Ten Days, Ten Prompts: Ten Years Of Being Owned By You.

'Take me, take me, take me,' is what I said.

It wasn't really sex until you hit me. The first time, the second or maybe it was the third. It wasn't really sex until your belt met my back and your palm met my cheek, but it was also *just* sex. I don't mean to denigrate sex, lord knows there is no form of intimacy of which I am more fond, but in the beginning, there was so much urgent need, I don't even remember breathing that first year that we were together. I think, maybe, when you meet a person with whom you will fall in love, it suddenly feels like you have to compensate for all the years you spent apart up to that point. Even though forever is an illusion, the forever of *tomorrow* at least seems possible, but the forever of *yesterday* is already gone. I had to fuck you for all the *yesterdays* we had spent apart. It was a desperate act, like trying to glue a severed limb back in place, and even though I knew I could never fuck you enough to erase the absence of you that had come before, I still saw reason in trying. I needed you to know me, all of me, with immediacy and all at once and the only way I know to do that is to take all of the pain you can give me. Inside it, I'm all of me.

'See me, see me, see me,' is what I meant.

.

'Will you be my daddy?' is what I said.

I called you *daddy*, way before I called you anything else, and I'd never really called anyone that before that point. It would be easy, now, to say it was all about the vulnerability and the compassion, but so much of it was about the filth of it. I told you how I had always felt like an orphan growing up and how the men who had hurt me had called me so and you stripped me naked and wrecked my orphaned body until it found a wretched home. I don't know if I expected tenderness and compassion within this role, if I did, I didn't know it until many years later, but you gave me so much strife and shame, instead. My sexuality has always been larger than those in my orbit, it has always subsumed my relationships, and I bartered that space for violence, but that year was about your sexuality, and in it, I was subsumed. A little girl is not a thing of wonder and joy, not to you, it's an object within which you deposit all of your cruelty. The most tender of creatures inspire the most unbridled of your madness and when I saw it, I knew there was merit to being the smaller person in the room, for once, because then I could see what you would want me to be, and know the dystopian joy of twisting myself into knots for your approval. That's what *daddies* really do in the real world, isn't it? They don't cherish and protect, they hurt and evaluate. The pleasure of disapproval is so much stronger than the gratification of approval and I could see that so clearly once I saw you. You wouldn't ever fix me because, to you, I wasn't even broken until you broke me. That's who you are.

'Will you show yourself to me?' is what I meant.

.

'I want you to hurt me, do whatever you want to me, whenever you want and even if I don't want it,' is what I said.

In the most dire of tones, you asked me if I understood what I was saying. To me, that had been my life, I'd always been with people who had access to me like property, and so many of them had never even asked, so your seriousness made me wonder if you were a little crazy but the longer I looked into your eyes, the more warped my version of reality began to seem. Maybe things aren't really inherently serious or casual, maybe it's all about what you take seriously and the way you talked to me about considering the gravity of what I wanted and what it would mean, made me scared for the first time in my life. That year you taught me a new relationship with fear—seductive, deliberate and considered—I learnt what it meant to *really* get what you ask for. I didn't know until then that you could be so unyielding and I didn't know that I could comply without railing against the violence. I felt my body change, not in appearance but in how it feels, when you touched me my fingers felt more dextrous, when you kicked me, my hips felt more capable, when you held me, my spine felt like it had been straightened by an external force. One that was taking control of me. You're like an evil genie who makes wishes come true by showing you what they are really made of, and being yours isn't the sordid fantasy of violence with which I grew up, it is much more terrifying, like a hand reaching into your quilt from under the bed in the dead of night.

'Will you own me?' is what I meant.

.

'I will spend every day as if you are in front of me,' is what I said.

I will always think of those three months we spent apart that year as the most intimate and filthy period of our relationship. Your leash is so much shorter when you are away than it is when you have me in your sight, and I am surprised by my own capacity to commit to a construct, I am sure that is how people who believe in god and texts must feel. Except your gospel is as unforgiving as it is exacting. Every night I spent sleeping on the floor beside the empty bed, every time I nestled into your shoe, every step I took towards the next thing you told me to do felt like it was being monitored by the most pedantic of task-masters. I felt like I was on the verge of simultaneous orgasm and tears—all the time—and when I saw you again, I don't know which one of those came first but I was a different person than the one you had left on that early morning when I dropped you off at the airport and drove myself back home. I cried in the garage because you told me that I wasn't to shed a single tear once I was back home and I cried again only when you put me back under your feet but they were the tears of a person who finally understood something I had never been taught before. The pain of separation is the only pain that matches the intensity of what you do to me and to be subjected to them together is the kind of thing that happens when you get to your first battle-ground. It makes a man out of you.

'Let me show you a capacity for devotion I didn't even know I possessed,' is what I meant.

.

'Why won't you let me scream?' is what I said.

I don't know how this started but I remember a moment, when I was on the floor, on my hands and knees, and you were hitting me with something or other, and I cried out loud, and you brought your weapon down on my back in full-force, much harder than you had been hitting me before, over-and-over, reminding me that you would ease up, as soon as I regained my composure. Things like that had happened before and they would happen again but that day is the one etched most strongly in my memory. For a long time, I had believed that resisting meant fighting in a way that was outwardly visible, it meant rallying against, pushing back and launching my own attack, but that was the year I learnt that resistance is a whimper, a hair out of place, a hitch in my throat, an unbridled scream. It's anything you hadn't pried out of me deliberately. Sometimes, you found the resistance even inside absolute stillness and composure, and even though no rational person could make a case for it, I could see it too. I could see the evidence of my resistance in a twitch of my toe and a breath that last too long, and I brought it to you like a firefly hidden inside my fist, so you could crush its light. Darkness does not deserve its terrible reputation, because it was only in darkness that I learnt to replace my thoughts with yours. Only in darkness that I could shut down every natural response of my body and replace it with your will.

'Can I defy the fabric of my human nature to be yours?' is what I meant.

.

'This is what the end of the world would be like,' is what I said.

It did feel like it. Everyone was shut inside their homes but we'd been on the edge of the Earth for a while already. In a strange place, at a strange time, surrounded by nothingness, the blueprint for mass violence and desolation. That year we only had each other. We had no internet, no connection to the outside world, much less electricity than the modern world had taught us to expect and no other people. In that politically eldritch environment, where civil liberties were as tenuous as the promise of tomorrow, I learnt to love you as my space of silence. I don't think you've ever hurt me as much as you did in that year. Every night was a fiesta of violence, every morning I took stock of my wounds and every evening I brought the ruins of my body back to you for more. There was nothing else for us to do but each other and I didn't miss any of it, the world felt unnecessary, and every mindless form of recreation and ever creature comfort felt like it belonged to another existence, because all I needed was for you to show me where I truly belonged. All those years you threatened to make me *exemplary* and then I was, it was so much quieter than I expected it to be. You pointed at mountains and I jumped off them for your entertainment. You made me cry so much, almost every single day, and crawled back to you through the trail of my own tears. There was nothing to resist anymore, the world had already ended for us, and in that place, I could finally see, everything I really needed.

'The world is endless if it is filled with our desire,' is what I meant.

.

'Please don't make me feel so very ashamed,' is what I said.

Shame was like a new toy you found in my body. Maybe it had always existed, and you'd visit it from time-to-time. Prop me up against a window while you pulled my clothes from my body, lay me bare before a stranger and invite them to humiliate me, bury me underneath your feet after soaking them in my filth. That was shame I had taught myself for my amusement, but that year, through the deftness of your fingers and the inexhaustible repository of your depravity, you implanted the shame you wanted me to feel into my body and left it there to grow. Like a mangrove that will last forever and only ever expand. Everything I had ever known as pleasure began to change and all the new things I learnt were of your creation, my body had felt like yours for a really long time, but you had simply taken ownership of what already existed. That year you excavated my systems and replaced them with your own and in them you left a psychological tracking device inside my head. It pumps filth into my head at your bidding, it watches me for you from the inside and all my secrets come tumbling out of my mouth when you touch me between my legs. I never know what I am going to say, I have no idea what I am going to feel but when you decide it's time, sentences I have never crafted pour out of me as if they'd been waiting to be summoned.

'These are not my feelings I feel, they're yours, and I feel them more strongly than I've ever felt my own,' is what I meant.

.

'I'm sorry I ever thought I deserved anything but torment,' is what I said.

It wasn't really sex until I started apologising during it. Maybe the first time. Or the second. Or maybe it was the third. I've apologised to the cock in me for as long as I can remember, but that year you made me sorry for so much more. I used to mine for fault and imaginary affront, but I didn't need to do that with you, you taught me I deserved to be punished simply for being and that it was always more fun to be disappointing and wrong. I apologised for having the wrong reaction. Sometimes for having the right reaction. I apologised for being too loud. Sometimes for being too quiet. It wasn't really a massacre until I started apologising for feeling any pleasure at all. You told me I was never going to orgasm again, and I felt terrified I had ever orgasmed at all, and each time you've touched me since, I know I must be sorry if I feel anything but your proprietary blend of shame, sorrow, guilt and arousal. I must feel sorry for your touch because I'm too dirty for it, no? I understand that now. A slave is a puppet and a puppet is a slave but neither is much value unless it's entertaining to you and in my chronically apologetic state of patheticness, I am most entertaining to you. When I am sorry for every aspect of my existence, I am most valuable to you.

'I'm thankful you enjoy the theatre of my debauchery as much as you do,' is what I meant.

.

'I don't know that I can survive this,' is what I said.

It was an emotional massacre. What you did to me that year. You've always been cruel, and I've always enjoyed that more than anything else, but those few weeks of abject torment, when you took away all your tenderness and any space for me to falter, and you crushed every inch of my soul whenever it popped up for comfort, were the hardest weeks I've ever spent subjected to you. Every day, I heard another part of myself crack because you were just *too close to me*. You know how when people kiss you, and they press their lips down on yours so hard, it leaves no room for you to kiss back, absolutely no space for response, that is how I felt every second of every day and then there was something transcendent. You found my weakness and it finally felt okay to be so. It felt okay to fall apart and crack. To be nothing. To accept that I cannot always be so strong and sometimes your binds will hold me so tight, I will split in half and you will sweep me up from the floor, put me back together and torment me some more. People think resignation is a bad, sad thing but it's the greatest form of acceptance I've ever experienced. When I say that I am resigned to you—to the sexual cruelty of your person—I am not lamenting my fate, I am saying that I see what lies past this type of acceptance. There is nothing more gratifying than being a strong, dutiful slave and nothing more liberating than being a weak, faltering one.

'I might be permanently changed by this experience,' is what I meant.

.

'What if I am too scared and too impacted to keep being able to do the things you want me to do?' is what I said.

I don't think I asked you quite in those words all at once, but over the years, I wondered and ventured, for myself, and for you as well, whether it would make so much of a difference if I were different. If I were less resilient or more. If I were earlier to hurt or harder. If I cried less or more. If I could bear to do the things I once loved. I wondered if there would be less joy to me, to you and to us. This year I faced a challenge I've never faced before, the challenge of having the things you love turn on you in a way that you have to either relearn them or let them go. Some things I am changing, some things I am learning over and some things I likely won't ever be able to go back to, but you aren't on any of those lists. In the middle of the night, with your fingers inside me and your foot on my head, I cried and told you I didn't know if I would ever be the slave you wanted me to be ever again, and you pulled me to your face by my hair and told me I never stopped being the slave you wanted. That made me cry harder than any cruelty I've ever endured at your hands. It wasn't sex until it came with complete acceptance of everything we are, we were and could be. I guess, in that way, it was always sex with you. The first time. The second. And the very last, whenever that may be.

'Will you still love me when I change?' is what I meant.

.