"J"

He's a quiet man. Taciturn. I often can't tell what he's thinking or what he wants. He's operational. The real-deal. His body is rock hard and beautiful, and his intellectual and military work speak for themselves. I read his papers online and am so impressed by what he thinks and how he expresses himself. His career makes my life look uneventful. He's spent several tours in Afghanistan. A man's man, he grunts and mumbles and spits, and leaves the toilet seat up. The first night I spent with him, I had a dream that he was beating the shit out of Sjors (not much room for interpretation there).

I like him a lot. But it's difficult to know what I want when I'm unsettled by someone else's lack of sharing. All of my energies go to empathizing and analyzing.

And I'm gun shy. Sjors was so misleading and deliberately cruel for so long, my emotional self-protection is on a hair trigger. The process of emotional shut-down doesn't seem to require negative feedback anymore. I'm calibrated to turn off when the silence lasts for half a day, or when the response is neutral. And I don't seem to have access codes to my own vault.

There have been some truly nice moments with this man already: holding my hand during the play last night; his almost involuntary observation post-coitus: "I can't believe I found you so soon!" and the way he is so driven to be with me. But I also know that he is in the middle of extraordinary transition in his life.

Two nights ago, while we were together in the dark, I had the strangely powerful recollection of that day when Sjors left Naples after we'd fallen in love. I remember how he laid down on top of me, toes to nose so that I looked directly into his summer sky blue eyes, and said, "there. Now we have the maximum amount of contact." I remembered this moment so strongly and unexpectedly while I was with "J", and I began to sob. I hoped that this would sound like the typical passionate vocalizations. Not wanting to ask if I was crying, "J" asked if I was congested.
"I'm just crying," I said. "Don't know why. Never happened before. It will stop soon."
In the dark, "J" stopped moving, and looked down at my face. He kissed my eyelids and tears from my cheeks.

Later, he seemed contemplative.
"Penny for your thoughts," I said.
"You have things going on with you, too," he observed.

I suppose we all do what we need to so that we can stay alive and keep moving. But I don't like that I'm shut down. And I don't like feeling that any man I choose to trust will betray me to the same degree that Sjors did. It isn't fair to extrapolate Sjors' cowardice on the entirety of his gender.