Well, it’s been a long time coming. The book is out. A book that took…who cares how many years it takes. I am here in my friend’s backyard and I am looking at a screen and I am meant to tell you what this book means to me. To do that would require going into the past. And into the past is where the shame resides. Much shame and much meeting said emotion with love.
I guess it starts with a woman. Whom I fell in love with. Limerence with. And this woman was very beautiful and she was very smart. Her intelligence was bountiful. She advocated for something resembling radical honesty. She wanted me to tell her everything.
And I did.
I told her everything, and she told me everything, and for a while things were very good. Things were very good indeed. And then after a while, the honeymoon phase started to fade, and what I told her, the secrets, started to sink in, and I guess because of her past she started to freak out, like kinda just freaked out, over things I would never do, maybe did in the past, maybe never did in the past and never would do in the present. I am the master of my domain, that sort of thing.
Anyways.
She didn’t think I was the master of my domain, had a hard time separating the notion of fantasy versus reality. Kink versus predator. Past versus present. That sort of thing. And well, it hurt me. Me feeling like I’m a pretty decent guy now even if I made some mistakes then, it hurt me, especially because she was the one advocating for such a tremendous and radical approach to intimacy, the one who wanted “all” of me.
But I’m not upset. I don’t look back on that relationship with tainted eyes. It was a beautiful moment. I took her lack of acceptance, her shame, her love, I took it into therapy and there is where I healed those broken parts of me. I did not “cure” myself, I did not exorcise the fantasies out of my body like a good Saint, I simply learned that I was lovable. All parts of me are lovable. And that’s it. That’s that. The story ends there.
This book is my attempt to transmit that love, erase that shame, from whoever is going through it. I want anyone who is dealing with it, whether it’s normative or not, whether it is a secret or not, I want them to know that I love them. I love the “monsters” inside them, whether they acted on it or not. To basically continue the work that I started with this special person, continue the legacy of sexual acceptance and revolution that came from my father, and put my own strange twist on this mind blowing shit we call human sexuality. That in essence is the goal of “High School Romance”.