On Worth

I'd been meaning to have a conversation with my boyfriend about this for a while now. All this, the journey, and his place in it, by default. See, he's vanilla...well, not in the sense that he doesn't like to play, but in the sense that he only plays sporadically, and for me. And so I had been telling him for a while that at the end of the summer, I'd need to have this conversation. Well, the summer is ending...

I had been giving him websites to research, places to chat, and telling him to ask all the questions he wanted. I tried to explain to him about how huge this part of my life is, especially right now. How it is so much more than a couple of smacks before a blowjob, or what have you. We talked tonight, but as per usual, the conversation was much bigger than I thought it would be, became about our relationship niches and about our attraction to each other. I feel more lost and helpless than I did before we had this conversation.

I was at my mom's house for the last week and the other day, I went to visit my father's grave. He died over ten years ago, when I was just a child. I am the only one who goes to the grave now. It's too far for his family and my mother and brother get really depressed being there, so I am the only one. I hadn't been in over a year; certain holidays pass to make me remember I haven't, and I feel guilty. So, having a free morning, I picked up some flowers and went.

When I got there, a woman with her young daughter was sitting on a folding chair a few feet from the grave. I couldn't look at them; they weren't sad, or angry, or hollow. They didn't know my pain. I grabbed the thorny weeds from the edges of the stone marker and yanked them out, and that pain felt good. It was intense, it was alive; it wasn't a dull, fading ache like my father's death. It wasn't the knots in my shoulders and inky blackness from watching my brother try to kill himself over and over. It was fresh, intense and so agonizingly real. And I wanted more of it.

When I drove away from the graveyard, I called my boyfriend, but he wasn't awake yet. I drove to a tattoo parlor thinking I would get another tattoo or piercing. I couldn't, for the life of me, find the place I remembered. My boyfriend called back but I didn't pick up, twice. Desperate and frustrated, circling the buildings and growing more agitated, I called him back. He knew I was upset and I told him, "Sometimes I don't want to be the one who carries the torch; sometimes I want to let them go and be strong for me. But they would never do that. And now, all I want is pain."

He knew; he understood.

And the feeling didn't go away. For two days I thought about how to get that pain. I thought about how easy it would be to fuck it away, to cut it away. But I didn't do that. I was holding out the hope that he would figure it out for me, that when I said to him, "I need pain," he would tell me he knew and give it to me. But it didn't happen like that, not exactly anyway.

Tonight we talked about lots of things, but in the end, all we realized is that he is uncomfortable with himself and he is no longer attracted to me physically, if in fact, he ever was. And this hurt, more than I wanted it to. I told him, "When you decide we won't fuck for weeks, even months at a time, it means I am not worth the effort." One thing I have learned about the D/s relationship is that it takes effort, and a tremendous amount of it. But that's why submissives love it and will gladly give control over to another person: we want to know that we are worth it.

And I am no longer worth it. It's all that stuff I was dreading hearing; I felt so ashamed. I wanted pain and more pain, but I am not worth that to someone else. When he went to sleep, I began to cut it away. Everything that I had mistakenly thought had value: my intellect, my sense of humor, my pretty face, my desire to put his needs ahead of my own, the way I helped him through difficult situations, the times I have been so insanely anxious and fearful for him, every single thing that I thought he might think gave me worth. But it wasn't enough anymore. The cutting.

You see I have to be careful, have always been careful. When you do something like this, you have to do it in a concealed place and not too much and not too often; you have to watch the details. Can't do more than a dozen or you would look really unbalanced if found out, can't do them so deep they reopen later and cause messy, unexplainable stains. I dribbled lime juice from my beer on them and it burned so bad; I was shaking. It was that pain I was longing for. But it was too fleeting.

I am not saying this to make him feel responsible for my actions; I am writing all this so that I can understand myself. I am a fucked-up girl and have been for some time, but I am trying to fix that. It doesn't always work out the right way. I don't always have all the answers and I am not expecting someone else to have them either. I don't know what I am saying, just that I am saying it. And that's better than before.

I don't know where we are now, but after tonight, I can't go back and unhear it. I can't go back at all.