissed for the first time since the weekend before and then we walked to the U-Bahn, his arm around me.

We got to the bar and there was Olive, Thora the birthday girl, my boss’s best friend, John, and a few others. My boss and I sat on our stools with our legs touching, not really talking to one-another, but with that secret kinship you can share with someone when part of a group. I really like John – he is gentle and clearly adores my boss and they support each other a lot.

We moved to another bar and, on the way, plugged our headphones into this jack in a wall that lets you listen to the movements of the building. We danced to old ’60s girl groups like the Ronettes. I sat down and my boss sat down next to me and I put my hand on the inside leg of his trousers – very bold, for me, with a boy – and we kissed for a long time. He stroked me all over my arms and back and neck and shoulders and the slow desire that had built over the whole day turned into a scared certainty that I wanted to go home with him.

It was half four in the morning and I said that I needed to take my drugs which were at my house, but, that, if he wanted, he could come with me.

We got in a cab with Olive and got out and went into my apartment building and came upstairs, me very nervous. We drank water and I took my pills and then my boss took off his trousers and I took off my tights and we got into bed and I put out the light and we started kissing.

I just loved the way his hands stroked me all over. He put his hand in my underwear and stroked my clit and I started sighing into his ear and then he pushed a finger inside me and I bucked and squeaked and gasped and, thinking about it now, I get a twisting in my spine.

After a while of deliciousness, I faked and then we lay together for a while. I kissed him and pulled off his boxers, feeling really scared now, and knelt between his legs and put his cock in my mouth and began sucking him off.

OK, so he had, by far, the biggest cock I had ever seen. I could just about close my fingers around it, and could only get about a third of it into my mouth. I stopped for a moment and then asked him for advice and he said I was doing fine and I aborted and felt really bad.

We snuggled for a while and he said, “So, I think we got a problem. I am not sure I fit inside you.” And I decided to tell him about being intersex and he took it incredibly well, just as another of the scar stories I have told him. And he said, “We figure something out,” and I felt so happy that he was seeing it as a problem to be worked at.

So, he fucked me again with his hand and I pulled off my dress and he sucked at my breasts and it felt so good and I am pretty sure he will be able to make me come. I really wanted him to fuck me.

We fell asleep and I woke three or four hours later and woke him up and we talked and I asked him whether he considered himself a happy person and he said he was very happy until a few years ago when this girl he was in love with died, and, since then, he has been slowly healing. I listened and hugged him and kissed his cheek as he told the story.

Later, we sshed into my remote server and he helped me set up some handy stuff. He left about two p.m. and I went to go a mozzarella burger and chips and walked through the street listening to Bob Dylan in that vulnerable/oblivious state.

I realised how desperate I was to talk to Cat. She went home with her date last night, too, and I thought how magical it would be to discuss the feeling with someone who had it, too.

On Friday night, I picked up my friend, Archigram, from the airport and we went to the same upstairs in a shopping centre bar that Malt took me to the week before. We talked about Archigram’s lovely girl and how fun in Berlin is happening without me having to make it and drank beer.

The next day, we went for a long walk across bridges and through dusty parks in the sun and ended up at the Soviet Memorial. I had been there with my old German girlfriend, Cassette, on a freezing cold night when it was pouring with rain and we were the only people there, the only warmth in the desolate, concrete wasteland. We were really in love with each other, then.

Archigram and I pottered about and talked about the war and having children and making a family.

We popped home and I changed into my sexy, slinky red dress and then we went to meet Brown for supper at the Italian she had taken me to for my birthday and had a cosy meal talking about triligual puns and people not understanding when you are being ironic. I ate spinach and ricotta ravioli steeped in butter and we dipped pieces of bread in oil and balsamic vinegar. Then, we went to the gay/biker/hipster bar for drinks and met Malt, his cute friend, Steffi, Cal and Smirk. We talked about nginx and ejaculation and the Kit Kat Club. Malt and Archigram got along famously.

The three of us went to play Lord of the Rings pinball and then Dust texted me to say he was outside. I went into the street and sat on the kerb with him and his friends and bantered and it felt so continental to drink beer perched on pavement and have a back and forth with a group of happy people.

Presently, everyone from inside came outside and we walked to the club. We got there and then Reed and his lovely girlfriend, Thora, and Wally from work arrived and we all danced faster and harder. Some time passed in dancing and talking and cigarettes outside, and Malt and I made a mini-gang we dashed about the club and danced. He did his winning smile at me like you would smile at a beloved but dimwitted child, or the smile people do when they are mocking you. We went to the unisex loo and it felt pleasingly public with the guys at the urinals and the people in the cubicles snorting cocaine and came out and stood real close and he stroked my back and my neck and I put my arm around his waist and we both stared into the crowd and I looked up at him and he was still looking outwards and then I looked up again and he kissed me and stroked my all over my sides and back and shoulders and it felt really good.

I heard Reed’s braying voice and realised that half the company would have seen, and I cared a bit, but not a lot. The night went on and Malt and I kissed a few more times and he kept on stroking my back and bottom and sides and I remember that, when I kissed him, I pushed my hips against his.

Finally, it was five a.m. and Archigram wanted to go home so we left. We got home and the cats hurled themselves at my bedroom door for the next hour until Archigram made me get up and stop them. But it was nice to share a bed with him again.

We wandered around on Sunday in a daze, went to the new national art gallery and drank coffee. He set off for the airport in the evening and I was very sad to see him go.

On Monday, it was obviously a bit awkward with Malt. No one else commented, which was gooood. A sense of horror and it-was-a-mistake-but-I-couldn’t-have-known-in-advance-ness crept over me, but dissipated when I went out for supper with Malt in the evening. He said he would be Ok with being friends and OK with more, which was very brave. I said I had always found sex with boys difficult and that I naturally leant towards girls and he said it was OK to take it slow.

So, at the moment, I am at the precise nexus of my feelings growing or shrinking. I wish I had the full text of my old Susie Down blog so I could refresh my memory on how my feelings for Dusk evolved. I do know that I felt only trepidation and not longing int the days after we slept together. However, when we had a threesome with Tourista a month later, I remember asking her whether she was keen on him and so I was probably, by that point, keen on him myself.

Today, when I came out of work, sexy D followed me down the stairs and smiled at me with his “I am thinking about having sex with you right now” smile and I skipped away to the U-Bahn light-footed and happy.

Last night, I went to see my friend, Delicate, the one I didn’t realise was still living in Berlin. I knew him in Northerncity. We had supper at his dusty, exposed-plaster walled and wood-floored apartment in Prenslauer Berg. We ate pasta and tomato sauce and talked about when I died and about when he got beaten up and I troughed down some dense, brown, German bread with Parmesan and we talked about how he had a time when he did absolutely nothing: two hours over breakfast, then maybe a walk in the park, lots of thinking.

We walked around his neighbourhood in the snow and melt-water and talked a little about novels that, in the same sentence, zoom into the mundane and earthly and then out to the expansive and sweeping.

I came home on the tram and wrote some Clojure. I thought about a sensation I’ve had before, of experiencing events as they happen through the frame of my blog. Ariel Schrag reported the same thing in Potential. But, that is a cruder version of the way I put it to Cat in my letter to her this evening:

“I sometimes feel this cleaving of experience from events. Like, if something weird happens, or something fun, or something that will make a good story, I think of it in those terms, rather than just revelling in the moment. I almost compose the diary entry as it happens, re-appraise my character in terms of this ‘experience’.”

Tonight, I went out for a drink after work with a couple of colleagues. A girlfriend joined us, and we drank and it felt like a good, laughing night out with people I half click with. We talked about hypothermia and the Rocky films and German customs and Berlin residents and The xx (they played here recently and I missed them, sadly) and freelance graphic design work and dress codes. I idly thought about having sex with the cute girlfriend and the colleague. I ate some truly horrendous noodles drenched in cheese which I am at a loss to even describe. Supper turned into another bar, a kind of art gallery type place with white walls and projections and lots of hipsters. I struck out to another bar with the other colleague and we found ourselves standing in the rain in Kreuzberg, unable to find the place, so I decided it was time for home.

I came home from my first day completely wiped out. I felt quite dizzy as I got on the U-Bahn, and, not being able to remember what dying felt like last time, briefly worried it was about to happen again.

I found myself wishing I was coming home to someone I adored, who would fuck me and then let me pass out wrapped up in their arms.

On Monday, I set off north from my house. I walked up through Kreuzkölln and saw a few squats and went into a record shop. I got to Orangienstr. and went into another, good punk/hardcore record shop that sells CDs for stupideuros. I went to a vegetarian restaurant for a really tasty veggie burger (I had to tip an imaginary glass to my mouth to find out what drinks they have) and read David Foster Wallace on the annual US porn convention.

I was just walking up through the squatting district of Kreuzberg when my landlord called and said they could mend the internet if I came home. I rushed back, they did mending and then I was connected again. I can’t tell you how worryingly normal I feel now I can tweet, research Berlin, email my friends, talk with Cat via Facebook and write Ruby Stark. I was even able to have supper with my step-Dad and little sisters over Skype.

The next day, I went to get my Einwohnermeldeamt, my residence registration. I queued up in the Bürgeramt, a big office building full of long, linoleum-floored corridors that feel like a hospital or like University. I waited and waited, trapped in bureaucracy, and finally got the stamped piece of paper I need. I felt like someone trying to get across the border to safety and having to put my life in the hands of a capricious official.

I came home and hung out and then went to the vokü at a squat up in Friedrichshain. I finally found the right door, went in and nervously asked where the vokü was. An old punk rolled a cigarette and told me that they weren’t serving tonight and recommended a place down the road. I went out and down the road and found a promising-looking bar. I went in and it was like a punk heaven: candles everywhere, a mix of hardcore and crusty and squatter people, red walls, pool, people milling around behind the bar, some serving drinks and some just hanging out. I sat on a stool and drank a Becks and smoked some cigarettes and looked at the tall, skinny, bleach/black-haired bartender. I struck up a conversation with the guy sitting next to me and we talked about squatting in Philadelphia and England. After a while, I slipped down from my stool, put on my coat, said goodbye and caught the U home.

On a whim, I went to find the queer bar near my house. I went in and found myself surrounded by straight looking people. I drank a bottle of Pilsner and asked the barmaid what the place is called and she said something that definitely wasn’t the name of the queer bar. So, I leaned against the bar and pretended to be Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a rent boy in Mysterious Skin. I went out into the street and found the right place right next door. I sat at the bar and drank limonade and then asked the woman next to me for a light that I didn’t need. We smoked and talked about music and Berlin. She was nice.

My little sister texted me to ask if we could talk on Skype. So, I left, and we talked for an hour about her dicksuck ex-boyfriend. Then, I re-read Cat’s letter, then I went to sleep and dreamt about Allure again and I touched her in the hollow between her leg and her hip and she sighed with pleasure.

Now, I’m going to make a lasagne for lunch/supper/supper.

A few days ago, I spent the day baking bread and writing code and pottering. Cat, someone I knew a bit in previousnortherncity, buzzed up on Facebook. She is queer and older and went out with Dusk years ago. She is a damaged alpha in that she is confident and strong-willed and inspiring, rather than in the embarrassing faux-male way of Angelina Jolie.

She asked if I’d really died and I said I had and we talked about that a bit. We talked about her boyfriend and her son and her crush on this girl. We talked about Matte and Dusk other old lovers.

Over the next few days, I kept on thinking back to that conversation. Today, she sent me a message: “in fact, talking of candid, i might have to sleep with you sometime, cos then i can casually drop into conversation that i have slept with someone after they died. that should be a conversation stopper.”

I woke up on Saturday and went downstairs and bade Dusk goodbye. He had a meeting in London. About twelve pm, Archigram, his girlfriend and Jordan arrived. They, Emma and I ate goat’s cheese, Parma ham, home-made bread and sun-dried tomatoes, and drank orange juice and cups of tea. After lunch, we played a game of Cranium with much hilarity. One all-play round had Archigram and Cyp both having to whistle us Say a Little Prayer, and they both started on the same bit of tune in the same key and produced an eerie, impromptu duet and then they couldn’t whistle anymore because they were laughing so much.

We went to the shops to get some last-minute supplies and then spent the rest of the afternoon talking.

In the early evening, Richard, Haz, Dusk, Grain, my Dad, my brother, and my Mum’s friends Sue and Vince arrived. My brother began cooking like a hero and everyone milled around in the kitchen and drank a lot and talked. It made my heart glad to see my friends and family together, and to see my friends who didn’t know each other getting on. I think pretty much everyone talked to pretty much everyone.

Dusk seemed a little withdrawn, but I’m not sure why. My Mum thinks it was because he was older than most of my friends, but I’m not so sure. I think maybe he was tired and maybe he was distracted by his meeting and maybe he was phased by meeting lots of confident friends of mine. He said he has a theory that middle-class families are, fundamentally, articulate and discuss abstract concepts, whereas working-class families don’t talk about things outside their direct experience. He said this results in a higher ability of the middle classes to adapt and aspire.

We did an informal survey, and found that, of the people who identified as a person with a working class background, he, Grain and Cyp thought their families supported the theory. Archigram’s girlfriend felt her family did not.

I had been nervous about showing Dusk where I grew up, because my Mum’s house is big and has a big garden and she and my step-Dad are rich. (At the same time, I was excited to show him off to my family and other friends.) I asked him whether meeting my family and seeing our house illuminated anything about me. He said another piece had slotted into the jigsaw puzzle: the articulate and well-to-do environment I grew up in explains why I can move to a country without speaking the language or knowing anyone there. He might be right.

I wore my red clingy American Apparel dress and Cyp said, “Ruby, if you weren’t a lesbian [his word for me being queer]…” He’s so damn handsome, but I just don’t fancy him.

Three thirty a.m. came and most of us staggered off to bed. Richard and my brother stayed up and sat at the kitchen table and drank a bottle of Amaretto.

I went to bed with Grain. He kissed me on the mouth and said, Goodnight, Ruby, and he asked if I’d like to spoon and I said yes and he wrapped me up in his arms and curled terribly close around me and said I am good to snuggle because I am petite.

I didn’t really sleep that well because I preferred being snuggled to moving so I could relieve my cramp or undead a limb. So, most of the night passed in a strange half-wake half-sleep where I listened to Grain breathe and thought how nice it was to snuggle after such a long time spent with Matte’s dislike of nighttime snuggles.

We slept in lots of different positions: me with my head on Grain’s chest, turned together with legs entwined, me on my back and Grain with a knee around my hips and and our hand together and Grain’s breath on my cheek. I slowly got more and more turned on. He kissed me all over my neck. I kissed his cheek slowly and delicately.

Thing is, though, we’re friends. I feel something very deep in my heartt for Grain. But, whatever it is, my feelings about our friendship and his relationship prohibit further exploration. When I came to the next morning, my desire faded into the deepness.

We got up and I fetched Grain a bowl of Wheetos and a cup of tea. Then, we saw that everyone else was already up and had started building an igloo in the garden. We went out to help. For the next three hours, a few of us gathered snow, heaped it in a sledge, took it to the igloo and shaped it into flat blocks. Then, the others sawed it up into bricks and built the structure. Mum brought us out cups of tea and we drank those. Richard brought out beers and we drank those (I felt fantastic for twenty minutes, then rather ill, then OK). At last, Archigram, his girlfriend, Richard and my brother had a beautifully-curved structure mostly complete. We spent an hour doing the almost and then horizontal roof, and then it was done. We got candles and my Mum took a photo of all eight of us inside. It was utterly joyous: the hard work, the euphoric warmth, the beer, my family, my close friends and the utterly pointless but oh so beautiful house.

I was on the tube to work this morning listening to Converge. Across the carriage, I saw a short, curvy, pretty girl wearing a bold-print dress and little shoes. Standing with her was a business-looking woman wearing gray cotton trousers and a masculine blue and white striped shirt. She had shoulder-length wet blonde hair and a pretty, feminine face.

As we all went along, the business woman moved closer and closer to the curvy girl and, at some point, they began kissing. I looked away, but for the next three stops, I heard intermittent lip-smacks. As I got out of the carriage, I saw the curvy girl was backed into a corner.

It was a strange thing: initially, they had seemed like they hardly knew each other, but they kissed like people going home together drunk.

I went to see District 9 this evening with Frost. When she arrived outside the cinema, I realised that I do fancy her. She was looking like a haughty adolescent boy in a hoodie, gray jacket, jeans and tin-can headphones. The problem is, as soon as we start talking, I stop fancying her. She drones about technology and is bashful and slight. In my head, she should be brutishly pushing me up against a wall and putting her hand up my dress.

We came out of the cinema and she said she felt like a cup of tea. I said I didn’t know where we could get one, except for my house. She said she needed to sleep and I said cool and got on a bus.

This week, Matte and I have been emailing each other back and forth. Here is my side of the correspondence:

On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 11:12 am

Hello! I was just thinking about you. V. sorry to hear about your poor drowned phone. Hopefully the little lad will come back to life (no wonder he was unable to take calls when you asked me to ring him – it’s hard to talk while you’re swimming).

I texted you the following:

1. Just got home. Thank you for a weird and amazing few days. I am so proud of you and your adventure. I love you x

2. Saw the following at elephant and castle roundabout. Billboard: “Does God exist? Yes. No. Probably [ticked].” Graffiti: “But when you kiss me, I don’t really care.”

3. And you have been away before – to Guatemala xxx

Like I said in bed yesterday morning, I love you gently and fiercely. And I miss you muchly.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 5:22 pm

Hi sweetie,

Don’t worry about the jarmeys. You can have them, if you want to wear them, or you could pass them on as some sort of guest-jarmeys for use by people staying at your house.

I am happy, yes. I am going out for supper with Archigram, Brother, Pony and Shure this evening, then to the cinema w/ Frost tomorrow, then to a gig where people write code that makes music, then my friend is coming to stay for the weekend.

Wow, it must be so weird to dismantle your life like this: taking down your room, giving away your things, saying farewell, moving out of your house. But you can rebuild everything on your bike: in your panniers, in your head, in the miles you ride and with people you meet and with the things you make.

I miss you so much, too. Can’t stop thinking about you, actually. My head is still in Bradford – it’s still making the pastry for your pumpkin pie, and sitting in the kitchen with a coat and hoodie on and watching you walk about in that way you do with your fingers clasped and hands raised, and falling asleep wrapped up with you in your filthy bed, and looking back over my shoulder as you lie fucking me with your head beside my hips, and varnishing the bathroom floor, and slouching on the sofa with my arm around you at three in the morning and wishing time would stop, and standing in the train and watching you disappear out of the frame of the window.

I love you very much. Ruby.

PS Here is a light-as-air, clean-cut kiss for your cheek: x

Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 5:55 pm

[This last letter is appearing here before I have sent it to Matte.]

Oh, sweetie, I’m not surprised you’re tremulous at the moment: you’re about to do a really big and scary and unusual (and super cool) thing. Plus, as you say, night time magnifies all scary feelings times ten. I remember the summer before I left Leeds when I was doing secret missions and going to NYC and deciding to move to London; for weeks I lay in bed at night and just shook and could not sleep. I thought it was because I had given up smoking. I am glad Abel was there to give you hugs.

That is v. cool that you are contributing to the band’s mission. I was wondering whether you were going to join. By the way, I made up a joke:

What does a member of Abel’s band say to their fellow members as they approach a hill?

Let’s get up some steam.

Here is a video of Slub, a livecoder. The guy will have written a ton of code in advance and then his performance is him triggering, combining and modifying parts of it: http://blip.tv/play/AYGD5CQC

By the way, there was something different about when we had sex while I was visiting you. I tried to articulate it when we were lying in bed, but I don’t think I did a very good job. Your fingers stopped being curvy and proddy and sharp and constricted and became straight and slippy and full. It’s not that either was better – they felt v. different – it was just that the latter felt kind of like I always imagined penetration would feel and when it happened, my head went all swimmy and all I could feel was your fingers but as well as feeling it in my cunt, I felt the sensation in my shoulders and across my neck and at the base of my spine.

Yes, who knows where we will meet next? Berlin? London? A tree? I am excited. I also have love in my tummy – when I think of you, I get all melty and turny.

I love you and I love your sloppy, passionate kisses

Ruby xxx

“I have navigated Iceland. I’ve laid my claim on Portugal.” – Sunset Rubdown.

On Thursday, I went to see Matte in Bradford. On the train up, I thought about the scene in Magnolia where Tom Cruise is at his dying, absent father’s deathbed and he chokes out, “I’m not going to cry. I’m not going to cry for you.”

Matte is moving out of her house to go on the road on her bike to Scotland and stay in a protest camp in the woods for a while and then move on to who knows where? So, this weekend was the last of the normality in our relationship. From now on, we will see each other more intermittently: when I go to visit her in the forest or she comes to see me in London.

Weirder, Matte’s boyfriend was staying over with his band. She picked me up from the station and we walked back to her house holding hands like a shot from a Scorsese film, through the front door, down the stairs, past the kitchen and into the storeroom, and she said, “Ruby, this is Abel”, and I said, “Hi”, and he said, “Hi”. He is skinny and had on cycling shoes and baggy trousers tucked into the tops of his socks and a big knitted jumper and an old farmer flat-cap. He has slightly sticky-out eyes and an arrogant smile, blonde hair mis-shapenly cut and down to his shoulders in places. I fucking hate description in books: you should be able to suggest everything with one detail, or with the way the character acts. However, I studied Abel’s appearance very closely and tried to draw conclusions about how Matte saw him. (Later, I said since I would only meet him for a few days, could she tell me what was, “pretty great”, about him. She said he is fearless and gets really into the thing he is doing, he is sparky, he is very gentle and loving and he has nice eyes.)

We spent the first day in the sitting room: we fitted part of a new ceiling, moved a ton of stuff to other places in the house, rearranged furniture, hoovered and swept.

In the evening, we hung out in the kitchen. I talked to Abel a little, but he spent a lot of time reading. I mostly spoke to his bandmates, Canvas and Scandinavia, about Denver and the US. I also developed a crush on one of Matte’s housemates, Waxen: her animation and looseskinny t-shirt that I wanted to take off and her solid, soothing personality.

After a lovely supper of stir-fry and tofu with Matte, the band, Waxen and Matte’s other housemates, I had a long conversation with Abel’s other bandmate, Mohair, about whether an aeroplane on a conveyer belt will take off. Part way through, Abel and Matte began whispering and laughing and said then they got up and left, saying, “Let’s go into the sitting room.” I finished the aeroplane debate with my stomach in my mouth. I said goodbye to Mohair and went to get my book and sat back in the kitchen, now on my own, reading the same sentences over and over.

Eventually, Matte came back in and asked if I was OK and I said that the situation with Abel, her and I was a delicate balance that could be upset by any kind of us and themness and that I had felt left out when they had left. She said sorry and I said we were all learning and it was tricky. After that, though I felt tiny frissions of jealousy when Abel and Matte cuddled, things were basically fine. Matte divided herself between us amazingly well. When bedtime came, Matte said goodnight to Abel and we left the sitting room and went up to her bedroom and it felt fucking weird. I felt bad for him.

Matte and I got into bed and I kissed her hard and pulled her to me and wrapped her up in my arms. I did it because I needed to feel close, but I felt not a bit sexy. However, that came eventually and we made love a few times. We woke in the morning and made love again. I ate her out and felt like a good boy performing a duty he enjoys.

We did more tidying and pottering the next day. Being at Matte’s house means I live closer to the ground. I have less choice in how I spend my time and no base to retreat to. Everything takes more time: hours go by spent cooking, running a bath, putting up curtains, or hanging out in the kitchen talking to the people who wander in and out. The manual labour and lack of solitude and permanent feeling of cold mean I live far less in my head. It’s unsettling and hard work, but a relief.

In the evening, I went to see my old beloved boy, Dusk, in Leeds for supper. Matte had asked whether I wanted her to come and I had thought it politic to suggest she spend the evening with Abel.

When I arrived at the place, I sat on a stool at the bar and waited for Dusk and drank a glass of lager and let my face become more impassive and felt my cheeks go redder and my legs slacken and watched the bar staff serve the other customers.

Dusk arrived and he told me about his forest research trips to Gabon, Cameroon and Tanzania. He told me the story of how he broke his ankle. We discussed our sexual histories and talked a little of my polyamourous relationship (he had no advice because his only experience is based on being in Matte’s position).

The evening was a handy breather from the weirdness back in Bradford. I dashed off to get my train and realised that, perhaps for the first time ever, I wanted to be with Matte more than Dusk. For the first time, he wasn’t the centre of the universe.

When I got back, I hung out in Matte’s room with her and Abel. He and I talked a bit about Settlers of Catan, and some other board games I hadn’t heard of. He told me about his band and how they tell stories in their songs about a mutant cat, a clown, sea-life and things that have happened to them on tour.

I could tell that Matte was happy that we were all hanging out together. Unfortunately, the last hour was Abel surfing Myspace for old bands and events from Denver and the communal spirit fell apart. Matte and I cuddled on the bed and, eventually, he went downstairs to his mattress.

The next day, Matte and I began the day by making love, then went shopping and then hung out in the kitchen. I made her some pastry and she used it for her cinnamon and nutmeg pumpkin pie. I used the left-over pastry to make an apple pie which Matte would later drop on the floor. Matte made a vegan maple and pecan cheesecake.

The party began and I spent time talking to Highschool and Matte’s friend Clive, Matte’s sister, Hardcore Boy and his girl. The band played and their accordion and saw and double-bass were great, but the stories and glockenspiel not so much. I did like the band in general and, bar his saw-playing, I disliked Abel’s contributions.

While I was in Bradford, I thought a lot about whether I liked Abel. I vacillated between quite liking him and being able to admire his adventurousness and dedication to creating an alternate universe for himself and finding him a morose, cliquey, self-absorbed little boy. However, I can’t pretend to know whether my feelings about him are an accurate reflection of him. On a side note, he seemed pretty remote with Matte: she always went to snuggle with him, or hang out with him, and he was always absenting himself to read his book.

The night drifted away in smoked cigarettes and gentle conversations. I went to bed about four a.m. and Matte followed me soon afterwards. We snuggled in her filthy bed, me still wearing my hoodie.

The next day, we made love again and got up at half two in the afternoon. We hung out in the kitchen while Canvas very slowly made pancakes and the rest of us talked about the Lappersfort protest camp and tripping and lock-ons and work ethics and music. We ate and I made hot chocolates with home-made soya milk. Matte and I started work on a new pecan pie and then I had to leave.

She walked me to the station and when we got there, we sat and waited. I said as I looked down the platform at the red light in the humid Sunday goodbye air that I felt like time had stopped. We talked about a life where time had stopped for everyone and everything that wasn’t near us. We talked about how we would survive if we lived in a house. You’d have to be near to something to make it grow.

I got on the train and we talked until the doors closed. I pointed to myself and made a heart shape with my hands and pointed at Matte and she did the same back. The train pulled away and she slid out of the frame of the window and I went and sat down and cried all the way to Leeds.

“Seen from the back of a train.
I rode away from your station.
They drifted in the air.
Like memoirs of old conversations.”

- Sunset Rubdown.

We took the train down to Cornwall, the mother in the seat behind us giving attention to her son for four and a half hours before finally cracking in the last hour and shouting at him.

We got to Penzance and then Mousehole and walked up the hill to find our cottage. We went in and ran around the house like little girls. There was a baby boat-cabin attic, a huge main bedroom with an utterly commanding view of the bay and its little island, an auxiliary bedroom and weird conservatory we never went into, a curiously austere sitting room and a homely kitchen.

On the first night, we pottered about, Matte cooking pasta that we ate for the one and only time in the dining room. We retired upstairs and sat in the chairs in the window of the bedroom and looked at the foggy penumbra glows of the Christmas lights slung above the sea wall. We went to sleep both facing out of the window.

I can’t remember where we went the next morning, but I do remember lying on the sofa and pashing while Remains Of The Day droned on in the background. I remember falling onto the floor and undressing Matte and putting my thigh against her between her legs and bucking viciously as she gasped and her breaths jerked out. After a little while, I slid two fingers inside her and she hitched up her knees so I could slide further inside and lifted her head so she could see. Her hand curled around under her bottom and her fingers joined mine inside her cunt and we fucked her. Her eyes got wider and wider at how sexy she found what she was seeing.

Afterwards, we talked about videoing ourselves having sex and Matte said that watching it “might be really gruesome”. I went to smoke a cigarette on the front step. I don’t understand why I always have this need to get away after an intense experience: a great night out, a great fuck, a happy time with my family.

Later that day, we went to the supermarket in Penzance to get some supplies. Matte said that she had, without thinking, invited Abel, her unboyfriend, to her house-leaving party and so I would meet him. As we went up and down the aisles, we did a sort of abortive version of our non-monogamy disclosure dance: she tells me something, I am calm as I ask her questions, I feel angry and upset, I express the more rational of my thoughts, we maybe reach a conclusion and then I slowly get used to the new data over the next few days. I say abortive because I seem to be getting better at coping with non-monogamy.

I said that I was mainly sad about the fact that I wouldn’t get to spend her last weekend in civilisation with her. I also asked what would happen at bed time. I asked her whether she was hoping we would all have sex and she said she had thought about it, but mostly when she was alone in bed. She said that her imperfect solution was that we would all go to our separate beds.

We went home and got into the bath and I stroked Matte very gently between her legs and she twitched and pushed towards me. I kept that going for ages with her franticly trying to get me to touch her harder. She said, “There’s nothing so sexy as not having sex, is there?”

We went into our bedroom and she put me on my hands and knees and slid her fingers in and out of me as her hips bucked against my bottom. After a little, she sat down behind me and I looked back and she was watching her fingers go in and out of me whispering, “That’s so sexy.” and “You’ve gone hollow and I’m so deep in you.”

Afterwards, we sat in the armchairs in the window and I said that I had imagined she was a boy and she said she had imagined she was Brian. I saw the look on her face and I said, “You’re worried about how in love with me you are, aren’t you?” She said she was and that she’d just realised she hadn’t thought of Abel for twenty-four hours.

We cuddled and started dozing off and she said she was going to fall asleep with the image of her fingers disappearing inside me.

The next day, we stayed in. We lay in bed and Matte started reading erotica on my iPhone. I lay beside her as she read aloud and slowly rubbed her between her legs. She told the story of a married couple, Brian and Tracy, and their slow sexual awaking of their eighteen-year-old next door neighbour, Rachel.

Later, after some toast and blackcurrant jam, I told her one of my wank fantasies. I said that Ben (me, when I am feeling like a boy) is at a bar and he meets Matte and Rachel. The three of them go home together and the girls suck Ben off and kiss and suck him off again then he gets Matte on her hands and knees and, as her fucks her, she licks out Rachel between her spread legs.

All the while, as I spoke, I stroked Matte’s cunt. Afterwards, her jarmeys and the sheets were soaked with come.

On Tuesday, we went to Pendeen. After two hours of getting on the wrong buses and going the wrong way on the right buses, we got there and tried to walk down to coast. We climbed over wall after wall and marched through field after field, Matte getting angrier and whinier and more scared of the cows. Eventually, we gave up, went back and found the road to the coast.

We ate beetroots and tomatoes and houmous and home-made bread and Tangfastics on the cliffs and looked down at the water smashing on the rocks as the wind rushed past us. We went around the corner and found a sheltered dell and made love on the grass.

The next day, we walked to Lamorna. It was raining when we set off and I was woefully ill-equipped in sneakers and a jacket. We walked up and down, up and down the cliff path, me skirting puddles and swamps. By the time we got to Lamorna, we were soaked and I was furious. We shared a scone and clotted cream and my jeans creaked against my legs and water dripped from my hair. We set off again, and by the time we were halfway, the path was mostly swamp and I was plunging through the mud holes I had carefully picked my way around on the way out. We got so wet that we couldn’t get any wetter and things became rather funny. When we got home, Matte ran me a bath.

The next day, we pottered and drew pictures of each other and ate blackcurrant jam and orange and ginger jam on toast. In the evening, we went to Newlyn and sat on the sea-defence rocks and ate the best fish and chips I’ve ever had: fish sliding out of the buttery batter and chips crunchy animal fat. We walked back to Mousehole holding hands and I wished we would never get there I was so happy. That was the only moment that I felt like I was centred in now and time kindly stopped.

When we got home, we made love again. Matte fucked me hard and fast from behind with one quick finger and then her knuckles bumped my clit again and again until I came and I started crying with my face in the pillow and she gathered me and held me as I sobbed into her neck.

On the last day, we went for a strange, other-people-filled time on the beach in Penzance. That night, I fisted Matte again and after she came she started crying and saying that she had felt like she was holding me. I felt so happy that she loved me so much then.

I told Matte that her name in the blog is Matte because of her otter hair and sleek otter face. I tried to find some pictures of a Matte-like otter on Google, but failed and she asked whether I was sure I wasn’t thinking of a water rat.

I know the boring relationship machinations with Matte have been going on and on. But, as usual and as consolation to the reader for his trouble, there sex at the end.

Matte came to visit on Wednesday.  Our relationship has become so complicated in my head.  And how I feel about it changes: sometimes, I am cool, sometimes, I cry, sometimes, I jump for joy.  I wonder whether how I feel is just based upon how deep into the relationship I think, how far I resolve all of the implications of the facts.  I wonder whether, at the bottom, there is the truth that makes me feel just sadness, and, the less far I go down, the more happy I am.

There are some new facts.  First, Matte’s new bloke is called Abel.  He is an American, in a band touring the UK, very young, a ragamuffin anarcho and probably a nice person.  Second, she is in love with him.  Third, she is about to move out of her house to go traveling.  Fourth, some of this traveling will be with him.  Fifth, at some point, he will return to the US.  Sixth, she is pretty sure she doesn’t want to see anyone else but me and him.

Matte told me these facts in the park near my house.  We went there to eat olives, spelt crackers, houmous and bread.  We lay down in the long grass and talked and talked.

I felt better: her see-saw metaphor made sense (her in the middle and two people on either end stops her tumbling down and turning into the person on one side when it clunks down without any weight at the other), I quite liked the sound of Abel, things would be more stable and so my mind would be able to solidify.

I still can’t bear the idea of someone else having sex with her.  I am still simultaneously happy and unhappy that Abel is totally different from me; really, I want to give Matte everything. I am afraid that her traveling all the time will make it hard for us to have a relationship.

Fundamentally, I feel like non-monogamy is underwater: I dive down and things feel fine, but, after a while, the pressure builds and I have to surface and breathe.

On the night she arrived, we went to see The Time Traveler’s Wife. I preferred the book – especially as it is so wrapped up in my head with the time I went to New York City – but the film was fine and Matte and I held hands. We spent a day with my Dad at the Tate Britain. We held hands a lot. We went out to supper with my brother, sister and some of my friends. Matte didn’t say much. We went to supper at the house of my friend, Archigram, and had a delightful evening of cracking jokes, eating vegan fish cakes, drinking beer and smoking. Matte didn’t say much. I wish she would talk more to the people I love. We had sex in the mornings and afternoons and evenings.

On Saturday, she brought up discussion number two. She said that she wished we could stop filling time. This is actually something I’ve been trying to solve ever since we got together the first time way back in July 2007. I sometimes feel like an events coordinator, trying to think up stuff she will like. Because we don’t live in the same city, we can’t carry on our own lives and projects when we are together; because we spend sections of time together, we can’t see each other and then go about our own business. We agreed that we’d try to just hang out more.

I said I wish we could stop talking about this fucking relationship and start having it.

I have just re-read some of the posts I wrote about the time when we got back together. (They start here.) There are definitely very low points, but there are lots of very high points, too. Are we just getting through stuff before we come to the other side? Were the previous high points because we were in the first (second) flush?

Saturday, her birthday, was pure joy. We went to see a stage production of Peter Pan, her favourite novel, in Kensington Gardens. The actor playing Peter was just the right mix of cocky and vulnerable, and the script didn’t shy away from Wendy’s ambiguous mother/lover role. When the children flew up into the sky, I couldn’t help crying. Flying and motherhood – those seem to be what get me.

After the play, we ate our picnic of ginger and orange marmalade, bread, houmous and crackers, and drank peppermint tea from the Thermos. Then, we walked through Kensington Gardens on the hunt for chips. We found none, but picked a few blackberries that were in range of the fences. Dispensing with coyness, I scaled a fence that protected some particularly laden bushes. After a short while, Matte followed me and we filled up two carrier bags.

We walked to Trafalgar Square and caught the bus home. Matte made letter pasta with garlic, onion, courgette and tomatoes, and an apple and blackberry crumble. I mixed mojitos for her and drank beer. We ate and then hung out on the sofa. I changed into my faded blue and pink cotton strappy dress. We were both quite drunk. My housemates were out.

Normally, when one is in a relationship, sex starts with a few kisses or an insinuating stroke, or before you are hardly even awake. This time, the whole day felt like a first date. I lay on the sofa and our eyes met and she came over and lay beside me and our sex started bashful. The day before, we’d talked a lot about fantasies. Hers include Rachel Stevens in Sweet Dreams My LA Ex, threesomes and switching from being a boy to being a girl. I had told her that I sometimes think about being fucked in a dress in a corridor by a boy or JD Samson.

So, Matte took me into the corridor and put me against the wall and kissed my neck and shoulders and pulled down my dress and kissed my breasts until I skip-gasped into her ear. She put her hand up my skirt and into my underwear and shuddered when she felt how wet I was and then she stroked me round and round. I think I was quite loud when I said, “Oh, fuckkkkkkkk, you’re so hot”, and then I got even more louder when she pushed one and then two fingers into me and fucked me with her hand. It felt so good. I faked coming after a while and whispered, “Will you take me to bed?”

She did. During our fantasy conversation, I’d told her I adore it when she stands behind me and kisses my neck. She had asked if I wanted her to fuck me from behind and I said, “Mmm, possibly.” Now, in bed, I reminded her of this. I lay on my front and she kissed my neck and shoulders and back and I squirmed and squeaked. She took a handful of my hear and yanked around my head to kiss my mouth. Then, without warning, she put her hands on my bottom and pulled me up so I was on my knees and elbows. She pushed her fingers inside me fast and low and I bucked and sighed. After a little, she sat behind me and eeeked with pleasure as she fucked me.

I made love to her and made her come with her sitting on top of me, my whole hand inside her. I took her into the corridor and knelt down at her feet and slid my fingers inside her and ate her out as come ran down her legs. We slept.

The next afternoon, I took her to the train station.

In the morning, we had made love again. She got on her hands and knees and I curled around above and we kissed as I slid inside.

We held hands in St Pancras while we waited.

I fucked her with two and then three fingers and then knelt behind her and moved my hips against her ass and pretended I was a boy fucking her with my cock. I turned my hand 90 degrees and suddenly she gave an explosion of ahh ahh ahhs ahh and came faster than ever before.

When she went through the barriers onto the platform, she kept on looking back at me and waving as she walked away.

My curtains had fallen down, revealing us naked and vulnerable and nowhere near the real world to anyone out there who cared to look.

I hadn’t seen her since she went to Belgium to live in a forest for a week.  I realised that, worryingly, I’ve been waiting to spend time alone with her since I died.  Before that happened, I felt suspended, the same way I feel when I am away from my laptop for more than a few days.  I felt like my life wasn’t going forwards.

She arrived at the railway station and we kissed.  The Moms gave us a lift back home and we hung out.  It was so good to share a bed with her again – that was what I wanted more than anything.  After a couple of days, I couldn’t handle the distance.  As we lay in bed on the third morning, arms around each other, I asked her what she meant in the letter she’d written while I was in hospital that said she felt she should take me more seriously.  I asked her whether me dying had been a temporary aphrodisiac.  Because the things she had said and the way she had acted while I was in hospital felt incongruent with the way she was being now. I said I felt like she wasn’t really here with me.  She agreed and said that Belgium had been a headfuck.  We talked later in the kitchen.  She said she was seriously considering moving into a permanent forest eco camp; probably the one in Brighton.  I went on a very rare tense and even-voiced rant.  I said that I felt like I didn’t know where I stood.  I said that if she moved to the forest, she must know that her and I would be finished and I did that two-handed, palms-down, lateral cutting gesture that Serpico does when he tells Inspector McClain that he’s done waiting for the justice department to contact him about the police corruption.

She said that her feelings for me hadn’t changed, but that everyone around had.  We talked things over and I proposed that maybe things could work if she came and saw me every few weeks and I went to stay with her in the forest occasionally.  Her face shone.

After all that, we got down to spending time together.  We went on a walk through the woods that left me completely fucked.  At the University Observatory, we fantasised about life as a Cambridge academic.  We went out for supper.  We looked at potential new pairs of glasses for me.  We sat on the sofa and read.  We had an awful lot of sex.

Since we started seeing each other again, our sex has been very different because I let her touch me, now.  I lie on my back as she holds me and fucks me with her hand and I buck my hips onto her fingers and moan and squeak and sigh like a slut.  This time, things were even more different.

First, I made her come five times in a row.  I fucked her with my hand and she came.  Then, I lay beside her because I haven’t recovered the strength in my shoulders and stroked her clit until she came.  Then, I did it again.  And again.  I stroked her again and asked if she wanted me to stop and she said no and came again.

Second, on Sunday night, she lay on the bed and I crouched alongside and made love to her with four fingers.  I stopped to adjust my angle and she said, “You could try putting your thumb in as well.” I felt like crying.  I pushed my thumb in a little to make that shape like you’re eating rice with your hands.  I very slowly eased inside, drew out a little, went further inside.  Finally, my fist was in up to the wrist.  I just twisted a little and she made sounds from her chest.  I stored the image of my handless arm in my brain like you’d take a photograph from the top of a mountain you’d just climbed.

She has now gone to Brighton to recce the forest.  She then has a bunch of volunteering to do and will visit me in London in mid August.  At the end of August, we’ll go for a week to Cornwall to stay in a cottage.

This afternoon, I was in the mood for a swashbuckler and so I watched The Count Of Monte Cristo.  The protagonist’s turn from God and towards his desire appealed to me.

For a long time, I’ve been thinking about how the people I admire, the qualities I admire, are not particularly good.  They’re not malicious, or nasty, but they sacrifice niceness for excitement, kindness for desire.  There are quite a few very good things I proud of: my closeness with my little sisters, my friends who love me.  But, the things I’ve done that I look back on and feel pleased about are not so nice: the time when I had two girlfriends at the same time, the time I kissed a girl my friend was in love with, the time I joined in with my housemates and laughed to tears when my friend came in to show off her new haircut, the times I fucked my friends.

I am slowly trying to come up with a way of living: less nice, more impulsive, better to the people I love, more offhand, more dickish.

On Monday, I had a coarctation repair and an arterial bypass.  The operation took ten hours.  I am in awe of the surgeons’ superhuman concentration.  Apparently, it took four hours just to get inside my chest without damaging my organs because of all the adhesions between my organs and chest wall.

I woke up on Tuesday swimming in morphine, ate four yoghurts, and was then transferred to the High Dependency Ward.  I was there for a painful and slow night, then had my drains removed the next day and was transferred to the general cardiac ward.  Today, I had my dressings removed and a delicious shower.

Matte is coming tomorrow.  I am sore, and keep on nodding off in my chair, but I am so shocked and grateful to be here.  I get to have some more life! I get to hang out with my little sisters at home.  I get to play the guitar again.  I get to make love with Matte.  I get to have evenings laughing with friends around a supper table.  I get to go on tour in the US.

Last Saturday, I went downstairs to meet her by the piano in the main hall of the hospital.  Apparently, one of the amateur pianists had been coming for years; then, one day, he started singing.

We cuddled together on a bench and she gave me a copy of her latest zine.  We cuddled on another bench in the park outside under the very hottening sun.  She said that I was wearing my white t-shirt again and I said I was.  The stickers on my chest and Monty the heart monitor’s wires showed through.  I also had on my blue stockings and Ariel Schrag shoes and had my loose Levi’s hanging off my ass.

I told her about what the surgeon is going to do on Monday and she sat silent and then said it was going to be OK.  I curled myself around and snuggled my face into her neck.

We went to the posh new cafe in the hospital and ate yoghurt-covered apricots that tasted like warm ice-cream and Sweet Chilli crisps.  We sat on the wall looking over the Thames and watched the couples and children walk by.  I had my hand tucked up inside the back of Matte’s t-shirt and my hand on her thigh with her hand over mine.  A group of young lads approached, taunting the people they passed.  But, all they gave us was a few high-pitched shouts of, ‘It must be love,” and blew us a few kisses.  A large family went past and the daughter smiled at us and said they should take a picture.

On the way back into the hospital, I suggested we go into the toilets and fuck.  We went in, but both became shy.  Then, unexpectedly, we were alone and I walked to a cubicle that was down a little corridor and she followed.  She closed the door and we pashed.  Each time someone came in, we’d grind to a halt.  However, after a while, we got hotter and hotter and cared less and less.  I put my hand around and under her breast and stroked her with my thumb and kissed her neck and she squirmed.  I undid the zip of her trousers and put my hand inside her pants and spread around her wetness and pushed one and then two fingers inside her.

The rest of the world went away.  All I felt was my fingers inside her and her open-mouthed kisses that muffled the sounds she made and the pressure of her thigh between my legs.  After a while, I grabbed her hand and put it against my cunt to tell her it was OK to touch me and she slid her fingers into my pants and stroked me round and round.  I put my mouth to her ear and said, I want you inside me, and she sort of shuddered and then fucked me with her hand.  She came and her knees bent and I faked it and we stood smoothing each other.

There was a break in the crowds of people in the toilets and we snuck out and then stood side by side and washed our hands.  We came back upstairs to the ward and sat very close holding hands, her in the chair and me at the head of the bed.

We started talking about Monday and she said I would be fine because she had sprinkled fairy dust on me and I melted and loved her even more.  Throughout the rest of the day, whenever I looked panicked, she just said, Remember the fairy dust.

We talked about old people.  She had told me in a letter that she thought they are stores of wisdom, even though this wisdom comes from the past.  She told me that they keep themselves alive by telling stories, and maybe keep us alive, too.  Yesterday, she elaborated by saying she thought that old people’s stories are like those memories of childhood that you sometimes take out and look at.  I thought that was quite convicing.  However, to me, telling stories fucking kills people because they are using the past to fulfil the present.

Matte went and bought us some noodles from Ned’s.  We guzzled them and then had syrupy banana fritters for afters.  And, then, she had to go and get her train back to Bradford.

I walked her outside and put my hands around her ribs and kissed her.  I was terrified that I would never see her again.

I was talking to Matte this evening about how sex toys are not that sexy when you’re not turned on. For a while, we have been idly batting back and forth the idea of me getting a strap-on. We both agreed it was hard to tell whether it would be erotic or hilarious. Further, my fantasies of fucking girls as a boy always involve me being an actual bio boy.

I asked her how she would respond if I told her to suck my dick. She laughed and said she wasn’t sure. But, a bit later, she said it was pretty hot. And, the more I think about it, the more I love the idea of her sucking my cock.

Matte visited from Bradford today. We hung out on my bed. We snuck sneaky kisses in the lift and on benches and in my bedside chair. We talked and talked. We had an abortive game of chess and I thrashed her at Connect-4. I read her the beginning of Sarah Waters’s latest book. We went to the noodle bar around the corner and ate delicious veggie yaki soba and banana fritters and on the way back, Drippy the drip got a bit agitated with all the walking and decided to have a freak-out so we returned to base and the nurse switched him off and on again and we went back downstairs and sat in the park.

I got hooked up to Monty the heart monitor, a little box with wires running to my chest that I carry around with me. I resisted the urge to pull Matte into the bathroom and push her up against the wall and put my hand in her underwear and fuck her until she sighed in my ear.

I have been in hospital for almost four weeks. The doctors are still deciding what my treatment should be. I feel desperate.