Irrespective

Women always think I'm somehow chivalrous for not wanting to sleep with them. Trust me, there's no nobility in it, in the nightmares I still have about being raped, about the fact I triple check every lock in my house before I go to sleep and double check when I wake up. I am irreparably broken, not some highly respectful Prince Charming.

It's not like I didn't try. I was a teenager once. And that was how I learned the definitions of the words 'panic attack', but more than that, it was how I learned something was still wrong with me. A real man could have kept going. I didn't. While most people probably don't have their first girlfriend dumping them leave an impact, the impact crater was already made long before I met her at all, and she dug into it deeper. So have I. This isn't a good place to be mentally, but it's well charted territory, familiar in its' sorrows and solitude.

For all that I am a lover of speculative fiction I can't fathom a human being of any gender, age or race that could put up with the panic, the pacing, the sudden bursts of feeling filthy that compel me to sit in the shower for an hour rubbing skin raw, and the way certain touches make my hands curl into fists. All the nice clothes and shoes matched to belts in the world will not hide my brokenness in the bedroom, the polished vocabulary won't cover the shattered nature of my glass heart, precariously put back together with the glue of time, lies and denial. No one has a use for something as defective as I am. If I let any one of them in, they'll realize it; high school all over again minus the soft cushioning of thinking I could grow out of it.

The break up is always instigated by myself, done for self-preservation's sake. My preferred form of destroying my only human connections are written words, where nothing might give away that they've been dating something subhuman and abhorrent the entire time. But, my best friend assures me each time, I was such a gentleman about the whole thing, I never led anyone on or pushed them into doing something they didn't want. Part of me is scared that she's beginning to think of me as more than a friend, that she'll be the latest pearl before swine I have to find a way to break away from.

A much deeper part of me, one I will never admit to even my therapist, sometimes betrays me in my sleep, and I dream of my best friend tangled up in the sheets with me, smiling, never disgusted, myself suddenly free from all panic and fear.

It hurts when I wake up and go to check that all the locks are still in place.