Tears

I don’t cry often during scenes. In fact, it has happened so few times (except for the occasional, choked-back tears at the end, or a sniffle here and there, maybe a gasping sob as I lay on the floor, trying to remember who and where I am) that I can recall each time clearly, each one a moment like crystallized ginger (sweet and still a little sharp) in my mind.
It’s funny, the phrase that is used most often regarding crying is being “reduced” to tears.  And I guess, in a way, you really do have to be reduced–beaten down, made small, broken–in order to get there. (Or at least I do.)  But the end result, what I feel after, is not a “reduction.”  My tears are usually tears of emotional release, not pain.  And in that emotional release, I am lifted up–raised–not reduced. The physical pain somehow opens me up and intensifies the emotional maelstrom, perhaps creating an opening that allows the emotional breakthrough needed to get there, but is not the sole cause of the tears.
I’ve thought, at times…I might like to cry from physical pain someday. To be driven there, broken physically to the point of tears.  But honestly? I don’t know if I really would. I get deep satisfaction from emotional tears. From the feeling of being shattered emotionally.   Of knowing that the person I am playing with can touch me that deeply, affect me that profoundly.  Would I get that from simply crying out of  physical pain?  It doesn’t seem that I would.  But there is part of me that sometimes wants to experience it.  Being pushed that far physically.  But that is perhaps a topic for a different post.
The last time I cried was at Kinky Kollege in October. (Funny, I cried last year there, too, during the piercing for the energy hook pull.  But that was a very different sort of crying.  I hadn’t even included it in my list of “crying scenes,” because it was so outside of sceneing.)
The first time I cried was with The Ex.
It was very late on the last night of dungeon play at our first big event. We had not yet played there, inhibited by so many strangers, and my ex’s (probable) fear of looking inexperienced, of being watched.  Suddenly he stopped in front of a spanking bench and ordered me to kneel. Always, in our play, we had specific mechanisms for moving from our balanced, vanilla relationship into D/s play.  Before play, I knelt at his feet and he placed my cuffs on my wrists and ankles, my collar around my neck.  In this case, I was already cuffed and collared. I had been waiting–and waiting!–for his signal that he was ready to do this.
He let me kneel there while he got out the toys. I glanced covertly around the dungeon: not many people there.  But enough. I’d already gotten a taste of the fear/excitement that public play elicits in me, and liked it. I was anxious, my breath coming in quick little bursts, and already feeling the edges of that spacey acquiescence that comes over me when I play.
That, and I was already wet.
He tied me face down over the spanking bench, arms and legs spread wide and tied securely down, and then a rope from the d-ring on my collar to the base of the bench, holding my head down over the edge so that I couldn’t look up or around to see what he, or anyone else, was doing, or even if anyone else was there.  He put a gag in my mouth to top it off.
I was in a happy, anticipatory headspace. I’d worn a sexy little slip of lingerie and black thong panties, and of course high heels. I was feeling sexy, not too exposed, and ready for what was to come.
Or so I thought.  What I wasn’t prepared for was what he did next.
In front of everyone (or the everyone I imagined there to be), he reached down and pushed my thong aside.   Impersonally, he used his fingers to “inspect” me, spreading my cunt lips and looking at me closely, pushing a finger just inside my pussy, my asshole, murmuring that I’d missed shaving a spot here, but that I looked clean enough.  This was part of the ritual too, this inspection, but he’d never done it in public before.  There is no nudity at the monthly play parties we had attended, so I had never been completely exposed in front of strangers before, nor had I felt…depersonalized…as thoroughly as I did now.  I was (I know it’s hard to believe) very shy, and very self-conscious, then.
And then, he took it a step further.  “Look what a filthy slut she is,” he said to someone walking by, as he spread my cunt lips open with his fingers. “Can you see how wet she is? What a whore, getting all wet and excited out here in public like that.”
A sob caught in my throat.  We hadn’t talked about this.  He knew I was very self-conscious, and I had just assumed that he didn’t want me to be naked in front of people, in front of our friends (he’d always been conservative and a little nonplussed, I’d thought, with the casual nudity in the lifestyle.) So this blindsided me, as did his casual, humiliating words.
I don’t know now if he marked my reaction or not.  He stepped away to pick up his first implement, leaving me there to reel, my head in a fog.  He came back a moment later and started in with floggers, a crop, his hands, warming me up.  All the things I was used to and enjoyed, but I hardly felt them, I was so deep in that space that my exposure had put me in.  And the tears I’d fought to hold back from the moment he’d pushed aside my panties started flowing.  The fact that I couldn’t move a muscle, not even to lift my head, that I couldn’t protest, all heightened it.  Tears and snot flowed, silently, down my cheeks and over my chin. And then, when he attached clothespins to my labia and spread them open, and invited people, our friends, to come over to look at me, at my exposed cunt, well, I was gone. By the time he undid my restraints, I was sobbing helplessly.
My friends looked at us in alarm. Even he was taken aback, and I had to keep reassuring him that it was okay, it was just a release. And it was. The humiliation, the embarrassment, was very deep and real, but the tears, when they finally broke through, were cleansing, and somehow, oddly, joyful.  That is what they feel like, when it happens: joy too large to be contained; it bursts out of me in tears.  And to be held in someone’s arms while I cry myself out, to feel myself held and loved and soothed, is pure bliss.  It is the cool salve over a hot, blistering burn, the loving touch when one is ill, the kind word in your darkest hour. I didn’t know it then, but that was my first step on the road to my fascination–and love for–emotional masochism.  It tapped some deeply-seated, and heretofore unknown, need for that kind of release.
I have very deliberately built a drama-free bubble around my life. I don’t like the highs and lows that drama-seekers crave; I prefer calm.  But with that sometimes comes a…dearth…of deeply felt emotion. Of the intensity of extreme highs and lows.  This kind of play allows me to feel those depths–and the subsequent heights.
I have mentioned in passing a scene I had some time ago with a friend of W’s. It affected me profoundly, on all kinds of unexpected levels.  Because of the set-up, it was a colder scene, emotionally, than any I’ve ever experienced. It was harsher and more remote, because the person that W allowed to play with me was a complete stranger to me, and W kept himself apart from me, withheld himself, during the entire thing, never reaching out a hand to me, never extending a kind touch, or look, or word of comfort.  I had never felt as alone–as betrayed–as I did during it. I felt he had cut himself off from me deliberately (which he had, that was part of the dynamic of the scene) but I wasn’t ready for that.  And to top it off it was a pain scene, and more painful than I’ve ever experienced. But the true pain was emotional, not physical, culminating in a perhaps ten minute period when I was made to stand alone against a wall, in the dark, silent and unmoving, while the two of them simply watched me.  My sense of loneliness, of unworthiness, of having failed W somehow (I had reached a point where I thought that he was not comforting me because I had failed him), of being unwanted and unlovely and…unlovable…was so deep and traumatic I don’t think I was even in that room with them at that moment. I was reliving all those times when I had been…invisible.  A piece of the furniture. Unnoticed, disregarded. It was devastating.
I’ve put a lot of thought into that scene; still, after all this time, processing it.  What I think about, when I think of that scene, is usually the physical pain I endured.  That’s easier to analyze, to poke at, then the emotional space I went to.  But I believe the reason the physical pain was so hard to take was because I was in an emotionally vulnerable place.  I didn’t have the comfort of W’s care, of knowing he cared, to get me through it.  Because usually, even when he is at his cruelest, I know he cares.  And that is why I can take it, why I do, why I want to.  Sometimes, that is the only thing that does get me through it. And that just wasn’t there.  Because of that, I felt betrayed somehow, like there was some trust that had been broken.  I know, in my logical brain, and in processing, that this of course wasn’t true. But at that time, that was what I was feeling. And it all coalesced into that one moment, when the other Top had me stand naked against the wall in the dark, with my fingers laced behind my head and a clothespin on my tongue, while they sat across the room and watched me. In silence.
W’s broken me before. I have lain in a heap on the floor at his feet, everything in me shattered into pieces–and felt joy.  Felt comfort. Comfort in his presence, whether or not he was touching me. Knowing without a doubt that he loved me, cared for me, cared about me.
I didn’t know these things about that Top. I didn’t know if he even liked me. He had been somewhat harsh in our dealings, with a more punishing edge than W has, and frankly, I didn’t feel like I pleased him. I didn’t think he liked me much, or that what I was doing was pleasing to him. That hits lots of triggers. And then to have W there, watching, whom I so desperately wanted to please…to have him see me that way…and yet not reach out to me…
I felt more alone, more broken, than I ever had before. The tears came, hot and bitter in the back of my throat, stinging my eyes, making me gasp and swallow.
But swallow them I did. I choked them back at the last moment, because, from somewhere inside came the resolution that okay, they may not care. Maybe I was nothing to either of them. But I was something to myself. And I would not let them see me break.  They would not see me cry.  Inside, the tears flowed; outside, I bit them back with everything I had in me. Standing there, naked, alone and vulnerable, I was empowered. It was a shining moment.
I learned other things from those two days, about myself, about my own limits, about my relationship with W. Good things. I am stronger for it. I’ve learned some things about my own submission, and who I am in it, what I want out of it, what I will take and what I won’t. So that is all good. I didn’t have the release that I have in other scenes, but…I think I got just as much out of it.
This last time I cried I did get that release.
It was after several days of sceneing with W, and then W and Ad at Kinky Kollege. We had done some fun things, and some edgy things, and just the night before had had a long, involved scene in which the guys had cut and stripped away my clothes and then transformed me from a normal girl to a ponygirl, right there in the dungeon, and I had fallen deep into ponyspace. This night, Saturday, there was no such orchestrated scene.  They simply took me over to one of the frames and tied me to it, then W caned me.
The guys have learned to play together, and to play me, so well. W usually defaults to the “bad cop” role, and Ad to the “good cop,” although, like a finely tuned machine, they seem to morph in and out of those roles, flowing from one to the other seamlessly. I’m not sure exactly what had gotten into me those two nights of dungeon play, but I was feisty, and rather than submit to them as I generally do, allowing myself to be tied or bound or tortured however they chose, I had fought them at times, making them use force to hold me in place while W tied me, and even slipping from the ropes if I could manage it. There was a…savage…light in W’s eyes as he recaptured me, as he held me, none too gently, and lashed my arms and legs back to the poles.  And Ad is just…big…and crushed me to him so that I could hardly breathe, much less move.
I was exultant, wild with excitement one moment as I fought them, and then panting, exhausted, the next, but not beaten, not yet.
Until W started in with the cane.
Funny thing about that weekend, now that I think of it.  That was the first pain play that we’d done.  Everything we’d done had been things that put me in a certain headspace, but not through pain play.  Even the cage time at the Leather Rose had been less about pain than mental and physical stimulation.
We had attended a seminar earlier that day on caning, and we’d learned different ways to cane. The guys each have their own style (surprise surprise) but I was kind of hoping that they’d learn a way to use it that could give me a long, extended, ultimately painful but not unbearable caning.  Ad tends to be short and sharp, very quick whacks one on top of the other that quickly build to an intolerable level if he’s using anything but the lightest cane, and W is heavy, slow and deep, with a brutality that sometimes puts me on the edge of my tolerance almost immediately.  I love both ways, and fight to endure them as long as I can, and even when I can’t anymore, I am always disappointed (even as I am relieved) when it stops. I truly love caning.  I love being pushed to the edge of my endurance, I love that moment when I am screaming inside (and sometimes out) that I can’t take anymore, not one more strike, all the while hoping I will have to. Praying both for release and for it to continue in a confused mixture that fucks with head in the best way possible.
My head was fucked with that night. W used his cane(s?) on me slowly, methodically, brutally.  He was the epitome of the bad guy, my Mean Guy that I love and fear, hurting me and hurting me, again and again, making me pay for fighting them, making me gasp and cry out and moan and writhe. Ad soothed and caressed and touched and was the good guy, but how fucked up is it to be kind to someone that you are allowing to be hurt? The dichotomy pulled me one way and then the other, so that I both leaned into Ad to escape W and snapped at him, pushing away from him when I felt that betrayal, that he was only soothing me to prepare me for more pain.  W, at least, was consistent.
Until he came up behind me, pulled my face around to his, and kissed me.  He kissed me deeply, and yet so, so gently, so sweetly, I thought my heart would break.  And that was all it took. That one unprecedented, unexpected moment of tenderness from him to make me come undone.
Fuck.
My heart did break open, and the tears fell.  Beautiful sweet tears that poured from me in gasps and gulps, clearing away everything inside of me, cleansing my poor, beleaguered psyche.  “Thank you,” I said, over and over. “Thank you.”
They lowered me to the ground shortly thereafter.  I saw someone walk by and give the guys a thumbs-up gesture. I gave them a thumbs-up gesture in my mind. What a fucking perfect way to end the weekend.
(Edit: Okay, okay, there was a little more to it.  After taking me down, they held me between them while W chased away the tears by fucking me with his fingers and his hands, making me scream in orgasm on the floor of the dungeon, turning me back into the filthy, craven slut that I am, and always will be, for him. THAT was the perfect way to end the weekend.)