Absent friends

"You don't really do anything, you just stay there and I do all the hard work." A joke, but perhaps one that some tops might secretly believe. But there's more to staying there than just doing it.

Captain is running ropes around me, moving me this way and that. My hands rest loosely on my shoulders, fingers splayed, arms bent double and knotted into place. I let myself go not quite limp, but limber. It's a balancing game of joints and muscle - to be soft enough to be manipulated easily, hard enough to hold oneself in a convenient place. For him, that is, not me. I'm the one who is meant to be convenient. My legs are spread and I'm stood up, leaning a little against him whilst at the same time trying not to intrude on what he is doing. The other balancing game is happening in my head as I try to think about nothing. There's a concentration that I don't want to break, both his and mine. I'm pushing mine into my skin, busying myself with being a thing. It's hard because on one hand I don't want to think about what is happening to me on any level, more than that, I don't want to actively mentally participate in it, just to be abstract and physical. On the other, there is a certain amount of effort required to give myself the first push.

Because we are still new to each other and relatively personally unconnected so the D/s is only really inferred at this stage. It's still mostly in my head - I don't know what he likes or dislikes and there are no protocols or agreements to follow. I'm out on a limb slightly. My instincts are still there, of course, but they are general rather than focused on him. I go where I'm put, I move, wait and want. I suck greedily at skin when it's near my mouth because that's what I physically desire. But I need something more than just my desire. I need his. Which I still don't really have a feel for, hence the self-inflicted push. I'm in an interim stage. Becoming null. I'm a body. A puppet. I experience. I don't look at him, eyes flickering down, I see him in patches: a shard of shoulder, a flash of skin. I feel him, pressing against my back, an arm around my throat. My head is consciously raised to maintain the posture and correct line of my back and neck. But I don't look. Eye contact is intimate and would be a human (and humane) reaction, a connection during which we would both see each other and the spell would be broken.

For some, this would be an appalling reaction. A deliberate pulling back and moving away from the other person in the space. A rejection of what they are doing. When in fact, the opposite is true. What I'm doing is making myself into a canvas, a space to be taken over and colonised. There are theories of submission, one being that it is a "gift" that is given up, another that the real power lies in the submissive, who controls what can and can't be done by what they are prepared to give up. Those things can be true, but that's not where I am now. I'm not handing anything over, not in that mechanical, mercenary way. I've let go. What happens next is not up to me. I don't want it to be. I refuse to control or to place a limit on what I will and won't do because I refuse anything that feels like agency. I'm playing another game of not being there. He's playing it too, covering my face when he fucks me, erasing any possibility of personality. I wonder if he is more present because of my absence, if he can move into the physical and theoretical space I have created. My abdication of power creates power for him which he uses to get what he wants. And that is how I am taken. I abandon myself, become nothing and allow myself to be rebuilt.

Talking to Kiss Curls about this, as she described a particularly intense session in which her hands were cupped like a porcelain doll - fingers fused together, thumbs on a curling semi-circle. Each time we do it, each time we erase ourselves and let someone else remake us, we get a little bit closer to the desires of the other, which are wrapped up and reflected in our own desires. We learn a little bit more, by doing and being done to. Become a little bit more perfect, a little bit better, a little bit more like that thing we want to be. That thing you always want to take.