Exploration
#2 in the relationship search poem & essay pairing series
Hello! This is Olivia Rose’s Ongoing Growth & Reflection newsletter, where there are (at the moment) occasional posts. I (Olivia Rose) am one-sixteenth of the Amtrak System, a dissociative system helping to support me through the most challenging of situations.
You are reading pairing number two (2) of the Relationship Search, a series of poem & essay pairings exploring my mindset and feelings up to the point where I met my current partner, S. This pairing is “Exploration.”
in safety, and in peace,
I decide and plan my intimacy.
soon, as I rub at a nipple
to aid in sleep, a fire is started.
I must remove my nightgown,
lie on my back. My hands
race over curves. Moans escape me
as I return again and again
pinching and pulling at my nipples,
gripping my breasts and wanting,
needing to share myself with another.
To share in the joy and ecstasy
of finding the right spot, singing the
song of love found, love shared, trust
earned.
My trust was not easily gained, at least not in sexual matters. So many people — so many men — have tried to gain my trust, which really means gain my sex and never speak to me again, or hound me so hard that I have to relent to their pathetic pleading. They’ve tried with food, with money, with gifts, with being less demanding at first, only to ramp it up later and descend on me like vultures, lips and cocks glistening.
I never let any man penetrate me until I met my partner, S. I never wanted to be penetrated until earlier that year, in 2023, when I was beginning to have my sexual awakening: consuming all the lesbian pornography I could, learning about sex toys and what I could use as a virgin who had never so much as used a finger to pleasure herself. I wrote poems full of fire, desire, lustful wanting. All of my fantasies could play out on the page.
Meanwhile, I was beginning to, once again, experience the monthly Flow that was absent for approximately five years, despite never being pregnant. In the past, once I attempted to begin the Depo-Provera injections, my menstrual cycle became highly irregular. Once highly predictable, it was suddenly no longer an issue. Again, I was never pregnant. I had no desire to be pregnant. I knew as much when I was eighteen years old.
When I began Depo, I was twenty-two and in a new relationship with a (at the time) sixty year old man, who would become my ex-fiance. I was forced to get on birth control by my mother, whom I had to lie to about my sexual activity because she would not have believed that a) I wasn’t having sex with my partner, and b) I didn’t want to. I didn’t have feelings for him that way. But I had to lie to her because she had her own narrative and to usurp it in so little time was a challenge I did not have the spoons to attempt. I told her that, yeah, maybe, I’d want to have sex with him and yeah, maybe without a condom.
I was promptly whisked to my local clinic and told information about birth control I did not understand and was too ashamed to admit I did not understand. When the provider ran off the list of birth control methods, I said Depo because I didn’t want a period anymore and it was an injection I got once quarterly. I was OK with that. I hated my period anyway.
I took the first injection of Depo and felt absolutely horrid for about a week after: pounding headache, shakiness, and feeling faint turned me away from further injections of Depo and from any birth control, period. I was still never sexually active with that man, despite everyone thinking I was. I had no desire to be, as much as he pressed the issue.
He searched an abandoned warehouse and brought home a dildo that would have split me. Girthy and white, that man insinuated more than once that I would not have sex with him because he was Black and threw my past feelings that I told him existed in my teen years in my face.
“You wanted that substitute teacher,” he accused.
“Yeah — when I was fifteen. Things change between then and now.”
“You wanted to have his babies.”
“I did — and now I don’t want children. Again, things change.”
I tried to inject some humor into the situation: “If I still held the same ideas from my teenage years, I’d be a really boring person.”
He did not find me funny. He still pursued having sex with me. From blow-up dolls to 80s pornography, my boyfriend at the time was desperate for me to give him the sex he so desperately wanted, up to and including threatening to spike my drinks to make me more pliable.
I was terrified of him, even though I stayed with him for six years. I was constantly berated for not having sex with him, for being so staunchly abstinent as I was. He mocked my fatness, bribed me with food, and was emotionally, psychologically, and financially abusive. I lived in a slightly less intense nightmare than at my parents’ house, where being intimate with someone was a foreign concept and was met with “I didn’t need to know that.” With nothing but pornography to guide us, we each did our own thing: my brother ended up with a family; I was sex-repulsed and almost certain I was asexual; and my sister was so horny she’d nearly cream her pants looking at muscular men on television.
I stayed for the length of time I did with him because I knew I could never live with my parents again, but had no recourse into helping me get a place of my own, with my boyfriend. I was being shafted financially by my parents as well, forced to give them my SSI paycheck every month, and every so often my meager work wages. I helped my boyfriend with his (unbeknownst to me at the time) gambling addiction, draining all the potential overdraft money I could in one shot.
I was not given the safety with my boyfriend at the time to explore my sexuality. I was not allowed to be curious about the same sex and imagine intimacy with them. I was not allowed to anything, really, that disrupted his ability to gamble. From using my own money to purchase books, to loaning money to family and friends, I was attached to him in more than just our relationship. I became his appendage. Fiancee, emergency contact, confidante. It was my responsibility to keep him in check, to make sure he kept his appointments. He, too, was disabled, but it not my job to keep him in check, nor was it his job to provide me a safe haven away from my dysfunctional family.
But moving to North Carolina was a time for perspective and clarity. I knew from the beginning of our move that one or both of us would show who we really were. It would be a test of if our love could sustain even an 800-mile move. I wanted it to. I was hopeful for it.
By this time, my fiance had stopped asking me to be sexual. Perhaps he finally realized he was not getting Those Goods. Nevertheless, I didn’t even want to masturbate. For over a decade, I was an Ice Queen. Not just with my boyfriend, but with every man who attempted to approach me and get my phone number. I was unavailable. Ask my mom if you want to talk with me.
So, a little over three years removed from my fiance (explored in a separate essay) and living independently for the first time, I at last had the opportunity to explore my sexual nature. I had been thinking that I was a sex-repulsed asexual. I was biromantic with a leaning towards women, but I had no desire for sexual intercourse or masturbation at all. I just wanted a companionship, a relationship that worked for both parties.
When I wrote this poem, “Exploration” in early 2023, I was curious about my sexuality and sexual being. Was I a lesbian? Was I bisexual? I didn’t think I was straight and had had inklings of such since I was in my twenties. I just knew I had these new, strange feelings that I was both excited about and afraid of. What if I got into a relationship with someone, I wondered, and lost the sexual spark of myself when I we attempted intimacy? What if he (or she, or they) did not have the same drive I had? I had so many worries, but was also lonely.
I began to explore Facebook Dating. It was fairly low-stakes and it was free to use. I got many types of men: who sent dick pics upon contact, who were clingy and controlling, who were unresponsive, who were frauds.
One of those frauds was a cheapskate who wanted everything handed to him. He was in-between jobs when we met; I was on medical leave from my job for the second time in a year. He asked if I could float him some money. I had no problem with that; I appreciate a man attempting to make some money, and I understood the being between jobs thing. I floated him some money so he could eat. Then it was ongoing. He would reach out every day asking for money. He was in Indiana attending a free truck driving school training.
“Why didn’t you stay in Fayetteville?” I asked.
“Because going to Fayetteville Tech costs money!”
I wondered to myself you didn’t even attempt to apply for a scholarship?
I was becoming quickly disillusioned with being an ATM. There was no ending. I grew to resent his reaching out.
When he reached out for the last time to get a loan because he got scammed, I told him that I would no longer be lending out cash.
He stopped reaching out.
Exploration of the dating scene had definitely changed since 2013, when I was at my most interested in dating. More and more apps were on the market in 2023, and many had subscriptions and rewards I was not interested in purchasing or having a free trial to. I just wanted to find a match that would understand my mental health diagnoses and autism. I wanted someone with whom I did not have to mask.
With my ex-fiance and in New Jersey in general, I wore a mask to hide the truest parts of myself, what is now being celebrated in Goldsboro, North Carolina: my disabilities, my courageousness to be open about those disabilities. I get to explore a different, happier me in North Carolina.
When I wrote “Exploration,” I was beginning my sexual journey, chronicling my own immediate sexual experience with myself: being desiring and desired for, once again, who I was, and not what I possessed or the size of such possessions.
Being allowed to explore sexual desires is crucial for anyone’s development and curiosity for growth. I was never encouraged to explore my sexuality, nor did I feel safe enough to explore that part of me. It was a place, as well, in light of the sexual abuses I had received since a child, that I would not allow anyone to go, which included myself. I was too afraid.
I became disinterested and held no interest when I was with my ex-fiance. I was not ready, no matter how many dirty, ancient videocassettes he would bring home; no matter how many dirty, ancient sex toys he would bring home; no matter how much wheedling and begging, he got close maybe twice, he never penetrated, and that was that.
He would not be the last. He would not be the first.