Her Love Boils BathwaterI'm flying back from Switzerland, after proposing to @khatsha (with a broadsword). Although I won't watch this Japanese film, because xXx: The Return of Xander Cage is there, the title grabs me. It makes me think of khatsha - ok, everything does at this point, but it makes me think about her passion, and how irresistible that is.
- Title of Japanese film in the seatback entertainment system
She came to see me on the train in Italy in August, 2015, and we had a mindblowing few days of sex and hypnosis. But I started to fall for her when I read her writing about it. I always fall for writers - people who can make me feel their powerful, specific emotions, and draw me into their world. khatsha is a writer. She has that thing. And also has the kind of wild, poetic flow that I envy. She has a talent for surrender: to the flow of words, to her unconscious, to her senses, to trance, to new pleasures, to passion. To me.
From that writing to her most recent, how could I not be seduced by those words? And by how I'm magic for her? This is not a metaphor: I'm magic, as close to literally as you can get without breaking the laws of physics. Because of post-hypnotic suggestions I can snap my fingers, or say a word, and something really, truly happens to her. And no one does compliments like an enthralled hypnotic pleasure slave.
But it's not just about her passion for me, it's her passion for her ideals; for hypnosis; for community; for open source software. What she loves, she loves so hard, and the same with what she despises. Some of it is for comedic exaggeration, but only a little. Being around her, colours are brighter, contrasts are deeper.
“At the end of the day, it comes down to the same question I've been asking my wife every Friday night for the last 20 years: Do you want some of this??”I know this level of excitement won't last. These feelings are partly about the joy of finding someone with such compatible interests and fetishes, the hunger from forced separation, the spice of different cultural backgrounds, the thrill of travelling all over Europe together, and, last but not least, hypnoamory, the tendency of people to fall in love with their hypnotists and vice versa. There's something tremendously naive about what we're planning to do.
- Samuel L. Jackson as Augustus Gibbons in xXx: The Return of Xander Cage
But I feel lucky that we're both in our 30s and have a tiny bit of life under our belts. Enough to know that there's more to this. Even when we're sexually spent (well me anyway) there's so much to talk about. Everything from design to politics to fictional tropes to deep learning to french translations of Poe. I remember looking at her across fancy high tea in London in March 2016 and realizing, I want to keep this conversation going, pretty much for the rest of my life. That’s when I told her I wanted to do what it takes so we can be together.
I have high hopes for our sex life, and the touching weekly ritual of Samuel L. Jackson and his unseen wife are an inspiration. Khatsha is bodacious and a super pervert, and with hypnosis in the mix the weird stuff is just endless. But it's the conversation that makes me most confident.
"We are officially living together." "The experiment begins."I've never lived with a girlfriend before. Now I'm having khatsha move thousands of kilometres to make a home with me in a Jamaica Plain apartment. The most consecutive nights we've slept in the same bed is about 14. There's going to be so much stuff to figure out, from what sides of the bed we sleep on to how the sink gets cleaned.
- Sheldon and Amy in The Big Bang Theory, Season 10 ep 4.
Hopefully living together goes way, way better than it does for Sheldon and Amy. I'm a much better roommate, and unlike Sheldon, I like sex! But I have my Sheldonish side, being used to having things in my living space just so (including the messes), so there will be a lot to get over.
But as we've been telling each other for a while now: there will be happiness, and there will be freakouts. All we can hope and plan for is that we'll freak out at alternating times, which still leaves at least one person to do the reassuring.
"I live for this shit."Nearly all the time I'm cautious and prudent in my decisions, not to mention physically and socially timid. Then once in a while I get a voice in my head that scares the shit out of me because it tells me it's time to do something big (also because it sounds like Riddick). When I switched colleges to move thousands of miles from my home town, when I walked into my first kink event, when I decided to move to Italy for two years in my mid 30s, when I proposed to khatsha. All sparked by something saying, you need to bust out into a bigger, more exciting world. My life would be so narrow without these decisions!
- Xander Cage in xXx: The Return of Xander Cage
Khatsha, also a nervous computer scientist, has that thing too, except it's much more consistent and warrior-like. Since we saw Mad Max she is often heard to say, "What a lovely day!!" (we’ve had some discussion of spraying our mouths with silver paint just before our wedding ceremony) That's something I really love about her.
I've spent so much of my life, maybe more than most people, immersed in fictional stories. Sometimes they seemed very important, but other times they were undeniably a kind of in-flight entertainment system for my life, just getting me through the ride with as little discomfort as possible.
But when the real inflight entertainment shuts off as the plane lands in Boston, I'm still in the story. It's real. Two nerdy hypnofetishists moving to America together for love, fortune, kink, adventure, and community.
I'm marrying khatsha, sooner than I will finish this box of Raisin Bran. And things will never be the same.
