Need

My body is craving sensation. Pain.

I’m trying to remember the last time my body needed to ground down into pain.

It’s not a bad feeling, exactly. It’s just disorienting. Like my skin doesn’t fit right and I need to writhe around inside of it. Like I need something that forces me to push against the boundaries of my body so I know it’s really there.

Panic. Feels like I’ve been still, sitting still, not moving, barely breathing. I need something to push against.

A good, long tattoo. Sex, the kind that makes it hard to walk for a couple days. Slow building tough rope.

This is winter, a permanent itch I just can’t scratch, a slow build to the next bad idea that tides me over until the next time.

Next time could be days or weeks. Months, if I’m lucky.

I need to panic and push against something. I need fingertips that sieve the color of my eyes and know this need. To casually, cruelly, lovingly hurt me until I can breathe again, until my eyes mix and meld back into green.

I need to scream, to howl at the sky, to find a way to stretch these wings and fly. The cold is suffocating and I am striking match after match, wasting the oxygen for a moment of heat.

The world is still, coaxing me into quiet as though quiet is reprieve. I need to get lost in the darkness, and not see what’s coming. I need to sit with terror, the kind that spikes my adrenaline and reminds me that tomorrow isn’t promised.

If I depend on tomorrow, I will never live today.

I need to choke and wonder where I am when I wake up. I need to write, to say every thought that’s spinning in my mind but can’t find the words to anchor into. I need to hurt, the slow building hurt that my body can process. I need to fuck, like it’s the last time that I’m going to, like I have lost all sense of reticence and fear, like I have dropped whatever shame stills my hands so many times, like this is damnation and redemption I am finding, over and over in the skin of someone else.

I need someone who loves me, but not too much.

This is winter, the dead heart of winter, where nothing moves too much or too fast, where the world takes a break and everyone seems calm and quiet in the stillness and I, I am the person in the corner running in circles inside my skin, screaming beneath the surface as we smile and make small talk.

Take another sip of coffee. Burn your throat so you don’t scorch the air.

Everything feels clogged, clouded, muggy. I need a breath of fresh air, something that lifts the pressure from my chest. I need simple, uncomplicated, clean pain, the kind that breaks through like lightbeams, something I can grasp and hold onto.

For my New Year’s Resolution, I started writing a list of wants. I am required to add something every week; more often if I happen to think of something.

Shower sex. Play with sensory deprivation. Butt stuff. Kidnappings.

I shouldn’t be reading this right now, but…

More CNC. Sexy rope stuff. Write more fiction. Blood.

My mouth feels full, tongue pressing against air that is thick like molasses. Where are my words but stuck somewhere in a self-imposed gag that I don’t know how to shake.

Something is off, I am off, there is something I am missing that isn’t fitting right. I know what I need but I can’t access that. The answer has always been to need less.

What if, this time, the answer is to need more? To sit, to soak, to absorb. To fill to the brim, fill to bursting, fill to overflowing with desire and need until my skin can’t hold it any longer? What if the answer is not to shrink, reduce, minimize, but to fill, expand, exist, be? What if the answer is not to stifle but to soar?

It’s doesn’t scratch the itch, the immediate need, but that’s a symptom of a cause I have to learn to sit with.

Sit with need. Sit with ache, with the need to hurt, the need for pain, the need for violence, the desire for recklessness, sit. Sit with it and let it simmer and boil, let it fill your pores until you are saturated. Live with it, breathe through it, hold it.

And when the time comes, release.