17

“To hurt me is to love me…and I need to be loved as much as possible.”

–Sub Girl


It figures.  Just when it’s starting to feel really, really good, she puts down the heavy leather flogger for some little, bristly, tickly thing that only makes me impatient.  “Come on now,”  I’m thinking.  “I broke down and took my shirt off in a roomful of people — the least you can do is hit me as hard as  you can.”

Fortunately she picked up the really big flogger before long and swung it with gusto;  the low grunts she announced each blow with brought a smile to my face.  “That’s it,”  I thought “Let’s both enjoy ourselves.”  I let my head tip forward, trying to soak up every bit of every blow, my skin loosening, my back muscles unclenching, my flesh and bones and blood warming and vibrating as she swung at me…swung through me.

“Ahhhh,” I sighed after a particularly deep blow.  I never thought to turn around, but i have it on good authority that those present were taken aback by what they’d just seen.  I suppose that after all the 18-year-old goth girls were done playing “spanky squealy” games it was a mild shock to see someone so bottomless that an intense flogging was like cool water to soak up and guzzle in the Tampa heat.

“Wow man,” someone said to me the next day.  “You can really take a beating.”  I shrugged and smiled a little, wondering how not to come off as falsely macho for wishing she’d hit me just a little harder for a little longer.

Don’t get the wrong idea — i am not a tough guy by any stretch.  Not the least bit macho.  Quite the opposite in fact–everything gets to me.  What might make me just a little bit tough is the fact that I almost never let it show that things get to me.  My mechanism for internalizing emotional (an even physical) stress  is disturbingly efficient.  What’s not so efficient is my mechanism for dispelling this stress later.  The result is that all the negative energy coalesces into a baked on coating encasing my entire body…A rock hard shell that hurts no matter what I do, no matter how I act, no matter how I move…Hurts all the time.

All the fucking time.

In short…my whole body hurts long before the flogging ever happens.  And with every stroke, every blow, I can feel that hard shell cracking, splintering, chipping away and falling to the floor around me piece by piece.  And along with it, all the stress (and distress) draining from me, running down into the floor, where it dispells harmlessly.

When I’m flogged, beaten, whatever, the blows feel like nothing so much as loving and healing hands, breaking me free of what’s been hurting all along, opening the brittle old skin and tearing it away, so that the new skin can breathe.

Did i mention that after she was done with me, I went off and did the best photoshoot of the entire weekend?  I honestly doubt it would have happened if she hadn’t asked/offered to flog me.

This year I’m planning to let her flog me first…and then start working….I just hope she hits me really hard this time.