A Penitent Season: Day 11

Note: This is a series of 14-days of erotic penance written in real-time available exclusively to my patrons. It's our observation of a real fucked up version of Lent. You can access the entire series at this tag.

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Day 11

It feels like this began a very long time ago. My memory of the last week is nebulous, I cannot recall incidents, but I can recall sentiments. It is a maudlin memory. Yet it also, isn't. I feel detached from my worries of the previous week. They seem, quaint. You know how people who live in big cities visit little towns and think the difference in architecture and socio-cultural habits must mean that bucolic life possesses simplicity? My worries from last week feel *simple* in quite that way. I am projecting an aspirational simplicity on them that makes the present feel like it makes more sense. I find those worries so strange now. I was worried the world would come to an end because I allowed myself intense, decedent indulgence. I was so stressed because I overslept. I was so concerned that relaxation would teach me the lesson that it's okay to waste away and do nothing. Now I am worried about something else.

I'm not sure if I can get through this, but that problem is easily circumvented by him, I could only bring us this far, he has to take us the rest of the way, and I know he will, that's not my real worry. My real worry is that at the end of this road, I cannot go back to the place where we started or the person I was when we began. It's not all to do with these two weeks and the erotic structure of them. Far be it for me to pretend that two weeks of getting my ass kicked and my heart broken turned me into a different person. That's not how it works, but there is a reason why we do certain things in our lives at certain times. Sexuality, like everything else, is a construct that can help restructure your thoughts in a way that you can get more from them, like shuffling the letters of a word-finding game, but it is rarely the problem or the solution. It is not important what happened to me this week or the last, it's important why I chose to do this now. It was a declarative and performative act of transformation. I am not just ready to be a different person, I want to be as well.

The last eighteen-months of my life have been significant. I would say they were difficult but when I look back through them, I see less of a struggle and more of a process of comprehension. In all the time I have spent in all of these years worrying about being perfect, irrevocably productive, the most helpful, the most sorted, the least problematic, unwavering in my stability and tempered in all emotionality, I failed to see how much systems of worry were a warning to start worrying about the right things. I didn't see it until a few things brought it to my attention. Well, two things. My natural response to professional success being a reason to hide and apologise was the first. My enthusiasm to make the lives of people who betrayed or hurt me easier by taking my emotions out of the picture and thinking only about their pain instead was the second. In response, I worried that I would stop doing things and working hard because having them be seen and appreciated felt so much like fraud. I also worried I would correct for being hurt by becoming a person who was incapable of trust or compassion. I was so worried about those two possibilities I doubled down on everything I was doing. I worked so much through the months of January and February, I started to lose my mind. I tried so hard to be a good, upright person, I started to undermine what I really am (which is not to say I am not "good," it is to say I was compelled to be inauthentic so I could still keep feeling like I was still a kind, compassionate person).

The truth is, and perhaps this is the truth for all of humanity, no matter how lofty and convoluted our thoughts, human pain and problems are pedestrian. I am just scared. That is all. I am scared of living in a world I cannot perfect — a world in which I will be hurt, I will win and lose, puppies will die and I will as well — and cannot control. I have been calling these weeks a penance, but that is the hook to get someone like me to do this kind of emotional work, it's really not about repentance as much as surrender. To him, but he is a symbol, we all are. This is my surrender to life. Life will happen. I will have to take it. Maybe I shouldn't worry I cannot go back to the world as it used to be, because when I really think about it, that's true every day. I cannot change that.

My heart is full of pain, but this curated, deliberate pain is a cushion I needed to put there, because I knew, I was about to fling myself, repeatedly, off the roof. Yet I don't feel anymore like I am falling, against all odds, I seem to have taken flight. The world is so hard, but everyday, it is laden with joy. With love. With sentimentality. With the endless opportunity to twist myself into knots to see what I become. There is no perfection to be had except for that. There is no perfection at all. There is no schedule but life and death. Everything in between could be freedom, if I let it be.

And I will.

...

He chained me naked to my desk while I worked. He chained me to the bed while I slept last night as well, but he does that a lot. We take intermittent breaks from chaining, but for the majority of the nights I have spent in his bed, I have been chained to it. This is different. He says I have to be chained and naked no matter where in the room I go from now onwards until the end of this period. If I am done with work, I have to tell him, and he will choose whether to untie and relocate me or not. If I need to leave the room or talk to someone who can see me, I have to ask, he will permit me to leave or dress, but I have to ask. I can dress if he permits me to leave the room, in which he says he will be locking me if he departs, I can dress, but as soon as I enter, I must get naked again. Usually, I am not comfortable with this kind of control over my life,  the kind that spills over into spaces where I am completely autonomous — work, parenting, politics, society, other relationships — but I am not opposed to being subject to a temporary form of this control in the interest of supporting him to create a particular mindspace for me. I cannot do slavery with such regulation as the norm, not least importantly because this pedantic form of control is too time-consuming for its reward, but I am eager for it in intermittent bouts of intense adherence to an expanded code. With him, and really only him, I trust that it is not driven from actually wanting to turn me into a different person, teach me to be or live better, or usurp my agency. It's also because such detailed instruction and adherence only works if it is constantly witnessed, and without the complete presence of both people, in the way we are present right now, it turns into a list of tasks to undertake. I don't like task-based submission. I like ritual, but ritual happens, tasks are assigned. He is enabling my immersion and I appreciate it.

It makes my pussy throb.

I don't like to use that term, but I do use it sometimes. I call it cunt when it makes me feel powerful, I call it pussy when it makes me feel weak. When it is in pain or responding to pain, it doesn't make me feel weak, it makes me feel assaulted in strength, destroyed at my best and even when I succumb to the pain and accept it as a non-optional state of being, I still don't feel diminished. I still feel like I am in control of it. In arousal, though, it makes me feel weak. I cannot fight it and, slowly, like an insidious poison, it turns me into a creature of such basic need. It doesn't make me feel powerful, it robs of me whatever magnificence I see in myself that allows me to be confident, and replaces it with the most primitive of functions. It feels like it is no longer in my control, and then, the word *cunt* stops being the one that occurs to me naturally.

It feels like a pussy now.

My pussy is throbbing.  

I realise I am no longer used to being naked all the time. Before the child came to live with us, and also back when I used to live alone, I was always naked at home. It had no meaning. My nudity was not a revelation but a constant condition. I'm still naked more often than the average person and I sleep naked as well, but it's different now. Now, I undress when he is going to beat or fuck me (or I am changing or showering).  In the past ten days, especially, his instructions about my clothes have been very specific. Usually if I get rid of them at seven because he was touching me, I wouldn't put them on again until the next morning, even as our activities change. Now, he has been telling me, explicitly, not just when to take them off, but also when to put them on. I didn't realise that the instructions to dress and undress had become so intertwined in his intention for me that I was aroused by the instructions themselves until he told me I wasn't to wear clothes anymore inside our bedroom.  

Now I feel so aware of my nakedness.

And my pussy is throbbing.

...

He chained me to the foot of the bed and locked me in the room, but first he fucked me. I finished working at my desk and told him so, he walked over to me and stood before me. He pushed me back into the wall as I sat at my bench and looked at my body. I lowered my gaze and let my hair fall around my face. He bent lower so his fingers could reach my pussy.

"Your cunt throbs for the wrong reason," he said, pushing his fingers inside me, one by one, bracing to fuck me with them like an unforgiving piston, "Put your arms up against the wall."

I raised my arms up over my head as he began to fuck me with his fingers, it felt uncomfortable to be in that position but not because of any strain it may have put on my shoulders, it felt uncomfortable to be positioned, in such specificity, for my punishment. It feels like more bodily exposure than just being naked. As he fucked me I got a cramp so severe in my abdomen that I fell off the bench and doubled over on the floor. After confirming that I wasn't injured, he let me writhe until the cramp had passed, and then he untied me from the desk and dragged me to the foot of the bed. He chained me back up and put his cock in my mouth. I thanked him before I began my usual devolution into the drug of its scent. I am expressing more gratitude than regret and amends today, I am expressing gratitude for everything, and it feels good. I know he likes it, he keeps trying to teach me gratitude, and then he keeps punishing me for not learning it, but this seems efficient, teaching me to be grateful for the punishment itself.

He fucked my cunt for way too long. My knee was resting against the chain once he bent me over the bed and by the time he was done, the impression of the chain had sunk in so deep, it looked like a permanent indentation. I had no determination not to scream or cry, but I had no impetus to scream or cry either. Despite being so loud on the inside, I felt so quiet as he fucked me. After he was done he made me clean myself off his cock and lick up all the cum that had dripped onto the bed. He smacked my face for getting his bed dirty, I apologised and thanked him for allowing me on the bed to be fucked. He asked if I had to pee and when I nodded he unchained me and made me crawl to the bathroom behind him. He held onto the chain as I urinated. It felt wrong, embarrassing, then he brought me back to the room and chained me up again.

Now he's gone.

And I am locked in here.

I wonder how long it will be.

...

There is very little noise left in my life. My concern that I would be unable to be productive or work hard if I engaged in indulgences seems to have been unfounded, I am more productive than ever, and it's taking me less than half the effort. I've suspended routines, bed-times, wake up times and fixation, but instead of leading to nothingness, it has led to cutting out all of the unnecessary noise that cluttered my life. I feel no need for the visual stimulation of Netflix, I feel no desire to scroll through marginally funny internet nonsense in order to fall asleep, I feel no need to participate in social theatre, I feel no active worries and I am literally filled to the brim with ideas and creativity. I do what I feel like doing and maybe it is the years of training myself, or the fact that despite my lapses in judgement every now and then, the general design of my life has never strayed too far from being who I really am and doing what I really want, but my world has not fallen apart by loosening my grip around my throat. On the contrary, I feel like I am doing better than ever.

I went for a run this evening instead of going to the gym, just because I feel I cannot be surrounded by people who might talk to me for the next few days, but also because the pool is going to open in fifteen days and I have to get my stamina back up to where I left it at the end of last summer. I made it to three kilometres last summer, I am determined to make it to five this summer. My swim partner from last year turned out to be a bit of a creep. It's not really like we were friends or that we even coordinated our schedules very much, but we generally swam at the same time, and we both did long distances, so we just started reporting to one another. He's about fifteen or twenty years older than I am, married and Bengali. His name rhymes with Sparta so I've been calling him Sparta for a year now. I think he misunderstood my friendliness to mean I want to fuck him, you know, as men do, and now it's uncomfortable each time I see him. He leers.

It is so disappointing when men cannot have a platonic or friendly relationship with you just because they see you as having crossed the social boundary of gender-compliant camaraderie as a sign that you must be a loose woman who wants to fuck them. It's enough to make you want to never befriend a man again, really.

Maybe I shouldn't.

Maybe I should fuck Sparta.

I fuck men to teach them a lesson sometimes. The lesson that they should be careful what they wish for, because they might get it, and they may realise, they cannot handle it. They should have befriended the monster when they had a chance. I can be scary if you cross me.

Boo.

...

I fell asleep chained to the foot of the bed on the floor while I waited for him. I keep thinking I shouldn't be this exhausted, but something about this is fatiguing. I kept reminding myself not to fall asleep, but I did. I curled my knees up to my abdomen for warmth and drifted off so easily. It's hard to believe it takes me hours of concerted effort to fall asleep in a bed each night. I woke up with a start because I felt something tapping against my shoulder.

"Who the fuck told you that you could sleep?" He asked, as my vision came back to me, "I left you here to wait, not rest."

I was on the precipice of offering an apology for my display of tiredness but he pushed me onto my stomach and swatted my back with the three foot long bamboo stick he was brandishing. I kept thinking about that song, Chloroform Girl, and the sanguine expression and hymnal tone of the singer as he recited verses on verses about keeping a woman chained up in his basement. *Don't let me catch you sleeping again.* That song has haunted me before and at that moment, I couldn't precedent that it would haunt me again. It got stuck in my head, like an earworm and every single time he brought the stick down on my back, I started singing the chorus in my head, from the beginning, even if I hadn't gotten to the end. It started to drive me a little crazy, like the floor was spinning and I was walking in the opposite direction to keep the balance, as if I were on an acrobatic set designed by Yoann Bourgeois.

But I couldn't feel the pain.

I could hear the stick slamming against my back but I couldn't tell how much it was really hurting me, I may have asked him whether it was hurting very little or very much. He may have responded. Despite the absence of noticeable pain, I was terrified. I was more afraid than I have been on any other day, but I couldn't put my finger on the fear. I felt like I was chasing it around inside my head but each time I got close and leapt at it, it sprang like a mouse to the other end of the room, leaving me to crash face-first into the floor.

"If I asked you to stop, would you stop?" I asked him, all of a sudden.

"Are you asking me to stop?" He responded.

"I am not," I told him, "I just wanted to know..if I asked you to stop right now, would you?"

He was quiet for a moment. I am not entirely sure why I asked him that question. He has both told and shown me a hundred times over the past ten days that he won't stop.

"Yes," he answered at last, "If you asked, I would stop. Now you tell me, would you ask?"

"No, I couldn't ask," I replied as the fear started to make more sense, "I am not asking."

He continued to beat me and I started to cry. It felt like I had spent the entire day moments away from realising that if my captor left the door of the basement unlocked, I still wouldn't try to run and the moment of realisation dawned on me like an avalanche of tears. This entire day, all the hours spent locked inside the bedroom, naked and chained and assaulted, descended upon me in one fell swoop.

"Good," he said, "I would stop if you asked, but then I'd have to punish you for the guilt you would feel for asking, isn't it? It's best I keep beating you."

I straightened my back, got on my hands and knees and offered more of myself to him. Tears fell from my eyes straight to the floor. I cried until my eyes hurt even though I felt none of the pain in my body. How many tears are inside one person? I'm worried i'm about to run out of mine.

...