Anticipation

I had a critique last night, for a piece of creative writing I've been working on. The work is relatively fresh and challenging for me -- I've essentially been using the energy from a recent incident in my life to fuel a story which is ostensibly about something else. And in struggling to talk about these things, a lot of unexpected twists emerged. My instructor last night pointed out a lot of the potentials of this work I hadn't quite seen yet.

The story explores what it means to have a fetish, whether it is possible to love someone as a result of pursuing that fetish, what it means to lose that love, how people manipulate their own memories and experiences in order to persuade other people, and it mixes in race and gender in ways I didn't anticipate when I started. I also flirt, very openly, with the fact that this story -- or some parts of it -- may be my own experiences. The instructor warned me about the ramifications of that, even as he suggested that it was intriguing. I learned the most from him about what was working in the story by what he warned me about -- the warnings were a sign to me that I was onto something potentially dangerous, which is what I want.

Afterwards, I went out with two of my favorite classmates and we had a long, interesting conversation. Both of them are gay men, and they got me talking about sadism. We got into the specifics of what I enjoy about inflicting pain. It was strange to describe it in such detail -- the tingle in your hand when it slaps skin, the eroticism of someone gasping in pain, the desperate, lost, dependent quality of a man who both longs for and fears you putting nipple clamps on him (or taking them off), the sight of him bent over for you, the knowledge that you could do it harder and he would take it happily, the freedom of being cruel when cruelty is so forbidden to women socially. In some ways, I can't even put words to the way I'm feeling when I'm being sadistic -- it is probably one of the moments in my life when I am the most wordless. I act, I don't speak very much.

I came home to find a sweet little note from my pet telling me that he missed me. Those small little gestures of longing and vulnerability are exciting -- knowing that he can't wait to serve me again adds a little spring to my step that I wouldn't otherwise have. Feeling that hunger to use him again soon, and knowing that I will see him in a few days. The anticipation is an important part of the fun.