Nothing but Pain Between Us.

There is nothing but pain between us right now. We haven't exchanged a single word in over an hour, not a single sound has escaped my throat nor has he said anything to me at all. The only sound in the room is the wood smacking against the back of my thighs every six-seconds. When I was younger, the *noise* of pain used to excite me — I liked the crack of a whip, the swishing of a switch, the thump of a paddle — perhaps, it did excarbate the anticipation of the moment of impact or maybe it announced the arrival of pain. These sounds don't excite me anymore, they don't bother me either, they're just the repetitive chant that outlines this exchange. It reminds me of walking up and down the streets of my childhood, the same chant blaring from every shop in the street, from every monk on a bench, you couldn't unhear it but it didn't overpower the experience of life, just a mellow soundtrack to existence. Those words within which thousands of people have found their entire existence, emitted as meaningless sounds, the significance of which lay only in repetition.

*Om mani padme hum.*

The pain doesn't excite me anymore either, which sounds a little more sad than it really is, I never stopped loving the pain, it just carries the familiarity of an old friend now; I'm never surprised by its arrival, I'm often surprised when it isn't there. I find that the heart of my sexuality now, with other people, is not pain, but a strange mix of fear, trauma, obedience and suffering. It's hard to explain in condensed descriptors, it's better with a story. My partner told me a funny story recently that explains the heart of my sexuality with other people quite well.  The pool we go to these days is in a sports facility run by the army, so the lifeguards are actually soldiers. In their training, they've been taught to respond a certain way to a sharp blast from a whistle, *attention and salute*. One evening, my partner was at the pool a little before it opened and they were doing a practise drill to rescue people which was being led by a civilian. He told them that when he blows the whistle, they should jump in the pool, but because you cannot untrain a soldier, each time he blew the whistle, they stood at attention and then saluted, only realising a moment later, that they were supposed to dive in the water. My husband thought it was funny, I thought it was hot, but more importantly, that's it,  that's my sexuality now.

It cannot be achieved with an evening of lying across a table and having my thighs beaten. It's a slower, more deliberate process with an impact that's much more permanent, it's not about what I can do for him, as much as who I can be for him and I cannot stop now, I cannot stop digging to see how deep this hole runs or how far I can immerse myself in it. My body has a faction of identity that I didn't design, it has an array of responses I didn't teach myself, a plethora of behaviours that aren't mine but emerge unannounced at the blast of a whistle, it even speaks a language that I do not comprehend. To an extent, I am alienated from my body because I have too much evidence that, at least a part of it, isn't mine, I feel sometimes, like I am merely manning it, for him. That's what really does it for me now. It's not pain, it's suffering. It's not hurt, it's violence. It's not suggestion, it's fear. It's not obedience, it's conditioning. It's not a scene, it's a novel.

However, I do still *need* the pain. I need it more than ever, really, I have always alluded that it's an addiction I have to pain and I am completely sure of that now. I cannot understand my body, and the world, if nothing hurts. I cannot identify a single emotion I am having when my the silence of comfort falls over me. My body feels like the empty hall of a place of worship when it doesn't hurt at all, you can tell even in the absence of footsteps and people, that this place has known the burgeoning sounds of prayer and man, and needs them, to matter. I am just less ceremonial about how I acquire the pain I need. I tire of these stereotypical renditions of kink and fetishism, I tire of the theatre of straps and chains and scenes, I tire of the language I must use to describe them, I tire of the roles that I must choose from a menu that is boundless only in its limitations. Pain is pain to me. I just want it.

I want it from running too much and standing too long. I want it from the warm, searing cramps of my period. I want it from bending and twisting and extending the reaches of my body. I want it from releasing the stiffness of my back. I want it without a camera on me that records the exact shade of purple my body attains. I want it like this, silently, without connection between myself and the person I love the most in the world; in a cold and clinical exchange without any context, nor menace, nothing at all to explain it, nothing to say, no one to save. However, if I could exchange that with a syringe that as safely shot me up with pain, I would do that too. I don't care where I shop for my pain, I just want it. My masochism is entirely about me, pain in my life is entirely about me and I have no doubt there is a delusional irrationality in my reasoning somewhere, nor do I discount the possibility that as a result of having womanhood taught to me as a condition of pain, my reclamation of pain as a condition of the  depraved pleasure being, is my pathetic little attempt at taking control of life, but I can confirm with confidence that I do actually believe this. Pain is not something I need someone to give me, I will always have it, it's part of who I am. When you hurt me, you talk to me. He fucks up my insides with evidence of his brutality and entitlement, because I love him, but he hurts my body, because he loves me.

He hurts me quietly, without words, without any need to reinstate our relationship. He isn't even moving around much, in the room, just standing in the place where this evening began, and beating me exactly as he was then. It must look extremely banal, it's amusing to me that a version of pornography that everyone says they want, one with real story, must look so visually devoid of it, but this is the truth of my relationship with pain. It is thoroughly unspectacular. It doesn't have theatre. It doesn't need words. It doesn't need honorifics. It doesn't need protocol. I don't need to be in heels, he doesn't need to look just the right amount of rugged in a very neatly ironed suit. I don't need to shave my legs, he doesn't need to purchase the perfect kink-presenting article of pain, a shoe-horn does the trick. There are no buzzwords in my head, I am sure he will care for me after, as he cares for me now, or not at all, it doesn't seem to matter to me. I'm not struggling, I don't have to scream, he doesn't have to threaten me with a good time and make it sound scary. Pain is all that is being exchanged between us.

I start breathing to it. Consciously meditating through the process of pain. I don't know when I started doing this but I remember exactly when I noticed it and turned it into a project. Meditation is a long-standing fascination for me but I have refrained because I had some shame about *being that person*. I try also not to write or talk about it because I am fairly inexperienced and not at all an expert on the subject, and also, I find, talking to most people who want to talk about meditation gives me a headache since the conversation very quickly goes from an exchange of thoughts to posturing and patronizing. These things are like gateways to portals of irrationality, but that is only because of social context, underneath it, there is still something of substance here, and I want to explore it. I want to know how one can smile through setting themselves on fire, I want to know what it feels like to be that person (which does not, at all, mean I am going to set myself on fire). I think of it as turning off the internet in my brain. Just letting the world pass through me, letting stimulus to absorbed and emotions be nameless, no need to discover, investigate decode, analyse, file, or even know.

I've been waiting to try this my entire life, but it never occured authentically, it never felt right, I mostly wasn't able to do it, and when I did, it felt forced. Somehow, I just accidentally, started to meditate while being hurt, I think I was heavily influenced by an interview I watched. I like my little practise, I don't know any of the literature nor the right words, I don't have a candle or a meditation cushion, but in pain, I find myself able to meditate, and so I do. It's a very potent silence, not a silence of the outside, but one of the inside. I feel a freedom from my younger self, one that was extremely deterministic about who I need to be and by when. She had good reasons, I subtly diss her now, on the other side where I benefit from her years of grit, perseverance and hard-work, but she had good reasons for being who she was. Yet it is liberating to feel emotionally emancipated from those years of my existence, I can see so clearly from here, that the conflict was never about loving myself, it was always about defining myself.

And the answer is not a plurality, it's not multi-factorial, it's not found in my bio on a dating app, it's nothing. I'm a human being, that's the definition. I eat, I sleep, I drink, I piss, I suffer and bemoan endlessly my suffering from the human condition and later, much to my inconsequential chagrin, I will die. Best not to tire myself by taking myself too seriously. This freedom from definition — which is not to say I am opposed to labels I do like starting with little nutritional packs of information and then seasoning for flavour —  made me realise it doesn't really matter that everyone know how many books I've read. Let me explain. All my life I was sure that the struggle was to be pretty enough, attractive enough, desirable enough, but in actuality, I find, I spent a lot of my life trying to prove I was smart enough. You know as we do, we learn the terms for yoga poses, and we call the guy who can do them a fool for not knowing what to call them. I was racing for that type of intelligence. The type where everyone in the room must know we are the smartest because we watched a lot of Frontline, I think this afflicts many people and it's not wanting to know or share information that is the problem, it's needing someone else to know that we know (and I do realise the irony of making that statement as I write this fully-intending to post it) and evaluating your intelligence by those parameters. When I stopped yearning to define myself, I saw the absurdity in loving someone because you have three-dozen pop culture references in common, and to be fair, maybe that is just absurd to me, and that is perfectly reasonable.

To me it matters that he understands this. He sees me underneath the facade of wit and intelligence, underneath the noise of the chanting around me, underneath the fear of being human, he sees me as the addict to pain that I am and he does me a kindness out of the tenderness of his heart. He hurts me so I may live another day. Have another thought. Smile once more. Understand the world. Repair my worldview. Grow and learn. So I may discover the realm of things that isn't made of words, but of silence.

There is nothing but pain between us right now.

And in it, everything I am.