What am I doing here?
Kneeling in this darkness, in the candlelight that I know is there only by the way the air brings the smell of smoke to me, I am helpless. Blind, bound, and willing myself to be obedient. Willing myself to be strong. And waiting.
I'm not sure what I'm waiting for. My ears, attuned to the smallest sound, gather in the slight sounds around me, the candles hissing as they burn, my breathing, the wind at the window, the beating of my heart in my ears. I shift my weight, strain my ears, and swallow, a dry mouth and tongue making it difficult.
I don't remember what answer I gave to the question of why before I started. I'm not sure anyone ever asked me why. But now I'm asking myself why. Why did I choose this, why did I want this, why do I still want this? Some hidden, perverted desire to become a slave, something in me that wants to bow to preconceptions of what I am?
No. If anything else, that is not true. I am here, blind, hands bound, for a reason that is purely internal. This is for me, in the way that auditions are for me, in the way that forcing myself to the edge of the cliff and looking over is for me.
My knees are starting to ache from being on them--I'm not used to this, but the air is a little like long hair flowing across my shoulders, and that is comforting. The unfamiliar weight of the ropes on my hands pulling them downward, reminding me that I am not in control. This is the secret. Control.
I have kept control my entire life, rigid in my belief that if I let go, there would be nothing but wreckage in my wake. Believing that the control I kept was to keep others and myself from harm. Along the way, though, I realized that I'd lost myself in that control, and there was nothing where the beating heart of a girl had once been. I could not cry because there were no tears left and nothing to cry them for.
So, my solution: lose control. Only, lost it in a situation where I could expect no harm to be done, where I could simply be and not have to control myself, or anything else. Lose control by handing it over to another person, one I trusted, and to believe in that person's ability to keep harm away so absolutely that I could place all of my faith on their shoulders.
This is what I am doing here, afraid, suddenly lonely, and yet knowing that all too soon the anticipation will end, that my senses heightened by waiting and fear will be assaulted, one at a time, carefully and with a thorough delight. I crave endlessness, I crave oblivion, but this comes close, with its feeling like a free fall, out of my hands, my hands bound this time not by fate or compunction but by rope.
This is the overt response to a covert pain, to expose the fester, to clean it. This time, I might live. This time, I might love again.
I am waiting, time out of my hands, fate out of control. I wait for the peace that I know will come, later. I wait for light.