writerly writing

Jan

2024

“‘I don’t think…’ Then you shouldn’t talk, said the Hatter.”*

If you are familiar with my writings, you likely know the content warnings this might require. If you are not, or if you would like to review them before reading further, you can find them here. In the scene written below, the adults depicted are fully consenting to and have extensively discussed the kind of thing they are doing and the potentials to their own risk profiles.

Alice asks the Hatter which vial to drink and then he tells her. This is how it starts, and she knows — she knows because she asked the question — but she doesn’t know, not really. Not yet. But sure enough, a few hours later, Alice feels herself falling, and her mistake is she lets him see. Alice falls, and he catches her. Alice falls, and everything echoes. Soon he’s walking her down the hall, helping her onto the bed, and she knows.

But she doesn’t.

Somehow she ends up without clothing. Somehow she ends up lying down. She laughs. She laughs like mad. He makes it so. She laughs until her eyes water, laughs like she once wanted, laughs until she’s desperate not to, a helpless way she never thought she really would because normally, she can think her way out of it. Or moans her way out of it.

But this is no longer her story. So she laughs, and — sweet almost-reprieve — he places his lips on her neck. And it’s too much. Of course it’s too much. And she asks if she may, and he doesn’t answer, only stops. And then, it all starts.

The laughter swept most of her away. Too breathless, heart beating too fast already, thoughts too electrified, everything too something. She manages to think it was genius, really — letting her get just weak enough, the point where she can’t remember a thought once it has finished and then making every thought the laughter; giving her an experience of real not-wanting where she couldn’t breathe from her own doing (or was it?) — and wasn’t she up there for an hour, or a day, and wasn’t he relentless, and isn’t he tired? He gets her more fully onto bed, gets her head to the pillow. He gets her there and she starts to sink immediately. So he starts to sink into her, even her hips struggling with the strength to push up. And she asks and he denies and he asks and she says no, I don’t like it, it doesn’t feel good, and he tells her she’s wrong so she believes him.

She swears she sees the letters of the words appear on the wall as he says them, quiver like her vision, morph and threaten. Each level she falls, lower and deeper; she sees the pit he’s digging even as she is already in it. Yes, that’s your favorite way to come. Your body is telling me I’m right; your body thinks that’s your favorite way to come. Go ahead, come your favorite way, and then Don’t you want to come your favorite way? and then Say it, and then Ask.

Strange respect becomes fear: this seems too crafted, even as she suspects it’s not. The last bit of critical thinking she has held onto tells her he’s smarter than she is, far more than one step ahead. Wrapped in the sentence of her realization, the world opens in that moment. Gravity shifts. Alice falls up, away from her body. She can see how her own eyes must look. Real fear. She sees him clearly for the very first time, it occurs to her, thinks, I had no idea… No, it turns out I have no idea what, exactly, you are capable of.

He doesn’t stop. He hasn’t stopped. Constant words that she can barely hear, breathing quieted, shifting halted, all her focus on trying to seperate the consonants she isn’t even sure are real.

Come however you want. You know how you want to. You know how you want to. You know how you want to.

The thing is that she sees his tricks as they’re happening but it doesn’t stop them. Or… well, she thinks she does. There’s this word he keeps saying. Or there isn’t. There’s this thing that happens when they lock eyes. Maybe not. There’s this way he is tracking when she’s present and when she isn’t. He always knows before she does. It seems that way, seems right now like he knows everything, so she doesn’t speak up if she doesn’t hear him or if he says she feels good when she doesn’t — because what she does believe is when he says she’s a liar. What she does believe is when he says she’s wrong. What she does believe is when he says she’s mad.

Are you going to make your old self disappointed in you, or are you going to make me? Are you going to be selfish, or are you going to be a hypocrite?

He gives her impossible choice. He gives her illusion of control.

Alice falls into a body. Anymore, it is not her body. The falling stays, the sinking, but this body moves as if touched when it hasn’t been; it feels words inside it and it hurts. It hurts.

*Come your favorite way.*
“I can’t—”
*Shut the fuck up.*

She obeys and she obeys and she obeys.

Alice becomes one, the broken bits of her, and everything she feels is everywhere, and she isn’t sure, she isn’t sure anymore, how long he would fuck her and how and where; she isn’t sure anymore of any horror he could inflict. Yes, he might do it. He might already have done it. Any of them. All of them. He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t. Would he? But after all, hatters are mad, and sadists are—

I’m going to rape the consent out of you.

Alice whimpers. Or Alice is silent. It isn’t clear anymore what all she is or isn’t. She comes how he says she will, how he has always said she likes when she doesn’t, this nothing, this release that feels like nothing (that feels like her). She’s allowing this thing that she hates, she thinks. Or it doesn’t matter if she is.

In the hole, the fog now separates over months of wondering if the Hatter really somehow thought she liked this thing that she doesn’t. And in through the haze, she sees the truth: it never mattered if she did or she didn’t. That’s what it means to be here. That’s what happens when you ask which bottle to drink. So there he is. Everywhere she opens or closes her eyes. And it’s all Alice’s fault.

And what she does believe is everything.

Please note: being “mad” and “madness” are terms that are generally considered pejorative to those with mental illness, though have more and more been among those reclaimed by the community they affect. I am in this community. Please do not use these terms without being asked to by those with mental illness, and then only to those specific people. To that end, please also do not use them for *me* without permission.

also, Lewis Carroll was not a good dude.

Jan

2024

Current State of my O/p Power Exchange: ice cream sandwich

So we have the kind of intimacy I don’t talk about for all the many reasons I don’t talk about it. So I am suddenly unconscious, and then I am on my knees, and the water is spilled, and my tears are in my eyes and on His jeans, and I am looking up and I am declaring Love like it is fealty and admiring shock and awe like a weapon (and didn’t he once say…?). And He wields it over me or I hold it in phrases, give it over to Him anytime He demands. So then we are in the living room, this couch an island, the world just the two of us — but we are briefly coming back to it, back to what is outside of Us. And He’s going into the kitchen; He’s saying, I’ll get myself a popsicle and I’ll get you an ice cream sandwich, and I say, Actually, Owner, could I please have a brownie instead?

And He says, I don’t think I heard you right. Could you repeat that?

So I say it again and it feels weaker. My pores are already wondering if this is some act of rebellion somehow, if He didn’t hear me or if I just misspoke or if I’m just wrong, so I say, the soundwaves themselves disoriented, Please, Owner, a brownie? And now He is above me and I don’t know how He got there. So He bends down, locks on, looks in, and I feel reality flutter, the unmasking that takes us back to the pretty voids He has made for us. I am falling again, I am leaving, I am gone, and He says, What is it you want? And I think: what is the right answer? I think: I want to give You what I’m supposed to. And so I say An ice cream sandwich and He says I don’t believe you and I am smaller; He says, Beg.

And I do not know how. I have never known how. This is not a dynamic where I beg; this is a dynamic where He takes. But right now, I do know how, so I am wretched, I am louder, I am saying Please, Owner, please. I really just want an ice cream sandwich. I was wrong. I want nothing more. Could you just get me an ice cream sandwich? I just want an ice cream sandwich.

No, He says. No, I don’t think you do. There’s something… false in your voice. You’re not telling me the truth. What is it you really want? And I say a brownie but we both hear the ghost of a question mark. And He says, Yeah? Is that what you really want? And I say, No, I want an ice cream sandwich, please.

So He breaks the spell, walks away, says I’ll just get you the brownie. And I say, No, no, could You get me that ice cream sandwich actually? And He says, You don’t have to pretend. You did well trying, good girl. And I say, No, I mean it, and I mean it.

And it is the best thing I’ve ever had.

And so He catches me, eyes closed, and He smiles at it the way that He smiles when He catches me, eyes closed, all the time. And He says: So what is it you really wanted, property? And I stop, stop without swallowing. I look at Him and I’m sure it’s filled with fear or reverence, words I’ve long known well share a root in our mother tongue. They might as well be the same. And I say, Yeah, I really actually wanted an ice cream sandwich. And now, He says, But did you?

So I don’t know anything again. So I don’t need to. So I don’t know when and how this started. So still we have come back to reality; we do not remain on that island. So I had missed this one thing:

Reality was always in His grasp. I had missed that He holds it in the same way He can hold my skin between his nails, the thin layer of barely detachable surface His to manipulate, His to move.

So something changed. So I meant it. So I know I meant it. So He knows it too. So He smirks. So I wonder still if I ever wanted a brownie. I think maybe it’s that He always knew better than I could. And then I realize: no, I knew; I did — and then He changed what I could know. No. I knew everything about the world, and then I didn’t. No. I wanted an ice cream sandwich.

Jan

2024

CNC is not an unraveling.*

I used to think that it would be an unraveling: that moment of “this is happening now and I can’t stop it.” I used to think that it would be a coming apart like unmooring, there being nothing I could do. It would be the all of me, flung into floating particles of acquiescence, the endless deep below me of uncertainty and lack of control.

I used to think it would be that easy, I suppose, that gentle. The crossed-wires I call masochism and the strange cravings for dark could be pulled apart, sorted into separate threads and made smaller. Then, there would be something that I could point to – look: you can see where those once wove together. You could put that back together exactly, if you wanted, the twists still visible, the ends maybe even still clinging as one. It wouldn’t be easy, but you could do it. Given enough time, you could.

I used to think it was an undoing. It is. But it’s not the kind I thought.

No, it is not a sorting out or a separation. It is not a coming apart.

It is an unknotting. It is a deliberate taking apart of what I have carefully put together. Now it is another thing, another thread. It is the string it was at its core, the knot as if it never happened. I can knot it again, and I likely will — but it will be a different knot. I cannot twist it up straight to where it once was; I cannot re-make it in any exact former image.

It is not a breaking-down of my self as it is, was. It is a breaking apart of my illusions of control.
Or call them illusions of sanity. Illusions of grandeur. Illusions of consent. Call it what makes sense to you.

Yes, that’s it. Not an unraveling but an unknotting: careful, skillful, intentional. The destruction not of a mess, but of something that used to be exactly how I’d planned it — with nothing there to prove that it really once was so.

Jan

2024

why is it so hard to do kink in a pandemic? (a lyric essay)*

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?

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.

Jan

2024

all I deserve*

CW: stuff I like.
Assembled from old LiveJournal posts and my memories of a few hours ago, which are not to be interpreted as exact dialogue given they likely mingled with my fantasies.

“The way you move your hips should be criminal.”

“The way You make me move them,” I say.

“Do I make you? Or have you maybe always been like this? Always been a little seductress, making men look at you, want you… always known exactly what you were doing, always lied about it—is that it? Do I make you, or are you a lying little tease?” I’m sure I must have answered, must have come up with some at least half acceptable thing to say, but I can only remember the terrible surety of knowing my shame had made Him need to fuck me again already, that instead of staying in this afterglow, I’ll be ending the evening sore.

My favorite weekends are when [the Catholic boy’s school] has their mixers. It’s the one time I truly feel like myself, and at the end of the night I can feel my heart and know I’m alive again and everything in me lights up. I always go on my own and can lose myself there, dancing, with lots of eyeliner and my black boots. I like to stay near the outside of the crowd so that the guys without girlfriends who are walking around looking for something to do see me. And they always see me. Someone did separate me from the first guy I made out with last night, which was awkward, but not the second. I know the second’s name, but only because I purposefully checked his nametag after I realized I didn’t know the first’s.

“What if I said I’d want to take you out sometime?” some guy said to me when I left.

I said, “I’d believe you.”

“Nobody else could Love you,” He says. “Not at this point. The things you’ve done, the things you like, the things I’ve made you like. You’ve come while I’ve pissed down your throat. I have videos of you begging to be fucked in the ass. Hell, you like being beaten—really beaten, punched and kicked until you cry. Maybe they did once, but at this point? You’re lucky I found you. And now, you’re stuck. You’re not strong. You’re not fast. You’re not smart. You can try to leave, but we both know I’d fucking destroy you. I’d drag you back.”

“Come back,” this one says over the phone as I turn on to the highway. I saw him script this to himself from his front porch, watching me after walking me to my car. “I know you think you’re happy with _____. I know I’ll probably never have the kind of job he does, or even something stable. But I could make you* truly *happy. We could have such a life together. v, I’ve been in love with you for five years. Ask my sister.” I don’t have to do that, because I already know. I knew when I went to see him that day, and I knew when I visited him in New York, and I knew five years ago, too. “That’s my fatal flaw: how much I hate loving you. That’s why I never act on it.”

No, I tell him, your fatal flaw is loving me. Hating it is merely a fact.

“Come back,” he says, “come back.”

He spits on his hand, gets ready to enter me again. “I’m sure you wish that was on you.” Maybe He saw me shudder when He did it, but He’d know anyway. I remember when I figured out He’d been training me to come when that happened. It’s too late, He told me then. It doesn’t matter if you know what I’m doing or not.

“Stay still,” He says. “Don’t even think about it. This is about me now; you don’t get to come again, except maybe at the end if you’re really fucking lucky. Every time you do, you move your filthy cunt, and I’m going to get off inside you now. So present yourself to your god. Put your ass up and stay. still. I don’t care about your disgusting little orgasms. This is all you have to offer me.”

This one calls me at two in the morning, flirting around the lines of drunkenness. “Aren’t you going to ask me to tell you why I called?” he says.

“No,” I say. “You’ll tell me if you want.”

“Well,” he says, “80% is that I just thought of how we used to be friends. Aren’t you going to ask me what the other 20% is?”

“No. You’ll tell me if you want.”

“I’m imagining you on your back on my granite counter,” he says, “like in that poem you wrote last September.” That poem wasn’t about you, I think but do not say. “I’d make you come so hard you could only think of me with any other man.” Sure, I think. They all say that. It’s so important to them, being the one I remember. “I’m imagining how high your back would arch when—are you going to tell me to stop?”

“No.” I lay on my floor and make the requisite moaning noises, half-listen… play Tetris. I don’t care about the words, and I’m not getting anything sexual out of this. What I get is confidence, and it comes from the sound of his need. He doesn’t text me the next day. Instead, he mails me a sweater.

“You don’t deserve to come. All you deserve—no, all you want is brokenness. You want to be treated like the little lying whore you are. After all the guys you left hanging, everyone you screwed over? You don’t deserve to feel anything good at all.” I can’t say for sure if what I’m feeling is “good”—this laser-focus sense of disintegrating at His touch, holding my breath like that will hold me together, desperate not to… lose? Disobey? Fail?—but I know that it is what I will save for whenever I’m next allowed to get myself off. I’m unsure in this moment if I’ve told Him that as of late, this is all I fantasize about: being told all the ways in which I’m a liar as I try not to give in. But it’s too late. It doesn’t matter if He knows what He’s doing or not.

“Let me tell you a story!” This one always uses too many exclamation points when he’s drunk. “I liked you! For so long! And figured you would never like me back! So I tried to find a reason not to like you but I couldn’t! So I invited you to my house and the whole goal was to find a reason not to like you! And you were still perfect!” When did I last speak to him? Two, three months ago? When did I go to his house? I saw so many men only once this year. “And you just left at the end! A truly good person would have just said they weren’t interested, but you played me from the beginning!” Oh, I remember now. We watched a Glee special on Valentine’s Day. I really thought he knew it was just as friends—except, of course, no, I didn’t. “So now I know you’re a liar! And I found a reason!”

“I hope that hurts”, He says—and it does hurt, that burning between my legs that happens when He fucks me multiple times in succession, or else without warning, or else stays only barely entering me so that the friction builds more and more as I’m reminded of my own weakness. “You deserve to hurt, the way you hurt so many boys–so many weak men–just for your own amusement. This is all you ever wanted done to you: you wanted them to teach you a lesson. You deserve this for the rest of your life, the kind of girl you were.” And it does hurt, that throbbing in my jaw that comes when I have to use all my focus to clench it shut, those exquisite, acerbic moments where what I would say back to anyone else is “fuck you.”

For five minutes that winter, we didn’t hate each other. And though I didn’t go with him to the Sweetheart Dance, he came over to my house after. I insisted I was too tired, and he told me he was already driving around my neighborhood. I was exhausted. I don’t remember much of what happened. But I do remember most that gorgeous face, that silent contorted moan or scream when I moved my hips over his and did not, no matter how he looked at me, kiss him.

I’m silent now. He hasn’t told me He doesn’t want to hear me, but I try my best not to breathe too loudly, just one small thing I can maybe control. If I open my mouth, I’m sure I’ll either come or cry. I want to look back at Him and see the way He is overcome at these moments, all venom and power, but that would cause the same problem. So I focus on keeping my ass up for Him—not moving even when He’s thrusting into me with all His strength, even when I feel so full of Him that if I don’t stop pushing back I’m sure my body will not bear it—until those final moments.

And then, I cannot hold it in anymore: I beg. Please, please, please.

“No, you goddamn little cocktease,” He says. “You may not.”

Jan

2024

“For whatever it’s worth, I think I’m having another degradation phase.”*

At least, that’s what I brace myself to say for the full hour before You come to bed. I repeat it to myself, ready to say it to You casually once You join me.

But I don’t.

Why? Because I’m embarrassed. Because I’m afraid it will be obvious how scripted it is. Because You’ve just walked in and called me pretty, and I certainly don’t want You to stop calling me pretty–but silently, I add a second part to it, my insatiability filling in the blank You don’t even know is there: “It’s good you’ve got that going for you. There isn’t much else.”

See, I have this second-rate version of You in my head. (“Isn’t everything you do second-rate?”) An hour ago, You turned me around while we were fucking and I pushed my face into the bed, hearing “I couldn’t bear to look at those disgusting faces you make any longer.” That’s a frequent one. “Keep your ass up, disappointment. Can’t you even do that much?” That’s another.

When You allow me to masturbate, I see You in the corner of the room, Your arms crossed like that day in the airport, observing, waiting. You watch me, mock me, even time me. I bore you. “Go on. You can’t get yourself off? Poor baby. I’d have you begging for me to stop by now. How does it feel, knowing I can manipulate your body so much better than you yourself?” I know how pathetic it is that I do this. I even hear You say, “I can’t believe you need to pretend I’m there in order to come. Don’t you have any imagination of your own? Of course not,” You smirk. “You weren’t built for that.” I can’t see anyone else. I stopped trying that two bedrooms ago.

You are the voice in my head. My earworm, my hallucination: You. You are what haunts me; You are all my nightmares. You’re the waking ones, too–when You’re there and when You’re not. You are the reason I have any self-control at all, like that time You told me You didn’t want to hear me anymore, my whining or heavy breathing, that if You did You’d stop and I’d have to live with myself knowing that You didn’t get off. I gave myself petechiae that night, limiting my own air. In the moments before You make me lose consciousness sometimes, I almost reach that feeling of despair. I almost remember how awful that felt, my fear of failure, my sense of dread. It isn’t quite as good as when You make me feel those things. It isn’t quite as whole. It’s empty, like me.

Why post this now? Is that easier than just saying that one sentence to You? Why share it with everyone? Maybe it’s the exhibitionist in me, the one You threatened to make hump a pillow while an audience watched. Or maybe it’s just my need for attention, but only on my terms–which they’ll give me, as they always do and always have (“Shameless narcissist. You are a disgrace.”) Everyone but You, that is, which is probably the whole point. Or maybe it’s just the recognition that when You’re actually there, I am smaller than small. I cannot predict. I cannot pretend. I cannot be so candid with You, Your laughter so near.

But for whatever it’s worth, Owner, I think I’m having another degradation phase.

I know it isn’t worth very much.

Jan

2024

How We Choose Infinite Love in a Finite World*

I see the words “when I realized that Love is infinite, I became poly” or some iteration of that come up from time to time. It isn’t quite as bad as “poly is more enlightened/evolved”] and I don’t think it is even meant as a negative statement on mono people most of the time—but sometimes it feels like it.

My Love too, is infinite. And I too am on a journey to access all of it.

Polyamory was something only in my peripheral vision before I was in kink. I think my relationships in this world are better because I tried and learned it wasn’t for me. It has allowed me to realize how individually relationships must be constructed, how even the categories of ‘monogamy’ and ‘polyamory’ are inexact to say the least. Everything is built from the ground up. What do we share with each other? Which experiences do we want to make together or apart? What is quality time, and how much do we need? What do we think it means to be Owned, to submit? Where do our journeys intersect?

My Love is infinite. My Love is the universe. My Love is the big bang—world-starting, constantly expanding. It grows to make room for me. It means different things. My Love is expressed towards existence, towards myself, towards my Owner, my God, my many soulmates in this world and my Love, like the universe, is beautiful and complicated and terrifying.

My Love is infinite. Love is infinite. I am grateful. I feel it growing all the time. Like God, it is beyond the capacity of human understanding. Every day I am in awe, shocked it is still possible for me to Love my Owner, myself, my friends more. Amazing, how it reflects what it is given, both the mirrors and the shattered glass. Worship, transcendence, muchness, glory, I can barely put a name to it. It is overwhelming, incandescent, and it will consume me for as long as I exist.

And my Love is also energy, and while it is infinite, my human capacity for energy is not. Nor is my time. So I have to allocate it, see where it fills me most. If I am to give my time to it–and I do not know what else I could give it to—I want to put it in the places it grows the fastest so that I can have more and more and more. I want to feel the personal kind, the companionship kind, the romantic kind, the earth kind, I want to feel so much. Everyone, everything I can Love feeds that Love in some way. In this lifetime, this journey, this experiment, I have found my happiness best served by placing the romantic part here. When I see the Love–which is to say the infinity—in His eyes, the Love I arguably never believed in before Him, I know my own grows strongest by His side. And so there will never be enough time by His side.

Love is a wide open space, a forest of oak trees. I learned that by meeting this one person, and every day I know it more. This boundless wonder, this limitless grace; Love is the place with many paths. And my body being this body, my heart being this heart—why wouldn’t I choose the one that I am most fit to tread?

Love is infinite. How lucky we are to get to choose how we get there.

Jan

2024

clarity: why suffer?*

“Only after disaster can we be resurrected. It’s only after you’ve lost everything that you’re free to do anything. Nothing is static, everything is evolving, everything is falling apart.”

There are days I wish I wasn’t a masochist. Sure, sometimes He hits so hard it gets around those wires crossed in my brain which can make it feel like pleasure, and sure, I know how to process pain. But the secret is that many days, I use that knowledge to actively choose not to. I choose to suffer instead.

I want to. I want it so often. Want to be made to scream things that go against my worldviews until I’m not sure what I believe, want to sob thinking of what former selves would say about me now, want to fear coming around the corner, want to sit alone crying without aftercare, want to have nightmares, want to yell out my terror that my bones will break. I crave it. It gives me clarity. I don’t know how to live without it.

I don’t pretend it’s normal. Those wires are crossed for me just as the others are.

On Friday, Owner and I are going to play at a costume party as Tyler Durden and Marla Singer. I’m looking forward to it more than I do many scenes, because I know whips, and I know methodical impact, but to be kicked, punched… sure, I have been, but not continually. Not without anything in between. Not until breaking. I’ve never been beaten up. I don’t want to not have that experience anymore.

How could I want something like that? Why suffer? Why actually hurt? Actually feel sorrow? Actually feel pain?

It’s service, for some. Knowing what their partner wants and subjecting themselves to it is a sign of their desire and willingness to give. It’s also power exchange. That’s where I’m at, at least in part. Anyone can hurt me in a way that makes me feel good; that’s natural for me. To bring me to suffering you must be a force which can truly control me.

But that’s not it. That’s not what I mean when I say clarity, a word which has recently become part of my ever-growing vahavta-specific vocabulary.

Why suffer? How could I want this?

To suffer is to know existence, to see what I call God. It is self-actualization. It is a spiritual experience. Suffering is recognizing that I am human, that there is a full range of human experience out there to feel. These emotions which control me so intensely on a daily basis — they aren’t the peak of it. There is always deeper. Darker. There are places I haven’t gone yet in this world. If the suffering can bring me lower than my own depression, if it outweighs what my own mind can do, there is something more powerful. *He* is more powerful. My demons go quiet.

To suffer is to be brought low. Suffering shows me the violence internal to the mundane of this life. It lets me master it. Survive. I cannot feel anything about surviving something I just enjoy. I cannot grow stronger from it — but when I am brought back up from destruction, I know more about myself than I did before. The boundaries of sensation and sentiment expand, and like a gas, my spirit grows to fill them. In the after, there is no limit to my limits.

But in those most poignant moments—those right between collapsing in gratitude that it is all over and coming back to myself—there is nothing in my mind. There is nothing I need. It is quiet, impossibly calm waters, seamless with my breath the way the sky and ocean were one night when I stepped outside on the pier and everything was black, black, suspended in that second. It is clear, this mind, this heart, this thing that I am, absent of the befores-and-afters, the analogies and constant associations. It is lower, it is higher, it is suffering, it is coming back anew.

“May I never be complete.
May I never be content.
May I never be perfect.
Deliver me, Tyler, from being perfect and complete.”

This stems from an ongoing discussion I’m in with people who have stated they don’t understand and have absolutely no desire to watch scenes that involve people subjecting themselves to real pain. I mean absolutely no disrespect to the people sharing their views in that discussion and am appreciative of your giving me a reason to think about a thing that has seemed obvious to me. I also do not intend in any way, shape, or form to imply that enjoying or not enjoying suffering is the better or stronger or more enlightened way to do things — this is simply how I experience it.

Jan

2024

the place with all my demons: on degradation and shame*

It’s always been about loss of control, for me. Helplessness. The giving over.

How I used to think that would be all blood and violence. For a time, maybe it was. Screaming and crying and eventual silence. How I used to think that would be enough.

But we grow, and we adapt, and I am a masochist. When I got better at interpreting the blows into what would make me come, I was no longer satisfied. Not fully. I accepted that I could do that. I even liked it.

How I used to think I could never fully suffer again.

I don’t know how I got to this place. Back then, words like ‘dumb’ and ‘worthless’ were on my list of hard limits.

There was a path, I’m sure.
Little taunts when I cried from beatings.
Piss on my shirt and in my mouth. Small things.

And then, when we had been long-distance for many months, when I came home for a week in the middle, there was this one night. A night where He mocked me for not getting Him off. Had me ride Him and neither looked at me nor reacted. Made me bend over and stay completely still and silent while He came and I did not. After, I turned away sobbing, hating Him for using one of our limited nights so selfishly. Hating myself more.

But in the time away from each other (sometimes even still,) whenever I got off… it always went back there. Every time. That awful suffering. I didn’t tell Him. (How I used to think I could keep this to myself.) My eyes closed, my hand between my legs, thinking about feeling completely tossed aside. That shame. That worthlessness. I started to notice it in every scene I found strong enough to think about, write about. It crawled into the most secret fantasies I had.

And in recent weeks, it has crawled right out.

I love pain. I still do. He can push beyond my masochism to where I get that, generate real tears, real fear in the moment. But that’s just it: I do love it. I want it. I can think through it.

When He’s in my head (and oh, how He’s in my head…) there is no escape. There is no secret enjoyment. Even what I enjoy, I hate. I suffer. There is no end to it. I can’t claim dehydration or exhaustion. I can’t tense different muscles or move a bit forward. I can’t meditate through it. I certainly can’t focus on the knowledge of His Love.

My emotions have controlled me at so many points in my life and here is a man who can control them, more powerful than all the darkness.

I don’t know how I got to this place: my looking back at my Owner Friday night, his cock inside me, begging Him to say something awful to me. Knowing in that moment that was the only way I could come. Needing to cry in self-hatred. I don’t know how I got to where in two weeks we will do our first full scene of public humiliation and how that’s the first play in forever I’ve found myself actively hoping He will forget, fearing in anticipation, not knowing how to prepare for. Give me beatings. I can stretch for that. I can prepare myself. I can know what to expect. Even now, I know part of me writes this to deflect that shame. Look, that isn’t real. That isn’t me. I’m not really that… whatever I will be. Remember me, how you’ve seen me bruised and bloody? Don’t you know I’m actually strong?

But I am not. He is in every one of my recesses, finding my weakness and taking it for Himself. And I crave it, and hate myself for hating myself. And I beg.

And then He says what I need Him to, takes me to that cliff where all my demons lie below, and I finally, finally, look up and say with my small voice:

“Please, please, please may I come?”

And He laughs.

“No. But you stay there for me. Right on that edge.”

Jan

2024

When There Isn’t Room to Serve*

Note: “you” is me talking to me. Not you.

You can be 24/7 property (and I am) but you can’t be a 24/7 slave (and I’ve tried). At least, not the way you want to be, the way you think you should be. Not always. There will be times when the papers are due and the tests need studying for and the invitations need addressing and the work must be attended to, and you must still sleep, and eat, and rest. And all the same, the stress consumes you. You want to beg Him to beat or threaten or tie or rape the tears out of you. You want to fall to your knees and refocus. You want to fill your mind with only Him.

But you can’t pour from an empty glass.

Even harder, these will be the times when He is showing you the most Love. He surrounds you with it. Reminds you He will take care of you. That He would rather you happy than conventionally successful. That you can live that life, *hat one, and He will still be proud, maybe moreso. These will be the times when He’s proving and re-proving that you can feel safe with Him, that he can be dependable, your rock, that all will be well, that all is well, and these will be the times when you most want to show your overwhelming gratitude in the ways that you know how.

He says things are clean but you know they just aren’t clean enough. The food isn’t your best. You could be doing more.

“Stop procrastinating,” He says, when you are wiping down the table again. “You can do this next week. You do what you must. You do it now. You do it for me, and you will have those pages done by the time I come home.”

So you do. And it is what He commands, but it still doesn’t feel like enough.

I am meant to serve Him. I need to serve Him. How can I find the time to serve Him?

But this is what He commands. You don’t decide what serves him.

So you go upstairs and you do the work. This is still service, you say to yourself until you believe it. This is what our future needs. This is what our one day home will look like (kitchen island, soundproof walls), this is what our days will be filled with (hiking and torture and reading scripts aloud), and this is where we will go (that secret beach), and I just have to get there, I just have to get there, and every little step is for us and for Him and you will give Him your happiness and stability and you will get there.

And when you take your breaks in it all, you will think of Him so you can keep going. You will lie on the floor and repeat the mantra He gave you back when you were oceans away and desperate for Him, I am His, I am Loved, I exist to serve, and you will start again.

And you will think of all the things you will do for Him once this is done.

And you will write.