LOVING MY OLD CARCASS

My body is causing me problems at the moment, my heart in particular. I have something called a dilated cardiomyopathy to add to the congenital issues of a dodgy valve and mild arrhythmia. I get out of breath at the slightest exertion. That might not sound much, but I have to tackle the slight incline between my home and the train station in a series of what climbers would call pitches, with short pauses in between.

I fucking hate it. The GP referred me to the cardiology unit and I waited three weeks to be told it will be three months before they can see me. And that’s just for a diagnosis.

It’s not only that. I constantly recognise other signs of aging. My shoulders have shrunk, I creak like my dad used to, my erectile disfunction seems to have become a permanent condition and my body inflicts other little ignominies on me too embarrassing to mention here.

So this would be a bad time to pay someone to tie me up and hurt me, right? I’ve written in the past about the line between self gratification and self harm that masochists have to be wary of. Surely a session now would put me on the wrong side of that line.

In contrast, it turns out to be the bloody perfect time!

As I sat watching the cricket in a sunny Lords ground before my session with Miss Hunter, I could feel my body waking up. Adrenaline kicked open the door of my internal barrack room and marched down the line of beds, prodding life into the somnolent functions there. I was already wearing the tight fetish underwear I’d chosen for the session and could feel it pressing against me. I felt alive. I felt turned on.

The session let me reconnect with my body, to love it for the surges of pleasure and pain it was sending me, and to be proud of its fortitude in the face of the onslaught it was subjected to.

Miss H knows me so well now that we don’t start with a detailed session plan or complicated role play. She’ll adjust to my responses moment to moment, now pushing forward, now holding back, creating an ascent of a sensual mountain whose contours only she can define.

This time, the final pitch was steep and demanding, alternating between violent blows on my arse with a tawse and on my back with dragon-tail whip. I was fighting for breath in the thin air, but we made it to the summit and the view was spectacular! I could see for miles, an uninterrupted view of a world of calm and peaceful reflection, at one with my body, at one with my kinks, and at one with Miss Hunter as she leaned her body against mine to soak up my spontaneous sobbing.

Why was I crying? Relief that it was over? Emotional release? A response to the beauty of the view from our hard-won summit? Possibly all these things. But in her wonderful book “Sex With Shakespeare” Jillian Keenan suggests that, for people whose sexuality is more defined by spanking than by sex, a flood of tears is like an orgasm.

I get this.

For me, pain is such a sexual experience that my sessions feel like ninety minutes of edging, the constant application of sexual stimulus without the release of orgasm. The emotional and sexual tension of it all are held back by a damn, to be released in a huge surge only by the knowledge that it is over.

I didn’t orgasm in the session, but I cried. It was a beautiful moment.

So for the next few weeks I’ll be in touch with my body again. I’ll take care of it, eat less, drink less and work hard for a cardiology appointment. I’ll touch myself a bit, squeeze the bruises and enjoy the prickling of my back against my shirt.

And when those feelings go, and my focus returns to the limitations of my old carcass, I’ll haul it back to Miss Hunter and we’ll drag it up another mountain together.

More Sunday Sin here: 

It feels a bit of a fraud to put this on sinful Sunday as it’s very much a wordy post, but I do like this image.