[F] I (F46) need a new title but this is just more of the same story [Part IX: Life Writing]

This is a new chapter in the saga I started here: https://old.reddit.com/r/gonewildstories/comments/u33z2w/f_i_f45_had_a_secret_affair_for_8_months_it/. It’s different, but the story of me and Keith was mostly done. This is still part of that story, with a different focus.

It was Scott who encouraged me to take a life writing class that was being offered as a night class for adults in my school board. Teachers got a discount, it was pretty cheap to begin with, and it was close to home one night a week. Scott suggested it’d be good for me to try my hand at writing, something I had always wanted to do since high school. When Scott and I met I was giving it a try, publishing a few poems in zines (remember those) and even in a few literary journals, and “working on a novel,” as I said for years before I had to admit to myself that I wasn’t, not anymore.

I needed a bit of a push, which Scott was happy to provide. He was doing all kinds of extracurricular things, playing basketball with friends once a week, having drinks with colleagues regularly, occasional gigs with his classic rock cover band…. I had friends I sometimes saw, but my life revolved more around work and home than Scott’s. It’s not that I missed things with Keith, but the end of that affair had left a gap. Besides, I still felt that need to self-analyze and also to confide my experiences. Taking a life writing class was a chance to get to that.

Not that I wanted to write about my affair for this class! But I figured I’d learn tricks and techniques that I could then use to write a story about my affair, which I could publish anonymously online (as in, the experiences I’ve been posting about here). The class turned out to be great, which was more than I’d expected. But what I really hadn’t expected was for the class to be an awakening itself.

I was shy and a bit defensive as I walked into the classroom for the first session. It was in a high school building, so that may account for my reaction. It felt weird to be there. I’m used to being in schools all day, but I teach younger kids. High schools have their own atmosphere, which is connected to a very tumultuous (though not all bad) time of my life. Anyway, I felt a bit cagey as I walked in, and I was ready to hate it.

I was not the youngest person in the room, but pretty much. I was surrounded by women about my mother’s age and a few men even older than that. There was one woman who I guessed was about 40 as well (I was 42 by then), but apart from her and me, the only young person was the instructor, who looked like she was 22. She was smiling at me as I walked in, and everyone else was also looking my way. I was half an hour late.

I learned later that Tobie was older than she looked, though not much. She was 27 at the time. The first thing that struck me about her was how good she was about making everyone feel like they’d written something amazing. For the first class we were all supposed to bring a half page anecdote about a pivotal moment in our past. We started by introducing ourselves, then each of us had to read their text out loud. As people read I grew more and more embarrassed about having to read my piece. Everyone’s story was pretty basic and normal. A beloved cat’s death. The moment you realize your parents are breaking up. The first time you heard the Beatles. That kind of stuff. After each person read, Tobie spoke enthusiastically, sounding completely sincere, about this or that great image, beautiful phrasing, teling line of dialogue, or whatever. I couldn’t tell if she was really so flakey or if she was just incredibly talented at making people feel they had written something of value.

My turn to read came last. My anecdote was about realizing, when I was about eight or nine, that I could see into the neighbours’ bathroom at night if the light was on. I would lie on my top bunk with the lights off and watch the young couple (who seemed so old to me then) brush their teeth together, or come into the room to shower or use the toilet. I couldn’t see the shower or the toilet from my room, but sometimes the woman brushed her teeth topless, which I found fascinating and strange, especially when her boyfriend was standing right there beside her, also brushing his teeth as if nothing momentous was happening. Grownups seemed so wondrously bizarre to me. I couldn’t imagine that I’d ever brush my teeth next to a man with my boobs just hanging out there. Then again I couldn’t imagine ever having boobs. So, one night I forgot to turn off my light, I don’t think I knew that it made a difference either way. Anyway, I was looking into the neighbours’ window while the woman was putting on makeup (she must have been going out), when suddenly I saw that she was looking right back at me. She made a surprised sound and brought down the blind with a crash. And that was the last time I ever got to spy on the neighbours. I was terrified that the couple next door would report me to my parents.

Tobie’s reaction to my story was pretty much the same as everyone else’s, and I was weirdly disappointed about that. She said all kinds of nice things, and they were admittedly different nice things than the nice things she said about the other pretty generic stories we’d already heard.

She was cool, this Tobie. As the weeks passed, I started taking the class more and more seriously. I enjoyed writing and found that I could use it to explore my own feelings and experiences in ways that were revelatory, if not always thrilling. Tobie gave me a lot of helpful tips about how to delve into my memories while keeping the story interesting to others. Over time I started seeing that she was giving more of her attention to my work. She never said anything, but I flattered myself into thinking that she saw something in my writing that was more than the usual, or at least different from it.

I found that I wanted Tobie’s approval, which seemed funny since I also felt that she was so much younger than me. But she had a confidence I liked. I tried not to seem obvious about this, and I limited my conversations with her to times when it didn’t look like I was running after her. This is one difference between being 42 and having a crush on your teacher and being 12 and having a crush on Ms Clarke who taught my English class when I was a kid. I don’t mean a sexual crush, though Tobie was very attractive, with glossy black hair and brown skin that suggested parents who might be South Asian and South American. When Scott met her at the reading at the end of class, he said she looked like a rock-climber. I don’t know if that paints a clear picture for you, but I thought that description pretty much captured her compact, strong body and general demeanor.

Like I said, it wasn’t a sexual crush. I’d never been attracted to women in my whole life, though I always did and still do find their bodies more aesthetically pleasing than men’s. Like many girls, as a young teen I kissed some of my friends in middle school, but not because I wanted intimacy with them or wanted them. It was partly to practice for boys and partly not to be left out. There was a competitive and joiner vibe to these sessions, which happened at sleepovers while we watched movies like Ghost and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? Anyway, apart from those innocent games I have always been and thought of myself as completely straight. This has been a source of disappointment to some of my exes who really wanted to try a threesome. I wasn’t into it, or not with another girl. Not that I ever had a threesome with two men, either, though this was just because the chance never came up…

I’m digressing, but this is all important context for my friendship, or whatever it was I had, with Tobie. It was clear that Tobie thought of me differently from the rest of the class, though she was amazingly professional. But we’d hang out after class talking about writing, then conversations gradually expanded into other topics, our relationships and families. Tobie was single and bisexual, a combination that for the first time ever sounded kind of ideal. Imagine the possibilities! We also started writing emails to each other, first about writing-related things, then more casual friend-like messages. I would look forward to these messages all day, and it kind of killed me that Tobie was not a great correspondent. She would not respond for days, and just when I thought she’d forgotten she would write a message that set my heart thumping–but it would be just a few words, or a sentence at most. Agh.

I only admitted to myself that I had an infatuation, and a sexual one, when I found myself thinking of Tobie when Scott was going down on me. Once I had allowed the thought into my head, I found myself constantly distracted. I had daydream fantasies of kissing and snuggling Tobie, and these sometimes turned a bit more sexual. I was also curious and intrigued by my own belated change to … I guess you’d call is bi-curiosity, though that sounds too categorical for what felt very specific to Tobie. I was curious about my curiosity, though.

It was as part of this infatuation that I started digging into Tobie’s web presence. Don’t get too excited. It’s not like she was an amateur porn starlet. This is real life, remember. Actually, I found a lot I already knew about (her publications, her performances at readings and other book and literary things), and there was her social media presence, which was minimal and not very informative. What I did find, through indirect and accidental means, was Tobie’s alter-ego as a writer of erotica. She mentioned having done this in a literary blog that was interviewing her. Like a lot of graduates of creative writing programs she had found a relatively lucrative side job writing porny stories. I did some sleuthing and found her pseudonym, which led me to her stories.

I won’t lie. I didn’t like them as much as I expected too. I thought they’d be as original and lively as she was in person, but they were pretty generic. Well written, but totally standard. They moved through the usual checklist of seduction and touching, oral, fucking, male orgasm, with a suspicious amount of squirting and lots of off-putting dialogue and roughness. I was disappointed. But knowing these thoughts came straight from Tobie’s mind made reading them exciting despite how unoriginal and gross they were to me. I wanted to ask her about this secret (and maybe past?) life of hers. But I had no idea how to broach it. It seemed like a bad idea.

Source: reddit.com/r/gonewildstories/comments/uj0u90/f_i_f46_need_a_new_title_but_this_is_just_more_of