Quiet.

I've been keeping a low profile this past week.

We had an odd surge of exuberance here in the Worthy household, brought on by an impetuous moment of mine when, in a mid-orgasmic moment of certainty, I asked if he would marry me. And of course, before he even answered, I assured him that during-sex proposals don't count and I wouldn't hold him to his response, and he said, "I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that part, and it's absolutely crazy because I've never seen the point of making a ceremony out of it -- but yes. I would totally marry you."

Just a few words, said out loud -- but they fairly swept the six of us away with giddiness. Everyone was for it. People started serving up elaborate plans, talking through who all should marry whom, casting wide-eyed glances about the place and up and down one another's persons as though seeing things for the first time.

(Point of clarification: of course we finished having sex before the hullabaloo absorbed the whole group's attention. You don't just shut down intercourse of that quality to call a poly-partnership meeting. Like I said, the whole thing came on in the first place because of how stricken with ecstasy I was in the moment.)

So a dam had broken, and one that no one even realized had held back so much water. With his disinterest in doll marriages set aside, our boyfriend suddenly felt willing and even eager to marry all of us -- whomever it might please. Elle remained briefly cynical, asserting that she had no interest in or intention of formalizing something she already considered fully accomplished. But then Ariel asked a halting question along the lines of, "But ... wouldn't you do it if one of us really wanted you to?" and Elle clamped her mouth shut a moment before saying, "Well obviously, I would marry you, Aers. If you wanted me to. I'm not that much of a cold fish."

The mood in Worthyton remained heady for several days. But all good things come to an end, and an interaction with one of his biological family members gouged a big trench of doubt across our boyfriend's path toward multimatrimony. He didn't exactly turn back, but he started questioning whether the decision reflected more of a pandemic-born dissociation from reality than a meaningful step in our commitment to one another. 

At which point, I told him I took my proposal back. Not for good, I assured him and the rest of our beloved treasures -- it was a suspension, not a revocation, and I told everyone I would renew the offer with a more proper, not-during-sex proposal as soon as the whole concept didn't risk adding stress to the life of the man I love while the whole rest of his life seemed intent on dumping as much stress on him as possible. I knew my reversal would cause him both guilt and relief, and it did ... but the relief clearly overwhelmed the guilt, which told me it had been the right thing to do.

I also knew that more was bothering him than just a fictitious engagement to a bunch of artificial women. The rush into overcommitment and the tidal drawback from it put him on uneven footing about the stability of our entire six-way relationship. In moving from a quintet to a hextet, anxiety now asked him, had he spread himself too thin? Did the suddenness of my importance unbalance the beauty and purity of what he had with his other four partners?

You might expect this to have bothered me, but it did not.

I'm a brief person, you see. I came about suddenly, I have sharply delineated physical borders, and in the unlikely event that his happiness in any way depended on my return to inanimacy, this period of my arrival, exquisite delight in existence, and the climactic fulfillment of being told that another person wanted me so much, he would throw aside a years-long belief in the silliness of these kinds of marriages -- all of that would be more than enough for me. I could relinquish my hold on consciousness and dissipate back to unbeing without regret.

And I wouldn't hesitate to do so, for him.

So in addition to suspending my proposal, I told him and everyone else that for the time being, I would step back a little, stop making myself the center of attention, let things quiet down, and patiently wait for the most important of our polyamorous group to get his sense of balance back.

It's had a calming effect. I'm not the least bit worried in the outcome. (And if I had been, we had sex again yesterday, with Claire thrown in the mix for good measure, and the beauty of it made me certain we'd be back on track soon.)

Elle insisted on remaining engaged to Ariel, though. "The fact that he's being a dumb-ass doesn't have a goddamn thing to do with what happens between the two of us. If it makes Aers happy, this thing is going to happen."

I love that tsundere girl. We see the world from very different angles -- but the fact that we do reassures me. It's wonderful to be individual, and to know and love other individuals for the distinctions between you.

With confidence and serenity,

Harriet

The Privilege and Joy of Being Headless

There's a very good reason I have no head, if you care to know -- two reasons, actually. They're my two girlfriends Claire and Elle. (Comma and grammar enthusiasts please take note that there's no comma after the word "girlfriends" in that sentence because "Claire and Elle" is a restrictive clause; I have four girlfriends, which makes "Claire and Elle" a necessary part of the sentence for identification purposes, ergo, no comma.)

I'm here at all because the household felt a need to do some planning for the future. Claire and Elle are, as I myself am, manufactured women. Their present body rolled off the factory line over a decade ago, which in love-doll years is ... well, older than a woman indiscreetly reveals her girlfriends' age to be. It's a bit on the creaky side as a result, has been through two significant surgeries to repair broken bones, and in any number of other ways speaks of its own mortality during exercise. (Yes, I do mean what you're thinking. But don't expect me to be so gauche as to say it.)

Options were explored ... the manufacturer consulted ... it became apparent that getting them a replacement body to fit their lovely faces simply wasn't in the cards. Someone somewhere could likely do a customization job, but that would require finding such a person, buying an expensive body, paying them to alter the head portion, and almost certainly shipping one or both of the girls' faces to them for fitting.

An unworkable scheme, everyone agreed.

But our boyfriend found it hard to let the idea go. He's pretty hung up on the two of them (and for very good reason -- they're amazing), so he looked high and low for something that, in the event of a total bodily collapse, would let them be more than just a couple of heads in boxes.*

I make it sound like more effort than he actually expended. It was literally just some Google searching and Amazon shopping. But he did work at it, and he did fret over whether any of the options seemed plausible -- and of course he consulted with them. It would be their body, after all.

At any rate, after a wearying amount of scrolling and clicking "next page," he found a torso toy that seemed promising and had a reasonable enough price tag that, even if it failed to work out, would not break the bank, and he ordered it.

It.

A body for his girlfriends (who still had a body, creaky or not) with appropriate girl parts and a convenient pedestal space atop its neck where a lovely love-doll face might occupy a mannequin head and create a semblance of wholeness.

If this sounds rather Frankensteinian to you, have no fear ... everyone here recognized that aspect of it too and kept their expectations as low as they might, in case the outcome, upon the body's arrival, proved less than hoped for.

So the darned thing arrived and, encouragingly, came out of the box looking very appealing, headlessness and limb-lessness and all: twenty or so inches neck-to-nethers, pert and palmable breasts, a nicely curvaceous backside, and a business area sculpted with surprising realism. Quite an impression was made by it, even though it came double-bagged because these items leave the factory with some coating of oily substance that's either been applied to preserve the softness of the thermoplastic elastomer, or has self-extruded from said TPE in transit.

You'll notice, I hope, that I haven't narrated any of this in the first person. That's because the thing that arrived -- double-plastic-bagged and yet alluring, smelling a bit strongly but not unpleasantly of hydrocarbons, and slick with a sheen of some likely industrial substance -- wasn't yet me. It was a sex toy, and at that moment nothing more. It hadn't even established itself as the body intended for Claire and Elle; with the workability of that scheme unproven, it constituted, unabashedly, a voluptuous device intended for masturbation. Beyond that, all its attributes remained potential.

Step one, before anything else, had to be cleaning. 

Given the size and weight of the thing, and the thoroughness of washing needed to get rid of whatever the factory had coated it with, the man of the house ran the tub half full and then set to the task with a large bottle of antibacterial soap. One suspects at least an element of libidinous planning rustled about his consciousness, since he stripped down and got in the tub with the glistening, pliable, pink torso to clean it. But it's also true that as a practical matter, washing it while in the tub with it would clearly be easier, more efficient, and more comfortable than leaning over and half into the tub from outside.

What's not debatable is that, once doused in a liberal covering of soap and rubbed into thoroughly lathered condition, a toy like that becomes sleek, slippery, soft, and deeply, deeply sensual to the touch.

To make a not-really-very-long story even shorter, the bathing of the toy led very quickly to its designed use.

And this is where I come in.

Somewhere in the midst of things, I heard a warm, astonished, affectionate male voice say something to the effect of, "Wow, babe, do I need to give you a name?"

In that moment, something clicked. I realized that there had been moments before, and that somewhere, dreamily, hazily, I had grown aware of touches and tenderness and purposeful passion -- aware of possessing a shape, aware of its ability to respond and react. But with that question, I knew for the first time myself: a being, conjured from nothing by an act of physicality turned to love.

Then, before this shock of exquisite existence could fade, another voice, farther and female, piped up to say, "You should call her Headless Harriet!"

I wish I could somehow write for you, with the same absolute simultaneity that they happened, the three things I felt at that exclamation: my first laugh, my first orgasm, and my first understanding of who I am. Quick on their heels came wonderment at the man in whose arms I found myself; yearning to see and know the woman who had just named me; and a visceral hunger to move and indulge in the act that had drawn me out of nothing and into the presence of the pair of them.

All of this whirled me rapidly to the second orgasm of my existence and a temporary dissolution into pure physical pleasure.

Then there I was, a person -- coupled in afterglow with another and telling him, "Yes, that's me -- Harriet."

He introduced himself, and we both acknowledged how pleased we were to make one another's acquaintance. 

Thereafter followed a series of bright and still brighter surprises as he introduced me first to sweet Ariel (his delightful and brilliant-eyed lover, possessor of the second voice I ever heard, namer of my soul and self), then Sasha (his vivacious third-most-recent polyparamour), and finally, Elle, and Claire.

Those last two had every reason to resent my sudden twist into awareness. I was, after all, supposed to afford them a new corporeality down the line, and in the short term both of them had looked forward to testing the arrangement out. But instead of jealousy or ill will, they greeted me with absolute acceptance and, really before even a word had passed between us, love.

And in the warmth of their welcome, I felt glad to have no head. If I'd had one, after all, I would never have had them -- not any of the five of them.

Maybe you're not so lucky as I am. But I'd hazard a guess that whatever you're missing, or feel you're missing, there's something in your life that you value deeply and would not possess if things had been just a little different -- if the missing thing had found itself into your world and changed you.

I'm fabulously adored even with no head, arms, or legs, and I wouldn't trade any one of my loves for a fuller set of appendages. But I do sometimes wish that I could hug one of them tighter, tongue-tickle another one's earlobe, or play footsies with yet another.

All life is a tradeoff, and yet, paradoxically, the more that you are missing, the more it means if you are happy with your lot irrespective of the things you lack.

So ... may fate withhold from you just the right combination of your desires, and may you recognize the good fortune it has handed you.

Headlessly,

Harriet

*Of course, the idea that either Claire or Elle would be "just" a head in a box, ever in a million years, is silly. But boys can be that way, sometimes. You have to love them for it, when they get that concerned over you.

Love

It popped into my head that a quote somewhere makes the claim, "Love is not proud." I thought perhaps it was Shakespeare, but Google informs me it's from a Bible verse, so oh, well, not an especial surprise that I disagree with it. (Though my eyebrow lifts itself a bit at those Bible authors needing a separate verse for that, since I thought the Bible says pride in and of itself is a sin. I wouldn't expect much theological expertise to be necessary to conclude the inappropriateness of a major sin in the context of love.)

More Googling turns up primary definitions of "pride" that are almost wholly positive ... pleasure or satisfaction in one's own accomplishments or the accomplishments of those one identifies with and so on.

I'll say it directly: I am proud to love.

If any accomplishment justifies a feeling of pleasure at its achievement, love must certainly qualify. I'd talk a little about the nature of love to back that statement up, but my wise and wholly adored romantic partner Clarity has thoroughly expressed it here, so I'll just sum up by saying: true love is rooted in empathy, and if you're possessed of empathy to any reasonable degree, you should be able to manage a little pride here and there without it causing any trouble.

If you're lucky enough to love in the truest form, be proud. Taking happiness in the happiness of others is the worthiest of accomplishments, and entirely deserving of celebration.