This is what it means.

He hands me the scarf and I put it around my eyes myself. It’s very soft and light, but it blocks my vision completely as I knot it behind my head. I remember buying the scarf, four of them—blue, yellow, black and green—and for that one week, I was a scarf-person. They seem like warm and whimsical people, what registers as redundant fabric to me is beauty and expression to them, and while I have no interest in being beautiful, I do enjoy trying on the predilections of other people. It feels like borrowing a warm, clean bed while on a long, cold, arduous journey. Like putting on a costume of human, like role-playing normalcy, like laying siege to the subconscious of another. It was fun for a week and then the scarves just lay there.

Until now.

It’s hard to explain what this is. On the Saturday evenings that we spend at home, we sit together in my office. He drinks whiskey, I drink tea. I tell him about the thousands of epiphanies I’ve crammed into my week, he tells me about the various dogs he met on his walks of the week. I smoke some pot, he makes fun of me for letting the ash fall all over me, I tell him all my thoughts about the things I’ve been reading, he tells me he loves me. It’s ordinary, it’s domestic, it’s the kind of thing that feels so routine you don’t think of it as special, but when it’s gone, it haunts you forever. No matter what happens to us, no matter where we go, this corner, this desk and my bench, his worn chair, will house our spirits forever. That is what this is, that is what we are doing right now, except that I am blindfolded. Something changes, as soon as I cover my eyes, I feel nervous.

“I feel like I am waiting for something to happen,” I tell him, feeling around my desk for my tea, “I feel a whisper of fear, calling out from somewhere, I cannot tell where it is, but I feel like I am running towards it.”

“Are you scared that I will reach out and hit you?” he asks, as I wince from accidentally having dipped my fingers into the hot tea.

“No, I’m always scared of that,” I respond, “There is something about this darkness, I feel alone in it, like I’m about to be too honest.”

Honesty is strange. I feel like I am always as honest as I can be, but there are moments in which you discover that you can dig deeper. There are still places you haven’t been, things you haven’t discovered and when you do, the challenge of honesty hits anew, you must reveal yourself over and over. Revelation is tricky, how it is received within his strange dynamic of power and ownership, depends on the day, on who he is being, on the costume that he has on, at that very moment.

“Is there something you want to tell me?” He asks me, his tone is strident but his manner is gentle as he reaches over to hold my hand, “Is there?”

There is, but the funny thing is, last week there wouldn’t have been. I cannot tell you what it means to be a slave in any satisfying explanatory manner, but this week it has meant enduring constant cruelty, the worst of which has been excavating myself for fault, every fault and revealing it to him so he can fix me—for words left unspoken, fingers moved incorrectly, sighs that were too loud, gratitude that came too slowly—all performed under some kind of physical duress. Some weeks he is unrelenting, but it’s more than that, when you become so malleable and compliant, your reality changes to one that is not of your creation, it’s not like putting on a costume, it’s like being dressed up by a mad-man to play a role he designed. You do as he says, because there is nothing else outside of that. He tells you what to feel when you wake up and he tells you what to think after he falls asleep, so little of myself remains in my brain, and what remains, thinks of things he wants me to think. Last week I wouldn’t even have noticed what I want to tell him, this week it feels like cardinal sin to have kept it to myself.

“I want to tell you but this blindfold is making me feel so scared,” I say, gripping my bench in genuine panic, “Can you tell when I am scared if you cannot see my eyes?”

“Yes,” he responds immediately, “It’s in your breathing, and the ever-so-slight tensing of your shoulders, in the way your voice changes, the way your sentences sound like pleas.”

It’s terrifying to be so transparent; it feels like being in front of a firing squad, there is no place to hide, you can run and cower, but you are always seen and found. It’s also liberating, I suppose, a madness comes over me, it’s hard to explain, all the things we do to demonstrate our surrender, the ones that denote our subjugation, they take a specific kind of courage. It’s harder than doing what you are told, it’s harder than taking a harsh beating, it’s harder than begging for mercy. The hardest thing I have ever done is walking up to him and kneeling at his feet because I want to, because I want to show him that I choose this surrender and desire it with such intensity I must show it, that I am unashamed of it. That feeling comes over me, it takes over my body, I stop gripping the bench with my hands and put them up over my head, against the wall, I stop resisting the fear of this darkness, my body relaxes and I feel as pliant as thought. I cannot explain what it means to be his slave, but this is where it lives.

“I want to tell you that for a little while I’ve been really scared of you hitting my face, so much that I think I’ve been trying to avoid it, even making excuses I wouldn’t normally make,” I speak easily now, with resolve and without fear.

“Do you want me to stop hitting your face?” He asks me, I cannot see him, but even if I could, I would be as clueless as I am now about what he will do with the information.

“No, that’s not why I am telling you,” I say, and it is the truth, “I have no opinion on the outcome, I know I am safe, I just..I want you to know, I’m so scared and the longer you don’t do it, the more scared I get because I know it is imminent.”

I start to cry. It’s not like when I cry from pain, nor from being tortured until I break, it’s emotional. I used to love being hit in the face, I regularly referred to my face as invincible and unbreakable, and I think, for a spell, I touted it as the downfall of all sadists, saying they would always break before I did because I loved it so much, he took that away from me. He took my sanctum sanctorum and haunted it. He took my desire and turned it into terror, like experimental alchemy performed by an evil genie, but I am not mad at him, I don’t long to go back to what used to be, I just want to feel this.As this new faction of me is stapled into my skin, I just want to feel it. Sometimes you don a scarf as a game of impersonation and it becomes you, we’re built out of the scraps of the costumes we try on. Around my neck, this scarf was just a game, put it around my eyes, and I will show myself who I really am.

I hear him push my desk aside and pull his chair closer to me. His knees part my legs and push me into the wall. I can perceive him better now, I can sense him, but I know I cannot touch him. There will be a moment when I’m allowed to do that again, but right now, I don’t touch my master, he touches me. I sense his hand coming towards my face and I flinch, I cry harder, but he doesn’t hit me, he only strokes my face.

“I’m not going to hit you,” he whispers to me, stroking over the dampness in my scarf, “Talk to me.”

I do. I cry and I talk. I thank him and I apologise. I tell him the long tale of where the fear began and how it got here, he already knows the story, he wrote it, but I need to say these things, this is what it means to be his slave. He hugs me as I cry, my hands still hover in the air as he pulls back, he kisses my chin. My arms rest on the bench once again. Silence stands between us for a moment, intermittently broken by my sobs, until he starts to fold the sleeves of my shirt up to my shoulders. My processing is slowed down, I don’t register what he is doing until the first punch lands on my arm.

“You said you weren’t going to hit me,” I cry out, louder than I had intended.

He holds my face between his hands, his fingers press down on the temporomandibular joint, forcing my mouth open and unusable. This is punishment for trying to hold him to his promises, when I know, they are as fleeting as his kindness.

“Are you..complaining?” He asks, his voice drips with indignant warning.

I cannot believe the fear of someone you love, and someone who loves you, can be so real.

“No master, I’m sorry,” I hurry to apologise as he relaxes his hold over my jaw, I can feel my lips turn downwards into a pronounced sadness.

He goes back to punching me and I realise I cannot take it if I continue to process. Sometimes, you are past endurance, you are past relying on resolve or tapping into your masochism, there are only two choices left. Either, you resign to that space inside your head where no one lives, the panic room, you detach yourself from the torture to get through it, you disassociate from you body until it is over, you stop processing, you slip into the nothingness of being. If you beat a person long enough, they’ll get there, our bodies our designed with the prospect of experiencing great pain in design. Sometimes being his slave means being willing to be led there. The other choice is to appeal to mercy. It doesn’t always work and it always comes with a cost later extracted, but sometimes you negotiate to pay a higher price later, because your resilience is bankrupt at the moment.

“Please don’t beat me,” I say in a loud whisper.

He ignores me, but I know he heard me, he keeps hitting me, but the pace is altered, there is more space for contemplation between the blows.

“I beg you,” I say to him, in pleas and tears, “Please don’t beat me, master.”

“Why shouldn’t I beat you?” He asks me, punching me harder with each word.

“I don’t have a good reason,” I tell him, “I don’t even have a reason, I just..I just don’t want you to beat me.”

He stops. I’m surprised but grateful. He comes closer to me and puts his hands on my shoulders.

“I won’t beat you,” he says to me.

I try to reach into his arms as I cry with relief, but he pushes me back, my head hits the wall harder than I thought it would, like reality crashing into you with the grating sound of a plate shattering on the floor. He puts his heels over my toes and begins to crush them, his fingers tighten around my shoulders and dig into my flesh.

“I said I wouldn’t beat you, I didn’t say I wouldn’t hurt you,” he says, clearly pleased with his semantic cruelty.

He digs his heels in deeper.

“You get what I give you, you don’t want anything,” he tells me, as it dawns on me that I demonstrated the worst thing of all, my will, “You cry when I say cry, you scream when I say scream, you feel what I tell you to feel, you want what I give to you.”

He puts both hands over my nose and mouth and presses me into the wall. I can never get used to this feeling of suffocation.

“Do you want to breathe right now?” he asks me.

I shake my head.

Sometimes there is no escape, there is only surrender, that is what it means to be his slave.