Panthalassa (2)

[Bill Floyd]

In the cold dry hotel room you ask me to push needles into your skin, slowly.  We use a towel so we won't stain the high thread count sheets.  Your body flinches, vulnerable, then rises to meet the sharpness, until at last you cry out, freed from expectation and sex and the questions of love, nothing between us but steel and blood for a single flickering hour.  The anticipation; the satisfaction.

As the airplane banks north on our flight back home, back to the jobs and the kids and the neighbors, all the band-aids are in place.  I watch through the window as boats carve white trails across the glassy abundance of the blue, the island receding behind and below, the shape and color of a scab healed all wrong.  

[Bill Floyd]

Not trying to pad my stats by commenting here again, but I just wanted to say the comments were quite illuminating, and exactly the sort of responses I'd hoped to prompt.  Angela's ideas about the intensities of how someone gets into this sort of expression, and T's ideas about controlling sex itself, as opposed to the person, are worthy of consideration.  How many fantasies have been compromised (some ruined, some enriched) because there's, you know, another human being involved?  

So thanks.       

[Teresa]

Just a quick thought after a little Googling:  Maybe some people feel overpowered by sex, so they put it in bondage or make it behave, spank it or cuff it, blindfold it.  It would seem to work either way, whether you were the top or bottom.  It isn't you, him or her in bondage but sex, so you can overpower it, control it instead of the other way around.  Sex becomes an object instead of a person so that it can be manipulated for our own enjoyment without guilt. 

 

Maybe I'm way off.

[Teresa]

I thought of drugs, too.  I'm glad you commented, Bill.  I did share your opinion of why anyone would get into S&M, that it suggests deeper issues, but now that I read Angela's comment I'm not sure anymore.  I read articles about spanking being bad for kids and spousal abuse and violence in general, and it's hard to put any of this in the context of enjoyment.  It's so fringe.  You've explored this before, long ago.  I'm curious, too, but I'd rather learn vicariously.  I think I'm gonna go, um, Google this topic...;-)  Oh, and EXCELLENT MELPHY writing!  Faved.

[Angela]

Many thanks to you for taking time to comment on your post.

I appreciate your venture into territory such as this.  It is a special challenge, for who can fully understand what one has no desire to feel?  You do a fine job in your third sentence especially, with its implication that the act somehow transcends sex and love.  Hmm.

What is most intriguing to me is not the act or nature of being submissive - or dominant, but the coming-to-be, the evolution.  Like what you say in your comment, why (but also very interesting, how) would anyone get into this?  So many variables, so many opportunities to blunder badly.  So much risk taking, and ultimately, so much trust.  Quite amazing, when you think about it objectively, and it may very possibly be less of a game and more of a quest.

Fascinating, and certainly worthy of attention.  Fine work.  I read it the first time as if the characters were drug addicts.  Maybe they are, just of a different kind.

[Bill Floyd]

And I rarely explain anything, but: This is another in an infrequent series of pieces where I try to work out why anyone would get into S&M type stuff.  I know there's a school of thought that says such interactions can be healthy and fine when carried on by consenting adults, but I always figure something that involves inflicting pain on a partner, or having them intentionally inflict pain on you, suggests deeper issues.  I just got back from a vacation where I wrote this and the other Panthaslassa piece within about 30 mins of each other.  I think I was turning the relationship coin to one side and then the other.  All those poor people around the pool, probably completely innocent of the stories I was making up about them...  

Anyway, just trying to see into the heads of people who willingly engage in the physical version of some of the emotional games that people play.     

[Cita]

I rarely say this about something you write, but Bill.... I don't get it.  What is with the needles?  Why?  Am I being obtuse?