Beyond the Veil

I began my day with a reading courtesy of one of my friends from elementary school. We were two of the three black people in our class. Our dads became friends, so we ended up spending a lot of time together, until her dad confronted my dad about his trademark absentee parenting style. It had been a decade since we were last in the same room, but social media brought us together in recent years, and we’ve been keeping up with each other from afar via IG.

I don’t know if it’s age or wanting to believe in something that makes me feel mystical, but I’ve been feeling witchy lately. My sister is convinced all Scorpios are witches, and I’m a Scorpio sun, moon, and rising, if that’s meaningful to anybody. Lately I’ve been thinking about what my “powers” might be. Of course, I am the staunchest of skeptics. It’s hard for me to get into conversations of a grand purpose or universal order, because as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I think that it cultivates a harmful line of logic that those experiencing the worst life has to offer are somehow deserving of their circumstances, and their suffering serves a divine plan. Buuuut, for the sake of seizing a day where “the veil between the living and dead thins,” I’m going to play a game of suspended disbelief.

What if I am a witch, or at the very least an enchanter? Sometimes I feel that way when I handle romance. Love has always been easy for me. I have an intuitive sense with people almost immediately. A “yes” or a hard pass. This has made my personal sex and romantic life more or less seamless. I’ve gone from one healthy relationship to the next without incurring much bad blood. When I want somebody, I take them. I know how to harness my seductive energy, and it’s not by forcing people, it’s by presenting something so lovely they can’t resist a peek. It’s easy for me to read what people want in a deep way, the core of their desires. I also know how to love someone in an intoxicating way that scratches all the itches they didn’t even know they had. Mine is a poetic sort of love. For me, it’s a little bit mystical, a little bit art, and a little bit understanding the core of what people want. People are just grown babies, operating with the same basic desires more or less: to be held, touched, mirrored, attended to without having to articulate it, to be fed, followed attentively, and to be cradled in the gaze of someone who adores them. The other power I have is distance. I love to have my own space and privacy, and I give my romantic interests the same space and privacy. I would hate for anybody to go through my text messages, or to grill me about where I’ve been, with whom, doing what. I encourage people to keep secrets. I love getting a partner to divulge of their own volition, but I don’t pry. I don’t think I would be able to be with Hassan if I didn’t give him a very wide berth to be himself, to flirt with who he wants, and to be the slut he is. My final power is drawing people down to my level. I have a bit of a sedative effect on people who have intense energies. One of the weirder compliments I get quite frequently is how calming my voice is. It’s somewhere between a sleep podcast and a Disney princess. I could take a deep internal dive and explain how I came to develop this talent for calming tempestuous people from having to withstand my mother’s psychotic episodes, but that’s another story. For now, we are in the realm of magic, and this is one of my spells. If I were a witch, I’d be a love witch. Not like the movie Love Witch, although I did relate to the main character’s struggle as she enraptured men with her seduction spells only to find that she wasn’t that interested in them. But the love witch never found a love she wanted, and I’ve had many great loves. Maybe I have a fourth power, and that is knowing that in my life, I will have many great loves. I never wanted to have just one. I wanted many, each lasting only as long as I’m enjoying myself. Love is like water, it will slip through your hands no matter how hard you try to hold it. It’s a lot more fun to play in the water than to try and capture it in your hands. God, metaphors, why do I continue trying to use them? But anyway, these are the spells I cast for my witchcraft, and the remarkable thing is how well they work.

But seduction can be useful for more than love. You can seduce someone by presenting a compelling vision of the way the world could be. I think of my social media presence as presenting a few types of seduction: of course the images can be sexy, but the vision is what keeps people engaged.

During my reading this morning, we spoke a lot about my powers of mind, body, and soul. My mind, to convince and imagine; my body, to absorb and transmit energy; my soul, expanding beyond where I am now to a future where the current is pulling me in the direction of destiny. I’d just had a difficult conversation with one of my closest customers about my conception of myself. He said that I needed to open myself to the depth of my potential, that I was thinking too small. I’m a contrarian by nature. There are few statements I buy into without question. My first instinct was to resist his conception of my conception of myself (ha, what a sentence). But here I am, engaging with some magical thinking, and so I will consider what he said with as little bias as I can muster.

I have always struggled with the gravity of my own potential. It’s something I was constantly reminded of as a child, from elementary school through college. People would always tell me that I could do anything I wanted to, because I have the brain for it. I was repeatedly told that I was different than my peers, that I was special, and that I would succeed in whatever I chose. But nobody could pin down what I might choose. Some teachers suggested I become a lawyer, or politician. They told me I could be president one day, and that I should because I have vision and compassion. Others said I should pursue art and make my way to the Guggenheim. They sent residency information my way and connected me to artist mentors whose art mine thematically engaged with. Still other teachers told me I should go into academia, because I have a knack for teaching and critical analysis. I’ve been told that I should be submitting my writing, that I have a career in screenplays if I want. My mom wants me to run a nonprofit to combat poverty. My aunt told me I should become a doctor, because I’m a natural caretaker. Everyone has had some vision for the direction I should apply my “boundless potential”, and they have had no qualms verbalizing it. I don’t hate it. I’m flattered by the way people recognize that I have something to offer as much as it is a burden. It’s probably one of the bigger reasons that I’m a stripper right now. I didn’t want to deal with the gravity of everyone’s expectations after shouldering them for so long. I believe my work is totally valid and has its own gravity, but it’s so far from the path my teachers and mentors projected for me. It’s an under-explored wheelhouse, and I’m a trailblazer in my field, so I have a lot of freedom to approach it the way I want without worrying about measuring up to standards set by my predecessors. In a way, it is a safe choice. It’s also a choice that has made me happy and that has connected me to a community I vibe with on an ideological level. I’m flanked by rebellious, sexually liberated people and who wouldn’t want that?

But I could be living in the world of respectability. Or on the other hand, I could be living a louder debauched life. I could be as much of a regular whore as a media whore. I could be using every connection I have to the media industry as a stepping stone to my success. And maybe that’s what he meant in a way: that I haven’t fully given myself to what I want. I am stuck in a cycle of hesitation? Do I lack the willingness to explicitly push what it is that I’m “selling”? I am open, yet somewhat passive. Why am I not utilizing my powers of seduction when I know I can harness them for more than love?

***

I saw Rahi for our final session. I didn’t feel open to coming. I just wanted to feel. I wanted to enjoy nurturing touch. This month has been about my words catching up to me. I wrote my Rahi passages with the intent to send them to him. His eyes as a reader were always in the back of my mind as I wrote each passage. I promised myself I wouldn’t hold back too much. It was a recollection of my experience, warts and all. It was an incredibly vulnerable moment when I sent the document his way. I didn’t want him to think that I was criticizing his technique by standards he wasn’t aiming to meet. I wanted to convey my own internal turmoil and the way I dealt with meeting my body, which is at times a mystery to me. What I want is rarely clear, and over time it has changed drastically. I think I’m a sex positive person until it comes to my own desire, then everything is too embarrassing to even articulate. You’d have to hold a knife to my throat to get me to talk about what porn I get off to (although, Evan managed to pry it out of me one day, surprisingly without using a single knife). Writing erotica has proved more of a challenge than I ever expected because engaging directly with my fantasies makes me feel completely out of control. The world will see me, and that’s terrifying. I know that it may seem paradoxical, because I’m about to talk about a happy ending massage with anal play, but there is a line between observing something where I am not the primary agent, and out right declaring what fantasies play in my head when I touch myself.

Rahi was very warm this time. It was like a barrier had come down. He knew some of the deepest recesses of my mind. He knew how I theoretically wanted to be touched. He knew I’d pursued his services because I was horny. My desires were squarely in the room. After a quick vaginal steaming, I stripped down and laid out on the massage table. My back was tight. I’ve been sleeping wonky, and haven’t done much to look for a massage therapist. Rahi began kneading my back, and it was lovely. I felt the knots begin to unravel. I didn’t want to be as hell bent on an orgasm as before. If my body wanted to go there, I would, but my primary sensation that day was pain. My back hurt. My knees were tender. My cervix was bruised by a very enthusiastic GKM. I wanted to be nurtured. But I was also open to exploring my anus.

I remember the best experience I had with anal as clear as day. I was twenty-one, on summer break. My friend and I had taken a vacation to Brazil. I wanted to see the architecture in Brasilia, which is a very uncommon location to visit because it’s landlocked, quite arid, and a little bit culturally desolate. (And this is what I read from various Brazilian artists who created art work about the construction of their surreal alien-landing-pad of a city.) I remember reading one of them who said in essence that it’s so barren, that there aren’t even rats in Brasilia. But that was where we were beginning our journey. I immediately got on Tinder and matched with several people. One man promised to give me weed, but also warned me that weed is illegal and I shouldn’t be advertising that I wanted an illegal substance on my profile. Led by my desire for marijuana and sex, I met with the judge-y man. After a twelve hour day spent together, looking at the monuments, we ended up at his apartment. We showered together, and he took extra care to scrub my body. Then he gave me the best head of my life and brought life into my asshole like nobody had ever done before. After that encounter, I couldn’t masturbate without anal stimulation for a while. Part of it was accidentally falling in love with him, the other part was that, as Rahi loves to say, “the anus is an underutilized pleasure center”.

For the anal exploration, Rahi had me lie on my side with my top knee tucked toward my chest. It was a bit more like his vaginal mapping, in that he explained where his fingers were at any given time according to quadrant, depth, and proximity to each sphincter muscle. It was interesting. I found myself focusing more on calming my nervous system rather than diving into the pleasure aspects. Like most people, I’m self-conscious about the cleanliness of my butthole, and a lot of times anal penetration feels like I’m in the middle of shitting but can’t quite get it out. This was no exception. I kept worrying that real poop would come out, and then how embarrassing would that be? I guess it doesn’t have to be embarrassing, but I’m a fragile fae. I’ve handled a lot of buttholes in my time. I’m very understanding and I don’t get grossed out by poop generally. There’s not a lot that grosses me out, but shamelessness isn’t in my toolkit. Rahi talked to me the whole time. In his very Rahi way, it was entirely casual.

Rahi: I know that you might feel as if I check in too frequently, but it’s the way I was trained to be. For many of my customers, this is the first time they’ve been touched by a person who isn’t their husband or boyfriend.

Me: That makes sense. I forget that my experience isn’t a typical one. Not everybody is as comfortable being handled as I am. What are your customers typically like?

Rahi: Well, there are a few categories. There are women in their forties or fifties who married their high school or college sweethearts, never had any real sex or pleasure education, had a few children, and never took time to explore themselves. They tell me they think that their pussy is broken, because they’re not enjoying sex like the women they see in the movies. Another group is women in their thirties to forties with “ten minute men,” who think something is wrong with them because they aren’t coming. The men I see are mostly gay men, but I also get a few straight men whose wives wouldn’t let them go to a female sex therapist, so they come to me, mostly to deal with premature ejaculation issues, and things like that.

I was very much not those things, as much as I could see some intersections. Even with all of my consciousness and experimentation, I was still battling my own internalized sex negativity. It’s easy to love and encourage everyone but myself. I pondered this as Rahi massaged my asshole, pressing through my first sphincter, to my inner sphincter muscle. Afterwards, Rahi excused himself to wash his hands. He had worn gloves, but he and my vulva didn’t want to risk it.

He was a bit more aggressive with my vulva, per my instructions. Everything felt good, but I couldn’t come. I realized, with some resignation, that it was because I needed erotic connection, and while fully receiving is a lovely idea, it wasn’t clicking for me. I wanted to see someone look at me with lust in their eyes. I wanted to hear their moans, and be able to reach around and touch their wet cunt or hard dick. That day, the only thing that could have gotten me was connection. It was a little disappointing. I felt like I was failing myself, not utilizing my time and our final meeting to get off. I knew the whole idea of failing was a counterproductive way to view what was going on-- and that I needed to honor what my body was saying, but I am a perfectionist.

I breathed into the defeat, and let myself simply absorb the sensation. Feeling good can take many permutations. Was I feeling good? Yes. Was I feeling orgasmic? No. Was orgasm the point? No. Was feeling good the point? Yes. If feeling good is the point, did I succeed? Yes. I had to work through the equation to absolve myself of guilt. I laid back and absorbed Rahi’s touch. He checked in to see if I wanted to come, and I told him it wasn’t what I wanted. He asked if he could hold me, and I agreed. I sat on his lap facing him, and we held each other. It was a very tender way to close our sessions. I was grateful I’d gotten to know him, and that he had allowed me to explore myself this way.

If you want to actually hear a conversation with Rahi. This Thursday, I will be putting out an episode of Heaux in the Kneaux where he is my guest. It was such a wonderful conversation and took some wild turns. If you like it, let me know about it.