Old Fantasies Are Like Old Books.

"I want to touch you," I told him, from across my desk, "I wish I could just walk over to you and touch you."

It sounds like a very simple desire, doesn't it? I love him, he loves me, we've been together for ages, touching him should be an act so anodyne it needn't bear mention, but it's not. This distance between us is not fordable and it's deliberate. The world is at liberty to design their sexual slavery in whatever ways seem most palatable to them, to us, this is part of the design. I want to be restrained in my humanity, to cower under the enforcement to refrain from expressing my desire for him with an act so fundamental as touch. My hands are perpetually bound before him, they feel heavy like there are two bricks suspended from my wrists; hanging off a durable, pliable and fine ring of metal that cuts me each time I lift either arm with unchecked intent.

"What would you do if you could touch me?" He asked.

I would put my palms against his chest and bury my face in his neck. I would kiss his busted knees, graze the pointy indentations of his bones that poke my legs in the middle of the night. I would run my fingers over his thighs and up his abdomen, I would linger at every follicle and trace the path of my touch with my tongue. I would cry my longing right onto his skin so he could feel it, uncomfortable and wet, against his flesh.

"Would you let me?" I asked him, leaning backwards into the wall.

My fingers darted towards my face, I followed the path of the unusual bruise that began at the infraorbital space. It looked like a black river originating in the dark glacier of my left eye and draining into the ocean of purple atop my zygoma. He watched my fingers as I ran them over my skin, he looked into my eyes and gripped the armrests. His mouth parted, just a little bit, as it always does when the desire starts to make its way from his head to his cock. Maybe if he were a different man I could achieve the same results by unbuttoning my shirt or biting my lip, or I could abase myself in a vulgar display of exuberant arousal, but he's not that man. My busted lip is the only adornment that makes him croon, my massacred skin is all he needs to see to become awash with need. He is my fantasy come to life.

When I was young, before sex was an act and still a concept, I had a very specific fantasy. In it I had just been beaten by someone, sometimes an abusive lover and sometimes another, I was covered in bruises and my lip was swollen and split. In the wake of that I would be approached by another man, usually someone I cast as a friend in my head, my friend would find me fighting unconsciousness on the bathroom floor. He would carry me out and put me on the bed, he'd touch me and kiss my wounds with impassioned fervour, hold me in his arms and just as I began to cry, he would force himself on me. If I fought him, he'd violently beat me some more and if I didn't, he'd only hurt me a little. I would thank him for his benevolence or apologise for my resistance depending on which version of my fantasy I was playing in my head. He'd finish inside me, pat my head and tell me I should be a better girl if I didn't want to be beaten anymore, but we both knew I would never make it to better. I would never be a better girl.

He is that fantasy and he plays all the parts.

It's like I conjured my husband by wishing upon a perverse star, like I built him with stolen requests made to evil genies; as if I snipped sections of people from the dirty books I used to hide underneath my bed and put him together like a monument of censored love.

"Maybe I will let you touch me," he said, gritting his teeth in response to the way I brandished the marks of his violence on my body, "Come over here."

Even when I know he is luring me, even when I can see through the mawkish trap, I am powerless to resist it. I realise now, the fantasy is less about violation and more about aspirational credulity. It's about being able to be the person who believes in the goodness of people, even when you have a repository of evidence that indicates you should not. It's about believing and hoping — like a naive, pathetic creature — that kindness will find its way to you at some point. It's about arrogating a state of stupidity and acting out of it as if you really don't know better. It's about being a beggar for love. There is an old Kamala Das poem in which she wrote —

*Can you, that I was (once) proud, and loved,
I who have lost my way,
and beg now at strangers' doors to receive love,
at least in small change.*

I think that poem is how I realised that sadness is erotic to me. I sustain myself on the irrational belief in the alms of his benevolent love and I float on the denial of it. It's for no noble cause, I don't really want it, I just want to show myself that I can keep on hoping, no matter how frequently he lures me into the warm shadows and impales me on his cold effervescent dagger, I will still remain the pitiful credulous soul who waits for her terrible comrade to rescue her from the bathroom floor, only to desecrate any wholeness that remains and still thank him.  

I walked from my bench to his chair and kneeled on the floor. As I lifted my arms to put them on his thighs, the metaphorical bricks tied to my wrists pulled on them so hard, they fell to the floor with a crash so loud I could actually hear it. I couldn't get them off the floor so I leaned forward and kissed his knee. As I placed my lips against the protrusion that keeps him from still being able to still play basketball, he slapped me behind my head. My lip cut against my tooth in an instant. He held the back of my head and pulled it into his knee, giving the blood no place to go, letting it pool inside me. I remember that it was the simplicity of his acts of torture that made me fall so completely in love. I brought him whips and chains, he laughed at my weapons and he destroyed me with his elbow placed just right over my flesh. I offered him a pristine back to colour in whatever shade of suffering he should choose, he went after the scars and effortlessly openly them all up to bleed once more. Maybe, it's ordained, that we must fall for the people who change the rules of our games. Even now, it's not the grand productions of blades and whips that have my heart, it's this. It's the ease with which he came to unravel me; it's the demonstration of how easy it really is to hurt human beings, it doesn't take tools nor equipment, only a careful knowledge of where to strike, and when. It is nothing to him, to reduce me to rubble, it takes barely any effort. Everytime he touches me, it's like he is picking me up off the bathroom floor, where he last left me, brutalised and incapacitated. It takes no work to destroy a broken thing.

He pushed his knee into my broken mouth, ordering to me keep kissing it while he struck me with his ossified will. I thanked him for an imagined kindness. Another man may have taken me with gentle passion or pleasured my broken bits for momentary relief, but he's not that man. He is an old fantasy come to life to haunt me. Old fantasies are like old books. They're filled with familiar monsters and the unfriendly etchings of yourself from times gone by; you always know how the story is going to end but you can never stop going back. He is an old fantasy I cannot stop reading. An old book, that I once wrote.