The drawer
and some things in it
Dear Sir,
The drawer is where I keep things, our things that we use. Some more than others and often times. The collar you awarded me with, the cuff that you tied my wrists with, the leather gone soft now where it sits against the back of my wrists, the satin-y blindfold that is fraying slightly at the edges, threads breaking making them look like fine nose hair. You bought it for me but I don’t think you spent a lot of money on it. Sometimes I use it on my eyes when I want to sleep but the light is always too bright outside because my bedroom faces south, and I don’t feel like drawing the curtains. There’s also the rope that you like to use because I complained about the other ropes that you tried and this one was softer on my skin. It also holds fast like you like it to. I like that you tried four different ropes on me and settled on the one I liked most.
There’s more in that drawer. Not the electric bunny or the glass plug that has a carved rose on one end. Those I keep in a basket under the bed. But there are ordinary things in that drawer too. A receipt—four of five receipts—from our coffee dates, a hair tie that I found in your car that I know belongs to your wife, an ink pen which I feel is too heavy for me to use to write so I keep it unfilled, the button that came off your cuff in March when you smacked me even though you were gentler than normal. I kept the button like a thieving little magpie, because as your submissive I am allowed a few thefts of things that belong to you and the button was one.
I am kneeling in front of the drawer. It’s a part of my side table in the bedroom that you find so calming. It is evening and I have switched on the big light that hangs from the ceiling with the lampshade that the landlady kindly did not remove when I moved in two years ago. The bulb is half-caked with dirt. It is barely one of the rooms in your house in Hammersmith. But you like this room, I know.
I know you like it when I kneel this way. My thighs folded and spread a little too wide. Buttocks hitching and back arching. You’re not here, but I do it anyway. For a few moments at least, before I relax and re-breathe and reiterate to myself that you’re not here.
I pick each content of the drawer out one by one and lay them on the top of the table. This I don’t like to do often, you know, because of my own inability to keep control of my own hearts and heartaches. But I want to write you a letter—several letters—and thought of the objects as talismans of memories, as all mundane objects are. So many times my hands have been on this table top because you carefully or carelessly placed them there.
The letter. This letter. I don’t know if I will send it to you.
I will.
Okay, I will not.
Okay, I will decide later.
But I know you’d like to know that I wrote it because you like to know everything I do or think and where everything is kept and what everything contains. Words, things, tears, whimpers, pens, and shoes. But if I tell you then you would want to read it and that will undo me beyond my own survival. But yes, you would like that I am doing this on my knees.
I choose a heavy pen to write. My brain fries at the idea of writing but this is what I want, isn’t it, Sir? I still myself with a few solemn whispers whispered into the brightness of my room. It makes me squint and makes my eyes hurt, but not as much as the ache between my legs. I choose my pen more carefully than I admit to. I have easier pens, lightweight, that flow smoothly and pleasing ink colours, but I choose the Chinese ink pen which is heavy.
I love you.
You already know. Or you don’t. I shudder to think what if you do know and you don’t make noises about it to make me aware. I make the first word with the pen and the ink makes a small scratch on the surface of the paper and a cut the same size as the scratch appears on the inside of my left thigh. Blood appears. Drips a little on my carpeted floor but it is nothing that hasn’t happened before. I wince but I don’t notice too many winces that escape me. You know what the red looks like on my brown thighs, especially on the inner part which is so much darker than the rest of my body. When we started with each other I wondered if my skin would bother you. The colour of it, the little bumps on it. But you rand your hand over them like you were trying to read my mind in braille and licked me wet till I quivered under your watchful eyes. I will write about your eyes some other day in some other letter.
My handwriting has always slanted backwards. Pessimistic. Sociopathic. Pathetic. But I don’t think it is any of those things. The ink spreads in these infernal slants and loops and dots across the paper and the cuts on my thighs appear at random. I don’t choose the cuts. I only choose the words. I write to you. The pain is mine. I will bear it. I will wear it and name it as if my own child.
I would rather feel the heaviness of your body on me than this pen weighing my forearm down. You sweat on me and we stick together, but I don’t mind because I know in two seconds you will put your mouth near my ear and say in the hoarseness of your voice nearing the zenith, “My beautiful rainbow girl.”
I once wondered out loud why you called me that and you rattled off a short list of things—the false colour of my hair, the unhideable colour of my brown skin, the golden of my face, the lips that I sometimes paint in pale nude or blood red depending on your wants, the brown of my eyes, the dark brown of my crevices and the pink of the insides of my cunt—like your mother had asked you to recite your ten times table. I had blushed because no one had ever spoken to me like that or described anything of mine like that. But you didn’t bat an eyelash. You never do.
I love you.
It is not early to say it. We have known each other for over a year. Me a lowly ghoul and you a married man whose wife likes to hear about what you do to me. She hasn’t asked to meet me for whatever reasons that are dear to her (insecurity, crossing lines, blurring the lines between fantasy and happy marriage) but she knows. You tell her. Someday I would like you tell me what you tell her and how. And also, how does she react? Does she spread her legs at you and touch herself prettily or does she listen to it like she listens to gossip from her brunching friends? Politely interested, mildly amused, nodding so her sparkly diamond earring dangle back and forth.
Someday I will tell you why I keep your ordinary things safe and sound in here, although I do not most of the time consider them ordinary. You will not find this letter or the others I will write to you. But you always reach for this drawer when we play, Sir, so you will find these items back where they belong, like me at your feet.
Under the big hateful light,
your beautiful rainbow girl