A Penitent Season: Day 7

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.

.....

Day 7

I am struggling. It's not really because of the physical assault, it's more about the ability to continue to focus on this endeavour with such intensity while still existing in the world. It's a little bit difficult. The rest of the world continues to exist and I'd like to pause it all for just a little while. I'd like to pause the e-mails in which I have to pretend that I care about semantics, budgets and politesse. I'd like to pause the need to eat and drink to be able to continue living. I'd like to pause the interactions that people feel comfortable having with me because I am a human being who exists in the social sphere. I am unable to summon the ability to care about these things. Last night, a friend of mine called to ask me if I wanted to join her at a women's day walkathon (hosted by an "NGO" that services the army, with which I have a huge socio political problem and about whom I wrote a series of exposés that got me the most hate, and the most support, for any work I have ever done in my life). I told her I did not wish to go because of who was hosting the event, she asked why, I told her it was a matter of principle. That was as far as I could have communicated. She kept pressing for more information, like I had to make a case for declining an invitation to an event.

Most days, I would be happy to explain the politics that keep me from participating, but I was so tired by the conversation the moment I saw my phone ring. I want everyone, but him, to forget that I exist for another week.  See, that was the benefit of the basement, I really was removed from the world. This is a different kind of prison, the kind I am constantly carrying with me but my shackles are invisible, I cannot explain to the world that I am carrying out a sentence. I'm doing two weeks of hard time and I cannot pretend to care about the explanation someone needs for my principles enough to provide it. That world feels alien to me right now. As the days go by, every single interruption, from phone calls to dinner to having to stand on my feet, feels like an interruption that is harder and harder to bear. I'd much rather be chained up and unable to communicate. I am so reactive to the disruption. I was genuinely annoyed by this phone call, I felt the annoyance in my body, my head hurt when I had to put dinner together and more when I had to feed myself, I am even finding it harder to be at the gym, not because I don't want to workout but because there are too many people around me, pretending the world is just a normal place, and I don't want to be reminded of that. The pedestrian is grating. The diurnal routine feels like an affront. Mundanity feels like a bird chirping right outside my window at 5 AM. I wish the sun would stop rising.

I am more reactive to the world than I have ever been before, it's as if my emotional range expanded overnight, instead of feeling only good, bad and horny (which is a mix of good and bad), I am feeling *everything*. Perhaps that is the challenge on which I should focus, how does one remain inside oneself when the world insists on continuing to be a sonorous echo of itself? I used to think the only way to do that was to make your insides louder than the outside, but it isn't working.

I wonder, maybe, if it's time to allow myself silence.

...

I barely reacted at all when he fucked me this morning. It felt like tragedy. I could see myself, lifeless and resigned, woefully draped over the bed like the bloodied saree of a martyr, but there was no fight in me at all. That did not make it easier to bear, I really think either he needs to stop hurting my cunt for a bit or we are about to find out how traumatic gynaecological emergencies are dealt with in this state. I want that to be hyperbolic, but I vacillate on whether it really is.

The brokenness is welcome though.

I can feel it in my eyes. I can feel my resignation taking over my body and mind. There is nothing I can do. In the first days, I was excited but unsure I could actually do this, in the couple that followed, I was feisty and determined, in the couple after that I was resolved and scared, but now I am just broken. There is no way out. I am in the middle of the maze and I have to do as much work to go back as I have to do to finish. It's Wednesday. It's the curse of the middle. There is no place better to go. I am stuck in a series of Wednesdays. This is the nightmare I should have seen coming.

...

There was an upside-down teddy bear drying on a table in my neighbor's yard. The first time I saw it, three days ago, I felt like it. I felt like a cherished object left in an intermittent state imitating discard while it recovered from its cleansing. Yesterday, I felt envious of it. It was forgotten, in the way that things can only be forgotten when you know exactly where they are, I wanted to be forgotten like that. If he forgot me, he wouldn't hurt me anymore. It's gone now. It has been inevitably remembered and brought back to its place. I long for other states, but that is where I'd like most to be. It's not terrifying anymore. I am not afraid anymore.  

In the early afternoon, he was sitting on the bed and I was on my bench, we were talking, as we do every single day of our lives, I was telling him that I no longer feel the sense of dread with which I have been living for the past few days.

"It will be back, you're only halfway through your penance," he said, smiling at me with half his mouth, "It's easy to not be afraid of the dark in the afternoon."

"I'm afraid of the afternoon," I told him.

I am unable to communicate what it is I feel. It's one of those emotions that can only be demonstrated by action and lust. I want it to be night. I feel encumbered by time, objects and space. I wish there was no visual burden for me to bear. I wish this closet didn't have these handles that shine so brightly in the day. I wish I could tuck this bed into the wall. I want to throw all the books out of his room. I want it to be so dark the only way to see is artificial light. I want there to be nothing, nothing but us, not even sound. Every sense I possess is overstimulated, but I don't feel dread. I don't.

"What do you feel then, if not dread?" He asked.

"Resignation, but it's not sad," I told him, "There is a moment when you accept that the things that are going to happen to you, will happen, no matter what you do, you're powerless, I see that now."

"That does sound sad though," he said, clearly aroused by my despair, which is my favourite thing about his arousal, it digs deep.

"It's not," I told him, "Because after you really accept that you are powerless, you don't have to care about what is going to happen anymore."

"So you don't care anymore?" He asked, reaching over to touch my face.

"No, destroy me, I deserve it and even if I don't it is not for me to decide," I responded, "Really, there's only one actual problem I have."

"What is that?" He asked, truly hoping he could solve it.

"The sun," I told him.

The bright, natural realism of the sun has got to go. The artificiality of a dim, yellow dust-covered lightbulb that should have been changed years ago is the lighting in which my story makes most sense.


...

I feel a sense of quiet devotion. I cleaned our room, changed the sheets, removed all the clutter from every corner of the room and prepared the space for him to destroy me later. He is planning something elaborate and extensive and I like being made to clean the space where I will be massacred. It's like having the criminal prepare their own noose for slaughter. There is something to me

As I prepared the room, he sat on the bed cutting a section of white cloth from an old apron. I wrote on it.

*I deserve to be punished.*

...

"Are you upset because I don't seem to be suffering?" I asked him, as he dropped a mallet on my thighs, repeatedly, from two feet.

I had been completely quiet all evening. I think a part of it was caused by the fact that there was this cloth covering my mouth. It didn't keep me from talking, it wasn't inside my mouth or pulled over my mouth in any way that truly impeded speech but sometimes the suggestion of silencing is enough to silence. Sometimes just because you hold a finger up to your lips, the silence feels enforced. When I finally spoke, I was surprised that I could speak.

"I am upset that you don't seem to be suffering," he said, dropping the mallet from a greater height.

It hurt very much. However, as I looked back, to all those days of screaming, fighting and crying, I was confused by my own behaviour. I realise that I have just adjusted to the intensity of his unrelenting attacks and the state of physical intensity, but despite that knowledge, I feel like a fool for how I was acting earlier. Screaming, snivelling, crying. How can you even be sorry if you fight your sentence? If you keep hoping to stop it, if you scream and fight your suffering, are you really as repentant as you should be? I feel that now, because the dread has been deracinated from my heart and in its wake it has left a heartbroken resolve to make a play for some kind of dignity in this suffering.

I sat through it quietly as he stitched the piece of white cloth that read, "*I deserve to be punished*" over my mouth. He put five stitches on either side to hold it in place. Each time he put the suture needle through my skin, then through the cloth and then back through my skin again, I expected myself to squeeze the arms of the chair, grit my teeth or whimper out loud, but the needle felt like it was passing through water. I couldn't get enough of it. I love the pain of a needle going through my skin and because of the surgical skills he acquired at his job, I enjoy watching how he works with needles and sutures. The way he does knots and patterns is so wonderfully alien to me, I can marvel at it like it's magic. I would never let anyone else do it to me, but it would be foolish not to reap the benefits of a maxillofacial surgeon as the partner of a facial-abuse fetishist.  

You realise life doesn't, or shouldn't, come around so fucking poetically perfect, right? That's what is most terrifying about being with him. I am often left taking a step back, looking at us, and wondering — How is this possible? How is it actually possible that we found each other? I spent my life seeking the romance of a fist to my face and then I met a man who could break my jaw, and then fix it. He could x-ray my face on an annual basis and study the long-term effects of slapping on the facial bone-structure and it would genuinely benefit his academic pursuits. I have the freedom to trust him so completely with my face because he's the act expert on facial trauma. Tell me how I should justify not believing in magic? I cannot.

After he finished stitching my plight to my face, he dragged me from the chair to the bed and brought the mallet. He began to drop it on my thighs. Over and over. The pain was emanating from deep inside, it's very different from the pain of a cane, it bruises much deeper, it gets to the skin much slower, but it debilitates much quicker. Yesterday, maybe I would have screamed and begged, but today, I couldn't remember why I would do anything but silently endure every single thing he gave to me. If for no reason other than the fact that I must need to be punished for all the screaming and the noise to which I have subject him for days. I wanted him to know though, I wanted him to know that I was holding my silence for him. That is why I asked him about his feelings about my lack of apparent suffering, I was hoping he would tell me that he knew I was suffering, but I was just determined to behave. Instead he said that he was upset I wasn't suffering and it made my brain itch. How can you stitch someone's face and then drop hammers on them and actually believe they aren't suffering? How can you? How?

"Do you know why I appear not to be suffering?" I asked him.

"I probably am not hurting you enough," he said, "Your skin and your tissues aren't reacting to this instantly, I cannot see your suffering, so it doesn't feel like suffering."

I broke into tears in one second. The moment he said it I started to cry like a child with big, fat tears that rolled down the sides of my face and into my pigtails like a river in the monsoon. How could he really think he wasn't hurting me enough? Is my suffering really only visible to him through my skin and my tissues? Can he not see it in my adherence to the silence he imposes upon me? Can he not hear it in the quickening of my breath? Can he not sense it in my performative resolve? Does he not see me at all? Am I nothing to him but flesh? Deep inside, in the place still capable of reason and deconstruction, I knew he was only saying that to hurt me. I knew he wanted to disregard all that I was doing to please him just to punish my soul for all its hopeless little errors over the past few days, but in the shallowness of my heart, I couldn't see that. All I could think about was that he didn't see me, he didn't see any measure of a person in me at all. Nothing but skin and tissues. Disappointing skin and tissues.

I cried so much I think I scared him. He leaned over to me and watched me as I began to mutter incoherently. I oscillated between apologies for being perpetually disappointing and questions about what I had to do to finally earn his approval. There was such rawness to my heart, such sorrowful vulnerability, I think I stopped making sense. Yet even as he spoke to me about my little outbreak, and I demanded with unearned valour that he see me, he kept beating me. The last time he stopped, I remember him coming over to sit beside me, I remember talking for a very long time. I remember crying so much, my eyes still hurt. I remember begging him not to apologise for hurting my feelings. That's why they exist. My feelings exist for him to hurt. I just wish he had understood them quicker.

Yet, I knew, didn't I? I knew we would get here, to this place where playing with my broken body would feel so quaint and juvenile, I cannot even remember why it hurt so much when he beat my back or my breasts or my thighs.

It has nothing on this.

He broke my fucking heart and I can't even scream. I won't. I must grieve hope in silence. The sun is gone now, isn't it? It's what I wanted.

...