When I Cannot Touch Him.

I didn't mean to but my hand reached out to his. He was sitting with his knees on either side of me and punching my jaw. The right side of my mouth felt swollen like a smooth cunt that had just been waxed. Inside my mouth, I could taste the blood. I don't love the taste of blood, especially mine, there's too much iron in my blood and it tastes like liquid metal, but I like how blood feels in my mouth. I like how I feel when things start to bleed, it's the same feeling I get when the thunder turns to rain. It was hard lying on my back, he had just stripped it red with something or other, but I was already starting to forget the discomfort. Sometimes all it takes is a different weapon to make you forget the last one.

His fist landed exactly in the spot that had just been cut and immediately my teeth squashed against the tender skin inside my mouth. There is something powerfully inelegant about violence, it doesn't break things cleanly. When someone beats me with a belt or a whip, there's an elegance to the welts and bruises, it's targeted damaged. Aesthetically pleasing, even. There is none of that with violence, nothing breaks in the right place. It's the difference between a crack in a glass and stomping on it. Violence disfigures and distorts in a way that is ugly. The sounds are ugly, the scars are wrong, the location is unspecified, the impact is inelegant. My ex used to say it's the difference between breaking someone's bone on purpose, and running over them with a car. He was wrong about a lot, but he was right about that.

When his fist landed on my mouth, again, it made my brain spin. I should worry about my face more, I really should, but that spinning feeling makes a really good case not to worry. I'm addicted to that feeling of violence on my skin. For someone who loves silence, craves it even, the noise of violence is too attractive to me. It makes me helpless, and a little sad, because when there is a belt or a paddle, they bring a quiet hum, when there is a fist it brings the promise of a whirlwind and it's impossible to catch your break when running with the storm knowing it will drown you. I was drowning in his fists and when I felt his other hand resting on my abdomen, I don't know why, I reached out to it.

I gripped his fingers, two of them, the two that he used to sow pain inside me, and for a moment it felt like everything had finally gone quiet. I could break. My head wasn't spinning. The world wasn't going at a million miles an hour.

For a moment.

Then he pulled his hand away and grabbed my neck.

"I touch you," he said, "You don't touch me."

It's heartbreaking whenever he says that. I touch him a lot, and I touch him all the time. I run my hands over his chest when he sleeping. I stroke his arm when he sits beside me. I wrap my arms around him ten times a day. I put my hands around his neck when he kisses me. I hold his leg every time I kneel in front of him. I touch him all the time. Except when he is hurting me. For a long time he never told me not to, it was just understood, but I remember the first time he said it. I was sitting on an naked on an armchair in the first apartment we ever rented together, he was hitting me with his shoe. My hands were on either arm of the chair and my head was hanging low enough that he could access my back. For a moment after he stopped hitting my back, he stepped closer to me and stopped, and in my naive understanding of his style of sadism, I put my head against his stomach and one hand against his hip. For me, it was a moment of extreme tenderness, and admittance that I do crave some kind of tenderness. For him, it was a breach. He stepped back and grabbed me by the hair.

"Don't fucking touch me until I say you can," he said shaking my head by my hair.

It destroyed me. Immediately, I started crying. He had no sympathy for those tears. For a man who literally cannot scold me for real because for some reason I start crying immediately every single time he reflexively yells at me for something stupid (like running into him and pushing him into the kitchen shelf because I was so excited to see him), his lack of sympathy for me when he is actively making me cry is truly astounding. I kept on crying, and he kept on beating me, but my hands never left the side of the chair again. I never realised how much I wanted to be able to touch him whenever I pleased, and how accustomed I was to doing it otherwise, until I couldn't do it anymore. I never touch anyone, he is the only person with whom I exercise any kind of physical comfort and I didn't realise its value. I didn't realise how much distance there could be between me and the person destroying my body.

Every once in a while when he is beating me, in the moments of silence in between, I feel tempted to just reach out and touch him. Just hold his hand or place my palm against his warm skin, and each time I have to actively explain to myself that I cannot do that. I cannot touch him unless he tells me I can, I cannot wrap my head around why that gives me the spinny feeling in my head that I love so much. It's much easier to stop myself, than to hear him stop me from reaching out for more gruel. I never do it, and he never knows that I felt the urge to do it, but I know, and each time I resist the urge, it breaks my heart a little. It chips away at it a little. I never do it, because I want to see what my heart looks like after it's been thoroughly chiseled by the hurt he doesn't even know he causes. I never do it.

But sometimes, sometimes like that night, I forget myself and the reflexes win, and each time I expect to be treated differently. I expect him to recognise all the times I exercised such restraint even though my heart was breaking, and in recognition of that, allow me a moment of breaking character. Just a moment. I expect him to see how much it took for me to succumb to that simple little desire to touch the person I love most, when I am hurting the most, and allow it. I expect him to have just a little bit of compassion, enough to see my vulnerability, and not massacre it.

But he didn't.

Even after he yelled at me, he sat there holding my throat and staring at my hand. My hand still lay on top of me, only a few inches away from where his hand used to be. I didn't know one could feel uncomfortable in their hand, I felt like I couldn't move it a centimeter without the whole world crashing around me but he kept looking at it and then back of me. He didn't need to say it, it was just understood. Slowly, too slowly, I moved my hand back and put it back where it used to me. Over my head, beside the other one. That's where they're supposed to be, out of the way and unobtrusive, bound but not tied. He released my neck slowly as my hand went back to the place where they would never try to touch him, and it was such a small moment, but I know I will remember it forever. Who knew one could be so deft at breaking a heart. The dexterity of this cruelty could please any woman.