The tragedy Of Obedience

Most of the night is a blur. That happens sometimes. It's hard to tell the beatings apart past a point; it's hard to place them even when I can see the marks on my body. I remember the night without chronology, I don't know where it began nor where it ended, but if I look around the room I can see where I lay. I remember it like a book I read a decade ago, the sentences I underlined have started to fade but the message is preserved. I can piece it together, from the strange bruise above my left eyebrow, and the creases in the belt I notice as I hang it back up inside your closet. There is a mundanity to the violence in its regularity. I don't mean to complain, a predictable routine is one of the most underrated things in the world and mine contains everything I genuinely need — work, love, contributory productivity, rest, meals, exercise, pain, coffee — they're all mundane in a way, but it's the mundanity that makes life fulfilling. It's not the sparkle, it's the substance. The violence isn't what sparkles in my memory. 

It was a different moment. 

You were hitting me. I was standing against the sex-wall. I don't call it that because we have sex against that wall, there's way too much of a difference in our heights for us to fuck against a wall unless you  push me up the wall, and that would mean you'd have to look me in the face while you fucked me for once, and I don't think that's going to happen. There was a moment when I allowed myself a morsel of tragedy over that, I let myself long for something I imagined would be more intimate and less transactional, but I don't understand why anymore. Perhaps it is a natural consequence of being deprived something, even something you never wanted in your life, like those characters in movies who absolutely have to have babies after they find out they can't physically have them. I never wanted a man to look me in the eye while he fucked me, until I met one who absolutely wouldn't. For a minute it made me long for an imagined intimacy, and languish at its denial, but it seems very silly in retrospect. I can be silly. I call it the sex-wall, but it's really a beating-wall, just like I call it sex, but it's really a beating. 

I was standing against the sex-wall and you were hitting me. You had been hitting me for a long time, I think, but I may be wrong. Although, maybe linear time doesn't really matter, and so it doesn't mean anything at all. You had definitely been beating me long enough that half my face was more swollen than the other half, and I didn't see it, but I felt a little lopsided. It's always the right side of my face, because you always hit that side with the back of your sex-hand. I don't think I remember the last time you slapped the right side of my face with your palm, but don't worry I won't project a fantasy onto that and long for it. Though, I suspect you will want to do it immediately, at the mere suggestion that you haven't done it in a while. We all have our idiosyncrasies, I'm just delighted to be along for the ride where I discover yours. 

I was turning my neck in anticipation each time you braced your hand to hit me again. I try not to do that but it's impossible after you hit me in the nose a few times. It's always horrible, but I suspect I like it the most, because even as it makes me cry, it makes me yearn for an endless violence. It makes me wish that you could turn me to chalk, break me into pieces and powder me underneath your boot; blow me away in the wind and turn me into the nothingness I so long to embody. A few times when I turned my neck, you held my chin and pulled me back to centre again. With just one gentle finger, you tilted my face upwards so my hair fell back and revealed the unobstructed expanse of skin where you commit your worst sins. A few times you did that. A few more times I turned my head in anticipation. A few more times you brought me back with your hand. And then you said, 

"*Before my hand even stops smarting from hitting you, your face should be back here, looking up at me, unflinching, right in the middle, completely exposed to me." 

That's the moment. 

That's the one that sparkles. I did exactly as you asked. That alarms me. There is a quality to this that I worry is ineffable, and I don't use that word lightly, or ever really, at all. You hit me again, my face swung, my neck responded, it turned to the left. Everything in me wished I could stay there, turn around and hide from you, just let some hair hang over my face so a few inches may suffer less than others, but I couldn't. I didn't. I turned my neck back to the centre and looked up at you. I know you thought I was crying because of how hard you hit me. I wasn't. I was crying because I felt so sorry for myself. It's like being walked to the gallows, and keeping your composure through it, even though you are walking to certain death. It doesn't make any sense not to scream, fight and resist. It doesn't make any sense to follow the instructions of your executioner. 

I will never be able to explain the tragedy of the sheer pleasure of obeying you. I let you beat me but that doesn't say anything at all, I let everybody do that, it really says more about me than it does us, but that I obey you is astounding to me. These games of power and pain, i have played them for a long time, but I was always cheating at least a little. Sometimes I did what I was told simply in service of the construct, just so I could reap the violence from the carcass of control. Sometimes I didn't do it at all, because they like it, they like a little fight in you and a little resistance, perhaps it makes them feel stronger to blaze through defences and win. I have no defences with you. I have nothing of myself to offer except this blind, mindless obedience, and maybe it makes sense that when I stop fitting into roles and playing games that are guarded by rules, I find myself succumbing to who I really am. 

I really am this person. That is what truly alarms me. I'm not the girl who'll sass you, I have enough witty quips to last a lifetime, but there's a time and place for that (and it's 1 AM on Twitter). I'm not the girl who'll resist you so you'll show me your strength by overpowering me. I don't have any fight in me, I used to, but I am starting to suspect it was either fabricated or a defence against the kind of primal violence that could actually kill a person. I'm not the girl who wants to argue the logic of your instructions, or have them explained to me before I agree to follow, I would like to be that girl, but every day, you demonstrate to me that I don't. 

I'm this girl. 

I'm the girl who turns her own brutalised face back within the range of your fists before my head has even stopped spinning because you asked that of me. Each time I come to that conclusion, it makes me cry. I have heard them talk of the joy of obedience, but I have never seen it, there is no joy to this ugly subversion of will. It's a disfigurement of romance, it's just the kind of disfigurement that grows on you to not just become palatable, but artful. There's something sad about it, there's something sad about the moments in which you choose to apply my obedience. It's never to let me show you that I care about you, you'll hang up your own uniform with pleasure and you'll do my coat too. It's not even to teach me anything, you have no interest in whether my routine could be maximised for efficiency by your intervention, and I am grateful that you treat me as nothing but a complete adult at all times. It's not to foster in me a sense of devotion, you just expect that, and how it's fostered doesn't factor into the discussion. You don't use it for anything like that. 

You use my obedience just to show me how powerless I am. It comes from the most vulnerable and real part of me, and you use it like a cheap sex toy that I bought just so my order would be eligible for free delivery. It comes from a part of me that shakes my own idea of myself, and you use it to get me to stop crying when the sounds of my sobbing is annoying to the rhythm of my violence. It doesn't come from a broken place, it comes from the one part of me that lies safe, within the fortress, and you have me take down the walls just so you can show me that I will walk myself to the guillotine if you tell me to. It comes from the only part of my heart that I keep locked, and you took away the key, and hung it up in a public square for anyone to take. It comes from the part of me that could believe in god if it read the right books, and you use it to make me stop breathing for your amusement. You use your powers for evil. You use them to draw me out of my cave, so you can kill me. 

Yet it sparkles. 

In my memory, that's what sparkles. The moments in which you ask me to obey, and even when I know it may end in a broken nose, I do. With my willingness and your expectations we could have made something so beautiful, but we created only the illusion of radiance, and the sparkle doesn't distract me from noticing the darkness in which it was born.