Bruised / Pristine

I mark easily and get quite large patches of bruising. It can cause a little bit of concern on the part of the Dom, but those that know me are relatively accepting of it, and can even find it intriguing or amusing. I quite like them on one level, they are signs of what has gone before, reminders that often carry sensation with them. I also enjoy having to dress around them, to make sure that those parts of my body are covered, it's a less obvious form of submission but there nonetheless.

When they are fresh, I think they can look very pretty: striking red lines across white skin. A few days later, they merely look a bit of a mess as those blooms of yellows and purples form around the fading stripes. Something that I am conscious of is the fact that I will go and see someone whilst still bearing the marks of another. No-one has commented on this, except me, and on a practical level there is no getting around it. They are an ongoing consequence of the way that my relationships are developing and represent that which everyone involved has agreed to.

I don't like it much though. It doesn't make me ashamed and I don't have an emotional reaction to it as such, but an aesthetic one: I want to arrive each time unblemished with a smooth bank of skin on which you may enact your desire. I want to leave you altered in some way, that only I can see, and perhaps you later if we decide we wish it.

That said, the overlay of marks by different hands is also interesting to me. They make my body into a conversation between people who have not all met: a palimpsest of where I've been, what I've done. It contextualises me, fixing me in a space between "then" and "now", I am not a newly formed thing, but composed of physical memories.