from-thedeskof

[from-thedeskof]

I’m not quite sure when it happened. Maybe it was my Venus in Gemini. Maybe it was my need. Ignored, then fermented, until it broke open like rotten fruit falling from a tree in summer.

This is how I deal with people: I flay them open and read what’s inside. Patterns, projections, pathologies. So let’s do it to me. Take me apart. Judge me beyond comprehension.

When did I become someone who would abandon her dreams for a nightmare dressed in intimacy? Was it because he was perfect for me on paper? Or because I was deluded enough to believe compatibility was the same as connection?

Sure, we liked the same music. Sure, his proclivities mirrored mine so precisely it made my skin vibrate. Sure, his need rivaled mine and met me on the battlefield of longing and desire.

I’d already made a myth out of us. I told him he was desire and destiny wrapped up in a temptation too great to manage. His fire burned through my good sense. I welcomed it like a pyromaniac. I let it destroy me, not caring about the rubble left behind.

What he really did was destroy the perfect container of Self that I had been holding shut for years. He was loss, love, grief, sex, and everything in between. He was quiet. He was my reckoning.

What he unlocked was the painful reality that life itself had not been real for some time. That a piece of me had been locked up, and letting her out caused a kind of chaos I never expected. Not the kind that changed my day-to-day, but the kind that created an inner turmoil that begged to be medicated the only way I could. Here, now, with a cold glass of white wine in an airport lounge.

Making eyes at a brown-eyed stranger who looked like you but didn’t have Lake Michigan in his eyes. This unending ache made even more extreme by your absence. The hole inside my soul now desperate to be filled with hands around my neck, a need to be savored, destroyed, to serve a Master who might let me forget for a moment what I did and who I became.

The fight for primacy, a bloodlust-filled war-torn country between the woman I am and the woman who wants to be degraded, used, abused, then cherished like a prized auction piece at Christie’s. The woman who would make eyes at a stranger in this airport lounge, take his cock in my mouth and give him head that would make his poor twentysomething girlfriend wet with her own desire to be me, to have what I am, to be able to do what I do.

He wears sweats in public for crying out loud! He’s not the object of desire, I am!

I wonder who let her chaos out. Maybe it’s because my eardrums are bursting with songs I listened to as I came for you or because my blood has become half white wine and I hadn’t had a drink in six months before my life fell apart or maybe it’s because his jawline could cut glass and my standards are dropped so low to take anyone who looks at me with a bit of hunger.

I crave their hunger because I’ve been starved. Starved! There isn’t possibly enough that he—or anyone—could do to make me whole again. Ten years of being fractured and fissured along my foundation. I am no longer Woman, I am Shell with deep need to be filled.

The love of my life is just one mile and three blocks away? The industry titan on the other side of the country, who can’t control himself around the idea of me? This fucking stranger on the other side of the lounge. I don’t care, I’ll give it all away. Fill me! Use me! Destroy me!

Rescue me from myself, or abandon me to the sweet pain of being called “Good girl” by a man who will never see me for who I am.

[from-thedeskof]

In Paris, she keeps a lover. He's romantic, uncommitted, an expat quoting Irish poets over. His ethnic origins are muddied both in lore and genetics. He was a quiet mystery she never grows tired of. She's quiet there, too. Living between art galleries and museums and cafés. Her mornings begin with an espresso, a pear, and a slice of sun warmed bread with butter before her first glass of Sancerre at 10:30 in the morning. She doesn’t eat again until the sun sets. She’s the lover who is kept.

In Chicago, she keeps a brownstone, purchased in the wake her parents death. The home holds the lost dreams of her childhood; the what if's and escapism of a life somewhere away from the West. She has an unfinished novel sitting on an overpriced desk her interior designer friend swore would bring her creativity. She's a socialite there; she hosts elaborate dinner parties and themed events with caviar and cote du rhone. She's unfulfilled and her husband sleeps in a separate bedroom.

In Dallas, she keeps busy, endlessly busy. Her college sweetheart, a partner in all things. Three kids under five, named after beloved family members who visit every holiday. Sunday dinners with the neighbors. Pilates three days a week, swimming the others. Their living is modest by the standards she grew up with but she’s more than comfortable. She’s grateful for every day her kids are healthy; she’s grateful they detected her abnormal cells early; she’s grateful for the grace of God.

In New York, she keeps a closet big enough that her shoes line the entire wall. She has all the designers she grew up loving in the pages of Vogue. Choos, of course. Manolos from the wedding, obviously. She's powerful there, she's in power there, she gives away her power there. After a day of negotiating divorces and prenuptial agreements, she drinks her “fucking extra cold” Hendricks dirty martini with blue cheese olives in a hotel bar. She waits on a lover that prefers to tie her up with black corded rope and ogle her than he does listen to her.

In her ceaseless dreaming, she metamorphoses into fractional elements of herself. Something more embodied, something true. Her womanhood defined by the cities she loved in youth. Her womanhood defined by the pieces of her she keeps in filing cabinets.

[from-thedeskof]

In this space, he holds my gaze in a breath suspended between us. His eyes first appraising me, then looking through me, then looking into me. It’s the kind of look that says, “I see you. I know what you’re doing. Keep going.”

What we’re doing is not traditional. Not spoken aloud in polite company or written into monogamous contracts with diamond rings and firm handshakes. It lives somewhere in the undercurrent. Sharp. Intellectual. Deliberate.

He will lead—not because I cannot—but because I want to see how he carries me.

I will follow—not because I must—but because I want to feel what it means to trust him with the map.

The way I respond to him is the way a violin responds to tension. Too tight, it breaks. Too loose, it loses music. He knows this. He tunes me carefully, navigating my submission with the skill of a thoughtful conductor.

In this arrangement, I soften, fully embodied and feminine. He accepts it, treasures it in a firm hand born from some unmatched internal discipline. He leads, not with volume nor intensity but with presence. The kind of presence that makes you breathe slower without realizing.

Our dynamic rests on his unwavering strength. He takes pride in this. I take pride in being his.

When he gives me orders, they come with precision. Clear directives with a matched certainty that I will follow them to the letter. Each question he asks, I door I choose to step through not out of blind obedience but because he’s earned the right to ask.

This isn’t a roleplay. This is power, passed like a secret between two unrelenting forces: the masculine and the feminine. This is power wrapped in restraint. This is power wrapped in vulnerability.

Sometimes I test him. Out of instinct. Out of curiosity. Out of the deep ache to know, “Can you hold all of me without flinching?”

He always does.

He knows I’m not easy to lead, but that when my “Yes” comes, it has not a single hesitation, not a single thread of doubt. This isn’t performative submission. This is intellectual edge-play. I don’t surrender in the soft-spoken, docile sense of the word. I surrender like a queen laying down her sword to the only man she’s ever believed could hold the weight of her kingdom.

And he does.

That’s the agreement. That’s the edge we walk together. That’s the space we choose.

[from-thedeskof]

[from-thedeskof]

Consultant by day.

Writer by night.

This is a collection of my musings, nonsensical snippets, and mental filing cabinets made manifest on this strange little platform I fell in love with more than a decade ago.

— CF

Cover Image "Sketchbook" by Richard Curtner

[from-thedeskof]

It's barely past dawn. Like always, she wakes with a clear mind, already running through her day. Slipping out of bed, her silk dressing gown falls to her ankles, swishing lightly in the quiet of the morning. It's a simple morning, with cold sun shining through the curtains, a quiet house, and two souls still in dreamland. In the mirror, she looks at her eyes, sharp with awareness and edged in last night's mascara. She shrugs on her cashmere wrap, inhaling the memory of her mother, scent long since faded. Padding to the living room, she curls into the couch, knitted blanket over her feet, tea in a vintage cup on the table, book in hand; peace. It's 7:07 in the morning.

Quietly, she hears little feet and a tender creak of the door opening. She peeks her head in, barely up to the door handle. "Hi, baby," she says. Seeing her daughter's sleepy eyes, she goes back to her reading. Pretending to see the words as she feels her daughter's presence come into the room slowly, cautiously, full of awareness and love. Just like her father's. Little hands find the other edge of the blanket, little warm body wraps under her arms, little heartbeat fluttering against her mother.

Sounds from the kitchen, the kettle on, the sound of the last moments of coffee brewing. He brings her a fresh tea in a different teacup, one she collected from their 11 years together, though she can no longer trace each back to their origins. She silently appraises her husband and smiles at him lovingly.

Moving with his quiet confidence, he looks to her, love pouring out of his eyes. “Good morning.” She repeats his kindness. For a while, it’s that simple, their three souls beating together as one. As he runs his hands through her hair, she runs hers through their daughter's red curls. Messy, slept on, perfect.

It’s a beautiful thing; a stranger would fall in love with them if only they could see it. He loves her. She loves him. They love their little girl. All at once, she is holding the love of her life and her husband together on this Sunday morning. It’s now 7:52 in the morning.

[from-thedeskof]

I remember the first time I fell in love with a hotel bar. Newly twenty-one, crashing on a couch in the hotel room of my older brother while he was on a work trip to New York City. I sat in a recessed corner of the bar after a long day of wandering the city in new shoes and borrowed confidence. Leather-bound menus. Brass sconces. Velvet banquettes rubbed thin by too many nights. The servers were too absorbed in their own entanglements to bother with mine. I ordered a glass of cabernet and a slice of chocolate cake. The wine, simply because I could. The cake, because at that moment I felt the flickering remnant of memory for the boy I fell in love with on a rickshaw in San Diego.

I remember the time my relationship with a hotel bar changed to one of anonymity. I was in Chicago, two months after finishing graduate school. I was six years into a relationship that was simple for him, and complicated for me. The after-work crowd was cacophonous, chaotic, matching how my soul felt. I ordered a glass of white wine. It wasn’t chilled enough, I drank it too quickly and ordered another. The attention of his eyes on me made me self-conscious. I knew what he was thinking. I also knew that if I rose to meet him, I could stop thinking. I could leave my overworked mind and underworked body on the cold leather banquette. I knew that he wouldn’t note the absence of what made me, me.

I remember when a hotel bar turned into a cocoon for my grief, the only place strong enough to hold it. The MRI clicks scarred into my brain so that I could hear them at all hours. Or was that just the sound of the death of youth? I grieved it all the same as I drank my Hendricks martini (”With four blue cheese olives. This is dinner.”). The room was polished, hushed. Power suits. Watches the price of most people’s cars. Smartly dressed servers and staff tending to the bar usually filled with elites. It was 3 PM, they had just opened, and I no longer felt elite. Life had ground me down. Or perhaps I had let it. Convinced that my being smaller would somehow ease the vast disconnect from my idea of self and the woman I had become. I grieved her, too.