Fear.

The five films I have watched in my life led me to believe that when a man brushes the hair off your face and tucks it behind your ear, it's a sensual act of intimacy meant to indicate just how much he cares about you. I think about that every single time my husband brushes the hair off my face, because when he does, it just means I am going to wake up with a swollen face and the juxtaposition tickles me so much. He does it with such tenderness, but it sends waves of fear down my chest. Fear is such an underrated sexual stimulant. I don't have erogenous zones in my body, I have erogenous emotions, and fear might be on top of that list. It doesn't work to touch me here or touch me there, only to make me feel this or that. When he brushes the hair off my face and strokes my chin with his thumb, the fear that flows through me feels like whiskey. Just warm, liquid inebriation that burns a little.

The most alluring thing about being scared is that you cannot manufacture the emotion, it's not up to you to decide whether you feel scared, your body must have reason to feel it, and for a masochist, pain is not something that always causes a fearful response. It's something else about him that scares me. Last night, we spent the evening on the terrace of our new house; I really love our new house even though the last week has been extremely rough because of the moving. It doesn't matter, I love this space, and after having spent years convinced that I don't have a sense of aesthetics, I decided to abandon some notions about myself and lean into my idea of visual beauty. I do have one, it just never seemed important to manifest it, but all of a sudden, muted tones, militant decluttering and glass boxes full of light seem very important to me. My visual sense is my least developed one, I think, and maybe that's because I have always had poor eyesight, and I have just gone through life not correcting for it, so I grew accustomed to never seeing things clearly.

When I was seventeen I went blind for a few days. I was just sitting on the couch, reading a textbook, and I shifted upwards, and I couldn't see anymore. There was just a thick white fog. I remember being unnaturally calm about it. In retrospect I feel much more panic than I did at the moment. In the moment, I just called out to my mother who was on the other side of the curtains, and told her I couldn't see. My parents' neighbours, very conveniently, are both doctors, he is an orthopedic surgeon and she is an opthalmologist, and it is the greatest regret of my life that I have only had sex with one of them. She came over and she drove us to the state teaching hospital where they studied every part of my head for a couple of days. They couldn't find a thing wrong with me but over the next couple of days, my vision just started to come back. To this day no one can tell me what happened or why I can see better on some days than others, but I think the experience is what led to me having a visual aesthetic that is solely inside my head. I didn't quite trust what I see enough to look for beauty in it, but I am trying to do that now because there is something to looking around your home and seeing things that pleasure your eyes. To think I learnt all of that from buying one weird-looking glass box for no reason other than it appealed to my eyes, and it led to a complete renovation. I love how it's going.

I also love the terrace, and just being outside in general, and even though he hates every single thing about the cold, he hung out with me outdoors all evening. I told him he should have to suffer the cold sometimes because I am a woman and I have been dealing with social and hormonal bullshit all my life so I want a trade off. He agreed, because he's chill like that, he doesn't always want his own way, and he cares very much about my need to be absurd. When we came back inside, he held my wrist, and walked me over to our bedroom. We were standing beside the bed, he went in to push the hair off my face, almost out of habit, realised that I hadn't undone the big tight bun I put on my head earlier that evening, and pulled his hand back. It didn't matter that there were no hair to get out of the way, it filled me with terror anyway.

Not because he was about to hit me, it's not that, it's his manner when he hits me. It's unforgiving, cruel and thoughtless; he looks through everything, he opens up all the neatly organised drawers and cabinets in my mind, throws everything around and walks all over it. It has to be this way, I do understand that, because that's just how fear works, if you get exactly how much of what you want, you wouldn't be scared, and I am scared of him because I don't get to decide when he stops or how he treats me, and he doesn't, almost ever, stop when I want it to. He backed me into the wall, and stroked my chin.

"I'm scared," I whispered, putting my hands behind my back.

"It doesn't really matter to me," he said as his palm met my cheek.

It doesn't matter, but I think I like to demonstrate my weakness. I used to be a *tough-as-nails* girl when I was younger, I enjoyed the style of masochism where I came as a challenge, an amalgamation of taunts and fearlessness, but that's not who I am anymore. It feels more honest to show my fear, to cry my tears, to brandish my vulnerability and admit to my weakness. It also hurts more when he tells me it doesn't matter. I believe that, I believe how I feel doesn't really matter to him in situations like that because he shows me. You know how when someone is beating you and they hit you really, really hard in that *one* spot that makes even your most pain-loving self wish they wouldn't hit you in that spot again, and despite yourself you try to signal somehow that you don't want that, in that moment you can deduce exactly what kind of sadist someone is, and he is the kind who will keep hitting that exact spot again and again. Especially if it makes me cry.

As he was beating me, the back of his hand landed on the front of my face, two fingers against my lip, one knuckle against that spot where the upper jaw begins and two fingers against my nose. It reminded me instantly of a night with him from years ago, when a blow to the exact same spot injured something on the inside. It was a pain I will never forget, nor ever stop longing for, and for weeks after it happened when I pressed into my upper right incisor, a pain would shoot up all the way to the base of my nose. I did it all the time. It was the exact blow from all those years ago, and the impact of deeply intense, once in a year type of pain is that it neutralizes me completely. Everything left. Speech, thought, sound, colour, breath. Everything left. Pain like that has the same effect as popping ecstacy, it overwhelms me to sentient numbness. He kept beating me — punching my arms, kicking my thighs, slapping my face, smacking my mouth — but it all felt very quiet. His blows felt quiet. His taunts about my tears felt quiet. His promises not to stop felt quiet.

Yet it was a quiet madness, the quiet madness is why I do any of this, it feels very similar to being overwhelmed by art, crazed by drugs and overcome by desire all at once. I cannot live without it, something feels dead inside until it is brought alive by his specific brand of violence and the blood it sheds inside my mouth. Nothing ever feels as substantial as when I stand before him, too exhausted to keep going, trembling at the lip, bleeding at the nose, tearing at the eye, stumbling at the knee and hoping it might be over.

"Are you going to fall?" He asked me.

"Not if you don't push me," I whispered from the side of my mouth that still opened.

"I won't push you," he said pullling me straight onto my feet, "You will get on the floor because I tell you."

Of course. I will. I did. I find clear instruction is one of the most gratifying things in the world. It adds to the structure, it neatens the world and adds light, it is exactly the sense of aesthetics I am trying to manifest around me but even as the harbinger of instruction he brings the chaos. I don't know when we reversed roles like that, when I became quiet and he became loud, when I became light and became the dark, when I became order and he became mayhem but it happened. He destroys things and I salvage them.

"Open your mouth," he said pushing his pelvis in my face.

I couldn't. It wouldn't move like that, half my jaw was stuck in place, and the other half was swollen out of place. He put his fingers on temporomandibular joints on either side and pried my mouth open because it really doesn't matter what I can and cannot do, only what he wants me to. He always wants to play with the toys he just broke. Fuck a mouth he destroyed.

"Why would I break a face if I wasn't going to fuck it?" He asked.

That's the aesthetic of his world. Mine is a glass box that's just begging to be broken. Together it makes rather fearful music, bu

t it's quiet. I don't know how.