Sugar Burn

Editor's Note

Okay. This one's tricky. There's one aspect of disability I speak on in public but haven't mentioned it here as of yet. It's sexuality. More specifically, relationships and sexuality. I'm a PWD (person with a disability) that believes that sex is good, healthy and is a visible (somewhat ;) part of my life. Disabled persons ARE NOT eunuchs, nuns, asexual or "safe" because they have a disability. No need for mental pictures here. I'm just STRONGLY refuting a belief held by most persons without disabilities (PWODs) and by many in the disability community itself. It's HIGH TIME that people got this concept. PWDs ARE RELATIONSHIP MATERIAL AND GENERALLY LOVE SEX AS MUCH AS ANYONE ELSE! There. Now it's tricky because my current dearest T doesn't like to hear about previous dearests. Women are funny that way. LOL I'm doing it anyway because this episode in my saga has many points worth stating. If y'all don't hear from me before January, assume I'm grounded from the computer. HaHa. By the way, everything in this post actually HAPPENED to a PWD, namely me. Oh and no sympathy for me either. This chapter's been long closed.



Post Proper

Once upon a time there was a little Dustin...ahhhhh never mind. Inside joke. Here's my opening. Gwenyth. That's what I called her. Gwendolyn is just too long to spell a lot and I didn't wanna have to say three syllables. Gwenyth=two syllables=more better. I was 23 and staying in a dormitory on the University of Montana campus in Missoula. My friend Eric (also a PWD) and I moved from an apartment out on Riverside to campus to make transportation a non-issue for our class schedule. We stayed in a dorm mostly with four person "suites" and four single rooms with a private, accessible bathroom. I was ground floor in the female wing (SCORE FOR ME!) Eric was on a higher floor. I hung out up there a lot because he had a video game console. 'Nuff said.



Now we pulled this whole thing off by sharing care hours through a PA (personal assistant) agency. We usually ate together in the cafeteria. Then a PA would aid one of us to bed followed up by the other's routine. It worked for roughly two months until we separated hours for the sake of the PAs. Then we finished semester with different people.



Well, I started primarily with guy PAs. One stayed the entire semester. The other became "reassigned" in mid-semester. The agency hired a new person to help take the slack of the other PA. She was a 26 year old, redhead nursing student with light brown eyes. Gwenyth. She was hired primarily for Eric's hours yet we magnetically drifted until she became "my" PA (This was around the time we stopped sharing hours.)



My relationship with her started out weird and got stranger. The second day working with us, we were hanging with Eric in his room. E and I joked around while we watched movies and played video games. Somehow, I incidentally mentioned how I should get a haircut. Suddenly, she was asking if she could and I kinda said okay and fifteen minutes later I had a haircut (she kinda used E's scissors). Yeah, that was weird. As days went, she started to volunteer for my hours until she was my primary PA. Then she started to hang with me outside of work hours. I did like her so I didn't mind so much.



Early Spring turned late and she and I were together almost all the time. I had learned some about her but not a lot. I learned her live-in boyfriend worked hospital hours and was rarely around. I learned she was putting together a modeling portfolio because her looks fit that. I also learned that she had a child who was not in her custody and her goal was to get custody of the child. Yep, that's about it but I was influenced by other processes that blinded me to the obvious red flags.



I remember once when she was untying my shoes by kneeling beside me. She flipped her straight, auburn hair aside revealing a peaches & cream neckline. My heart skipped because I would have given a Kingdom to place my lips upon that flesh. That was it. I fell for her then. I will admit to being awkward about this falling thing so I didn't just blurt things out. Instead I indicated fondness and waited. Eventually she asked if I'd seen the movie My Best Friend's Wedding. I hadn't and said so to which she says I should because I reminded her of a character in the movie. I never saw the movie but I leveraged the comment into her admitting she liked me...a lot. I, being stupid, asked what we did next to which an "affair" was offered. I yearned for her so I consented. I was granted my wish of being with her although clandestinely. There were a lotta issues requiring secrecy. Her boyfriend couldn't find out (I actually thought she'd separate eventually). The PA agency couldn't know because PA/client relationships were fireable offenses. E couldn't know because he could tell the agency. It was a giant freaking mess and I was blind to it.



I was blind to the truth of things because, for the first time in a physical relationship, I found someone who wasn't scared of me possibly being too fragile or too inept or that the equipment wouldn't work properly. In the heat of the moment, things kinda flowed naturally and adaptation was presumed. That was the first time in my life someone treated me that way and it seemed worth it to me.



So we had the physics of the physical part down but I began to see another entire part of the equation. Although we shared our bodies, her mind started to frazzle and I was too inexperienced to know what to do. She believed that her boyfriend was spying on us, she started losing sleep over it and we distanced. Final straw was when the agency called her for a "meeting." She was POSITIVE I told them about the relationship. Then she did what shattered the entire thing: She accused me of PLOTTING this all along to get her fired and "ruining her life." Yeah, I lost it. I yelled that the idea of such a thing was insane and that I tried more than anybody to "protect" her. Suddenly she tells me about domestic violence she's experienced and that she doesn't know if she can trust me as a man. I cry about this and that she couldn't trust me to tell me earlier. Then she is crying because of her stress and I tell her that if she can't trust me after all that had happened, she never would and that I could do no more than I had. She got up and slammed the door on her way out. After that, we didn't touch non professionally again. We did find out that the meeting was about her taking more hours on weekends, but the "relationship" had ruptured and there was no fixing it. As the end of semester came, she informed me that her boyfriend proposed and they were moving to flatland somewhere so he could take a job there. Outwardly I said I hoped things went well. Inside I was confused, bitter and angry. When I went home to Superior for the Summer, we never saw each other nor talked again.



The other part of the equation was trust. We didn't have it. Also I missed a thousand red flags about the nature of things. Plus starting a PA relationship is not something I would recommend to everyone. Anyway, I got me in the mess but I also got me out. I learned things and eventually I met T and we worked together to get through problems. I'm not an inexperienced idiot and we've been together seven years. Wherever she is, I want to thank Gwenyth for teaching me what to do and how to approach an adult relationship with maturity. It's great knowledge to have. Well, now I'm going to chain myself in the basement. I guess you won't be hearing from me for awhile. Ah well. Women are funny that way.



D