Tears - Part 2

Switching Sides holds my head to his chest as I press close, racked with sobs. I'm naked, cuffed in a cross shape against cold chain, leaning against him. Crying my heart out. Real tears that hurt the throat and come from a painful place in the middle of my chest where all my fears and worries live. Each of them pouring out of me, confusingly, terrifyingly. This has never happened to me before. In retrospect I clearly didn't know what to do, but at the time there was no such obvious thought process, I just cried. It was a tremendous release and I smiled whilst I'm doing it. He kisses each tear from my face. I feel safe, cared for and able to be vulnerable, without shame.

In unfamiliar surroundings I've felt on the back foot since arriving and each action seemed to compound my feelings of anxiety. I'm still not precisely sure what I was nervous about - the fact that he is a new partner who I didn't know as well as I did either Ethical Hedonist or The Photographer when we first played; that I didn't know what to expect; that I am here in his house, far from home; that for whatever reason he made me a little frightened. Not unsafe, never unsafe. But unsettled, unprepared.

The point that set me off was the pain. I've been beaten before, and worse. This was somehow different, as each blow fell, rather than press myself into it and become absorbed in the feeling I became more sensitive to it. It hurt, genuinely and with the knowledge that it would continue to hurt. And as the pain built I cracked and started to cry. Alongside the physical pain, I was also crying with real emotion - the stress of the whole week, various concerns in my day-to-day life, all of them came out. A small part of me immediately wanted to stop everything and go home. I was scared, trapped but also unwilling to end what was happening, because the intensity was breathtaking. And I was being held. Able to let go.

We played three times or thereabouts. The first time we had to both stop after I cried as neither of us had expected it at all and we were totally thrown. We curled up together with cups of tea and talked it through, I used up a number of tissues. I felt shocked, drained and also quite giggly. I tried to remember the last time I cried and couldn't. I have always listed "being able to let go" as one of things that make submission exciting for me. For a long time, this has been a way to not be in charge, to relax into someone else's hands and also to settle in to my body and sensations without thought for the world. I feel like I've been shown another type of release, rather than subsuming my worries for a few hours I expurgated them.

You feel better after a good cry.