“I heard that you spank so hard, you send girls flying across the room,” I said.
“You heard right,” Skyspook replied.
We’d been kissing for a while, intensely. I felt breathless, half mad. It seemed a good time to come up for air. I sprawled myself across his lap, wiggled my butt. “Well?” I said.
He laughed. “You sure?”
“Oh yes,” I replied.
But he hit me, and I didn’t fly. Instead I bore down on him and moaned. He hit me again. And again. Until my backside was completely on fire, and I begged for him to stop. Until I found myself begging for him to start again a mere 10 minutes later when further kissing left me insane with desire. We spent hours exploring each other in the darkness, never leaving the realm of “foreplay,” scratching, biting, hitting each other, spiking pain with pleasure, falling, rising, falling, rising.
It was a hell of a great first date.
*
I take hard beatings. Skyspook is very big and strong, and he doesn’t hold back. It’s been about a year now that we’ve been doing pain work together. And I can ride the pain well, convert much of it into pleasure, lose myself in the struggle, the challenge of the pain, the fear, the outrage, the anger. It arouses me. It moves me. The acts are both base and transcendent, like much of our instinctual animal mesh work. Okay, okay. I can be aroused terribly by expertly delivered pain, driven to the brink of insanity with desire by it. In a lot of ways, I appear a textbook masochist.
However, pain isn’t the most efficient method for me to get there, that weird floaty chemical brain soup where very little matters, and yet everything does. Not by a long shot. Being laid on, crushed, used as a furniture, verbally humiliated, sexually objectified – all of these are an expressway to blissful delirium in comparison to pain’s long, winding country road. And while I tend to easily dissociate when overwhelmed with the aforementioned fetish play, I remain quite present when Skyspook is hurting me. Pain is challenging. Pain requires me to actively participate in the process, to process and re-channel it. I have to work for the reward – at least with the manner and intensity of pain he delivers.
*
A year later, and pain remains a mystery, my personal relationship with receiving it idiosyncratic and sophisticated, at least seeming that way to me.
As a person who continually scans life for lessons, I’m finding pain rather elusive as a teacher.