The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [50]
I gripped her hand a little too tightly, as I recall. Desperately thinking inside my skull don’t be desperate don’t be desperate don’t be fucking desperate.
When she looked at me she had that glazed look of a speaker handling the hands and faces of adoring morons. When she let go my hand I thought, that’s that, I’m an adoring moron. Probably I’m drooling.
Her hand in mine was wet. Wet from the effort it takes to speak to a desiring crowd when you are meant to be off gloriously and unapologetically alone in the world with your only beloved: a camera. Point and shoot. Wet with all of our slobbering projections of who we wanted her to be dripping from her hands. Wet with the sweat of hundreds of numskulls just like me.
I don’t know why I did it, I just know I couldn’t not. While I was holding her hand I leaned in close to her face and said my name is Lidia. I am a writer. Which I said exactly to the scar underneath her eye, letting my eyes and voice travel down her skin. I saw stars as I let go. Her hair smelled like rain.
I remember leaving the campus feeling like I was exactly like anyone.
But it would not be the last time I touched her.
I didn’t know yet that desire comes and goes wherever it wants.
I didn’t know yet that sexuality is an entire continent.
I didn’t know yet how many times a person can be born.
Mother.
Before I met her in that auditorium in Eugene, Oregon, I’d been to exactly three SM play parties in Eugene. Wanna know how? Because my former best friend who went on the little beach excursion got me invited. At the SM play parties I saw some awesome things happen. Once I saw a man wrapped in plastic wrap with nothing but his mouth and dick unwrapped. Sometimes he got drops of water in his mouth. Mostly he got his dick whipped until it was red as a screaming infant.
I saw a woman ample as a Michelangelo cherub with her wrists bound and hung above her head get her twat whipped for over an hour while her pussy swelled and reddened and purpled until even the air shuddered and felt faint.
I went back.
I saw a woman’s thighs pierced with tiny blue capped needles - 20 up one thigh and 20 down the other - her eyes streaming with tears, her endorphin rush coming at those around her like a tsunami, her cunt gushing.
I saw reddened welts rise on a woman’s ass like swollen railroad tracks from caning, I saw a tranny pierce her cheek with what looked like a barbeque skewer all the way through to the other cheek without blinking, I saw a man hang from giant meat hooks carefully puncturing his back slabs. I saw bondage in 300 varieties, fistings, bloodsport, dungeons, crossbeams, strange wands shooting out electricity anywhere you wanted.
Some of which I began to let happen to me.
Watching pain and feeling pain mattered on my skin more than anything had since I was a child. Unlike drinking. Unlike drugs. I could feel it. I could more than feel it.
But I wanted to feel it more. Harder.
“ Tell me what you want.”
That’s how it began. If I said something dumb like, I’d like a kiss, she’d say, “No, that’s not right, Angel.” And lightly sting my skin with a riding crop or this crop with thornish things dangling from it in a kind of tassel. “Try again,” she’d say.
I’d try again. And again. Until I said what it was I really wanted.
What I really wanted was to be taken to whatever the edge of self was. To a death cusp. Maybe not literally. But maybe literally.
I suppose it’s good I was in the hands of a professional. A calm sadist. An intellectual. Because she took my request and made it deeper.
“Can you take the pain and go somewhere? Can you make it a journey?”
I don’t know why, but I thought of my mother - who was under hypnosis during my birth. “Dorothy? Do you have pain? Where is the pain?”
At first I didn’t know what she meant by “journey.” I just wanted to be with her. I just