You know, if I change the song that is playing I get to change my mood.  It’s a handy trick.  Do you know why I’m willing… no… why I want to do the really scary painful things?

Noah is nicer to me than anyone has ever been.  He goes really far out of his way to make me happy.  I can’t believe how willing he is to go through a lot of effort for me.  I’m important to him.  He’s a complicated man.  When we do intense play I have to trust him.  I have to communicate about the physical limits of my body.  And I have to trust him.  The thing is there is a lot of gray area in between when it stops feeling good and when I actually can’t handle more pain.  I genuinely don’t understand why pushing someone to that place is erotic.  It doesn’t get me wet to top.

But oh man it turns Noah on.  I don’t have to understand why.  I don’t have to be able to feel the same feeling in my body to understand that it is important to him.  There is some part of him, something scary, that wants that.  I don’t think it is a need.  But he wants it.  He wants it a really lot.  He likes how I react.  When I’m in that kind of mood.  I don’t think he would enjoy how I would react today, so he isn’t going to hurt me today.

But when my body isn’t aching like this from going too far, sometimes I do want it.  There are brain chemicals attached to being hurt.  But I like being hurt a little.  Mostly Noah is happy to cater to that.  Mostly what I want is for someone to touch me fairly gently and tell me evil stories about hurting me far past what I can handle.  I like knowing that he wants to.  That he can.  That he has.  That he will.  But right now he’s being nice to me because he likes me a lot and he wants me to be a happy, healthy person and right now hurting me isn’t a good idea.

I like that he’s stared at me for a long time.  He hasn’t fucked up in a long time.  He reads my signals so well.  He knows what I want before I know.  All he has to do is grin at me and I want.  Maybe the problem is that when I go back through my roster I have the whole thought process over again about how they so aren’t Noah.  Maybe I need to stop reminding myself of why I stopped sleeping with these people in the first place.

I like the idea of poly.  Of sexual relationships that continue on casually through  time and get revisited.  Other people don’t evolve with me fast enough.  I feel angry at them for being exactly who they were the last time I slept with them because it wasn’t right then either.  That sounds weird.  I have sex with people to audition them in my head.  It decides a lot about how much weight I put on someones opinions later as a friend.  Like Chris.  (The awesome thing is, I have slept with quite a few Chris’ of both genders so using the name is totally meaningless.  Yay!)  I am really attached to Chris.  When I talk to Chris I listen harder than I do with other people.  I care a lot about his opinion.  When I’m really worried… I call him and ask him to weigh in on a topic.  Because when we had sex he looked at me and he actually played within my boundaries while finding out where they were.  Not very many people have ever done that.  They either blow right past what I can handle and enjoy or they never come close to pushing me.

Mostly though people don’t do that.  Mostly people are imperfect in one way or another.  At the end of an encounter I always have the thought, “Man I would work on ____”.  How long the list is decides how many times I come back.  If there are too many things, I can’t handle it and I move on.  I don’t discuss sexual incompatibility with people.  My issues are mine.  It’s inevitably something about the way someone is touching me.  The way it makes me feel.

Noah is the only person I have ever dated who has been able to have dramatically different “modes” of touch.  I don’t even know how to codify how he does it.  He reads me.  He learned me.  He studied me.  He studied me like a religion.  He learned how to coax things out of me.  When I feel like shit I want to stop feeling that way because it makes Noah sad.

Finding people to sleep with in a reasonably healthy way is hard.  I need to learn new screening procedures because mine are broken for my current set of needs.  That sounds like work.  But maybe the kind of work Noah would find fun.  Really, isn’t all of this for him anyway?  No.  But it sounds more fun to say it that way.

Because other than being in pain this much later, and having to tell him no that vehemently to unprotected sex (seriously? I have to yell at you that it’s not ok to fuck me without a condom? When neither of us have another form of birth control? Fuck no.  That’s not. Fucking. Ok.) it was hot.

And I think that the only reason he was able to fuck like that is because he’s the kind of asshole that really wants to push past all my boundaries.  I like that aggression.  This feels so dangerous.  I’m not attracted to passive men.  I don’t know how to flirt with people in a socially acceptable ways.  Do you know how I set up this tryst?  He posted on facebook that he was in town for two weeks and if anyone wanted tattoo work they need to get in touch quickly.  I responded and said, “So you’re saying that if I want to fuck you I have to hurry?”  He responded at midnight when he got off work with a voicemail.  We arranged getting together the next morning.  He’s staying with his mom.  Hotel room it is!

I loved the excitement.  I feel so bad that my response afterwards is so ungrateful.  There is that word.  Oh man.  That’s what this is.  I feel bad because I feel ungrateful.  He really went to a lot of trouble for me, and I enjoyed it.  And here I am bitching.  You see how I don’t fucking appreciate anything.

I want to cry, but it hurts.  It hurts to exist in my body.  I’m not grateful for this.  Sex does not have to be this.  Noah taught me that sex doesn’t have to feel like this.  I wasn’t raped.  Not in any way.  But I was brutalized.  And I feel like it is my fault because I somehow advertise that I want that.  Is it really so unreasonable to want aggression without being injured?  Does every sexual encounter truly have to involve people choking me until I get terrible headaches that last for days?  Is this really normal?  I have never been in an abusive relationship because I brag on the internet that I love to be choked so everyone does it and I never tell them to stop.

Even though I get these terrible headaches.  Even though when they lean on my chest choking me they bruise my bones and I hurt for weeks.  Even though I kind of wish that people would stop telling me so explicitly by their actions that they think it would be hot to watch me die.

I don’t want to be that kind of hot any more.  I am not expendable.  I am not an object.  It is not ok to risk my death just because you like how my cunt contracts when you choke me.  I am not actually a fucktoy, no matter what you call me.

And back the fuck off with acting like my hips are just supposed to get out of the way.

Shit.  Changing the music didn’t work, did it?  Well.  It’s a different flavor of whining.  I don’t understand why I am incapable of talking about this kind of thing in the moment.  Well, part of it is that I don’t know just how far past my fun-pain level things are at until later.  And very few people have ever had to deal with the consequences of hurting me this way.  Mostly I dealt with it in silence.  Noah has had to deal with it extensively and as a result he figured out how to have pseudo-rough sex with me.

I really like Noah.  I think I persist in sleeping with other people because I start taking him for granted.  I forget just how very exceptional he is.  Noah has made reading me his hobby.  It’s not that he’s made such a master study of sex, although he is far more experienced than most.  First he went after sex.  Then he went after me.  Because I’m enough.

Yeah.  I’ll heal and stop feeling angry.  Then I’ll let Noah hurt me again.  Because Noah will do it right.  And I want to see him smile.  Because I want to feel him vibrating with tension as he pushes himself and me right to the edge of me panicking.  Because he thinks it is funny.  Because he thinks it is hot.  It’s sometimes an abusive relationship.  But it has an off switch.  I think that makes it ok.