Whatever… (2-17)

Cycle II: Coming of Age
The Hidden Life
The Record · 17 (v1.00)
THE HOUSE OF ZAN — Zan

Consent (The Ticket)

This piece is about the strange in-between after a long relationship ends: dating apps, sexual confusion, rebound intensity, cheating, D/s references, cuck/witness dynamics, loneliness, misread signals, and the ugly little ways people try to feel alive again before they know what they actually need.

If breakup aftermath, betrayal, sexual chaos, being treated like an object, or trying to find yourself again after being someone’s person is tender ground for you, skim or skip this one as needed. It is written from the haze between one relationship and the next, not from the safety of having understood it all at the time.

— Zan

Scene (The Ride)

There is this wonderful time that happens in between when a relationship ends and a new one starts.

No, not really.

But it’s something that happens, and I guess that’s worth taking note of, right?

Coming out of a long-term relationship is a drag.

It’s like being an all-star quarterback, taking a decade off, remembering the rules, but coming back to a whole new crowd that liked you better when you were younger.

There was something empowering about lying on a couch and swiping through profiles while listening to music.

It had that summer-after-a-breakup feeling where things felt too quiet, every notification felt like a lottery ticket, and every profile looked like either salvation or another way to waste more of my emotional capacity.

The only pieces of tranquility I had were repeat listens of “Dreams” by Beck, which felt less like a poppy summertime anthem and more like an escape plan for my mental state.

Getting lost in long plays of Kingdom Rush helped too, because sometimes the healthiest thing a person can do is defend a cartoon kingdom instead of refreshing their value for the single-bodied masses.

Scanning applications for the next emotional train wreck I would be accepting.

There is that point of excitement where you think, could this person actually be amazing enough to be THE ONE?!?!

Also, that point of desperation where you think, WHAT’S MY VALUE TO STRANGERS?!?

Either way, it’s a nice distraction from all the sadness, hurt, and why did this fucking happen that swims around in your head after a relationship blows up.

The kind of blowup where you know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the place that felt like home is gone for good.

Once the pain lets up, and the healing begins, and you start to “feel” the person that was locked away inside for however long you were busy being someone’s person, you start to remember things about yourself.

Some of those things are good.

Some not so much.

The things you learned to accept about yourself because another person made room for them start coming back into view.

The old parts you forgot were still yours start knocking around at the front of your mind.

Suddenly, you have to remember how to be confident again, not with someone that “got you and accepted you,” but with whatever random person you might communicate with that makes some form of logical sense as a mate.

Online dating can be the coldest version of this because you are trying to sell yourself to people in a space where they have the option to not deal with your face or bullshit.

At school, at work, in a community, and even in a family, if that’s your jam, you have a potential audience that MUST deal with you. They have no choice. It’s part of their internal mission statement, whether they like it or not.

I mean, there are ways to eliminate you, but let’s not be too harsh now.

I spent the summer trying to meet a lucky individual that could put up with my shit.

I took the scenic route in my love-matching adventures: vanilla dating apps.

My thought process: how am I going to tend to the needs of someone submissive when I’m trying to deal with my own baggage?

While it was a sensible thought, me being me, I would have likely been better off skipping the kink sabbatical and getting right to the pool instead of splashing around in inflatable substitute-land.

I came across plenty of people I tried to connect with, but I wasn’t getting much traction right away. I had other things happening at the same time, so it wasn’t like I could give the whole thing my full, undivided attention.

Eventually, though, someone got through.

Turns out you can take the kink out of the man, but the kink is still going to find my ass anyway.

Or something like that.

So, I met someone that was perfect on paper for me post-breakup: funny, liberated, generally good company.

They were also a nymphomaniac.

No, really. Like, you have no idea.

I didn’t either when I started talking to them.

It wasn’t because I didn’t believe them. They just didn’t tell me how far it went.

They stopped at “I like sex often” and left out the part where they needed to fuck something at least once a day or they’d start turning into a rotten pumpkin, Cinderella-style.

I mean, should I have been that surprised when, the night I met them, they were already on their way to fuck someone else?

We talked back and forth for a few days. It went well. It was fun. It was exciting. It was something different from what I had been doing inside a long-term relationship.

After years of being trapped inside something familiar and burning, standing inside something different felt like finding a pocket of clean air in the smoke.

It was not peace, exactly. It was more like being reminded that I could still be desired by someone who had not already memorized the exact hit points on me like some final boss with a predictable, exploitable pattern.

Sexually, it was chaotic. Hell, it might have been the defining engine of the whole thing.

It felt like I was watching something unfold while performing the minimum number of actions required to get to the next thing.

When we establish ourselves in a relationship, it becomes a part of our identity.

A living space.

A built world.

A thing we have just enough say in to call it our decision, until it isn’t.

That sounds dramatic until you have to move out of one.

This one came with unexpected cargo almost immediately.

There was me.

There was the person I was now in some kind of relationship with.

And then there was her ol’ friend.

Actually, more than a friend.

They had “history” together.

The kind of history people mention casually when they don’t want to say they were fucking, but still want to make everyone else responsible for the intertwined imagery in their head.

She had been gone for a while. Living some other version of her life until that version did what life sometimes does and sent her back to the area.

And when she came back, my new girlfriend was ecstatic over it.

She could not stop talking about her.

Not in the casual, “oh, my friend is back” way either.

More like the whole company budget had gone into promoting the concept before the product had even entered alpha.

There was a plan forming, because of course there was a plan forming.

To the person I was with, this girl was deprived enough, curious enough, available enough, and close enough to be folded into whatever this thing between us was becoming.

Some lucky little piece of human furniture placed in the room to make us feel sexually wrong in just the right dirty way.

That is how she was being talked about inside the fantasy, not the full truth of what she was.

Considering the headspace I was coming from in my prior relationship, the idea of someone else being the “watcher” was appealing and slightly empowering.

I mean, to the person I was now in some kind of relationship with, she was nothing more than a “lucky witness” to the sexual deeds that were to take place, eventually, between me and her.

She was going to sit in the corner and watch.

Maybe clean up the mess afterwards if she was a good girl.

And at first, that sounded fine to me.

In theory.

Because once I actually talked to her, I couldn’t stand her.

Whatever else was under the surface, I was not looking at her that closely yet.

She kept talking about her boyfriend.

How great he was.

How their D/s relationship worked.

How important he was.

How much he mattered.

And I did not want to hear about some absentee Dominant while this girl was being waved around like a possible future problem with a heartbeat.

Besides, even though I was becoming numb to the idea of being cheated on myself, I didn’t want to become “that guy” I so justifiably hated from my previous relationship.

So she annoyed me.

She just wasn’t doing it for me.

Kept talking to me randomly.

Kept showing up like static.

That’s why I blocked her.

And then unblocked her.

Then blocked her again.

At the time, I thought she was background noise.

Another loose piece in a situation that already had too many moving parts.

Of course, there were things I didn’t know yet.

About him.

About her.

About her living situation.

About what loneliness does to a submissive person when the person holding the title is not actually holding the weight.

But that is not where I was yet.

I was still treating the wrong things like distractions.

Still mistaking a signal for static.

This whole section of time was like a haze.

It wasn’t the destination.

It was the drive to the destination.

Memorable enough to know it happened.

Different enough from point A.

Not life-affirming like arriving at point B.

I didn’t hate this stretch of time.

There were fun moments.

There was a sense of sexual danger and a rediscovery of another part of myself.

It was like making a pit stop outside city limits and discovering some obscure drink or food you didn’t know existed, but they still didn’t have the thing you were hoping to find. And when you needed to do your business, the restrooms left much to be desired.

I didn’t love it either because, small note, I was getting lied to and cheated on literally every day, even if I enjoyed watching sometimes.

But it felt better than the quiet time after the breakup, when I was on the hunt for companionship. It wasn’t what I wanted to live inside, even if the mystery of “is this person going to be faithful to me?” was destroyed on day one.

I mean, that can carry its own freedom, sexual charge, and intensity, but every day?

Sure, sex is always great for me, but someday, when the sexual high is gone and you are sitting there with yourself, a person is going to need to feel love, not just the pleasure of another body.

So, it happened. It mattered. It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t great. But, you know, whatever.

Companion track: “United States of Whatever” – Liam Lynch

Aftercare (The Comedown)

If this one felt strange, that is probably because the time it came from felt strange.

This was not a love story, but it was not nothing either.

It was a record of the space between hate and love: the boredom, the hunger, the ego, the bad judgment, the sexual charge, the little humiliations, and the way a person can mistake motion for direction when staying still hurts too much.

People are easy to misread when they arrive through somebody else’s fantasy. The “witness” in this piece was not only what she seemed to be inside the mess, and that matters.

What you just read was not an argument for betrayal, numbness, or using people as props. It was a record of what can happen when someone is trying to feel alive again and does not yet know which signal is actually worth following.

Cycle II · The Record · 17

Go Deeper with This Piece

  • Cycle II – Coming of Age · 17 · The Blacklight
  • Cycle II – Coming of Age · 17 · The Playbook
  • Cycle II – Coming of Age · 17 · The Hidden Girl

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