My "queer" attraction

This is what happens when the instrument that am supposed to work with breaks down in lab and i have literally little to do in lab. i sit and think. i was thinking about my guilt feeling that i sense as i am getting paid by the government to do science but am not doing it (not entirely my fault, i did not break the instrument after all). and as i think about work related guilt, thought expands and i start thinking about guilt in general. how the society guilt trips us for everything we do. this is to such an extent sometimes i think if something feels  good, I know i must feel guilty for having that thing. i will talk about one particular guilt that i feel all the time. i am already feeling guilty for saying this in public, fearing and anticipating people will think i am "crazy" (sorry for using this word, i just read an article posted by a friend on Facebook and am trying not to use disability as a slang).  Anyway as am half of the time this “who gives a shit” kind of super radical person (the other half am conservative, confused or stereotypically), will go ahead and write it down.

So this “guilt” that I feel is for finding people (read men) attractive. As soon as I realize I find someone physically and/or sexually attractive the tremendous guilt becomes so overwhelming that I consciously start avoiding that person. There are several internal reasons for this guilt, but first I will talk about how others fan this guilt. It has happened several times that am taking a walk with a friend and a guy passes by us and I just say “oh! He is cute”. Obviously I do not say it shouting, but in a volume that I and may be my friend can hear it. The immediate response (totally unwanted) that I mostly get from my friends is “oh my god! But he is a kid”! The indication is as if am a pedophile and just raped someone. And my immediate reaction would be to feel extremely guilty about my attraction. But I have decided from now on I will fight the guilt, for several reasons. One, it is not my “fault” that I like men younger than me, go and open my brain up and fix the chemical reaction if it is so offensive. Two, just calling someone cute does not mean I will drag him to my bed and start having sex, it’s just a comment (although I know it as well that it is not a crime to feel sexually for someone, as long as I wait for consent and do not impose myself, stop sex shaming).  This happens more often if I make the same comment for someone who is already “taken” (yes if you did not know we are like a bag of potatoes that someone can own, UGH!). The first reaction from within and from surroundings is “how could you even think of liking him! The next thing you will try is to break them up”. (This whole reaction reminds me of a hilarious comment one of my older relatives made some time back. We were talking about a Bengali movie showing how a middle aged married woman falls in love with a young guy and the whole hypocrisy of the society about that. And this older guy just looked at me and said, this kind of feeling might happen with French women but our women (Indian) are pure!! ) First of all grow up and stop being melodramatic and stop making 1960s Bollywood movies, where the vamp in black dress, black lipstick and cigar will seduce the hero and the “poor” man will get distracted and at the end the vamp will pay for her sins and will die and repent.   Going back to the original topic, the guilt, there are lots of assumptions when this guilt is triggered. First of all and once again, just liking does not lead to me acting on it and trying to “break” people up. Second, just because that person is with someone else that does not “de-validate” my feelings. Its not my fault that I did not meet them when they both were single.  Third and most importantly, the assumption that these two people in love are completely unable to love more than one individual is so Victorian, and we all (including me) need to remember all the time things like bisexuality, polyamory, open relationships exist (yes they do however alien these might sound). And of course am not saying that I need to assume the other extreme (that everyone is bi, poly or open). Just be respectful to the people you find attractive as well as to your attraction and there are plenty of decent ways of having a conversation expressing interest and being open to both yes and no.  So what I am recently trying is, being mindful of my attraction, trying to understand if it is just a physical thing or both physical and intellectual. Once that is worked out it seems having the conversation is much easier and when the guilt is taken out from attraction, magically the objectification disappears (for me that happens, not sure if that is a psychologically validated thing). So as a caution, I do tell people these days when I find them attractive, please do not get offended or assume or read between my words. In general am a person who respects others and expect the same in return, hence the chances are slim that I would go overboard and do anything outside my own boundary.  

Just writing these things down and putting in public makes me feel more comfortable with my own feelings.  I feel more open to ideas and validated about attraction. Attraction is a “queer” chemical reaction that takes place faster than social seasoning and unless we keep questioning our social conditioning we will keep having conflict between feeling and acting on it. 

whisper in my ear the name...

I get to talk about sex a lot, but whenever the topic of love comes up I feel I have no entitlement to talk about it. After all in last five years or so I have been in love too many times. Sometimes I lose count and hence feel less legitimate to talk about it. Legitimacy, a strange word, which decides on the basis of average how we individually should behave. Granted, of all the loves that I felt, many were infatuations, but that does not discount my legitimacy to talk about it. As I did experience love, this truth came to me last night in a very strange still mundane way. And hence I sit down to write about my love, fragmented stories from this period have been told to so many but I never felt I have the right to talk about love. But today I know I do. I am listening to a song, a love song, written a century back, there is something magical in the voice and the instruments, as it broke open the darkness in me and the pure flow of joy makes me smile, though he is not with me, and we have no intention of getting together. But still love existed and that is the joy. The song “whisper, tell me in my ears the name that plays in your soul” took me back to a small room, with just one bed and a desk, and that damp feeling. It was his room in his residence, it took me back to the smell and feel of that room, and took me back to that evening when we two first touched each other. Our lips trembled in joy and in fear, fingers intertwined, and heart racing. We both made love to other people before, but in that moment everything was new, the pain, the longing, and the fact that finally we were there, “tell me, pour in my ears the name that fills your soul”.

I do not know why am I writing this today, not to validate, not to justify and not to prove, I just felt, it is a story worth telling. Everything in our love actually started with a song, his first text to me, after talking online and receiving my one sided texts for a long one year, was a song. That evening in November, looking at the setting sun, I sent him a text, a line from an old love song “I will not tie you with my charm…” and after couple of minutes the magic happened, he replied, from the same song “let me tie you with my love”. I was 29 he 25, but the story seems so juvenile. Then we met, and love happened so naturally. Though he always told me my driving to his place at the middle of the night on his birthday, with a small cupcake, and forgetting to get a matchbox and hence calling him to ask if he has one as I pretended to be a forgetful new smoker did the magic. On that cold January night we fell in love.

We were different, we still are, very, and we fought. He would hardly show his emotions, and it was left to me to know what he felt by looking at his eyes, ah! Those dark-deep eyes! I did read his emotions every time. We found a song for us, our love and our fights, once again an old one “I lose you every moment, oh my love! To find you anew”. I remember our trip together to the forest of North Bengal, in the train we wanted to share a seat, but could not because other people were there before us. We looked at each other and listened “I lose you my love every moment, to find you anew” the whole way. That trip was magical, the walks we took by the river on a spring full moon night, the cold air, and our walks without a single spoken word, but sharing thousand thoughts.

Then I remember the day we broke up, or may be the day before, we two separated by thousands of miles, and millions of misunderstandings and rage and anger. I was listening to a song, “you have me my love but still fear to lose” and I had to call him at the middle of his work day, just to tell him about the song, and then to break up. He did not fight, as he would never show emotions, and in a long time I refused to read his emotion, after all those dark deep eyes were not in front of me.

Several years have passed since we broke up, we have a very strange and bitter relationship since then. When you are so close and then the closeness is not there, perhaps you do not want anything else. We both have moved on, to me he has come back several times as a thought, a desperation to have him back, an anger, dismissal. For him I have always been a rage, for not reading his emotions that night we broke up perhaps. But how strange it is, after so many years, our love came back to me through a song, “tell me, and whisper in my ears the name that resonates in you”. It came back as calmness, as joy and as an understanding, yes I know what love means. I was in love and I was loved.