Love, Me

This is the first in a set of series. #1



My name is Tobin Wade. I am a thirty-five year old model, movie star, and lover. My life has been a series of events that unfolded as evenly as torn foil. Ripped into pieces, and discarded when required, crumpled into a ball when needed, and never what I wanted. To understand all of those foil bits, you must go back with me to the very beginning, when it made sense at first, when the foil piece was flat, shiny, and unmarred.

         In the beginning I was born to a mother and father that at one time actually loved one another. They were small town people, grown up together in a little pit stop of a town on the border of Ohio and West Virginia. An old mining town that shut down with the mines, and left the town abandoned. Like many old mining towns, there wasn’t enough to keep people interested, but the old people had been there so long they weren’t going anywhere. My parents had grown up there, had left, and returned, and so this is all I knew at first.

         Before I graced this world a brother came first, four years older and infinitely different than me. He and I would never see eye to eye on anything, and it never changed no matter how old we grew. After my presence filled the world, a sister came. Young, beautiful, the love of everyone’s life, she would be my greatest supporter, even when she did not understand wholly what she was supporting. This is true love. Uncompromised, unshakable, true, passionate; this is the love of a sister for her brother, even when the foil crumpled oh so slowly right before her eyes.

         I adored the color pink. I adored wearing pink. Pink hair ribbons, pink dresses, pink everything. I had long, platinum blonde hair, and gorgeous green eyes. My mother always dressed me in pink, my sister in pink. We were beautiful little blonde dolls and so close in age that everyone thought we were twins for such a long time. For ten years, we grew the same, together, loving, in our home. Encased in our family we were happy, peaceful, and children. We played as children do, fantasy, and make believe, and everything in between.

         But all things must come to an end, and even the love between man and woman eventually faded to an ugly reality that no one was really, truly happy. They set out hell bent on hurting each other, and in the end the only ones they hurt were the three of us. We were left with the broken bits of what was once called family, and given nothing to make our way through the matter that held us down in its grip. It became the norm to spend our time split between homes, split between parents, and in the end, the choices that those parents made ripped the five of us into completely different directions and we were never, ever the same again.

         Around sixteen years in I began to realize that I did not fit the mold I had been given. It was not for lack of trying. I spent time with my girlfriends, discussing boys, having supposed ‘crushes’ and writing their names in my school notebooks like any other teenage girl would do. But no matter how hard I tried, it never worked for me. I could never get a boyfriend; I could never get a date. Eventually my friends became desperate for me, and arranged sex meetings for me instead. That’s right, come over to our house, my friend Jon is here and he will have sex with you. Wonderful, I thought, because if I have sex with him, then I will be like everyone else, and I shall fit into that mold!

         Yet no matter how many times I had sex with how ever many different men, it left me feeling completely alone, unloved, unwanted, not normal. Not normal. Those were the key words. I was not normal, I knew I was not normal, and I did not know why. It would take an entire decade more before I realized why I was not normal, and what was so very different about me.

         Several years after sixteen, and after dozens of sexual escapades that never left me satisfied, I had a thought. Perhaps, I do not like straight guys after all. Perhaps, just maybe, I’m a lesbian. I’d always found both men and women attractive, and so maybe I had just been trying to want the wrong sex. It was possible, right? I set out on a quest to become a lesbian. I went to the right clubs; I flirted with the right women, and so began the phase of my sexual escapades with women.

         The problem was that sex with women was the same as sex with men. It became a series of fucking, with nothing behind them. Nothing mattered, and there was not any connection. I craved a connection. I craved one person, man or woman, to provide me with a connection that I would finally be able to say, I get it. But that never happened, I never got it.

         I decided that perhaps in my desperate attempt to find love for all of these years, I was looking in the wrong place. Regular people did not appeal to me, but perhaps wild people would. I became engrossed in the BDSM community, looking for that person to spank my ass, to chain me up, to humiliate me. I wanted to submit to someone, to that one person, that would make me get it. Then I would finally be able to say, I get it. But again, it didn’t happen. I spent hour after hour tied up, beaten, tormented, abused, and I loved it. But there was no connection. Ever.

         Twenty some years in now, and I was still different. I had never found a male partner, I could not find a female partner, and I didn’t find a BDSM partner. I felt as if I were floating around in this world, not touching anything or anyone. I tried threesomes, I tried foursomes, I tried swingers clubs, and sex parties. I tried different dating programs, and I was still not normal. I thought maybe it was race specific. So I started dating black men in a hope that it would sooth the beast inside. But it didn’t. They were the same as white men. Old men, young men, gorgeous women, ugly women, intense men, passionate women, my world filled with all of them, and at the end of every day, I was still alone; Empty inside, just a shell.

         Around the time I realized that race had nothing to do with the emptiness, a certain set of circumstances introduced me to a gay man in California. He and I became instant friends. I adored him. The way he thought, the way he talked, the way he laughed, the way he smiled. Except I’d never seen his smile, I just knew I loved it. We talked on the phone every day, usually about the reason that had brought us together. But with any human being, after months and then a year of talking every day, you start to care about that other person. We became friends, and I was invited out for a week or two of vacation. I accepted eager to meet my gay male friend, and his partner.

         This trip completely changed my life. It was when I was in California, with my friend and his partner that I finally felt what I had been waiting to feel. I felt complete. My gay friend was just as loving as I’d thought he would be all those months talking on the phone. He was affectionate, he hugged me, he touched me, and I fell in love with him. I loved his mind, I loved his body, I loved everything about him. And yet, he was gay, and I am a woman.

         I left after two weeks there a changed person. A new door had opened inside of me, and suddenly I was completely overwhelmed. I did not want to make my gay friend become a straight man, if he were a straight man, I probably would not have wanted him anymore. I loved him just the way he was. I began to fantasize about him, making love with his partner, how they looked, what they would do to each other. I started watching gay porn, and the sight of two gay men making love filled that empty gap inside me as nothing else during all these years had. I had found what had been missing all this time.

         It started slowly, but before I realized it, I was surrounding myself with gay friends. I loved each and every one of them, from the masculine sexy muscular gods, to the flamboyant twinks. They all became my friends; they all became an important part of my life. I went to gay bars, gay clubs, and they all labeled me a fag hag. Yet, I was not a fag hag. Deep inside, I wanted to be one of them. So badly. I wanted it more than anything I’d ever wanted in my life. I was afraid that I was broken; that there was something inside of me that wasn’t right. Were my hormones out of whack? Did I need a drug to make me feel normal? What was normal?

         I spent a decade wrapped up in this life of gay friends. I lived my life through theirs. I listened to their sex stories, I listened to their love lives, I became one of them in my mind. I role played online as a gay male, I portrayed myself as a gay male to other people online, and I gathered more and more gay males around me.

         It took years more, before I actually realized what I was doing. I was now a married woman happy in my childless marriage to my straight husband. I was happy spending time with my broken family pieces. But on the inside, I felt dead. My sex life with my husband was nonexistent. I could not stand the way he touched me, I could not touch him. I wanted nothing to do with him. He was the kindest, gentlest man I had ever met. He took care of me, he loved me, and he gave me everything I wanted. But I could not love him the way he wanted me to. He wanted my passion, my sex, my everything. And I could only give him the shell of me.

         When I realized what I was doing to him, it hurt inside, because I was not being true to myself. I was living a lie. I started spending more and more time online, watching gay pornography. I thought about being with a gay man every day of my life. And I realized that I could not live this lie any more.

         At thirty five years of age, I could not live the life I had lived any longer. I left my husband, my best friend, because I could not tell him the truth about me. I stopped talking with my family, because I could not disappoint them. And I became what I realized I have always wanted to be.

         A gay man.



Series #2 coming soon.