FAMILY – confessions

Well that was emotional.

We’re in wonderful little Spanish restaurant near my brother’s cave house, an hour or so from Alicante. We’ve had a few beers earlier, and are now on to an excellent local red. The food is wonderful, as it always is at this place.

He tells me about a night of passion he has had with an ex-pat lady. “Tell me another secret,” I ask him. “I want to share something with you, but it needs another secret or two from you for me to be ready.” I get a story about a 65 year old Bulgarian lady in an apartment in Alicante. He tells it with wit and self deprecating humour. But he’s lonely down here – he’s between jobs in Africa – and the stories don’t hide it. I feel very close to him at this moment, connected by our different types of loneliness.

“So, bro what’t the big secret?”

“Ermm. This is a big thing for me. Only three people in the world, or at least, I hope only three people in the world, know this about me. But I want you to know it too.”

The words are travelling on square wheels and don’t want to come out. Suddenly I wish I hadn’t started, wish I hadn’t brought my laptop to the restaurant to deal with a transaction problem at work. Reluctantly, very reluctantly, I open it and pull up my blog. I’m pulling up BibulousOne from where he’s been safely buried, deep in my subconscious and I can’t handle the emotion. My brother’s not a sex worker who I’m paying to listen to me, nor is he one of BibulousOne’s twitter friends who has met only that version of me. He’s family and suddenly it’s too much.

Heart in my mouth, blinking mute tears from my eyes I push the laptop over to him.

“Just read it,” I want to say but the words drown on the way up and I just wave at the screen.

I can tell where he is in the familiar words of the post by his expression. It’s all there in an imaginary confessional letter to my wife, written a year ago but never sent: the early days, my first self punishments, the first vanilla marriage; then the first Mistress, the one who hurt me so much I bounced into a second vanilla marriage to avoid the frightening truth I saw in my response to the pain she caused me.

Oh, my God, he understands.

He seems to understand all of it. The hidden life he understands because of his time as a secret gambling addict. The self inflicted pain he understands because he went through a period of self harming at school (I didn’t know this). The need to write about it he understands because he has done so himself. We swap tales from our lives, tales of deceits we’ve lived and lies we’ve told, tales of  people we’ve hurt. We talk about the nature of addiction and how it affects each of us.

We talk of things that might have been if only.

A dam breaks inside me and I have to show him all of it: he sees Lilly in rope, my arse after a caning, Katie over a bench, my sessions with a man, my Top 100 sex blogs citation. I can sense I’m showing him too much, too many new things but I can’t stop myself until I’ve taken all my emotional clothes off and am naked in front of him. It’s cathartic and renewing, a huge sense of relief to share all this with someone so close to me.

In our discussion we recognise who we are; two men of a certain age, each deeply flawed but in ways that give us an almost intuitive understanding of each other, almost like identical twins. We are both faced with starting again at a time when most of our peers are settling down with their life partners, contemplating the advantages of newly empty nests. I’ve been finding this ‘starting again’ notion terrifying, destabilising and hard to process. But at least now I’don’t feel I’ll be doing so alone.

We talk about going on holiday together, perhaps travelling a bit. We may do these things, we may not. But I now have someone who knows all of it, understands all of it, is OK with all of it. I have someone who has been shown under my rock and seen everything that is writhing beneath it, and yet still wants to be around me.

And that makes last night really rather special.

The meal was rather special too

His wonderful reply to this post (which I showed him before posting it) is here. 

The original post, the one I used to tell him the story of who I really am, is here.