Every day, a new press conference. Every day, more dead. The “everyday” of us no longer something we can count on, even if we are far removed from any tragedy: every couple I know is not coming together quite well enough to click. Every couple I know is disappointed that despite time and space, their lockdown did not lead to more protocol and transcendence, to more exploration, to more connection, to more sex, to more.
Even on mornings like this morning, where my throat and abdominal muscles are still aching their way back to reality out of last night’s separate universe our locked eyes sometimes create, I wonder: where will we be tonight, or tomorrow? Will He be wanting while I am too depressed? Will I be in need and the opposite true? Will I get my work done, or will I drown in self-deprecation? Will the dog do the thing where she won’t stop begging the TV to play?
Will we be all right?
Will we be all right?
I know so many questioning themselves, every innate part. I have heard so many friends in pre-mourning, doubting their successful and ongoing relationships. Last week, I stayed up until dawn crying over celebrities who it turns out are not actually getting divorced after all. They’re not even celebrities who I like all that much. Still, that’s what I did. Maybe, I think, this willingness to see Bad Omens in everything comes from the goodbyes we didn’t get to say. In March, I let my students off to Spring Break–“Wash your hands! Write your essays! Wash your hands!”–and never saw them again.
Now, we are all too ready. We are afraid of what happens if we are not.
We are learning, quickly, about all the things we touch: steering wheel, lock button, handle, doorknob, pen, clipboard, counter, remote. We must think about things that were once so autonomous. We are learning the places we needed these roles: our motivations, our routines, our times of crisis. Our justified depressions. Our manic joys. We have enough energy to take note of all these problems, and we do this whether we really want to or not. Perhaps we don’t have enough left in us to parse it out and find the solutions. Perhaps we don’t have enough left in us to weave it into any sense.
Why is it so hard to do kink in a pandemic?
I run out of room in me. Service both expands and contracts. I can no longer go pick up His favorite foods on a whim. The meal-planning is long-term, and not just for our sake: how do I minimize how often I leave my home so that I can avoid being the vector that makes someone lose their family? How do I make sure I’ve kept my own life-line safe?
I lose my grasp on what exceptional is. On unfamiliar footing, protocol becomes mundane. As time bleeds into itself over and over, threatening to hemorrhage on it being Saturday both again and already, it is easy to forget that being chained up to sleep is not normal. I find myself feeling desperate for subjugation, waiting to serve Him dinner, thinking about all of this already on my knees.
I do not know how to measure risk. Edge play threatens on a new level. If things go worst-case-scenario, if we have to speed to the emergency room, how much further danger will that place me in? How much could I possibly expose to those already there?
We must think about things that were once so autonomous. We are learning all the places we needed these roles.
We cannot compartmentalize when we cannot tell what normal is. This is what I think is at the heart of it. We used to play in ways meant to shift the balance of reality, and cause singulatory mental states, and stop all sense of time. We played in ways meant to upend our day-to-day, to disrupt those things we control so well until the right person makes the right space and we are safe to drop our masks.
But there is so little control. It is dangerous to take off the masks. Reality is already unbalanced. Time is already unclear.
And all of us have fallen to something contagious, swept up in our guilt, or our anger, or our defiance, or our fear. We are finding boundaries we did not know we had; we are figuring out what happens when loved ones do things we never negotiated for. We are learning the limits of “I never imagined I’d have to”. We are each one of us in the process of revising and being revised.
Why is it so hard to do kink in a pandemic?
Some of us have heard–some of us already knew–about cytokine storms: what happens when an immune system on overdrive begins to attack itself. As more and more friends reveal their inability to do *This* right now, I wonder if that’s what’s happening here too. What happens when a support system on overdrive begins to attack itself? What happens when we cling so hard to precedented times that the whole thing can’t help but eat through the lining?
I don’t know the answer or what I’m trying to do here, other than “what I can right now”. I can string words together. I can try and make some sense. This pre-grief, this anticipatory aching–I can trust it will fade with time as every bruise of mine always has. That this will flatten like my scars, though their whispers remain so loud.
I can remember what I do right. I make food. I kneel. I beg. I make confidantes in the strangest of places. I know how to walk away. I find all the good people who use words in ways that heal me. I find all the good people who remind me to use my own.
It is so hard to do kink in a pandemic.
I’ve talked to other people, and you are not alone: this is what I’m trying to say here. We are doing this together, no matter what we planned. Together, we grieve, even if we grieve different realities. Together, we hurt, even if sometimes in more desirable ways.
We feel. We try. We somehow make things work.
And we beg, in a world asking for six feet of distance at all times: take me apart. hold me close.