A Penitent Season: Day 5

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 5

I had a little bit of a breakdown last night. He said he saw it coming a mile away but I didn't see it coming at all. I wonder if I should believe him. I cried a great deal, and oscillated between intense sexual arousal and terrible emotional turmoil. I realise that sounds exactly the same as my constant state of being these days, but it was different. I asked him if he still loved me. Why would I ask him that? It's so embarrassing to have emotions out loud, like taking a piss in public, in the middle of the town square, into a bucket placed between your feet, while everyone watches.

I once read some erotica about something really similar. It was about a woman who had been sentenced to public humiliation by a court of some kind of law in an alternate world order. It may have been a futuristic dystopia of some kind but the punishment for the iniquity of women had the flavor of medieval times, a lot of times the depiction of the future in pop culture feels like it is informed too heavily by the past. I understand it a little bit, if we could write the future, wouldn't we be able to predict it more accurately as well? In the story, this woman was to stand naked on a stage in the town square, her hands tied up and her legs, there would be a bucket in the middle of her legs but she could only pee a little at a time, there was a specified amount and the bucket was marked. There was a mandatory amount of water she had to consume over the course of the hours she would be there, but she could only expel a certain quantity. It was very specific. It made me uncomfortable, but it also taught me that good writing is entirely about specificity. You dig, dig, dig until you get to a place of exactness. Exactness is evocative. Exactness hurts like a blade, the pain is granular, it's deep. You can locate it with complete accuracy.

Emotional exposition feels like that because I know in explicit detail exactly what was driving the vulnerability that made me ask him if he still loves me.

"So am I going to have a breakdown every four days, you think?" I asked him after my tears had been contained by his tenderness.

"Probably," he said, "It could be more often."

It could, couldn't it? Really, what am I doing? This imposition of supplicant remorse and overwhelming physical experience that I have placed on myself in the name of an erotic exploration of the soul is so wild and untamed. My body is easy, it will take what it is given, but my heart is cracking. Even when you know in your bones that you are loved, such cruelty is so hard to accept as a temporary condition. It's like Sirius, our dog, whenever we leave the house without her, she doesn't ever believe that we will come back. I am worried my heart won't ever return from this trip. Yet I want to take it, because strife is so alluring. And strife in this form, it feels more meaningful, even though it isn't, nothing is. I've been reading The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus (and I wish more polemics were written in our times), and I find some truth in the idea that the acceptance of the meaninglessness of all of life is a mindspace that is dangerous to individuals when contemplating whether one should live or not. I refrain from discussing this subject out loud around too many people because it's so fraught, perhaps as it should be, but it's one I think about a lot.

Of late I am so bothered by the people in the world. I have reached the place where I find it unbearable to have to parse through the words of people to find their intentions. I am told my expectations of honesty are unreasonable, and maybe they are, but dishonesty when it is directed at me feels like an attack, and because my emotional structure is how it is, I can never tell I am being attacked. I just feel, uncomfortable. I feel unable to form new relationships with people, I feel unable to commit to old ones in the same way, I would talk about it with everyone, but people don't talk truthfully. They make excuses and they build tales, and these words feel like acid being poured into my ears. I also feel watched and studied, not just by the people in my life, but also by the people I don't know are in my life. I was deeply impacted by being plagiarized last year and I have since discovered that it wasn't a single incident by a single person, it was happening in a pattern, people don't steal exact sentences and words, they steal ideas and identities, they pose as me sometimes. There is a type of identity theft that isn't about papers and credit cards, but about essence. I didn't think I would ever care, or even notice, something like that but I care and I notice, and it makes me wonder about myself. Why do I believe I own a patent to myself? To my work even? There is nothing special to me, why does it matter if my inane generic nature was robbed? For a person so allegedly committed to detachment, why do I care?

I've always let people take from me, anything they want, they can have a jacket, my earrings or an idea I may have had, I give it freely, but perhaps it is the fact that I wasn't asked, I was taken. I am attempting to recover from these feelings of alienation from the world but I worry that this was always the eventual destination for me. I am no longer able to show myself, really share myself, with the people who are actually, physically in my life (well, except him, and the kid) and it's not because they aren't interested or there, it's because I know I will not be understood. It's not a matter of intelligence or interest, maybe it's a matter of insanity, but I feel like the only person in a town who doesn't speak the local language. I am not sure what that has to do with the numinous suffering I undertake, but maybe it's just to demonstrate that this is what I would rather do with my time. It's tumultuous, but at least when it comes to my intentions for myself, I know them.

...

I kept the tip of the cane after it broke off while he was caning my thighs in the afternoon. He gave it to me, I am certain he didn't mean to make a present of it, but as soon as he handed it to me it acquired some value that made me want to hold on to it. I held it to my chest and I went to use the toilet, and then I put it in my drawer. Maybe I would like to imbibe it with my blood, or my tears. I don't know for sure what I would like to do with it, but there is something, it will reveal itself in time, but I do wonder why I hung onto it in such a furtive manner. As if revealing to him that I did would get me in trouble.

I think I am adjusting to the harsh nature of the beatings he is delivering to me these days, I was very calm while he caned me. He was very quiet. I was talking to myself about the need to react, not out loud, but emotionally within myself, to every single blow. Sometimes, it gets a little bit pedantic, when I internally ask questions like — Why did you hit me there twice in a row? Why didn't you switch sides in keeping with the pattern? Why did you hit me so much harder than the last blow? These questions, usually come up in the first ten minutes of being hurt, before one slips into the space of silence that is evoked only by pain, but even in those ten minutes it is clear how they are borne from a need to wrestle for control. Either someone else is allowed to do to you as they please or they aren't. Either you are available to be impacted by the influence of another, or you're not. If I am, these questions are futile. I would like to erode this need to question, even internally, in the interest of a conceptual idea of freedom that could be real.

Would the pain feel any different if I didn't try to structure it in my head?

In the morning, right after we woke up, he fucked me. It was a kindness. I needed him inside me, I needed to feel his pleasure in me, as cold and dispassionate as his rituals of love-making are as they pertain to me, they are a semblance of normalcy. They're the intimacy that I understand. I think my cunt is swollen shut now, I am only exaggerating slightly, but I don't feel as helplessly horny as I did until yesterday. I feel determined, not to behave in a certain way, but to delve past the simplistic pleasure and pain of genital reactions. Today feels very internal, the voices inside me are louder than the world, and there is comfort in this retreat. I am fielding bigger questions, issues that are more uncomfortable. I wonder if it appears as if my sexuality is my means to introspection, it probably does, but it's not so linear. The intense immersion in a sexual construct allows me the space to delve completely into the effort to write it, I am alone in the lab with my microscope, and there are so many samples that have been unearthed by this persistent state of emotionality that I am consumed. I aimed to overwhelm myself and now I have, this state is what spurs me to write with such determined focus. It's the writing that allows me to introspect, the sexuality is the narrative within which I am conducting my research. It creates the dire straits I need to engage the most of me.

Is it that a little weird? Well, then it's a little weird. Perhaps it is time to stop aspiring to the normalcy that I have insisted is the most vital part of me because I want to make sense of my life. I want to look back at it and be able to say: *Oh it's just the usual stuff, it's like everybody's life*. There is a comfort to being included in the covenant of normal, especially for those of us who grew up and lived with life experiences that may have been somewhat harrowing. I just want everyone to know that I am perfectly functional as an adult and that there has been nothing in my life that is any different from anyone else's because any deviation from that means I must confront the abnormality of the circumstances in which I was born, raised, lived and hurt.

Perhaps it is time to stop fighting the strangeness.

Maybe I'm a little weird.

So what?

...

Ever since he has been off work and at home, I've pulled the armchair in our room to the front of my desk for him to sit at when I am taking a break from work but I'm not done working. A couple of days ago, I sensed that he may eventually experience, or may have already experienced, some emotional discomfort from enforcing the condition of continuous unrelenting excessive cruelty so, as a joke, I asked him to step into my office for a debriefing. The joke turned into an excellent and vital conversation about managing the expectations of one another and balancing them against our own needs and excesses. It created a space for us to step outside of the construct and communicate.

Today, I needed to be debriefed.

I'm fine. I am. I am just confronting something about myself that I have avoided for a long time; I am contemplating the validity of all the guilt that I have carried around my entire life. The fact that I am so committed to the suspension of disbelief around this endeavour, allowing myself to *know* and accept that everything I have ever done wrong, I am being punished for it now, I am paying for it, in a manner that I understand, has also allowed me to actually consider the source of all the guilt. To think about it without panic. To wonder if it is warranted. The act of direct suffering has made me see the possibility of exoneration, but more importantly, the futility of the standards to which I hold myself. The harshness of the expectations to which I have subjected myself.

I cried while I talked about it with him.

In my office.

It wasn't the kind of crying to which I am accustomed, I try to keep all of my expression of pain and emotion restricted to a sexual or artful realm, no need for it to get too person, you know, but this wasn't sexual. It was therapist-crying. It was the kind of crying you do when you finally allow yourself to be a human being for a minute and admit that you've been a tad hard on yourself. I'm realising that I straddle this line between the insanity allowed to artists and the extreme functionality expected from professionals, and in straddling it, I have lost some of my madness. I used to live a lot more intuitively. I worried less about being perfect but I have something in invested in proving, to the odds more than anything else, that people like me can turn out okay. That people like me, with all the rape and childhood abuse and domestic abuse and more rape and eating disorders and PTSD, can be perfectly functional. Just, perfect. Never miss a deadline. Always have a homemade cake in the fridge. Consistently there for my kid. Helping the entire community with everything. There when you need someone for support in the middle of the night. On top of what everyone needs. Fighting for everyone's rights. Caring for all the animals. Always achieving, never asking to be noted for it. I have to be perfect or the statistics win.

But seriously, am I really going to battle..statistics? Statistics do not give a shit about me. No one does, really, and I mean that in the least nihilistic way I have ever meant it. For whom, am I trying to be so perfect? For what? The artist demands something else from me, something that has always made me live my life more joyfully, it demands that I commit to my whims and my constructs, to my ideas and my creativity, to notions of erotic Lent, or weeks spent in communal hotbeds trying to find the version of God that's causing all the trouble and accidentally creating all this beauty. The artist has always demanded that I do what occurs intuitively, go where I think I need to go to create, put myself in whatever state I need to in order to be able to experience the exact realm of experience from which I wish to create. If that meant I should be a sex worker, i did it, because the artist demanded it. If that meant I should commit to being locked up in a basement, I did it, because the artist needed access to that voice. If that meant I should wake up and decide I needed to move to a different city the next day, I did it, because the artist needed to write there. I make concessions for the artist, because all of my joy is there. All of it. The artist is not afraid of pain. The artist is not afraid of life.

But this? Little miss perfect? She's afraid. Even when it comes to pain she wants to curate, manage, organise. When it comes to all of life, she wants to schedule. She wants to discipline the creativity and don't get me wrong, I appreciate some of this. Discipline is exactly what most creatives lack, it's what keeps the world from hearing their voices. Most writers spend 80% of their time thinking of writing, 10% of it planning to write and 10% of it writing. Little miss perfect gave me the habits that ensure I spend 80% of my time writing l, and both professionally and artistically, I have benefitted from that discipline. But, I may also have over-corrected and quashed some of my own freedom. The artist must have its madness, for soon enough, without it, it shall lose the curiosity and wonder that drives creation.

I have to give myself back the madness.

I have to cut off the infected leg.

Because what will happen, really? What will happen if I don't micromanage or try to micromanage every aspect of every part of the world that crosses my path every single day? If I don't make myself responsible for everyone's problems? If I try to exist in spaces without ensuring that I am always a non-issue? I want to exist in the lives of people without the right to have an impact, i dread the possibility that I could negatively impact someone. Who the fuck am I trying to be?

And why?

I am denying myself the most vital element of myself. The courage to live in all of life's extremities and insanities. The fearlessness with which I can approach situations because it matters less that I be comfortable, than I be privy to the state of existence, the entire life-experience that awaits me, when I allow myself to prioritise creation and discovery. From whom am I trying to earn this tag of normalcy? Just to be able to say that everything that happened in my life happens to everyone so I can keep feeling like I am okay?

I cried because I finally said it out loud. It wasn't okay. My life wasn't "normal." I will not fix it by forcing myself into social conventions that stamp me as upstanding, contributory and productive. You cannot fix the past. I do not wish to trying anymore. What would happen if I gave myself permission to be free? Is it insane that I want to do things — strange things, unusual things, difficult things, unprecedented things, intense things, things that cause debilitating change and unprecedented trauma — primarily because I want to joy of writing them? Yes, it is.

Why should I let that stop me?

Because will think I am crazy?

The thing is, they already do.

...

I felt an emotional lassitude after I returned home from the gym, I thought my heart was fatigued, but there was something I had been wanting to do all day. I went to the gym early, I rushed through my workout, because I wanted to come back home and polish all of his shoes. I wanted to buff and shine until my shoulders hurt. Until I could see the sparkle in the leather. I took them all out from the rack and placed them on the floor, I brought the polish and the brush. He watched me, silently bemused, for a while.

"What are you doing?" He asked, finally.

"I want to polish all of your shoes," I responded, because I could not, at the time, offer the essay-version of the answer.

"I'm not going to work though," he said, still unable to assess the situation, "Why are you polishing all my shoes?"

"I have to," I told him, "Please, may I?"

He nodded his head. I sat on the floor, resting my elbows on the stripes of the cane on my thighs from this afternoon, and one by one, I began to polish his shoes. I did the brogues first. He doesn't wear them very often, only with one set of uniforms, and he doesn't have to wear that uniform very often. Tending to shoes is not about leather for me at all. I don't find leather sexy, I don't think it is cool, I don't find it beautiful, I don't even know enough about the history or ritualistic maintenance protocols of leather. This is about shoes. Tending to his shoes means polishing them, tending to the shoes of another may mean something else. There is something religious about this for me even though I am not a religious person. The thing I like most about the religion of my father (which is Sikhism) is that prayer in the form of service is the most admissible and encouraged form of worship. Especially service that humbles you. So, at the Gurudwara, every person, is encouraged to serve the community through invisible, quiet acts of service. Serve food, wash the dishes, cut the vegetables for the food service, wash the kitchen floors. It's all necessary physical labour. You are just allowed to find work for yourself, expected even, they leave it out for the community to do, but you don't assert yourself to be recognised in your service at all. If ever anyone asks, "Who cooked this food?" you never answer with your own name, even if it was you. There is no social goodwill and because prayer of this kind is so normalised where we used to live (because of the majority religion being Sikhism), you are no better than anyone else for doing it.

The children were encouraged to do the shoe-service which is to organise, arrange and return people's shoes after they were done with prayers. I never used to go inside the temple because i've had an *opinion* on religion and God for a long time, but I loved doing the shoe service. I don't know why it is humbling to tend to people's shoes, it's possibly because of the least imaginative association with feet being the lowest of a person, but I still find it humbling. I will always do whatever a lover needs for their shoes.

He needed me to polish them.

Well, he didn't, when we first met, he was appalled at the idea that I polish his shoes. A month into dating, the morning after he had just beaten and fucked me for the first time (which, I still cannot believe he made me wait a month nor that I enjoyed it), it was Sunday, he pulled his shoes out and said he was going to polish them. I just had to do it. I asked immediately. I told him, immediately, that I would do it for the rest of my life. I know that's a bit much for a month of being together, but you had to be there, you would have seen we were already entrenched in forever. He was hesitant, the soldier's trepidation to let another do this kind of work is something I now understand, the cultural hypocrisy of families teaching men not to have women tend to their feet despite how women are treated in this country, is something I still do not understand, but neither reason was sufficient for me. I begged him to let me do it. He relented.

I did it wrong.

Actually, I had never polished a shoe before in my life. I'm dirty shoes and unironed shirts. That's who I am. There was never cause for me to polish my shoes nor those of anyone else so I thought all you have to do is coat it in a thick layer of polish and it's done. I liked it too, the matte-finish of the shoes, and I showed him with pride.

"But you didn't..you didn't polish them, my love?" He said, trying to be as gentle as possible.

"What do you mean?" I asked, "I did!"

"Do you...not know how to polish shoes?" He asked me, putting his arm around me.

I felt like a fool. Like an idiotic little girl playing with her mother's pearls.

"I will teach you," he said, taking the shoe from me.

He taught me. It didn't take very long, it's not a terrifyingly complex process. He showed me on one shoe made me practise the process, then he handed me the other shoe.

"Now do it properly or I will punish you," he told me.

He punished me. He punished me every single time I polished his shoes for the next year, I really thought I just couldn't, I wouldn't ever be able to do it well enough. His gaze was so exacting, always looking for the smallest flaw and finding it, but then after that year, he never punished me again for doing it wrong. He says I never do it wrong. I wouldn't dare.

I guess I wouldn't.

As I sat there polishing his shoes, I lost myself in them completely. I polished each shoe for much longer than it needed it. When I finished the brogues, I did the DMS. They are so heavy for shoes I could probably use them as weights in a punch. I sat them over my aching thighs and polished them with my aching shoulders. Finally, I did his combat boots. The ones with which he beat me so brutally ereyesterday. I couldn't stop polishing them. They needed the least work, because I had just done them so recently, but I wanted to spend all my heart on them. I didn't even notice him get up and walk over to where I was sitting on the floor.

"You've been polishing that shoe for a long time," he said to me, making me jump.

"Oh," I said, my manner so cloddish the boot stumbled in my lap, "I guess I..."

"Got lost in it?" He finished for me.

"Yeah," I responded, gulping, as if I couldn't augur the situation.

"It's okay," he said, bending to stroke my cheek, "I found you."

I was about to tell him that I love him, but he cut me off, and grabbed my hand.

"As much as I love to see you bleed, the polish on your fingers is my favourite thing to see," he said.

Should that have hurt?

It didn't.

...