It's a long journey from identifying oneself as a binary identity to opening up to the possibility of something more. For me it was pain, deep emotional distressing pain. After my princess left me, and long after we divorced, I cried and cried and cried. I cried so much, that my romantic soulmate was gone. When I thought I had run out of rivers, then I cried some oceans for good measure more, just to somehow guiltlessly prove to myself that the well would never run dry. In many ways it destroyed me, as can only happen to a man.
Somewhere in there, amongst the days and weeks and months that turned into years, something inside me began to split. Of course, being a man, the need for some form of sexual gratification was eventually going to come back. But not in the way I expected.
I have to explain that my romantic and sexual identities had been so intertwined, that I had never entertained anything other than the act being a full expression of love. That's where the bifurcation began, I guess. As the need to self-satisfy came back, when the pain had long since numbed, so it was that now it was pure lust itself which became the only stamp impressed on my feelings about sex.
But it was larger than that. For a true separation, for a gratification that would not painfully remind of romance, even the whisper of a woman had to disappear from the meanderings of my erotic consciousness. So it was that this all first began in the bath; a nice hot bath at home, after yet another drunken night alone at the bar.
Everyone knows a man loves his own dick, very much. And I had my fair share of personal explorations over the years. Once I had discovered it, and what it could do, I was obsessed with it. Even more so, I was preoccupied with the sensuality and the erotic settings of sex. All of those things that would work up to that cock of mine blasting an explosion out of my mind.
So over time I did things, and I taught myself things, on that journey of discovery. A big thing was that 'naked dream' which everybody has, brought to reality. There were a number of times I explored this, but one of the most memorable was when we had moved into a new area and I had just turned eighteen. Our new house was just a quick walk up the short slope to the long double line of pines that bordered the back of a fence separating the subdivision from virgin farmland. People used to jog along that area in the daytime for recreation. But in the dead of night I would slip up there, and strip off and hide all my clothes under the ground-brushing branches of a tree at one end of the line. Then I would run naked and totally alone between and under the snug avenue of pines, just wishing to be discovered, till I was hundreds and hundreds of yards away from the security of my clothing. There I would sneak out to almost the outer edge of the branches, sit cross-legged on the carpet of needles, and wack myself off silly in the moonlight.
My youthful fantasies only multiplied past maturity, as my private explorations continued all through adulthood. I wanted to be miles up the isolated beach - yet out by the seashore, on the salvinia-softened bank of a creek secluded in the remote bush, or under a heavily forested tree set starkly alone alongside the darkness of a park trail. All of these things actually occurred.
