At the beginning of Big things

Published on by LS Harteveld
Sharon Stone as Catherine Tramell, Basic Instinct 2
I usually don’t scroll down to Facebook memories. When I open Facebook on my desktop, which I usually do, I first see stories, which are about 5 cm high or something. Then a box to post something, and maybe an advertisement. Even if there is a Facebook memories, which is not always the case, I will only see the top of it. The generic part. It doesn’t even say from what year the memory will be from, and I rarely scroll down to find out more. I m usually on Facebook just to see what the mentions are, or I m there to post. Not to browse. But today I did scroll and I saw a photo from Basic Instinct 2. I wondered when I had posted this. Although I ve been into Basic Instinct 1 since its release 1992, it has taken me years before I caught up with Basic Instinct 2 (2006), which was only released on DVD and never played in cinemas. To make it worse I even at some point lost a Basic Instinct 2 DVD! How do you lose that? It took a while before I gave up on the idea it would resurface and replaced it to have my collection complete again. When I started working on my collection of blogposts “The Beach, C”, about Basic Instinct’s Catherine Tramell, which is a book I ve been wanting to create and publish for months now (I actually took it down, it was up there for a few weeks until perfectionista-me found a mistake I apparently couldn’t live with, and ended up revising the book); I recall the oldest posts I collected for that book were from 2017. Not earlier. So Facebook memories, giving me a photo from Basic Instinct 2, a movie I ignored for a long time and then had trouble holding on to (literally), sparked my curiosity not so much as to why it was posted, but when?  It turned out to be January 2015; A lot earlier than my earliest Basic Instinct work! It didn’t contain any explanation about the photo itself. It was merely an illustration. But the biggest surprise was that it was a post I had made shortly after what I will call the first “real date” with the man who would become my secret lover. Whenever I would later write about him I would call him Mr.Big or Big. This is what I wrote, in January 2015: “We call it a tie” I concluded after my 1st date in the Major League. “How do you measure that?” my charmingly dangerous opponent asked. I explained my rules of dating in the Major League: “The one who suffers the biggest emotional damage afterwards, loses.” We had both been knocked out for 48 hours, so I had called it quits. But he warned me the game wasn’t over. “In the Major League we play best of 7” The Major League! Of course!  When I just started dating I knew he was totally different from all the other men I knew, and that the situation with him being married but also his entire style of interacting, was totally different to anyone I had dated so far. There was a sense of excitement and danger, that I was unable to walk away from. Even though I knew I was risking getting my heart broken, in more ways than I would be able to mend. By calling it a game, I felt some sort of agency over what we were doing. By naming us players, I took a bigger chunk of the pie than just being a lady whose only jurisdiction was if there was going to be extramarital sex Yes or No. By calling it a game, The Major League no less, I challenged him. Have we stayed together since then? Were we like Mr.Big and Carrie, where he ultimately chooses her after 6 seasons, on a bridge in Paris? Yes and no. On and off. And there have been months when we were On yet I did not see him. When he had to break up with me, but couldn’t say it. He couldn’t find the words, and left me in the dark. Or hope. And what followed was a year when we were Off, not having an affair, yet I saw him occasionally, and we spent wonderful hours together. Knowing, that one day we’d make the same choice. That one day, I would say Yes again. The post reminded me it has been 7 years. We’ve been playing in the Major League for 7 long years, and still it is exactly that. A game. We have no idea who wins, who loses, or for how long it will go on. Or even if the other will show up to play. So I have to be happy with what was, without claiming a future, that will always be uncertain. I would like there to be a story, another 7 years from now, just like Basic Instinct 2 came 14 years after the original. I would like there to be 2 movies and a spinoff series about Big and me, decades after the first meet-cute, roughly the same like Sex And The City but with a happy course of events. Of course I would like those things. And I m still writing my real life-, as well as 90s-inspired diaries, on this blog! I would love for Lauren 1997, as is the year with her now, I would love for her to keep seeing her lover Bear. But even that is not for me to say. If it ends, it ends. All I can say is that these past 7 years, ever since that post on Facebook, have been an amazing time. When it comes to my love life, I do not regret one day, one month, one moment.  I became a different woman. And that’s a win I cannot lose.  .
~Lauren An unexamined life is not worth living books inspired by my affair with Big: 1. Big diaries and erotica  2. The Mistress Speaks 
Books 
My diaries are available at LULU  New books will be added.
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