Soul Flagellation (part 1)

"First the charioteer of the human soul drives a pair, and secondly one of the horses is noble and of noble breed, but the other quite the opposite in breed and character. Therefore in our case the driving is necessarily difficult and troublesome." --Plato

I lay on the bed, arms and legs secured to the bedposts with my own neckties. I was soaked in sweat, as was the bed beneath me. I was exhausted; the muscles in my arms and stomach especially kept jumping and twitching in a cacophony of protest.

She'd spent the last 4 hours educating me in submission. I'd asked for it. I think I needed it. And yet I immediately discovered that I couldn't stop myself from testing and straining against the leather and ropes and chains she'd applied to me. Even more perplexing, I'd found it harder to remain submissive when I was bound only by my word; there's something freeing about straining against the unbreakable to the point of physical exhaustion. But straining against your own instincts, honed over the years by betrayal, pain, loss, humiliation, and a lifetime of rage directed inward? Taking punishment, abuse, and humiliation purely because I said I would, with nothing but my self-respect to stop me from putting an end to it? That sort of restraint exhausts your mind.

I was free to struggle, to lose myself in the impossibility of escape, when I was physically restrained. If I escaped then the fault lay with her, signaling her conscious or unconscious transfer of dominance to me. She has quality restraints. She knows how to tie knots. And I force myself to lie motionless as she applies them, allowing her to devote her full concentration to the task at hand. So if I manage to escape, it can only be because she wants me to do so.

She'd been careful thus far, and thorough. She began with the leather, cuffs securely buckled around my wrists, ankles, and throat. Chains clicked and clinked against my body, catching the odd hair, pinching my skin. The convenient clasps on the cuffs made it easy for her to change my contortions on a whim. Wrists behind my back, or over my head, or attached to my ankles. Neck to ankles, or wrists, or to the headboard. I threw myself into my struggle fully, surging and straining against my bonds, at first unconsciously, but as the hours wore on I'd come to appreciate the cathartic release involved in the struggle, and I embraced my body's response to captivity. The fear of unleashing my demons slipped away in the knowledge that they were restrained along with me.

I grunted and yelled, guttural bursts of spit-laden anger ripping past my teeth. No words at first; I didn't have them yet. Just raw anguish, fear, and anxiety, with a hint of psychosis. But we're all mad here, right? The animalistic expression of my brokenness, and my own acceptance of that status, came easier than words.

Once I could talk I cursed. Vitriol laced profanity with absolutely no structural meaning other than transgression, interspersed with the words "you" and "I." Somewhere in my ranting I lost track of who I was yelling at. But I still kept yelling.

I threatened. I begged. I may have cried, but my body's liberal coating of sweat made it hard to tell for sure. I called her names, pushing at the edges of her control with my words. I exulted in the punishment heaped upon me for this, allowing my demons to scream and writhe through me as I watched from outside myself.

She'd moved to ropes next, making me check each binding before releasing me to struggle. My muscles relaxed as my mind kicked into marathon mode, holding me to my word, forcing myself to put all my effort into these tests, reminding the part of me that rages against the dying of the light that this is where I decide whether I rule my demons or am ruled by them. Reminding myself that this is where I figure out who the fuck I am: a man in charge of his destiny, or an animal bound by his instincts. She'd rewarded my adherence to my word with a string of anal beads, slowly inserted up my ass. She kept tugged gently on them, teasing and torturing me as she whispered "Good boy!" and "Who's my puppy who wants to play tug of war, huh?" in my ear.

I came without warning or control, spraying all over her leg and thigh, and she laughed in delight at my exuberance before making me clean it up.

(to be continued)