I called off from work tomorrow. They’re not going to be happy about that, but I must get better. My voice is almost completely gone and I have a rehearsal tomorrow, a concert the day after, and then a service, another concert, and a singing-social event on Sunday. I can’t take chances.
I remembered something as I walked back from my car the second time tonight. (I left my phone. Again.) It’s raining. Two days ago I called Jess and left a message about the melancholy feeling I get when it rains. That elusive want isn’t the need to be needed that I talked about before. I apparently have two unknowable longings. This second one is more nostalgia than the other, I think, but not completely.
What I remembered was sitting on the front stoop of my house when I was a child (think 7-9, or maybe more like 6-8) with an umbrella propped against the wall, huddled underneath it in the rain. I was making a tent for myself and enjoying the gloomy weather. I’m fairly certain that the feeling I feel now when it rains is the same basic emotion I felt playing then. This is significant because it proves my assumption about the rain-feeling’s origins wrong. If I felt the same feeling that young, then it can’t be nostalgia for some forgotten adolescent event associated with rain. It likely has nothing to do with boys. I think I’d just come to assume it did because a) common layman’s understanding of psychology leads us to assume that all things stem from sexuality and our parents and b) boys are generally the only thing that can get that deep and strong an emotional response out of me.
But maybe it still is about boys in some way. First, the feeling can’t be exactly the same now as it was then. I’ve matured and evolved and had new experiences that have added to my associations with rain. And I certainly experienced a lot of rain and tents with boys in boy scouts.
Or we could consider the possibility of an early sign of my sexuality. (A dangerous and often misleading course of action, I have come to believe.) I’m sure I ran fantasies of children caught out in the elements, despondent, needing rescue. I think I remember thinking of that, playing that “game” with me as the distressed child. (I remember being particularly fascinated with stories like Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Match-Seller.) I don’t recall that leading to rescue fantasy. Only the helpless situation. Only when I was old enough to cast myself in the role of rescuer did my fantasies take on that element, I believe. But I’ve been fantasizing that general situation my whole life.
And I think this fantasy is likely familiar for most boylovers. It goes back to the need to be needed thing. We fantasize about children and distress not because it’s attractive, but because it creates a need for the rescuer.
Perhaps that very fantasy – which is often featured in BL fiction – could be the root of what makes some pedophiles turn violent towards children. The fantasy has an undeniably dark aspect. It isn’t inconceivable that a young man experimenting in his mind with the rescue scenario could become fixated on the first half to the exclusion of the rescue portion. Especially if he pays too much attention to the opinion of society at large that people who feel sexual attraction to children are monsters by “virtue” of their attraction only, and not their actions. If he obsesses too much on the fantasy child’s distress it could eventually become attractive to him. Especially if he comes to embrace that self-loathing that viewing yourself as a monster leads to. Young men often try to live up to expectations.
Coming from someone as inexpert as myself, this may all be a load of bollocks.
In any case, the rain makes me feel melancholy in a sweet way that I want to nurture, while making me long for something unknown and lost.
To all men else uncouth 