the song of your people

The first time we slept together you took me to the pond and said
“This is where the lovers say their vows”
And I said nothing in exchange
Because I know what vows are worth in your language
A year of misery, maybe two if we’re really unlucky

I let the frogs in the pond sing their answer instead of mine
And then I let you kiss me.
We fucked, although you’d prefer it if I said we made love
But calling it that won’t change the fact
That I have no more love to give than I have fucks

The next morning I woke up when the cooks turned on the kitchen lights
Turns out your bedroom’s only window was placed exactly between the refrigerator and the pantry
And the cooks at the window were sharpening their knives
And looking hungry.

And I said it’s always the fucking same isn’t it
Your kind can’t help themselves talking of vows and of wreaths
And how you’ve changed from the frog into prince with the movement of our hips

But once you’ve come in our hair you can’t help but make us feel like a piece of meat.

“You’re Insatiable”

Having sex for money* plummeted me into a spiral of sex addiction and a constant need for experience. 

@louijover

I was inspired to write this after a friend asked if my inability to “open [myself] up to the prospect of having a girlfriend” was triggered because I was “mistreated in a previous relationship”. The simple answer is no but it is far more complicated than that and maybe even a little taboo for the average discerning person. So here goes.

I have always been a very sexual person. I first had sex when I was fourteen. I had boyfriends in abundance during high school. The most traumatising break up I experienced was when Samuel dumped me on Valentine’s Day in 2002. He didn’t even have the gutsiness to tell me himself, instead he sent Kieran to run to me and shout it in my face in the playground at lunchtime. It was the Valentine’s disco that afternoon, who was I to hold hands and dance with now? I was heartbroken. It still haunts me to this day. Maybe that’s where my hatred for cowardliness stems from. Oh, Samuel. You are he who is responsible for all my complexities.

I was either fifteen or fourteen when I my tolerance for bad sex had been reached. My best friend, Rebecca, and I were fucking our boyfriends at one of their house’s. She was on the top bunk bed while my boyfriend and I were on the bottom. I was as outspoken then as I am now. Blunt, abrupt, to the point, and satiated with the ritual of moaning with “glee” as he tried to fumble with my labia and penetrate my clitoris. I demanded that Rebecca and I swapped lovers. Her boyfriend was marginally better, or at least, he had a bigger dick. Maybe that’s my love of swinging stems from.

I can’t pin point how I developed a love for dominance and degradation but I recognised that my Head of Year pulling me out of class to reprimand me turned me on more than anything than I could ever find scrolling through RedTube. I fully committed myself to the cause: excluded five times, forbidden to go on the ski trip in France, not allowed on the trip to Auschwitz, instead being made to sit outside his office and complete tedious tasks. Although it did give me something to wank over when I eventually got home so somehow it all seemed worthwhile.

When I wasn’t masturbating, I was in chatrooms and talking with “slave owners” in Texas on ALT.com. I told one local Master the exact route I walked from school to home. We played with the idea that he would kidnap me and one day I felt his presence in my shadow. I strayed from my usual path, and instead walked down a busy main road and scurried into the closest newsagents where I called my mother to come pick me up. I remember telling her I felt faint and nauseous. It wasn’t untrue. I was panicked and learned that some fantasises should stay as such.

And then I met Steven. I was sixteen and at the nightclub that was infamous for “underagers”. I had been going there since I was fourteen and grew friendly with the door staff. In hindsight, and looking back at old photographs from then, I’m not entirely sure how I was let in but it was before Challenge 21/25 and if it wasn’t for my teenage posse and the old perverted men who lusted after us, there’d be no revellers.

“I’ll give you £300 to fuck you if you can prove you’re sixteen.”

He was offering me money for something that I would have done for free. He was exactly what I wanted at that moment. Charming, older, experienced, a perfect one nightstand and a brilliant excuse to disappear. I said my goodbyes to my disinterested friends and escaped to his hotel. This “one night stand” evolved into a five year affair. I wasn’t so naive not to realise that he’d have a wife and a family but he was in my city every week for work and his accent was the same as my biological father’s so when asked me to call him ‘Daddy’ I knew that the wet between my legs would not be found if I was the ‘sweet, little girl’ that he liked to call me.

We were perfect for each other. We were equally perverse, taboo, and being 26 years my senior I relied and look up to him as a daughter would depend on her father. And him being an egocentric, he needed to be needed.

I spawned an imaginary friend so to have an alibi for my countless weekends away from home. Her name was Sarah, we met through friends but she lived in Edinburgh and my mum knew just how much I loved that city so of course I’d have to go see her every weekend. Little did she know I was in Liverpool, or Manchester, sometimes actually in Edinburgh, London one time and Tenerife another. He’d teach me to drink whiskey and we’d play Strangers in a Bar. We’d fuck all weekend, he’d made me squirt and come harder than any other boy my own age could ever dream of. And then there was the gifts: designer watches, underwear, jewellery, a £450 dress just because it looks cute. Sometimes cold hard cash too and I can’t deny I didn’t love it. “Spoil yourself”, he’d say.

Fucking was, and is, like cocaine to me. The supply creates demand.

One sugar daddy wasn’t enough to sustain my sexual hunger. It was inevitable really that I’d eventually get into sex work. I was obsessed with that famous call girl who was all the rage some ten years ago. I was impressionable and wanted all of the things: the money, the sex, the power. I liked conversing with men, humouring them as they tried to make me believe that they were interested in me as a person and not just because I was a young hot whore.

The money was a bonus. I was outwardly living the last of my teenager years as a sexually liberated, kinky woman, having experiences, and going to parties that my peers could only dream of and fantasise about.

It all calmed down (a little) when I started to date a woman and things looked to be getting serious. I still occasionally saw Steven, I was still occasionally “working”, I was still venturing to my local fetish club and I even dragged her to some of the bigger kink parties.

I loved her but I couldn’t omit my sexuality, not even for love, and I don’t think I will ever be capable of doing so.

Being in, what was essentially, a monogamous relationship saw me cheating and living out my hedonistic tendencies unethically and at her expense. It seems everyone’s seven-year itch is my five and last year we amicably made the decision to split up.

This last year has allowed me to find my feet as a singleton again. I can’t deny that I actively seek out “quick fix” conquests and I don’t think I will stop anytime soon. Everyone needs a hobby and while you may pass time playing video games, I fuck strangers. What began as a desire for experience has unfolded into a never ending chase for experience, and in turn possibly an undiagnosed sex addiction.

I have no idea how many people I have slept with but I don’t think the number is relevant. I am proud of my sexuality and will talk freely about it to anyone who wants to know. I may not live my life in a way that is considered conventionally healthy but the pleasure derived from it outweighs the shame. I love love and I love sharing deep moments of passion and lust with similarly sexually liberated individuals. Just because we’re not “in a relationship” does not mean there is not the opportunity to share, to grow, to trust, to provide. Any relationship, given the opportunity, no matter how significant or not, allows change, allows process, and allows healing to occur.

Maybe one day I will grow out of this need to have everything, to do everything, everyone. Maybe one day I will get married, have children, and stop looking over your shoulder.

I’m 25 now and I can’t foresee myself slowing down any time soon, it all seems like a terribly dull and boring prospect for now.

---

 *I am aware that this post has been published on a platform where I am not wholly anonymous. Many of you here know me outside of the realms of the inter webs and my sex worker past may be something you were not aware of but it is neither something I deny or am ashamed of. Sex workers are real people and there are more of us than you think. 

to look at, to wonder at

I am the flower in the mirror,
the moon on the surface of water

I am the shadow behind you,
the Mona Lisa

I am a mirage,
the beautiful dreams that are unattainable

I am the sun setting or rising,
the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel

I am the beauty that you can only see,
but can’t touch

I am the beauty that you can only feel,
but can’t touch

the intervention

It’s not your decision whether someone falls in love with you or not.
And I agree for the most part.
But I struggle with it.
I struggle with all of it.

I sit in silence absorbing every word while you chat amongst yourselves.
I want to defend but I can’t argue what I can’t articulate.
It’s like white noise inside my head.
Instead I laugh. I shrug it off. It is what it is.

I’m not deflecting. I’m not being defensive.
Or at least I don’t mean to.
I’m an open book.
Or at least I thought I was.

Do you feel like you’re letting a barrier down if you openly talk about things?
Do you find it difficult to trust people?
Were you mistreated in an old relationship?
Why don’t you feel?

If I knew the answers I wouldn’t be the disaster that I am.
But trust me when I say that I’m doing you a favour.
You don’t want the toxicity.
You don’t need the burden.

Just ask those who tore down that wall.
I’m the parasite.
The gnat.
The switchblade.

There are never any positive adjectives.
Just a bitter after taste.
An off flavour.
A bad habit.

A beautiful mess
But a mess no less.

Let’s just have sex because love, love means one of us has to fall. I don’t want to fall and I don’t want you to either. So let’s choose not to. Let’s choose to stay afloat and be guided by the current, to grow and ebb with the tide. To contort our bodies into each other, to wrestle with the mania and to listen to that song which speaks the feelings we can’t articulate. Let’s take our detachment and fears and forget about them for the evening, to only know this reality. 

As lovers we are image makers and artists and unique. We’re story tellers and dream chasers. We’re the fingerprints and snow flakes and forgotten child memories, metaphors and desires out of the ordinary. The impulse is deep and old and persistent. A drug, chasing the highs but not naive enough to not anticipate the lows as consequence.

We can’t be in love because this is not how love is made. 

The only things binding are the shackles on wrists. The only things blinding are the scarfs and dust bags. The only thing warm is the melted wax from burning candles over skin. It’s concrete and viscera, it’s the wet and the hard and the dirt and the rope, it’s the only love I want to know.

 

I’ve grown compliant. My life is easy and I sleep side by side with my best friend, sometimes we touch each other. I make promises of monogamy and those promises sometimes last three whole days. Maybe this is normal. Maybe feeling unfulfilled in a relationship of four years is normal. But I can’t stop my mind from wandering, thinking of others, lying about me, my existence, my responsibilities. Maybe it’s normal for people to fantasise about others. But maybe it’s not normal to act or pursue those fantasies.

Maybe I’m not normal.

Plenty of Fish, Tinder, HER, OK Cupid, I’ve had them all and more. I think part of me enjoys creating new profiles, creating an illusion of myself because I am a narcissist. I have a palm full of sweeties, come and take one, come and taste the mystery. You’ll assume they’re sweet but it’s only me who knows they soon grow sour…

Usually I am the pursuer. Girls want to feel special – and I am good at making girls feel special – but this time it’s not me who makes the first move. One day passes and you suggest we meet for a drink.

“Number one,” you say while pointing at the recent spilled beer mark on my thigh.
“Number two,” after I knock the tobacco out of my would be hand rolled cigarette.
“Number three,” when I trip over the last cobbled step in that eery pub.

“Are you always this clumsy?” The question hangs in the air while I blush and try to regain composure.
“Are you always this judgemental?”
“I’m never judgemental but I am always observant.”

We talk a lot, mainly about me, and you quickly discover that I don’t live alone. I quickly discover that you love games. You tell me your life is all about music, food and sex. You have a sex friend. I tell you I have more than one.

From there we started to play with each other. Not a normal game but a fucking psychological war to see who would fall first.

Later, the next evening, I’m at your apartment, “what do you eat?”
“Anything but cheese.”
“Are you allergic?”
“No, I just don’t like it.”

You order pizza topped with four cheeses and I fucking eat it. We fuck. I don’t come and you tell me it’s psychological. We’re laying together, you’re kissing my forehead, stroking my hair, tucking that one strand back behind my ear.

“Are you staying here tonight?” Tension and silence fill the gap between our entwined fingers. I can’t look at you but instead bury my head beneath your chin.

“I don’t do sleepovers,” I whisper as you climb on top of me, staring into my eyes, smirking. “But I do want you to fuck me.”
“I’m not fucking you.”
“I want you to fuck me.”
“You’re not here. I’ve lost count how many times you’ve looked up at the clock.”
“I am here. I’m here. I’m right fucking here,” guiding your hand to my cunt, “fuck me please.”

The smirk on your face quickly fades and I think I have gotten my own way but this isn’t for my benefit. This is about power. You’re bigger than me, stronger and you make me feel so small, weak even. Eventually you stop and we’re laying in a puddle of your accomplishment, my humility.

“Now fuck off back to your girlfriend.”
“I don’t -“

Later, another evening, I visit you after a night out and I get defensive when you ask if I’m an alcoholic, subtly reminding me that I had three beers that first day we met while you only had two.

“You make me feel uneasy and uncomfortable.”
“Well if it’s comfort you’re looking for…” you hold your arm out and I cry.
“I barely know you but you make me feel naked and vulnerable, but safe too.” You run me a bath, pick out some pyjamas too big for me and I stay the night. In the morning you heat up croissants and brew fresh coffee and we smoke too many cigarettes. You ask me if I would mind if you fuck someone else and I tell you I couldn’t know. I ask you the same and you say yes.

When I leave it’s more than two days before we talk again.

“How are you?” A text that I reluctantly send but less than a minute later you call me.
“I’ve booked for us to go away together next month. Don’t make plans that week. Don’t ask me where we are going. Don’t ask any questions. Just say yes.”

I want to ask questions, mainly why haven’t you contacted me, where have you been, and what the fuck? Instead, silence again.

“I’m sorry we’re just friends.” I say, attempting to fill the void.
“Did I ask you something?” You say my name as though I’m being summoned by my Head of Year all over again. Your accent think and full, and how my name rolls off your tongue gives me instant goosebumps. “We are incompatible. I’m the definition of possessive and you’re not ready for that. You’re not ready for me. But you do intrigue me. And I like you. And I like it when you come.”

We had plans to meet on Tuesday but after a horrible day I needed to be at home with my best friend.

You call me. “The problem with you and I is that I like to plan and you don’t. The difference between you and I is that I respect the people I schedule time for and you don’t.”

We erase each other’s numbers and agree that it maybe could have worked if we were both emotionally available.

Last night we matched on Tinder. I think part of me fell in love with her. And when I think about her I get sad. She probably won’t sleep alone tonight but I know she will still feel lonely.

“Don’t burn all your bridges down,” he warns her. “You won’t have anyone left to turn to.”

“I’ll still have you, won’t I?” Her words slurred with pain or too much beer, he doesn’t know. “You always come running back even when I make your life miserable.

You can’t stay away from me.”

He wished he could tell her she was wrong.

I’m going away for a couple of weeks but it’s no holiday. I’m going away to seek asylum from the war in my head. To find stillness, to yield the loneliness, bend the anxiety, manipulate the madness.

I’m escaping to arctic winds to remind myself that I am alive. I’m going away to seek the visible breath as proof that I am warm on the inside.

I’m going away for a couple of weeks but it’s no holiday. I have this incurable illness of restlessness, a pre existing condition of being alive. I’m running from the punishment of perpetual consciousness to entertain ideas of unrealistic virtues of an eternal hedonism.

I’m escaping to find beauty in the ugliness, find a fraction of joy in the bitterness, peace in the chaos, existence in the loneliness. To take my fractured sense of self, put that black dress on and contemplate death under the pale moonlight.

I was never taught love,
I never looked for it.
But I learned love,
By looking at you.