A Previously Loved Toy.

He pushed his hand down on my chest, and when it scared me enough to back away and gasp, he laughed.

"Who's going to stop me?" He asked, "No one's ever coming for you, my little orphan."

Orphan. Hearing that word made the sides of my lower lip curve visibly downward. As if a mascara frown had just been comically-drawn on my face. In my head I pictured myself as a sad clown, as if there is any other kind.  

"Oh, did I touch a nerve?" He asked, his eyes gleaming with the awareness of what he had done.

There is a vulnerable nerve, from so many years ago, when a man taught me that I may live in a house built upon the labour of my caretakers, but when he violated me inside it, no one would come for me. He would remind me, each time his pale, uncircumcised cock made its way inside me that I was an orphan, any love I got was already more than I could expect, and I would believe him. The evidence was all around me, and when he was done, inside me. I can't help but think of that man, when the one who owns me now, calls me an orphan. I can't help but smart, from the sting of deliberate cruelty.

He did, indeed, touch a nerve.

"But you have so many of those," he said, pulling me up by the collar and tracing his finger down from my neck, "I could touch you anywhere, and hit a raw nerve."

I suppose, there is some truth to that. Hundreds of people have written over me, and while some, like decent folk, scribbled with a pencil in my margins, others took a quill filled with my blood and wrote over my own words. It's unfair for me to judge, I desecrate all stories. I write in all my books in ink, in the middle of sentences. I dog-ear the pages. I rip the edges off the pages just to chew them. I put out cigarettes on dust-jackets, just because there was nothing else around. I take notes in the back, with offensively black ink. I leave them out in the rain, let them fall in a tub, toss them around even if they rip. There is no book I own that doesn't look *used*, there is no story I tell that hasn't been exhausted and violated to shreds for meaning, I have no right to be treated any different. I don't even want that right.

He put his hands around my throat, his fingers meeting at the horizontal, one-inch scar in the back of my neck. He rubbed it, gently, under one fingertip.

"So much damage...." he said, "Can't even choke you without wrapping my hands around damage."

It's an old scar. I had a strange piercing in the back of my neck, and the man who loved me then hated any changes I made to my body that weren't made by his total lack of control or mercy, so when he saw it, he ripped it out of my skin. I can never forget that pain, I can still feel it. Sometimes I think the immensity of pain is directly proportional to how long it takes you to process it, this happened eleven years ago, and I am still processing it. I am still not ready to experience that pain, it makes me feel sick like you do after you've had so much vodka and so little sleep that you're convinced the faint sheen of cold sweat on your body is the physical embodiment of what a dream feels like. I felt exactly like that, as he squeezer the old scar between his fingers. I would have cried, but he let go of my thoat and moved his hands lower on my body. Down my sides, and down to my thighs. His fingers lingered over the barely perceptible bump over my right femur, and then moved past it to all the different scars on my thighs.

"So much wear," he said, stroking them underneath his fingers, "A half-filled canvas is what you are, but it's been painted by so many, one wonders if it's worth it to even finish it."

I knew he didn't mean that, and maybe that's why that one hit the hardest. He doesn't believe he is finishing the work of another, he believes he is doing it over. Gathering all the elements he finds when digging through the dirt and putting them together to see what unholy abomination I could be. He makes me feel like my leg was cut off and sewn to my arm, my eye to my knee, my heart to my cheek, and my humanity to the gutter. It's not liberating, as I am told it should be, not at all, but it's entertaining to see what I might do or who I might be after the psychosexual surgery.

He pushed me back into the wall. It was cold. I hate that about walls, I wish they were warm. Wall, chains, lube. I wish all of it was warm. I used to like the coldness of all of these things, a long time ago, and I'm not even sure when I stopped, but now, everytime someone pushed my naked back into a wall, I wish it were warm. His fingers were cold too, as he shoved them between my legs and grabbed me like a savage who had never touched a cunt before.

"So much fucking use," he said, "It's too bad because it didn't actually teach your cunt to work better, it's almost unusable."

He did an impression of me crying, meant to imitate my reactions when he fucks me. It was below the belt, and simultaneously it was rather impressive that he would strike me like that. As two brains, I respect the game. As a human being, I can't believe the casual atrocity he'll inflict just to elicit a little hurt. As his slave, I live for the moments where he shows me just how much I will bear.

"To say nothing of the rawest of nerves," he said as his finger pushed against my asshole, "You're just completely ruined in that area."

It's true. That part of me is ruined, and the sad thing is that the brutality and thoughtlessness with which it was ruined are things I still crave in exactly that way, but my body can't take it, I can see him looking at the girl I used to be when he pushes up against my ass. I can see him looking at my terror, for another man, still lingering on my skin like the smell of old garlic, when he invades the spaces in me that haunt me, like an attic in an abandoned home. He locks me in there with the ghost that will never leaves, and smokes cigarettes right outside the door as I scream. Then he takes me back out and tells me how poorly I'm doing.

"It okay," he said, stroking my face with the same hand that was inside me, "I knew you were previously-loved when I decided to keep you."

Previously-loved.

What a terrible way to put it, so accurate yet so misleading, it's almost sarcastic just in and of itself, yet the aesthetic describes me almost perfectly. I can clean up for a podium or a paycheck but if you look closely enough I'm not built of my virtues, I'm made of the broken spaces in between. The scar on my jaw. The holes in my heart. The brokenness in my cunt. I can wipe away all signs of the use and wear, but if you take away the pretty words and raggedly clothes with which I cover myself, it's all there. All over me. I wouldn't call it love, that thing that left all of this wear on me, but only because I cannot speak for them, for me it is exactly that. I don't know if monsters can love, but I know I loved them. Previously.

"It's better though, it's better to own a used toy," he said, pulling my hair from both sides of my head, "It's much easier to break you, because you're not worth very much, are you?"

........