Posted by Ryan on September 6, 2005, 9:42 am, in reply to "Part 17: Slipping into darkness" One day when I was out strolling alongside the water, lonely and depressed as usual, I heard the sound of some girls’ voices on the other side of the brush, and suddenly I just flipped out. There were thoughts flowing through my mind, memories of situations overseas that involved the girls there walking along in public places, and how—mmm, a rush of chill and emotion started running through me—remembering their different concept of bodily decorum in public... their acceptance of taking it out—I mean, IF it was for the purpose of urinating—and there I was getting a rush from it. Prodded on by the depression I was feeling now, the inability to combat all the cravings, desires to indulge in any temporary little pleasure trying to anesthetize the pain.... The voices of the girls walking along.... I caught a glimpse of them through a break in the bushes. They were teenage girls. ‘Now stop!’ I tried yelling at myself inside my mind, though weakly. ‘You know you can’t do that kind of thing in the United States.... You’ll get arrested and thrown in jail!’ (And speaking of which, there was still a warrant out for me, I remembered at that moment.) Stop it? Oh, I tried. I tried remembering how in the heat of the moment that time when I was out on the walk that day where the two girls were sitting on the steps, I had pulled together all my will power and had stopped myself before taking it out in front of them (even though in their culture doing so wouldn’t have been considered any big atrocity anyway). ‘Don’t men have to pee sometimes,’ I started thinking to myself, ‘even when they’re outside, like when they’re out in the woods, even here in the U.S.? Of course they do. What? Have I forgotten how things are in my own culture? Like when you’re out camping, for goodness sakes. Or remember the keggers? What if it turned out I just had to pee, and I thought I was all alone in the woods, and it just happened that they were coming by, and I didn’t know it... and by chance they just walked by right when I was...?’ I was trying to get control of myself. But I was an emotional wreck. I was afraid, but I couldn’t stop myself. That was it. The next thing I knew I had my zipper open and was standing there beside the bushes waiting for them to come by, holding it out as if I had to urinate. I heard their voices. They were getting closer. Then I suddenly realized I had a case of shrinkage. I looked at it in my hand. ‘It can’t be like that,’ I was thinking, ‘so little, like that.’ Quickly, expecting to finish before they got there, I took hold of it and started massaging it, rubbing it, trying to get at least a little bit of erectile blood flowing.... ‘Now, it’s got to look like all I’m doing is... I have it out to pee, and I don’t know they’re....’ They were almost in view. ‘One last jerk before....’ Their voices were louder now. I looked down at it, just for a glance, while I was still rubbing it. Then I looked up—and there they were, looking at me... and it—and before I had stopped the motion while holding it in my hand! ‘Uh-oh!’ In a reflex, I quickly turned aside to get it out of their view—also trying to make it look as if I had only then realized that they were there, as any decent man might, after accidently finding himself in a situation like that.... They just kept walking on, casually talking amongst themselves. I turned around and began walking quickly away in the opposite direction. Now out of their sight, I went up the hill to the highway where there was a bus stop. I could see the bus coming just down the road. Could any of them have had cell phones, I wondered? Did they see where I was going, and was there any chance they’d be able to get the cops there? If they called them, besides sending a squad car to the scene, the police would alert transit authority, who would radio the bus driver, telling him to be on the lookout for a man getting on right about there, dressed in such-and-such a way. They probably didn’t, though, I reasoned. I didn’t even see any of them carrying purses, and they didn’t keep looking at me afterwards. So I decided to get on the bus, and I rode it downtown. ‘Dang! Dangerous thing to do!’ I was saying to myself the whole trip, shaking my head. ‘Lucky you didn’t get your butt hauled off to jail—and have another charge to deal with!’ I walked around downtown, looking at things in stores, passing the time away. After a while I went to a fast-food restaurant and had something to eat, and then I went to an Internet cafe to check my e-mail. When I did, I noticed there was a message from N——, the girl overseas at the center, the supervisor’s daughter whom I had thought was such a pretty girl, but as far as her personality, I thought wouldn’t really be suited to me. Wow, it seemed like just a dream, remembering the people over there. A life—another whole world—way, way over there on the other side of the planet. Did the place really exist? It wasn’t just a big dream I had had one night? But there was an e-mail from her, waiting to be downloaded. First the standard long greeting, as is customary with them in writing letters—and in this day and age, has been continued sometimes, even in e-mails. Then after she was done with her greeting, she said, “I want to tell you that I am sad and distressed that you have not even sent me one e-mail since the time you left and went back to the United States. Have you forgotten about my humble self? My friend, you don’t know how much I miss you. Please write to me and tell me how you are doing back in your country. Tell me, how is life treating you, now that you are back in your natal land?” I waited till the next day, then sent her a reply. I just told her the truth. I told her life was not treating me very well. I told her that when I got back home, I found that my girlfriend had left me for another man, I lost my job because of 9/11, my family and all my friends had moved to other parts of the country, my schooling had been discontinued, and I had basically lost everything I had ever had or valued in life, and, if truth be told, I was suffering a living death. I didn’t have a computer where I was staying, so it was the next day before I went to the library to check my e-mail for her response. She had written back to me. “I’m so sorry,” she was saying, “for everything that has happened to you. When I read your e-mail, I felt like crying. Is there anything I could possibly do that might make things better for you?” “Thank you so much for your concern,” I wrote back. “That is so kind of you, N——. I wish there were something that could be done, but for right now I’m just going to have to—” I stopped and thought. ‘How do you say, “rough it”?’ I went to get a dictionary, then sat down and looked it up. I put together the words. “For right now I’m just going to have to bear with the difficulty. But I thank you for being a friend to me, N——. Sincerely, Ryan.” Sometimes I couldn’t get to the library or an Internet cafe, or a copy center with Internet access, and days, and sometimes weeks, would pass between e-mails between us. One day when I was riding home on the bus, I was sitting by the aisle about three seats from the back, and there were some teenage girls sitting in the back seat, loudly and boisterously talking the whole trip. The bus came along the street that overlooks the beach a little ways below. “Oh, guess what happened the other day!” the girl sitting in the middle section of the back seat announced loudly to the others. “What?” asked another one of them. “We saw a flasher! We had to go to the police and everything! It was right down there.” I took a look down at the place where she was pointing, as the bus was going by it, then thought for a second. ‘Oh my. Could that have been me?’ The place we were passing was the area where it had happened, the time when I was walking down there and lost control. “He was going like that,” she described, loudly and vulgarly, so that the whole back of the bus could hear. I turned to look. She was holding her hand in front of the V-form that her tight jeans made on her crotch, pantomiming holding a penis and moving it, in the place in front of her crotch where there wasn’t a penis, because she was female. “It was really gross!” Then she noticed me looking back, and commented, “Well, you didn’t have to look!” “Oh.” I turned back around. ‘Oh my. I think it WAS me.’ Was she going to recognize me? Well, apparently she didn’t. (Maybe she had been looking somewhere else besides my face when it happened...?) Oh, my! I got off the bus at an earlier place than where my stop was, and took a long walk home. It was dark by the time I got home.
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Part 18: Crashing...and flashing: What goes on in the mind of an exhibitionist when he falls into it
(Originally posted November 7, 2003, 7:04 pm) 
