The Five Strands of A Sedentary Empress

watching him sleep

One of my more glaring problems in life is that I have always been attracted to men who are much older than I am. It's not a 'daddy issue', I don't think. I have a father and I'm close to him. He's always been there, always been ready with advice, always has a eye trained on his daughters. I love my dad, but when I'm looking for someone to sink my teeth into, his face and any other hint of him is very much removed from the situation.

It never occurred to me that I'd one day be with a man who was a teenager before I was born. In high school, I didn't have an interest in the teachers, was never a candidate for a clandestine after-school tryst on the gym mats. I knew girls who were, but they had the 'daddy issues'. One got pregnant, in fact. It might have been sad if she hadn't worked so hard at being above the rest of us. In the end it was kind of poetic. That girl has an eighteen-year-old now. I cannot imagine that.

At sixteen, though, while sitting in a desk trying to focus on what whichever teacher was saying, trying not to lose myself in teenaged reverie to the soundtrack of Howard Jones, somewhere else on the planet was a thirty-year-old who would one day be the father to my child. He was in a relationship with someone else, a long-faced woman who always had her nose in a book. How they lived, what they ate, how they spent their evenings I'll never know. I don't want to know. I simply find myself amazed at the whole situation. There I was, spotty-faced and dressed in a sateen jacket with a strand of pearls, and somewhere else was a grown-up who would one day share a house with me. Wild.

My first major crush was on a 'man' who was six years my senior. He had long, curly blondish hair, parted down the middle, and it fell in glittery ringlets down his back. He was lean, walked as though he was made of rubber, and he was smart, a reader. That he played guitar was the last bit of information I needed to push my stake in to the mystical dirt around him. I wanted that man badly, in a way that would have made me compromise every bit of morality I had in me, but when he started sniffing around me, and ultimately learned I was a mere sixteen, he became my 'friend', which, it must be said, pissed me off entirely. Retrospect has taught me that I was actually fortunate to have him back off, but there is still that yearning inside, the thirst of my nether region which has never been sated, and I will always remember him with a bit of exquisite pain. I wonder what he'd make of my mate, now? Six years is nothing next to fourteen.

I also have a bad habit of lusting for men who were at the height of their attractiveness before I was alive. Take Jim Morrison, for instance. How did I fall in love with him when he was dead before I even came to life? How does that even begin to make sense? I read an article about him, caught sight of his picture, developed an unhealthy attraction and began reading every book I could find about him. I had a poster, I had the cds and I saw him in all sorts of potential suitors. One guy I dated actually looked a lot like him, except he was a Skinny Puppy fanatic who wore Docs and black leather, but the face and the eyes were astonishingly similar to my dead crush. I never told him that I saw a similarity. I liked that it was all mine.

Then, Robert Plant. Now, to be honest, I was never a Led Zeppelin fan, not really. When I was younger the only people who were into them were the headbangers who hung around the smoker's corner, the same guys who played Dungeons and Dragons and wore matching jeans with jean jackets. They seemed caught in the past decade, while the rest of us were moving toward techno and goth. To me, 'Stairway to Heaven' was an unknown annoyance, a canned answer to the question 'what is the greatest rock song of all time'. I didn't care about them, had no interest in hearing anything they were responsible for, until one day there was a connection. My first crush ended up playing guitar with Jason Bonham, son of Led Zeppelin's ill-fated drummer, and because of this, I looked them up. Can I just say I was not at all prepared for the beauty which was Robert Plant? A gorgeous, lithe man with curly blonde hair who exuded sex with every twitch and turn? I was stunned by my reaction to him, and even more I was stunned at the somewhat eerie similarity between my crush and the rock god of the 1970's. While I was listening to Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Cure and The Smiths, I harboured a very serious private obsession for a man who sang music I didn't listen to. Go figure.

We come now, to M. To see him now you would find a six foot three gentleman with blue eyes and short blonde hair who looks like a professor of something technical and mindnumbing. What I see, though, is a little bit different. When I first met him, it was through a font. There was no physical attraction, only words and hastily typed sentences. I fell in love with the wit, with the intelligence and the creativity. In a chatroom of people looking for connections, ours was one which came out of nowhere. I found myself drawn to him without understanding why, and I was terrified. What if he was bald? Fat? Missing teeth? The love was happening against my will and I tried to stop myself from feeling it, because it made no sense: how could you fall in love with a personality which had no body or face?

Then, he told me he'd like to see my photo.

Okay, I'd typed nervously, but only if I can see yours first.

He agreed, and within a few seconds he sent one to my email box. I sucked in my breath and prepared myself for a short, round accountant type with a handlebar moustache and a lazy eye. I hit open, and there he was: Robert Plant. I thought it was a joke, and I wondered how he'd known, until I looked closely and saw that it wasn't Robert Plant at all, but a man who was even better looking. The photo was black and white, but I could plainly see that the long, wavy hair was glimmering gold. He wore black, and he had a silver necklace around his neck. His shirt was open, revealing a very tight, ridged stomach, and I swear, I nearly slid off my seat. He then typed me a quick instant message saying he was only kidding, and I was immediately outraged at the cruelty of him posting a photo of a stranger. No, he'd said, that is me, only it was taken a long time ago. You look like Robert Plant in that photo!, I'd typed gleefully, and he'd laughed and responded that he used to hear that all the time.

I was done, as of that moment. Here was a man who had looked like that, who was sweet and smart and hilarious. It was all over. I was done.

He sent an updated photo of himself and I was still done. Older, with short hair and slightly weary eyes, he was still the beautiful man from the earlier photo, except he looked even better to me. Wiser, more mature, more experienced, but in a safe way. He was the sexual seventies icon mixed with the handsome, dependable older man. For me, there is no better combination.

I sometimes watch him sleep, and while he does, I see the long-haired god from the photos. Perhaps it's nothing more than the fanciful daydreams of a teenager in a thirty-something's body, but I see him as the very best version of everything I was looking for. I know the washboard stomach is there, under the years of experience, and that the hair would still be long, if he wanted it to be. I see all the men of my former fantasies as appetizers for the main course of my reality. I suppose I consider them practice attractions for the man I would one day call my own.

I was always coming for him.