Will You See The Fireflies Too?

There are two triangles embossed onto the left lapel of his shirt, the logo of some brand I do not know, even though, I am sure I bought this shirt for him. As he grips my throat again, I force myself to stare at the triangles; the blood drains from my face, I feel light as air and I know the only way to remain conscious is to keep looking at the triangles, but I am distracted. The reflections of the yellow lights that are wrapped around our bed-posts twinkle at me from the floor, they seem to swirl around my eyes like the fireflies we used to catch and try to turn into lamps when we were kids; in the wee hours of the morning, before dawn had really broken, we would sweep them off the porch, like clearing out a luminescent graveyard. It feels so cruel, in retrospect, to have gathered life into a dustpan, and left it in the bin, just to avoid getting into trouble with our parents. 

I slip off the bed and try to touch the ersatz lights on the floor, I stare at my fingertips in confusion when the incandescence doesn't leave its residue on them, he stares at me, mirroring my expression of confusion, only his confusion is about my audacious decision to move, without being told to move. He doesn't ask me anything, he merely holds me by my hair and turns me around so I am on my back, I am surprised by how easily he conducts me, how my body moves in response to the slightest cue, as if we have been rehearsing this show for decades. I wonder how this would look to an audience, would they see what I feel? What they know to check for meaning inside the gestures and under the whimpers? Would they know that the lights I chase are fireflies I once killed? 

I'm going to find out. 

I do feel the desire to perform my sex and my sexuality, but not in the way that the word *performance* makes it seem. In a way, when I write sex, not essays that turn sex into a textbook, but erotic writing about my own sexual dalliances, I am performing them. The presumption of a (preferably voyeuristic) audience adds to the thrill of writing, it encourages the exposure, it makes it appealing to peel off layer-after-layer of my existence so I can be seen in this state, not just as what is happening to me, but as who I am. Whether I end up sharing what I write is immaterial, because while I am in process, I picture the stranger who doesn't know me at all, peering into the most intimate spaces I can conjure, and seeing me way too closely for someone they will never know. They will never know what I keep on my nightstand, instead they'll know me as the person who cries when penetrated, and they'll know in harrowing detail, why. They will never know my name nor where I work, but they will know exactly who I am when I am suffering and in love. They will never know my unabiding love for peanuts and my hatred of biryani, but they'll know the minutiae of where I keep my shame. For a few years, I've been calling it erotic emotional exhibitionism, but it is also a performance. 

There is a minor distinction somewhere, I view exhibitionism as the portrayal of what would have happened without the audience anyway, I view it as being seen without influence of the seer, as the sheer pleasure of being watched in states of being I continually occupy and I view performance as the ability of the audience to impact what I show. When I say impact, I don't mean I write *what people want to read*, I will die on the hill of never doing any market research to be a more "accessible" writer, when I say impact, I mean that the knowledge of how my writing will make them *feel* drives me to extract those emotions by strategizing and structuring my depiction. If I want you to truly feel my pain, you won't feel it just by picturing me drowsy and breathless in the hands of a lover, you will feel it when the starlights on my floor drive me to reanimate the creatures I left for dead. When I perform my sex, it is with knowledge of the audience and I have no shame about that. In fact, I have nothing but pleasure, because this shared emotionality and experience, the kind where I can map the specificity of my being so exactly that you cannot help but feel like you are viewing my world from inside my head is so thrilling and heady, I couldn't stop doing it if I tried. It's not about validation, though, it is sometimes about validation as a *writer* (but from specific sources only), it's about how it *feels* to be so exposed and visible, like a black-light attack. 

I wonder if that is how it will feel to perform what I do privately with my partner, live in front of people. In general, I am not a fan of public play. It's too, noisy. I don't even mean it's just loud, I can drown out a certain degree of sound, it's that often, in spaces that are occupied by people who all know each other and play together with frequency, which is what happens in small, closely-held communities, there are unseen dynamics at play. I cannot celebrate my sexuality in a room where I know this person hates that person but pretends not to, this person is looking to see whether that person is better than them, that person is problematic in so-and-so way but no one is saying anything, this person wants to interfere in everyone's scenes, that person wants to make comments, those people can't wait for this to end so they can gossip about everyone there. I cannot let go in such a space, not even enough to be there, let alone divulge my madness. The mundanity of it is noxious and the pretence makes my brain malfunction. I can handle hurt, confrontation and grief, but I cannot handle confusion, and often in social spaces, I have no idea what is going on in terms of emotional interplay, because I cannot stop taking things at face-value. I only see the value in public play (for myself that is, I see that it has other value for other people, such as the existence of spaces where you can safely play, supervision, accountability which is great), if the public is vital to my pleasure. If not, then we're just playing *around* each other, right? There is some exhibition to that, but I'm not looking to casually exhibit anything. I need very clear lines and boundaries. 

The public play events that I have attended so far in my life don't work so well for me (and it's not because there is something wrong with the people who do them, that's a case-by-case thing, and honestly, I don't want to be the assessor) for several other reasons too. It seems like the dynamic-interplay sometimes makes other people's roles spill into your scene, I have on several occasions, had attendees of the party who were not playing with me, expect subly docility from me because of the role I was playing with someone else. If it's that kind of party, you gotta tell me in advance, and I won't come. It doesn't always happen so explicitly either, it's usually in the *fun-and-games* of it, and if you say something, you're a sanctimonious boring bitch who is being *too serious*. Well, I hope I am not sanctimonious, the rest is accurate. Look, I think people should have "fun" with their sexualities, they should laugh and make jokes, and if that's the energy they enjoy, I would never criticise it, but I like my sex quite serious. I will makes jokes about it *later* and every once in a while depending on the activity, I may let a little human slip out. I don't mean I perform my role with too much adherence, I mean that I like to be alone and immersed in it and in that state even the slightest distraction feels like boulder on my face, and often it is not meant to be, people are just doing their thing, and I am unable to bear that sensory input because it tells me that I am in public and must therefore enact my social learnings. I cannot do people, casually. It took me a lot of work to learn how to interact with people and understand them and when I am cognizant to their presence, I am always doing socio-emotional math. My therapist calls this autism. That's a different kind of performance, the social behaviour, not the autism, because in it, I am trying to figure out what is expected of me in order to seem *normal*. I get that it is a problem, and I am working on it, but I am not sure I will ever get to the place where I can be sexually social. 

So, no public play. Not like that. However, performing has always appealed to me, particularly for strangers. Performing has clear lines, conventions and boundaries. If I invite someone to watch me perform, it is understood they will serve as *audience* which means that their purpose is to watch the show, and mine is to be the show. The conventions of the interplay are quite clear (and bonus, if you are being the noise that disrupts me, I can, within the bounds of propriety, ask you to stop). I also know exactly why I prefer strangers, it's because there is no existing relationship so no social confusion about where we stand with each other has been introduced into my head for me to try to parse through for 5-6 business years (which just means one full lifetime) to understand. Ideally, you don't know me, and I don't know you, because that is the best frame of being for me to be able to conjure the kind of emotional objectification to which I want to subject my audience in order to truly feel the thrill of performing. I don't want you to be my casual acquaintance, nor my friend, I want you to be my helplessness, my sorrow, my lust and my hope. You are nothing but emotions of my choosing (well, I can hope, right) and I am nothing but the conduit to take you there. That happens best with strangers for me. Blank slates, you and I, connected by a single instance of too much intimacy, with no solid social foundation to back up our relationship with one another. 

I also love that this kind of performance is kind of pointless. Okay, okay, listen. I speak/perform a lot publicly in my life—at work, in teaching, sometimes just on the terrace because I am high and feel like delivering a lecture to my long-suffering friends and family—but it has a point. I am either sharing information or extracting it. Teaching or learning. In public play, in the form of demos, for instance, I may be going through the motions of (what qualifies as) sexual activity (to me), but my primary objective is didactic. In performing, the only goal to me is pleasure, which I suppose is pointless to me also (but only in so far as, it's its own point). I wanna do it for the thrill of it, you want to watch for the thrill of it. I like that. I am not trying to teach you anything, and whether you are trying to learn is none of my business. I do wonder if in ideal communication with regard to informed consent, whether any prospective audience should be privy to my views on performance, but then again, isn't the point of any performance art to evoke emotion, and we don't really believe that when we consume, we are totally in control of what we will be made to feel? I hope not. I would never read again. 

Of late, I have been seriously considering performing at a public socio-sexual event (god, Ancilla, just call it a party), I have been talking about it and trying to access the same feeling I have when I write, in moments when I am engaged in sexual play. I wonder whether I can truly make an audience feel what I feel in this format. I wonder, if I can do that as well as I can write (come on, a girl can take a little credit, right? I do realise no one said anything and I am the only one who feels weird about having said that, also, working on it). I wonder if everything I want to convey, will go through. I wonder how being able to perceive an audience in its physical form—as sound, as smell, as gaze—will impact me in the moment. When I can perceive an audience most intensely as I write, I often close my eyes, and let myself feel the existence of hypothetical strangers and how it may feel for them to experience and learn another person the way I am depicting myself, it's the best part of this erotic emotional exhibition. It's the best part because I am articulating *exactly* what I felt, and the exactness, allows me to transcend past all mundanity of human existence, and access the part of us that's most alive, emotions. Will that still happen if I do this a different way? When you see me gasp for air and grasp at nothingness to assuage an invisible guilt, will you see the fireflies too?