the fruit is slow to ripen, though fast to fall

in the last 6 months or so i have begun to find that i prefer the company of women. as i come to understand this new un/folding self i realise that this is only a cognizant manifestation of that which was already true, that i am severely disconnected from the hetero-normative male condition.

anyone who has been close to me since 2009 knows of my non-cognizant sexual awakening from a very young {pre-concious} age, and subsequent non-normative world perception. i was taught to masturbate from a very young age, before i was forming crystal memories. i do not remember a time when i was not aware of the sexual potential in human play nor ever not desiring that from those around me. so it went that instead of being able to act on this impulse, through my poor self-worth and perceived unattractiveness (being that i was 118kg at 19 years old), i had long since fallen to putting women up on sexual pedestals or forming safe mother/child dynamics with older women i knew socially. one wore red lipstick, the other wore pink; pink was for fucking, red was not. as a sex therapist or tantric practitioner will tell you this can lead to a wildly misfiring and undirected eros, and in my case a deeply ingrained masturbatory life. all the proto-friendships i formed with girls around my own age were either abortive teenage shots at dating, or contained a barely concealed antagonism at the barriers in personality that would not let intimacy ensue between us. To illustrate: once i recoiled when i thought a potential play mate might have held feminist leanings, something which seems absurd in it's naivety now. i was angry at myself for being attracted and subsequently unable to express it in any meaningful way. it wasn't until my twentieth year that i found a girl to share my sexuality with, which means i have existed as an external sexual being for only 6 years.
So for all that truncation I feel that to finally say i prefer the company of women is a huge step. the moment of steep and vertiginous realisation came when the 3 women i worked with all nodded casually when discussing having been raped by a partner . I stood a flat footed minority in the face of their sanguine revelation that my veil of middle class pretention and protection simply hadn’t presented as reality. I felt the charge of their lives so forcefully, their giving, their considered communication. Again I idealised them, and chastised myself for denying reality. But I remain shaken that hetero-normative males are simply something I do not feel i can associate with on more than a facile, surface reality.

I realised that i had no female friendships of any substance…

until my friendship with beruthiel.

I remember being attracted to her very early in our acquaintance, but being that i was partnered when we met and, concomitantly, we worked together, i was "forced" to reserve my attraction to non-sexual play only {this being before my deep and abiding existentialism}. she moved jobs and eventually cities and we kept in nebulous contact through friends. It wasn’t until i moved cities and we were brought proximate by chance that I remembered that proto friendship and being lonely in that faraway place i did eventually move to capitulate it.
i was much afeared of the Eros i perceived between us, the energy that circulated there was not something I could yet channel, nor could I fully articulate my discomfort to myself, so to veil that I came bearing an idea, a vestigial notion of shared creativity, a comic.
Oh! the coiling of the plumb line that occurred in this. A shattering great release of Eros and channelling of intent into form that leapt alive in our words, beneath our skin. i bore a whole city into existence with the early surge of our coming together; in two sittings at a café i scrawled on stray parchment the machinations of a multitude of factions, characters, the geography of a place beyond existence.
We came together again and subsequently beruthiel poured herself into my dreaming, she became quietly immense, open, questing, generous with thought, blossoming in creativity and self, committing to the study of anatomy, perspective and illustrative tools; I now feel dwarfed by her commitment and capacity. This responsibility means I demand of myself to double my efforts in accessing the very best of my creative capacity in this world, to shape my life to match hers. To grow this together.
More than once we discussed the language surrounding our thoughts that this creative quickening had wrought, blushing that it was borderline sexual. But that is the truth of our connection; it is simply that we have been given such limited vocabulary for what friendship is. We have been educated to understand Eros as sexual and more specifically for a singular direction and purpose, when it is simply a desire between individuals to connect and to play, a circulation of energy and aspiration for bringing the future into being.
I do not feel as though we could have created so beautiful a thing had beruthiel and I simply made love, that the choice of focus and cognizant redirection of ourselves created a new space for us to fill with our intention. I have female friends with whom I share a similar circulation of Eros, but intuitively, and with consideration, I realise I cannot pursue a friendship in this same way. They are not people with whom I can share like this, their creative expression is not in alignment with mine and so i calmly accept that I am graced in what I share with beruthiel, with dae, with mr thylacine, with brannigan. That we create exceptional space and foster our better selves.