Inamorata.

The first time I said it, the world stopped. I had been holding onto it for ages, like sand in my grip, and each time it threatened to pour out of me, I clenched harder, cutting my palm with my nails to bloody the sand just enough to keep it from flowing. 

I couldn’t hold it in anymore. 

You lay beside me, trying to wipe the streaks of shoe-polish off my arms while the streaks of my tears flowed freely down my swollen face; I kept telling you how much I loved you, just to placate the urge to show you who I really am. Your touches went from gentle to firm, as your hands wandered over to my bruised and broken body. You made that sound – that low, glottal moan that tells me everything I need to know – and you climbed on top of me, gripping my wrists beside my head, getting polish on your fingers. 

“I’m going to hurt you again,” you said. 

I knew the moment for my prevarication had passed, it reminded me of all those times I has stood off stage, waiting for my cue, running lines in my head, mapping the stage with my eyes to check if I remembered all my blocking and clenching my teeth in nervous, jittery anticipation, but the show must go on, right? It will always come, that moment when you must step out of the darkness of private rehearsal, and into the spotlight of public performance.  

“Yes master,” I gripped onto his fingers, as I said. 

The world really did stop, a practiced and planned pause, perhaps, a comma unto existence itself. Maybe it was already scripted, but with you as the audience, it felt like I had never read those lines before that moment. 

“Please,” I begged, as if to urge you not to see me, even as I forced my way into your sight, “I don’t want it to mean anything.”

You held my face and all I could smell was the polish that has made its way from the brush to your shoes to my arms, to your fingers and then my face. Like I hadn’t spent hours practising them in my head; concocting scenarios in which I may finally utter them.

“You’re lying,” you accused me, “If you didn’t want it to mean anything, you would have said it ages ago.” 

We treat the truth differently – you and I – I bludgeon the world with mine, with the elegance of a tank, I toss it like a grenade that would have decimated me had I not thrown it. I fear holding onto the truth, in privacy truth turns to secrets and when you finally open your palm to reveal secrets, they stink like clumpy, putrefying, sanguineous sand, and you have to douse them in artificial redolence to cover up the stench. You have no fear of secrets nor holding onto truth for the right moment. You wield the truth with the precision of a scalpel, cutting in just the right place, at just the right moment, so no tourniquet could possibly save that which you seek to exsanguinate. 

“Oh,” I responded, with the cadence of a child caught with their hand in a cookie jar, “What is the truth then?”

I knew the truth. Of all the things I can be accused of in the world, taking words lightly does not feature on the list, I knew what I meant when I said it. The exactness of language is the most beautiful thing in the world and I am a servant of language, mining for dead words from the heaps of refuse and sweeping up strewn syllables so I may put them in order to limn a reality that is breathlessly ephemeral even in its immortality. I just panicked because the reality happened to be mine, I panicked because I didn’t know what it would mean to you, I worried that you would see me differently, like too much and nothing all at once. I wanted my truth to fall on deaf ears and when it didn’t, it seemed easier to mask it with furtive sheepishness. It seemed easier to ask you for the truth. 

“The truth is that you want it to mean everything,” he said. 

I did. I couldn’t just say that. I mask my mawkish sensibilities with a façade of irreverent seriousness so impenetrable, I’m unknowable unless I love you and altogether too much, if I do. It was terrifying to reveal to you, these depths of feeling that had me so ashamed. What was I trying to say anyway? I give myself to you, I pledge an allegiance that has no earthly meaning, I reveal a loyalty at which I’d rather scoff, I pledge a devotion that is delusional, I embrace a suffering that is eternal, I promise a subservience that is unquestioning. But you already knew all of that, didn’t you? As weighty as is my world of words, it’s just as meaningless since we speak with sentiment and action more than anything else. It wasn’t about what I was trying to say when I called you master, it was about what I had been holding back by not saying it. Please don’t skin me to raw nerves and crush my ability to be this vulnerable. Please, if I show myself to you entirely, don’t walk away from me. If I tell you it means everything to me, please tell me it means as much to you, too.

“I do,” I said, holding back a different form of tears, “And you…?”

There are some questions that can only be comprised of the consonants of silence. You gripped my wrists even tighter and brought your face down to mine until I could see nothing but the haze of your eyes.

“I’m going to hurt you again, slave,” you said, “I’m going to hurt you, forever.”

"Yes, master.”