I wish I were a Vulcan.
Stoic. Logical. Blissfully untroubled by the swinging pendulum of human emotion.
For such a petite woman, I possess an absurd capacity for feeling. Not one emotion at a time, either – that would be far too simple and respectable.
I have always appreciated Inside Out for giving form to the peculiar truth that we can harbor more than one emotion at once.
How charming.
I seem to have fifty.
And mine do not sit politely at a quaint console awaiting their turn.
Mine arrive in a mob. Armed.
They invade every thought, inhabit every breath, quarrel over the governance of my heart, until I can scarcely distinguish what I feel from what I am.
There are days when I feel submerged beneath them, wave after wave of feeling too much, caring too deeply, perceiving too keenly, until surrender begins to seem less like defeat and more like the simple exhaustion of a woman who cannot tread water forever.
I am weary of being at their mercy.
Joy beside grief. Desire entwined with shame. Defiance arguing with guilt. Hope making dangerous little promises while fear whispers the price of believing them. They jostle and claw for dominion until I am left frayed and unmoored, no longer certain which voice belongs to me – or whether there is still a me beneath all that clamor.
Perhaps that is why I have tried to impose some order upon the evening now. To separate the mob, give each unruly creature a name and grant it a respectable little heading of its own, as though they arrived one at a time and politely waited their turn. They did not. But chaos is considerably easier to examine once one has forced it into columns.
So here they are – the principal offenders.
This is not the impish, salacious tale I wish it were…though that is through no fault of my dashing companions, but of my own stupid heart.
Sadness
I had made it inside. That should have counted for something.
Earlier, I had sat imprisoned in my car, staring at a party I had dressed for and driven all that way to attend, unable to persuade my own hand to open the damned door. By evening, however, I had accomplished the remarkable feat of crossing the threshold, owing largely to the grace and companionship of a goddess who appeared at my window and coaxed me back among the living.
Once inside, I managed a convincing approximation of socially presentable.
Or at least convincingly counterfeit.
I mingled. I smiled. I accepted embraces and returned pleasantries. I moved among people I genuinely adored, carefully fitting the familiar mask over my face and adjusting it at the edges whenever I felt it begin to slip.[
See? I came.
See? I am participating.
See? I am fine.
Except sadness had come in with me.
She was terribly well behaved. No spectacle. No tears. She merely took up residence beneath my ribs and accompanied me from conversation to conversation, a leaden chaperone reminding me that being surrounded by affection and feeling alone are not mutually exclusive things.
Perhaps that was the cruelest part.
I wasn’t unwanted.
I wasn’t forgotten.
I wasn’t even alone.
And still, some wounded little chamber of my heart could not remember how to belong, how to sparkle and shine.
Joy
And then I am stolen.
There is scarcely time for protest before stalwart arms sweep me from the earth as though my diminutive person weighs no more than ribbons and lace, and I squeal as I am summarily carried off through the party and into the depths of the pavilion. For the first time that evening, the sound that escapes me isn’t counterfeit. Apparently, I am being abducted, and I find the development marvelous.
My captor bears me an absurd distance with all the ceremony of a knight carrying away his tournament prize, and a bright, girlish impulse bursts through the gloom before I can suppress it. There is a peculiar delirium in simply being gathered up – in not being asked what I want, what the plan is, or what should happen next. For once, I am not leading anything. I am merely the prize tucked securely against a stalwart chest, going wherever these arms have elected to carry me, and the indignity of it is positively charming.
I ought to object on principle. Instead, I discover that a smile is tugging at the corners of my ruby lips, the carefully fitted mask having slipped somewhere during my abduction without my noticing.
For one glorious spell, I forget about it. Sadness, my leaden chaperone, has apparently been abandoned somewhere in our wake, and Joy – brazen, irrepressible creature that she is – has stolen me from her.
Apprehension
Of course, Joy is permitted only a brief reign before another member of the mob catches up.
Is this what I want?
The question arrives almost absurdly late, considering I have already allowed myself to be spirited away like some willing bit of plunder. Yet there it is, needling its way through the merriment. Not fear of where I am being carried, nor of the man carrying me. I know these arms. I trust the company whose footsteps thunder down the hall. What frightens me is far more familiar.
My own wanting.
Because wanting has acquired consequences. Desire is no longer the simple creature it once was; now it arrives dragging an entire tribunal behind it. Who might see? Who might know? Who might misunderstand? Whose feelings might bruise because I rendered a verdict that belonged wholly to me?
And beneath all those questions lurks the most treacherous one of all: If my happiness causes someone else pain, am I still permitted to choose it?
The sensible answer should be yes. My body is my own. My choices are mine to make consensually, freely, without apology. I know this. I believe it with a conviction I have defended fiercely.
Yet knowing a thing and feeling entitled to live by it are apparently very different arts.
So even as anticipation begins its enthusiastic flutter beneath my skin, Apprehension slips an arm through mine and accompanies me onward, whispering that perhaps desire is a perilous liberty when I cannot guarantee that no one else will ache for my having exercised it.
Defiance
And then, mercifully, there is a spark of anger.
A flicker catches somewhere beneath my breastbone as I realize I am once again standing trial in a courtroom of my own construction, preparing to defend myself against crimes I have not committed.
No.
I have done nothing wrong.
I am here because I chose to be here. These are consenting adults. This body belongs to me, as do the gratifications I permit it, and I refuse to make myself guilty merely because desire has had the audacity to survive heartbreak.
More importantly, I will not let depression have this too.
It has already taken enough. It has stolen mornings and appetite, sleep and concentration, whole hours surrendered to staring at nothing while my mind gnaws the same sorrow down to the bone. It nearly kept me imprisoned in my car tonight, dressed for a party I could not persuade myself to enter. I will be damned if, having finally crossed that threshold, I allow it to follow me into this room and dictate what I may enjoy.
So Apprehension may clutch her pearls in the corridor if she likes. I am going in.
And for once, I choose me.
Startlement
Apparently, going in is taken as permission to dispense with ceremony.
I am laid on a plush pallet with gentleness. Looming over me, his fingers catch the front of my white cover-up, an oversized gentleman’s work shirt rendered rather less respectable by fabric gauzy enough to offer tantalizing suggestions of the bare breasts beneath. He pauses, calloused knuckles resting against my sternum, and his voice drops into that gravelly register that immediately arrests my attention.
“Do you care about this top?”
I look down at his hands curled into the fabric, then back at him.
All I can manage is a weak shake of my head.
Something in his expression changes.
Instead of studiously attending to each miniature button, he seizes both sides and wrenches them apart. Fabric rips open. Buttons scatter across the floor in a magnificent succession of plink, plink, plink, while some strangled sound of astonishment escapes me.
Oh.
Well then.
He mutters a half-formed declaration about wanting to see my skin beneath, and for one suspended instant I can only blink wide-eyed as the dancing colored lights catch in his eyes, lending an almost inhuman quality to his gaze as he beholds me. My sleepy Inner Goddess is suddenly at full attention.
My carefully assembled modesty has quite literally been torn open. The buttons are never coming back from this war. Warmth blossoms low in my body, but even the thought is interrupted when my next breath is stolen by the vehemence of his mouth forming around mine.
Perhaps Defiance was right.
Perhaps I did not come all this way merely to survive the evening.
Perhaps there is still a part of me that wants to come alive.
Hope
There you are.
The thought is so tender I almost distrust it.
Not there he is, nor even this is what I wanted, but an infinitely more precious discovery: there I am.
For weeks, I have felt as though grief has been methodically dismantling me, carrying away familiar pieces until I no longer quite recognize the woman left behind. Appetite vanished or ignored. Sleep became elusive. Pleasure felt frivolous. Even my own reflection occasionally seemed to belong to someone performing the role of Elsie from memory.
Yet beneath the crush his impressive body, I catch a glimpse of her.
The woman who flirts because it amuses her. Who delights in being admired. Who inhabits her body rather than merely dragging it dutifully from one obligation to the next. The woman who can still be startled into wanting.
I am nowhere near whole, and I know better than to confuse desire with healing, but for the first time in what feels like an age, my body does not seem like another burden I am responsible for carrying.
For this fleeting interlude, I belong to myself again.
And gods, I have missed her.
Self-Consciousness
Unfortunately, belonging to myself does not prevent me from monitoring her.
We are not alone. Another couple has already claimed the bed, thoroughly occupied with one another, and with an easy generosity invited us into their private sanctuary. There is a certain decadence to the arrangement – the four of us sharing the same clandestine space, each pair absorbed in pleasures of their own while occasionally becoming an audience to the other.
My companion lowers himself between my thighs.
And immediately, that vigilant wee governess appears.
Shhh, Elsie.
Because the couple is right there. Because these walls are not nearly thick enough. Because beyond this room is an entire party, and those I do not wish to hurt.
So while one part of me wants to surrender to the experience, another remains absurdly alert to every sound that escapes my mouth. Don’t disturb the couple beside us. Don’t attract anyone to the door. Don’t let your abandon travel through the walls and find someone it might wound.
Most of all, don’t be too much.
It is an astonishing contradiction. I adore being watched. The occasional glance from the bed sends a whimpering thrill through me. There is an intoxicating reciprocity in knowing I have been noticed, in witnessing and being witnessed in return. Yet apparently there is some invisible boundary in my mind between being seen and being too much, and even now I cannot stop searching for it.
Don’t ask for too much. Don’t require too much. Don’t make anyone accommodate you.
So I swallow the fractured sounds that want to escape, cupping a hand over my screams while my rebellious body answers each practiced stroke of his tongue and teasing ministration of his fingers with increasingly treacherous abandon.
I attempt to remain conscious of the room, the bed, the walls, the people beyond them, trying to enjoy what I have freely chosen while simultaneously ensuring my enjoyment inconveniences absolutely no one.
I have given myself permission to want.
I simply haven’t yet given myself permission to be heard wanting it.
Shame
My body, it seems, has no interest in being well-behaved.
The vigilant governess may issue all the commandments she likes, but flesh is an appallingly poor student of decorum. Soon I am no longer merely receiving attention but answering it, meeting his force with my own, demanding more with a feral eagerness that feels almost treacherous after weeks spent believing grief had rendered me numb.
And there it is.
Shame.
Not because I am here. Not because I have chosen this. Not because there is anything inherently shameful about pleasure freely given and freely received. I know all of that with perfect intellectual clarity.
I am ashamed because I want it so much.
Because my body is not conflicted even when my heart is. Because it feels almost indecent to discover how fiercely one part of me can crave delirium while another is still mourning. I was supposed to be chaste for a while. A shattered nun cloistered away with her sorrows, fixing what was broken, passing each grief solemnly through her fingers like beads upon a rosary until I had properly atoned.
My body has apparently received no such memorandum.
Instead, she arches toward what pleases her. She commands rather than retreats. She has the audacity to participate in her own pleasure. At the same time, my mind watches in astonishment, wondering how a woman can be this heartsore and still possess such an appetite for being touched, admired, wanted.
For one treacherous instant, it feels like evidence against me – as though wanting this much means I have grieved too little, as though rapture and sorrow cannot occupy the same body without one making a liar of the other.
Yet my body continues her rebellion, magnificently indifferent to the prosecution.
My cheeks burn with the confession of shame even as my eyes drift closed in bliss, and I cannot decide which betrayal is worse: that my body still wants so much, or that for these stolen moments, she refuses to be sorry for it.
Belonging
And then our secluded sanctuary acquires another deity.
There is no disruption when he joins us, no awkward negotiation or sudden fracture in the spell. He simply folds into the scene with the strange ease peculiar to those rare moments when everyone seems to understand the language being spoken without requiring translation.
And then I hear the lock turn.
Such a small sound.
Yet some overly vigilant part of me eases at the click.
The party still exists beyond these walls. All its complications, histories, loyalties, tender places and unanswered questions remain exactly where I left them, but for the moment they cannot wander accidentally through that door. Inside are five adults who know why they are here and have chosen to remain.
No one has been deceived into this room. No one within it requires protection from my indulgence. No one seems remotely troubled by how much I want.
Quite the contrary.
For the first time that evening, I stop searching the perimeter for casualties.
Perhaps that is what makes the decadence feel so strangely wholesome beneath all its depravity. There is no conquest here, no competition for ownership, no anxious arithmetic of who belongs to whom. There is only invitation and acceptance, pleasure offered and answered, bodies admired without being claimed.
For a woman who has spent so much of the evening wondering whether her happiness must inevitably wound someone, it feels almost miraculous to discover a room in which nobody requires her to diminish it.
Beside us, the other couple remain tangled together upon the bed, sometimes absorbed wholly in one another, sometimes watching us with expressions that make no secret of their interest. I watch them in return – or make a valiant attempt, considering how thoroughly my own body is monopolizing my attention. The exchange feels intimate without being possessive, decadent without apology – a private, wanton society assembled behind one closed door.
Pride
My mind goes blessedly silent.
I am bookended by two formidable gods, surrounded by hands and mouths, their cocks filling and stretching me; accommodating their size demands nearly all my concentration as I compel my muscles to relax around their girths. They leave me nowhere to retreat into thought, and for once I do not try.
I relinquish the exhausting privilege of thought and allow myself to become a vessel, a creature – breath and pulse and movement, receiving and answering until I can no longer tell where one response ends, and another begins.
I take my fill from both of them. I am a greedy thing, and for once there is no shame in the admission. I give myself over to the decadent excess of it, held between two gods while lust strips away every remaining genteel thought.
And beneath all that abandon, an unexpected emotion rises.
Pride.
My body is beautiful here. Feminine. Lithe and liquid, yielding without weakness, voracious without apology – precisely as a daughter of Aphrodite ought to be. I marvel at my capacity, at the way my form bends and answers and holds me steady even as everything within me threatens to come apart.
There is nothing demure about me now. My carefully cultivated composure is in tatters; their need wets my lips and glimmers down my chin, my knees somehow remain stable beneath me, and dignity has become an entirely irrelevant concern.
Still, I do not falter.
Two gods have made a battlefield of my senses, and rather than disappear beneath them, I discover myself there – flushed, disheveled, gloriously carnal and profoundly alive.
In rippling waves, ecstasy crests beyond anything I can contain, and my body gives herself to it without apology.
And somewhere inside the shattering, my wings spread, and my soul exults.
Catharsis
Something changes after that.
Pleasure is no longer merely pleasure. It becomes an exorcism.
Hands are everywhere, turning and positioning me with an assurance that leaves scant room for thought, and I surrender to the strange mercy of not being responsible for what comes next. The intensity builds until I cease to feel like a fragile creature that must be handled carefully.
I feel like iron.
Caught between hammer and anvil, incandescent from the forge, struck again and again until everything misshapen inside me begins to yield. Every blow seems to find another burden I have been carrying – the grief, the anger, the loneliness, the endless vigilance, the exhausting compulsion to remain composed – and beat it from me.
There. Take that too.
I don’t want tenderness from the moment. I want transmutation. I want all this nameless anguish dragged from whatever hidden chambers have been harboring it and given somewhere else to go.
For weeks I have tried to think my way through sorrow. I have examined it, reasoned with it, written about it, turned it over until its edges were worn smooth beneath my fingers.
My body chooses another method.
She burns.
She bends.
She refuses to break.
And somewhere within that forge, I begin to glow.
Reprieve
Perhaps the strangest luxury is that there is nothing for me to do.
My mind has become blissfully useless. The two gods reach an unspoken accord over me – one exchanged glance, a wordless conspiracy passing between them – and from that moment I am scarcely responsible for so much as my own orientation.
They cease treating me as though I am delicate.
Hands clamp around my waist and turn me. I am hauled onto my knees, dragged upright against a hard chest, lowered again, rolled onto my back before I have quite registered leaving my stomach. One moment I am facing one deity; the next, a grip at my hips has revolved me toward the other. There is a faint menace in the ease with which they maneuver me, as though my petite body presents no greater obstacle than deciding where they want it next.
I surrender all jurisdiction.
There are no instructions to give, no experience to orchestrate, no careful tending of everyone else’s enjoyment while mine waits politely for its turn. They simply take command, reading each response and adjusting accordingly, until trying to anticipate what comes next becomes wonderfully futile.
A calloused hand closes beneath my jaw and tips my face upward. My lips are claimed by another adamantine cock, its crown flushed and swollen. Fingers knot into my hair and draw me deeper. A gravelly command reaches my ear and is obeyed before my scattered mind has even finished translating it.
Gods. I am a good girl, and I will take it all… every inch.
They could have swaggered directly from the pages of some disreputable romance – the sort of men mothers warn their daughters about, and daughters make catastrophic decisions for anyway. All hard hands, imposing bodies and predatory eyes, behaving as though hesitation is a language neither has ever troubled himself to learn.
And between them, I become increasingly ornamental.
I am handled. Repositioned. Considered. Their attention follows every response with an unnerving intensity, as though nothing my body betrays escapes them. It should perhaps frighten me.
Instead, my Inner Goddess preens like the shameless creature she is.
There is an almost indecent luxury in becoming this mindless, in trusting the hands upon me enough to relinquish the exhausting privilege of command. There is nothing for me to manage. Nothing for me to carry.
So I finally abandon my post while two terrifying gods methodically unstitch my soul.
Foreboding
Apparently, they unstitch one thread too many.
At first, I do not understand what has changed.
Nothing has stopped. The room remains exactly as it was – the locked door, the muted music bleeding through the walls, our generous voyeurs upon the bed, two dark gods still intent upon reducing me to a boneless, incoherent creature.
And yet.
Something is wrong.
It begins beneath my sternum, a peculiar pressure with no obvious source. Not pain. Not fear. An older, far less courteous thing, rising from a place I have kept barricaded for hours.
I try to ignore it.
My body is still answering beautifully. Eruptive bliss continues its treacherous ascent, but another current has begun moving beneath it, and the two are becoming impossible to distinguish. My throat constricts. My chest feels strangely crowded. I wrap my fist around the base of a cock as I drag in a breath that doesn’t seem to reach far enough.
No.
Not here. Not now!
Without thinking, I reach for the familiar monastery inside myself – the walls, the locks, the carefully reinforced nooks and alcoves where grief may be stored until I have sufficient privacy to survive it.
They are gone.
Of course they are.
I abandoned my post.
The gods have been dismantling every defense I possess, and like a fool I mistook the absence of armor for freedom.
Something buried stirs.
Then another buried thing answers.
Then the whole damned graveyard wakes.
The torrent of swirling emotions cannot be contained. I know what is coming a heartbeat before it arrives.
Oh, gods.
Not now.
Please.
Not now.
Flood
And then I break.
There is no graceful transition, no single thought I can blame for pulling the first stone loose. One moment I am fighting to contain the pressure beneath my ribs, and the next a sob tears out of me with such violence that for one bewildered instant I do not recognize the sound as mine.
Then another follows.
And another.
I cannot stop them.
I am sobbing now. Not prettily. Not the cinematic sort of weeping where a single jeweled tear slips becomingly down one’s cheek. I am crying with my whole body, great wrenching sobs that seize my chest and fold me inward while tears pour hot and heedless down my face.
I cannot breathe.
Gods, I cannot breathe. I gulp at the air and get nothing.
Someone says my name. Hands that moments ago were commanding become careful, but I can scarcely understand what is happening around me. I know only that the room has blurred, my mascara is undoubtedly making a spectacular migration southward, and some humiliating, wounded sound keeps escaping from a woman who is supposed to know how to hold herself together.
I don’t even know what I am crying about.
That may be the most frightening part.
I curl in upon myself, knees drawn tight, forehead pressed into the mattress as though making my body small enough might contain what my mind cannot. Maybe if I can diminish myself sufficiently, I can cease to exist altogether.
There is no single grief to point toward. No tidy explanation I can offer these bewildered gods. Nothing happened. Nobody hurt me. Nobody crossed a boundary. I was safe. I was enjoying myself.
I was happy.
And apparently happiness was the final stone.
So I do the one thing I have spent the entire evening desperately trying not to do.
I become too much.
Mortification
There is a hand stroking the ladder of my spine. A crooning voice near the cusp of my ear. The mattress is cool beneath my forehead. Then arms slide beneath me, dragging me close, refusing to permit my miserable little fetal position to become permanent.
I am gathered up. My feeble resistance sternly ignored.
One god draws me against his chest, wrapping me in arms that seem large enough to hide me from my own humiliation, while the other settles behind me, his hand moving soothingly along my back. The same men who moments ago seemed carved from menace have transformed with bewildering ease, their former ferocity supplanted by a startling gentleness.
Which, frankly, makes everything worse.
Because kindness is intolerable when one is busy despising oneself.
I become conscious of my face. My swollen eyes. My ruined mascara. The wet tracks down my cheeks. I must look positively deranged, and I am acutely aware that I am naked, disheveled, and sobbing between two men who had every reasonable expectation that this portion of the evening would involve considerably less emotional catastrophe.
They murmur assurances I barely absorb.
You’re okay.
A hand strokes my sapphire hair.
We’ve got you.
Gods, please don’t be kind to me. I cannot survive kindness right now.
Through a ghastly sniffle, I peek toward the far side of the bed.
Empty.
My stomach drops.
Our salacious companions are gone.
They have quietly slipped from the room and surrendered the sanctuary to us, presumably so the hysterical little libertine currently disintegrating between two bewildered deities may do so in privacy.
Oh, splendid.
Like a cluster of spiders, Mortification crawls over every inch of me.
I know they were kind. I know nobody has scolded me, blamed me, or suggested I have done anything wrong. But my mind has already begun composing the prosecution.
Look what you’ve done!
We were invited into their space, and now they have left it because of me. Everyone was enjoying themselves until I became a spectacle of an entirely different variety. My companions are no longer pursuing pleasure; they are managing…me.
Caring for me.
There it is again – that ancient horror of becoming an obligation another person must tend.
I try to apologize. I am not entirely certain the words make it through the remnants of my sobbing, but naturally I try anyway. Sorry for crying. Sorry for stopping everything. Sorry for requiring comfort. Sorry for taking up space in a room where I had already been welcomed.
Sorry for… existing.
The god upon whose chest I am cradled, my tears coursing over the sculpted planes of his pectorals, draws me closer, folding me into the sanctuary of his broad frame as though he might shelter me from the mortification I cannot escape.
And that nearly undoes me all over again.
Because nobody seems angry.
Nobody appears disappointed.
Nobody is treating me as though I have ruined anything.
And I have absolutely no idea what to do with mercy I have not earned.
Disorientation
I assume, naturally, that this is the end of it.
Surely there is no returning from an intermission involving hysterical sobbing and an impromptu crisis of existence. The evening has been slain upon the altar of my emotional instability, and the only dignified course remaining is to gather whatever fragments of myself can still be located, find my ruined shirt, and disappear into the night… possibly forever.
Apparently, no one else has received this script.
No one makes a move to leave or release me from their hold.
Somewhere in the fog of my mortification, the locked door has apparently opened and closed without my noticing, because when I finally become aware of my surroundings again, two boon companions have joined us. Whether they came looking for us or merely happened upon this peculiar sanctuary, I lack the faculties to investigate.
I only know that when I recognize them, I am glad they are here.
Which makes absolutely no sense.
With their arrival, the room begins knitting itself back together around me without requiring that I first become presentable. Neither god recoils from the wreckage; they simply continue holding me as though my spectacular collapse has altered nothing essential.
No one demands an explanation for the mascara streaked beneath my eyes or asks why I have clearly been crying. There is no tribunal convened to determine whether I have made everything awkward beyond repair.
They simply… stay.
And slowly, bewilderingly, the catastrophe I was certain had ended the evening begins to assume an altogether different shape.
It was a moment. An ugly, uncontrolled, deeply human moment.
Nothing more.
The gods have not fled. My friends have not recoiled. The earth has declined to open beneath me despite my fervent preference that it do so.
I am still disheveled. Exposed. Thoroughly confused.
But I am also still wanted.
Desired, even.
Communion
And just like that, the room comes alive again with the addition of another bewitching goddess.
Six bodies fall into some primitive accord, a shifting tangle of limbs and breath moving to a rhythm none of us remembers choosing. The air grows close with fractured gasps, murmured encouragement, the violent percussion of movement, until individual sounds dissolve into one collective cadence.
Six people, one heartbeat.
For a while, I swear we are the last creatures left on earth.
The room is shadowed, save for muted lights changing languidly from one color to another, washing over skin and turning familiar faces strange, beautiful, almost otherworldly. The locked door seals behind us and the chamber seems to contract around our tribe, warm and dim and secretive – our own private universe, hidden from the gathered merrimakers.
Nothing exists beyond it.
No morning waits for us. No names or histories or complicated hearts require explanation. The outside has been extinguished, leaving only this little congregation of heathens – bare skin, wild eyes, ruined hair, mouths curved in conspiratorial smiles.
Gods, it is beautiful.
We watch one another with open admiration. Gazes meet through the half-light and hold. One person’s pleasure catches another’s attention; a serpentine grin flashes in the darkness; a breath catches, and the room seems to answer. We are participants and audience at once, exhibitionists and voyeurs, feeding the same strange current until I cannot quite tell where one person’s abandon ends and another’s begins.
An ancestral part of me recognizes it.
Not romance. Not ownership. Not even desire in its decorous finery.
Communion.
For these stolen moments, I am caught inside a pulse older and wilder than propriety. I am no longer thinking about how I appear from the outside because there is no outside. There is only this breathing chamber and the six celestials in the half-light, breathing with one set of lungs and moving to the cadence of one feral heart.
The colored light changes again, and we disappear into it.
And gods, I never want civilization to find us.
Apprehension
Civilization, unfortunately, has ears.
The reminder arrives when a sound escapes me far louder than intended.
My hand flies to my mouth.
It is reflex now, an ingrained attempt to smother the evidence of my own enjoyment before it can escape beneath the door or seep through the walls. The pavilion may feel like the last inhabited place on earth, but some traitorous portion of my mind remembers perfectly well that it is not.
There are people beyond this room.
People I do not wish to hurt.
So I bite down against my palm and try to contain myself.
A hand catches my wrist and pulls it away.
I blink up at one of my gods.
He gives me a look that requires no translation and releases me.
My hand promptly returns to my mouth.
Another hand removes it.
Apparently we are at an impasse.
The absurdity would amuse me if I were not so preoccupied with suppressing every incriminating sound my body insists upon making. The god drilling into my core, his knuckles white as he grips my hips, shows no mercy, driving me beyond my limits until every fresh assault tears another cry from my throat. Again I cover my mouth; again someone drags my hand away, increasingly unimpressed by my attempts at self-censorship.
Shhh, Elsie, whispers the governess, worry creasing her brow.
But the divinity surrounding me seems to have no interest in her rules.
They do not ask me to diminish myself. They do not appear embarrassed by the sounds I cannot quite swallow. If anything, every failed attempt at restraint seems to sharpen the predatory satisfaction in their faces. The gods answer each faltering attempt by drawing me further into their grasp, their rapacious hips slamming into me until my vision bleaches white and fireworks burst beneath my skin.
I am not going to win this war.
And as thought dissolves once more beneath the onslaught of pleasure, I find I am no longer entirely certain I care.
Elation
Somewhere in the whiteout, my hesitation and embarrassment lose jurisdiction entirely.
My hand does not return to my mouth.
The next cry escapes unimpeded, followed by another, and nothing terrible happens. No judgment descends from the heavens. No one recoils. Instead, my voice simply joins the others already rising through the half-light.
And gods, there are so many.
Gasps. Fractured cries. Masculine groans torn from somewhere primitive in the chest. Breathless encouragement giving way to helpless sounds. Goddesses surrendering their voices to rapture. The chorus swells around me, carnal and unashamed, each person’s abandon provoking another’s until no single voice seems to belong to anyone anymore, only to the strange six-bodied creature we have become.
My Inner Goddess, who has spent weeks with her wings bedraggled and folded close, suddenly stretches them to their full magnificent span. I can almost feel them sweep outward behind me, immense and glorious, brushing the walls of our little world as she lifts her face toward the heavens.
There you are.
Elation courses through me with such startling purity that for once I do not interrogate it. I do not ask whether I deserve it, how long it will last, or what sorrow may be waiting beyond the locked door to collect its due.
Around me, my companions are finding their own heights, and instead of diminishing mine, their abandon magnifies it. Every cry answered by another seems to lift me higher. Their pleasure becomes part of mine; mine folds into theirs until the room feels almost buoyant with it.
For these few stolen moments, jubilation requires no defense. I give myself to it with the same abandon surrounding me, spending whatever remains of my strength without thought for what might be left afterward.
My Inner Goddess unfurls her wings.
And gods, she flies.
Depletion
Unfortunately, even daughters of Aphrodite possess finite resources.
Mine are gone.
The realization arrives a touch abruptly. One moment I am happily lost in our personal bacchanal; the next, my body simply… resigns. Whatever divine reserves have carried me this far are bluntly exhausted, leaving behind trembling limbs, fatigued muscles and the profound conviction that I would happily sleep for a century.
I collapse into the tangled sheets, panting, pleasantly wrecked and perfectly content to remain horizontal until society itself crumbles into dust.
The viril gods, however, regard this development with suspicion.
They know me.
They know the almost ridiculous reserves my body ordinarily possesses, and a trace of incredulity touches their expressions when they discover that tonight, the well is dry. A coaxing touch. A smoldering look. The unmistakable suggestion that perhaps the little daughter of Aphrodite has one more miracle tucked away somewhere.
Absolutely not.
Their coaxing fingers make one final, audacious search for a response.
Empty.
The flesh that has answered every summons tonight now refuses even the pretense of negotiation. My limbs feel boneless. My thoughts have become syrup. Even my Inner Goddess has collapsed dramatically across her chaise and appears prepared to receive last rites.
I want water.
I want sleep.
I have reached the absolute boundary of myself.
And that should feel like peace.
Eventually, I stand.
The room has begun returning to itself around us. I gather the remnants of my clothing, find what remains of my dignity, and begin the inelegant business of assembling myself into a woman fit to rejoin civilization.
That is when I feel it.
Not see it.
Feel it.
A presence has been waiting in the shadows.
Patient. Motionless. Almost courtly in its certainty that eventually I would have to come back.
In my mind it takes shape at the edge of the half-light: tall and cadaverous, swathed in sable folds that seem to drink the meagre light remaining. Not quite Death, though perhaps a close relation. There is no scythe, no skeletal hand extended toward me.
This creature is wetter somehow.
Oily.
It seems to seep rather than step from the darkness, leaving an obscene slick across everything the colored lights made beautiful. The bacchanal. The laughter. The bodies. My brief, precious freedom. One by one, it stains them simply by passing near.
I know this creature.
It has been my companion for many long days.
It has been waiting outside the locked door all along, content to let me have my slight reprieve because it knew, eventually, I would return to the world.
And now, as I gather the pieces of myself from the floor, I feel its first cold fingers settle upon my shoulders.
Depression
The fingers tighten.
Not enough to hurt. They do not have to.
The weight comes first, settling across my shoulders with dreadful familiarity. Then the blackness begins to spread, viscous as pitch, creeping down my back and across my chest until even drawing breath feels like an obligation.
I was weightless moments ago.
Now gravity remembers me.
The creature leans closer, draping itself across my back with the intimacy of an old lover, and begins its favorite work: revision.
That wasn’t freedom. You were escaping.
Its oily fingers drag across the memory.
You didn’t come alive. You distracted yourself.
Another stain.
Look at you. Exhausted. Half dressed. Mascara ruined. You cried in the middle of everything and made everyone take care of you.
I hate how convincing it sounds in my own voice.
The beautiful setting begins to spoil beneath its touch. What had felt primal becomes shameful. What had felt communal becomes selfish. What had felt like surrender is recast as irresponsibility. Even the kindness shown to me emerges slick with its residue, distorted until it resembles pity.
No.
I know better.
Or at least, I knew better ten minutes ago.
But Depression does not require my belief. It merely requires exhaustion, and I have handed it the perfect vessel – dehydrated, underslept, underfed, emotionally flayed, and far too depleted to mount a proper defense.
So it pours itself over me.
Thick. Cold. Clinging.
I can still see the colored lights moving across the room. I can still hear my friends nearby. Nothing has actually changed.
Yet everything beautiful suddenly seems very far away.
And the creature at my back whispers the cruelest lie of all:
You were never supposed to be happy here.
Condemnation
You were never supposed to be happy here.
The words find an ancient fault line inside me and press.
Because there it is – the law I keep pretending I do not live by.
My happiness is permissible only when it costs no one else anything.
I may want, provided no one aches because I wanted. I may choose myself, provided nobody feels abandoned by the choice. I may leave what no longer nourishes me, but only if the person left behind understands, agrees, heals promptly, and suffers with sufficient discretion that I am never forced to witness the wound.
Otherwise, their pain becomes evidence of my wrongdoing.
And then there are the people who love me.
Heavens.
They have been so good to me.
Messages. Calls. Invitations. Check-ins. People rearranging evenings, driving distances, opening doors, making room beside them when I cannot seem to find my own footing. Tonight alone, arms have swept around me when I collapsed, strangers surrendered their sanctuary, friends appeared and simply stayed.
Everyone keeps reaching for me.
And instead of feeling only grateful, I feel ashamed that they have to.
The oozing creature shifts against my back.
They’re going to get tired of you.
I flinch because it has chosen one of my own fears and spoken it back to me.
How many times do you think they can ask if you’re all right?
Stop.
How many evenings can you arrive carrying the same grief before sympathy becomes obligation?
They love me.
Of course they do.
Its fingers tighten almost affectionately upon my shoulders.
That’s why you’re exhausting them.
Cruel thing.
I know my friends have lives. Problems. Sorrows of their own. I know they are capable of deciding what they have available to give me. I know their kindness is freely offered rather than extracted.
Depression is unmoved by evidence.
And here you are again, wasting their time. Being a burden.
Still hurting. Still requiring patience. Still receiving kindness I cannot seem to repay by getting better quickly enough.
The oily creature adores this particular arithmetic. Every kindness becomes another entry in a ledger I can never balance. A hug becomes evidence that I required comforting. A message means someone had to worry. An invitation means someone noticed I should not be alone. Even love becomes a debt I am incurring rather than a gift they have freely chosen to give.
I would never measure someone else’s grief this way.
But we’re not talking about them, are we?
Gods, I hate this creature.
Standing there exhausted, gathering the remnants of myself from the floor while people are still being inexplicably kind to me, gratitude and guilt become so tightly entwined I can scarcely separate them.
I don’t want anyone else carrying me. I don’t want anyone worrying about me. I don’t want my sadness consuming space in lives already crowded with burdens of their own.
I want to disappear.
I want to be invisible.
I just want to be better.
Not tomorrow. Not eventually.
Now?
Depression sinks deeper, its viscous weight filling every hollow place until standing upright begins to feel like an act of defiance.
Look at you.
The words are almost hideously intimate.
Everyone is carrying you now.
No.
You’re the burden.
The accusation lands differently from the others.
Weak. Exhausting. Another problem someone else has to manage.
Everyone has been so good to me. Everyone has been carrying me. I cannot keep asking them to do this.
I have to stop it.
I have to wrest back control.
The creature bears down harder, and for one terrifying moment the weight nearly drives me to my knees.
Grief
Eventually, I make myself presentable enough to leave the room.
Or a passable approximation thereof.
I fasten what can be fastened, smooth what can be smoothed, and stand upright, Depression clinging across my shoulders like an invisible, inky burden.
One of the gods – the one who joined us later, whom I mostly watched from afar – has been wordlessly dressing beside me.
I don’t know what betrays me. Perhaps my tear-streaked face. Perhaps the mascara never recovered. Perhaps he simply recognizes that peculiar way I hold myself when beneath the mask, every bone in my body is devoted to the singular task of not falling apart.
Whatever he sees, he does not ask.
He simply opens his arms and engulfs me.
A proper bear hug. Immense and uncompromising, my face pressed against his chest, his arms closing around me until there is nowhere for my composure to escape. It is one of the mightiest hugs of my life.
After a moment, I give him the customary squeeze-squeeze.
Thank you. I’m okay. You may release me now.
He doesn’t.
If anything, his arms tighten, and I feel his cheek settle against the top of my tousled head. I feel a fissure open beneath my ribs, fine as cracks racing across glass, splintering over every tender contour of my heart.
Oh, no.
Absolutely not.
I will not cry.
His hold tightens.
I will not lose control again.
His fingers curl against me as though sheer contact might impart what words cannot – magic, comfort, strength. I don’t know.
Traitorous tears sting my eyes.
I swallow them.
He does not let go.
There is an almost unbearable tenderness in being held by someone who demands no explanation. No questions. No advice. No insistence that I look on the bright side or tell him what is wrong so that the problem may be tidily solved.
He just holds me.
And I realize with a fresh little fracture of the heart that perhaps he can feel the weight even if he cannot see the creature carrying it.
I am torn cleanly down the middle – still carrying the salacious afterglow of that clandestine gathering in my body while grief sits leaden behind my ribs. Sated and heartsore. Desired and desolate. Grateful and guilty.
Both are true.
Gods, I hate that both are true.
I press my face more firmly against his chest and make myself one final promise.
I will not cry again.
Depression curls its oily fingers around my shoulders. Grief climbs into my throat, and the god holding me, apparently unconvinced by promises I have not spoken aloud, simply refuses to let me go.
Not until my heart slows, my breathing evens, and the tension in my shoulders finally yields a fraction.
Immediately, my mind begins its interrogation.
Did anyone notice? Was it all right to accept such tenderness? Did I embarrass myself again by needing that much human connection?
And what did the hug mean?
We had been slightly at odds with each other.
Questions beget questions, multiplying with vicious efficiency until a thousand icy little interrogations are clawing at the inside of my skull.
As a unit, we leave our cocoon.
The noise finds me first. Voices. Music. People moving through an evening that has apparently continued without noticing that I have lived several lifetimes behind one locked door.
I try to rejoin them.
Smile. Mingle. Be normal. Dance beneath the stars.
And even this recounting… all those emotions separated into tidy little headings, named and arranged as though they arrived one at a time – falls absurdly short of what it felt like inside me.
They did not arrive in patient, modest lines, each remaining politely within its allotted place for a respectable amount of time.
They never do.
That is the cruelty of it.
I hate feeling this much. I hate possessing a body that keens for human touch and a heart that can make receiving it feel like a crime. I hate aching to be desired and then questioning whether I deserved the wanting. I hate craving arms around me and apologizing inside my own head when someone refuses to let go.
I hate that pleasure does not silence grief.
I hate that grief does not extinguish desire.
I hate that gratitude can arrive carrying guilt, that freedom can ache, that being cared for can make me feel ashamed for requiring care.
Fifty emotions, each clamoring for dominion, and every damned one of them mine.
I am drowning beneath the weight of them all.
Gods.
I wish I were a Vulcan.
I wish I felt nothing at all.
Until next time, XO. Elsie
Year of the Inner Goddess 