Sixty-Five

There are three of me present here, outside of time in the breath between blows. we stand in the scent of pine and urine, in wet boots and shaking legs. Simultaneously, the me from before sits in the car rolling a cigarette and says – “i want You to push me. i want to find out what i can take. i don’t want You to stop no matter what i say or do.” they’re resolute, curious, eager. The me who exists only in the after stretches out on a damp picnic blanket, tears drying salt-stiff on their face, and their back feels like old cracked black leather left out in the sun. It’s hot, burning, throbbing, and their urge to touch it fights the urge to escape the agony. “i have loved You for as long as i have known You,” they say, fingers tracing Mx’s face, “but now i feel closer to You than ever.” The me of right now, the me who can’t see a future or remember a past and knows only pain and fear twists over its shoulder – hunched and animalistic – and roars as its throat cracks, “i fucking hate You.”

Friday is the game, Saturday the consequences. On Friday morning i make myself up in the bathroom mirrors and clip in coils of plastic hair, then hang a sign around my neck. “If this bimbo pig uses a word with more than two syllables, please put a mark on its body with sharpie. Thanks!”

Suddenly everyone wants to talk to me, it’s a hell of an icebreaker and, let’s be honest, at a kinky camping event every second person is a sadist looking for a reason to unclip the convenient sharpie and get me in trouble. i rack up black marks thick and fast. On a nettle foraging walk i reveal my experience of vaginal nettle stuffing, and everyone has questions – questions answered with words like “speculum” and “tingling”. The before me is carefree and laughs and says “fuck it, Mx, keep count” and speaks freely for about five minutes. There’s a me still to come who’ll hate them for that in almost exactly twenty four hours.

It hits when my cuffs lock around the tree. The reality. The fear. Breaths short. Pulse racing. The tallies on my arm, the texture of the pine bark, the gentle tug of leather cuffs on my wrists. Past me signed me up for this but they’re a thousand miles from here and it’s just me now alone in the woods with Mx behind me. There’s three of Them too, i suppose. The Mx from the car ride here pulls over before the turn and says “I’m really fucking nervous.” The Mx of later holds me close and says “I love you, I’m so proud of you,” over and over like a mantra. But this Mx is the monster. This Mx is vicious cruelty filling out Their flesh like an oil slick leaking in from another world. This Mx’s heart is not warm like the Mx of yesterday or tomorrow, this Mx is ice. They hold the veneer of Their other selves a moment longer to ask if i’m ready, and then again after a warm up with a soft flogger that does more to terrify me than it does to prepare me. “Are you ready?” The answer is no, i never will be, but i force out a yes.

There’s further warm up, this time with the whip. Time to process how it feels when it’s at Mx’s usual force. i start to wonder how much worse it will be – two times, three times, ten times? i can’t take it any harder than it is, surely. i start to cry.

“Are you ready?” again

“If You keep asking me that, it’s going to become a no real quick,” i say. The me who’s here now can’t say yes to this. Past and future me have that covered. For this little piece of disconnected time, cut cleanly and brutally from the whole, They entrust that yes to Mx. To hold, to take, to desecrate. In this moment i will know only no.

The me of the past falls into kaleidoscope. i’m thirteen feeling true helplessness and not yet knowing all the years i’ll spend making sense of that feeling and reclaiming it with teeth and claws and broken edges, snarling “mine”. i’m thirty-one tied to a table with cheap bondage tape saying no for fun for the first time, thinking “oh, fuck, i needed this.” i’m thirty-five smoking in the kitchen doorway with my love telling Them i want to find out where the limit is and if there even is one. i’m in a low-lit club under the lashes of Their whip sobbing and wanting it to stop but at the same time wanting more, more, more. i’m on O/our couch telling Them “consensual non-consent gives me permission to be ugly,” and They say back “seeing you release that is beautiful.” i’m in the tent and Mx shows me how hard full force really is when They bring the whip down on O/our airbed and i flinch, but still reaffirm that this is what i want. i’m thirty-four asking if They’re ready to go no safeword, and spending hours talking through what that means for U/us, how W/we’ll navigate it, how W/we define “too far”. Perhaps W/we can’t, perhaps W/we’ll know it when W/we find it, perhaps W/we never will. But what a journey to take with Them, with trust and love and just a touch of wild madness that carries U/us through bruises and blood and ultimately, inevitably, to the now. To the woods. To piss-soaked boots on the spongy ground and clenched fists cuffed to the unforgiving pine.

Sixty-five hits for sixty-five tallies for sixty-five words i’ll regret saying. The first hit feels like… there are no words. i didn’t know anything could hurt like this. The stinging fire burrows deep into me until it feels like it latches its venomous teeth into bone and the pounding heart beneath. It is unrelenting, unending, and then the second lands, the third, and i am pulled apart. i am pain and screams and “god, no, please, fuck, no,” anchored only by Mx’s harsh voice counting out the blows.

At ten, i lose control of my bladder. Piss floods down my shaking thighs and i still, just, have the presence of mind to part my legs to try to spare my boots. Too late, of course.

“Disgusting,” They say. my humiliation does nothing to deter the rest. “Eleven, twelve, thirteen…”

W/we move from the picnic blanket to the greenhouse of the tent in evening sun. i lie down carefully on the airbed and whimper as my back roars in response to the pressure. Here in the future all is quiet and soft and warm and still and W/we talk until the sunlight fades and the fairy lights twinkle into life above O/our heads. Mx’s hands are gentle, Their voice is soothing, and They hold me more than just in Their arms as W/we come down from the high. It isn’t roleplay, what W/we do, it’s something deeper and more urgent. Something more ugly and more beautiful. Show me the worst of You in trade for the most broken and breakable of me, and in the after place W/we become O/ourselves again while knowing that W/we always were. Those selves live in parallel within U/us both, the calm and the storm, the desire and the despair, the love and the rage. Their beautiful, vicious monster is there in Their laughter lines and kind eyes. my deep wounds and sobs that tear my vocal cords sink into the murk behind my dimples and my jokes. There are places in the ocean no human has ever seen, but in U/us those places call U/us with a haunting song only the most depraved can hear and drag U/us deep until W/we awaken the eldritch things that lurk beyond conscious thought. In the sunset W/we hold those horrors close and tame them in kisses that melt to more as the summer night closes cool and healing around this sanctuary.

“i fucking hate You.”

my voice breaks and i sag against my bonds, tears and snot and drool dripping from my lips.

“Then do fucking better,” Mx snarls. “This is your fault.”

“i know,” i sob. “i’m sorry, i don’t hate You, i love You, i love You…”

“Then learn.” They move behind me, and i feel more than hear Them positioning Themselves for the next hit. “Stand up.”

“No, please…”

“Stand. Up.”

And is it past me, future me, or me right now who obeys? The love, the dedication, the surrender so pure it eclipses every other thought? Some power i didn’t know i held steadies my legs, straightens my spine, trains my eyes to a broken branch of the tree. If i can focus on this one point, breathe it in, breathe it out, i can do this.

The count begins again, the fire, the despair, and i’m pleading unintelligible cries to the sky and the pines and the cruel God behind me. They tear into me with words and the whip and i am undone. Agony, emptiness, and i would do anything, say anything to make it stop – but past me took the word from me that had that power and future me will remember every blow and still not take it back because they remember this too. The love that overpowered pain and anger and didn’t mean the hate even as i screamed it out because Mx is the only one i trust to unmake me just like this.

Late night walking to the toilets W/we stop to stare up into the night sky and a light darts into view – impossibly fast, impossibly bright, arcing through the darkness between distant stars. Mx identifies it as the International Space Station – in time to stop my addled soup-brain jumping to aliens. W/we are impossibly small down here under infinity, specks of dust in the winds of forever. And in this moment – one among more than can be imagined – W/we are experiencing so much. The scale of it is beyond comprehension. And there amongst the vastness of it all is something humans made that seemed impossible once, orbiting U/us and disappearing out of sight behind the tree line. W/we are all what comes on the other side of “can’t” – a defiant scream into the void that swallows everyone and everything but in the flicker of O/our lives W/we refuse to be nothing and choose instead to feel every precious second. Who am i now, on the other side of “i can’t take this”? Who are They, in the space after “I can’t do that”? W/we are humans – impossible is what W/we chase.

“Sixty-three, sixty-four, sixty-five.”

i fall to my knees. There’s silence, stillness, and my tears and snot falling from my chin. Then Mx is on Their knees behind me, They’re holding me. i might say “thank You.” i might say “i love You.” i might say nothing. i can’t remember the words only the feeling – the intimacy like nothing i have ever felt. i remember leather sliding from my wrists. i remember walking back through the woods as if i’m in a dream. i remember lying in the sun, proudly showing friends the wings i earned in red and purple on my shoulders. The future me carries these fragments to another now-me, in the car ride home with a lingering ache in my bruised flesh and a throat torn raw from screaming, driven by a need to capture this while i still feel it all. i am not the same person i was before, i am something new. Sixty-five hits taught me that the limit of what i can take is not just further out than i thought possible, but may not exist at all when i am carried by trust that runs deeper than the oceans and is wider than the universe. With Them, for Them, i can take it all.