Be Irrelevant.

A quiet evening after a quiet day. It may not have been quiet on the outside but some days I feel so quiet on the inside. It’s as if the people inside me have all left; like a dormitory during summer break. Or a school music-room in the middle of the night. The kind of room you can just walk into and you automatically know that it is used to noise. And so the quiet, is sometimes, unsettling.
Maybe because when all the voices have left, I have little knowledge about who I really am. I feel like a sleeve, like a glove, like a silhouette. When he touches me, I’m surprised I don’t take the shape of his hand. It’s alarming that I have definite form, but a strange kind of alarm. It’s alarm that doesn’t betray itself. Instead I feel I appear extremely calm. Too calm. So calm I forget to react to his touches. I forget to hear his words. They don’t bounce off me but they aren’t getting to me either. Somewhere in my skin, his words melt. Maybe I’m feverish. Maybe his words are ice.
I forget to react but I am watching him play with my body. It looks very different when I can’t really feel it. It’s more interesting to look at now. Could it be that watching yourself is easier when you don’t have to feel it? I used to ask my mother how I could occupy someone else’s experiences but not have to feel them, and this, feels like that. It feels like how I felt when I asked that question. I yearn deeply for this place. This place of disinvested deep vivid experience. On a larger scale. Sometimes I wonder if I steal people’s lives and characters so I never have to find my own. And that’s why, when it is quiet, I don’t know anything about anything. I don’t know what I want, and I don’t know what I don’t.
But there’s still some uncontrollable faction that makes decisions for me.
So he knows that I am rejecting pleasure. I don’t know why, but I can see my legs move of their own volition. Closer to each other. I reject pain too. I don’t know why. But I can hear my own words asking him not to be horrible.
If you reject pain, and pleasure, what else is left? Does it matter I reject them both?
“What does it matter what I want?“ I may have asked out loud.
“It doesn’t matter,” he says, “It’s almost unfair that you expect me to care.“
His words cause a reaction. In my leg. I wonder how I would look on a screen; parts of me coming alive and glowing like warm lights in reaction to his words, and then fading right back into nothingness as he goes back to touching me but after he says what he says, I don’t ask anymore. I don’t ask that he be nice or not. On his part, he still doesn’t care. He can see that this is not us; not us from everyday. But in his face I can see how much he enjoys being the person I wasn’t expecting. Sometimes, I can see very clearly, the monster that I helped create. As he reminds me that I will take his pain and smile if he asks me to, and that I will take his cock and say nothing in protest, I am reminded of another man. A man from three years ago. They both look the same and are comprised of the same genetic material, but that man wouldn’t have been here. That man couldn’t imagine doing these things to a seemingly unwilling girl of sparse words and reactions. He couldn’t look at sorrow and make the decision to hurt it more. He wouldn’t hear of any tears that he didn’t immediately wipe from my eyes.
Did I teach him to love me less?
Really, what am I even doing here? Feelingless, and floating outside myself as I watch my body thoughtlessly contort to the pull of a voice. I don’t want to be doing any of this, and I don’t want to be not doing it either. I feel like a curiosity sometimes, to myself. But through any of it, I never before have wondered if he started to love me less.
It would appear this person doesn’t love me at all. He couldn’t both love me and promise to bathe in my tears. He couldn’t love me while he tries to bruise my jaw. He couldn’t love me while he threatens to traumatise me. Except I never feel unloved. I never even feel concerned about the loss of love. I feel he loved me less, back when he just couldn’t express his evil on my skin. I feel he loves me more since he started to trust himself to know which protests to disregard. The more responsible he feels for my safety, the more comfortable he feels taking me to dangerous places. Every inch of the rope I let go of, is another inch he can hold.
Until I have nothing.
And I can reject pain.
And pleasure.
Or accept them.
Without worrying about what I want. What I want is to never have to figure out what I will get. This body is a minefield and trying to give it what it wants takes up so many drawers in my head. Yet I still never know what I want.
“I don’t know what want?” I may have said it out loud.
‘It doesn’t matter,” he says, “I’ll tell you what to want.”
His words cause a reaction.
From the middle of my chest down to my gut. I feel nothing, nowhere else. It’s strange to have these little parts of me ignite. My heart hurts. My stomach feels tingly. My eyes are leaking. But I feel no sadness. Nor any joy.
“You can cry,” he says still hurting me, “It still doesn’t matter what you want.“
I don’t want it to matter but I don’t say that. It doesn’t matter that I don’t want it to matter. It doesn’t matter that my whole body feels like an act of service. It doesn’t matter that it feels like I’m holding my entire identity like sand inside the desperate clutches of my hand.
It doesn’t matter.
Because he’s teaching me to be irrelevant.
And this is what irrelevant does.
It learns not to matter.