Silence

Author's Note: Please see the post labels if you would like to know what triggers this piece might contain before reading it. If you notice something else in the piece that seems like a common trigger that I have not marked, please leave a comment to let me know. I would like the sharing of my work to be as safe as I can make it for my readers.

In this case, that list is a bit more complicated, as most of it is just in reference/passing, but I've put all of the things I notice in the labels anyway.





 
There are many kinds of silence.

There’s the silence of anticipation. That is the calm before the storm, the moment between movement and contact, between contact and the physical sensation of the blow. There’s the silence of satisfaction, wrung out and languid, a still tangle of disparate limbs. There’s the silence of stubbornness and desperation, just before need overcomes pride and leads to begging. There’s the silence of companionship, two people slotting smoothly into each others lives and patterns, working at opposite ends of a table on entirely different projects, but still there with each other.

There are other, darker unwanted silences. The silence of shame in the specter of things past that stand in the way of things present. The silence of fear in an unwilingness to speak up and risk rebuke or censure, a terror of facing disbelief. And there are intentionally darker silences that dance on the knife’s edge of what they want and what they are willing to risk. Pleasure and discomfort and humiliation in the downcast eyes and spreading blush of being publicly introduced as someone’s slut. Wide startled eyes staring at the point of the blade, hardly daring to breathe as it comes closer and closer to skin.

Sometimes silence is voluntary, and she is still and quiet out of her own sense of the moment. Sometimes the silence is mandatory, enforced by gag or protocol, “Don’t speak until you’re spoken to,” or “Little girls should be seen and not heard,” where her right to speak is his, and he is choosing to remove it. Sometimes silence is imposed, a hand or a mouth darting it and cutting off whatever she was saying.

There’s something within her that rarely shuts up or turns off. It runs and analyzes, computes and examines, and while it is an inherent and often helpful part of her, it interferes. She spends endless time trying to predict how interactions will go, struggling to parse them correctly in the moment, and picking them apart after the fact. She fucks and she wonders if she is responsive enough, too still, if there’s something more she could do to satisfy her partner. She kisses and she find herself adjusting based on their angles, movements, and responses. She thinks too much. Pain sometimes quiets her thoughts, but often she thinks too much then, as well. She is whipped and she tries to predict the next blow, worries about if she’s too quiet, too loud.  She starts analyzing and stops experiencing.

It isn’t that submission always involves not thinking. Neither of them believe that submission is just shutting off one’s entire brain and mindlessly following orders with no individual will. Sometimes it involves a lot of thinking, about what she wants, what he might want, if there are things she could do to improve in her responses, what to do when he hands her the menu and says “Order me something” while they’re out. But sometimes it does involve not thinking, in an almost trance-like mode of subspace where she can simply let herself react without mentally processing and analyzing the reaction.

There’s a certain quietude in a lot of her submission. When she waits, or he holds her down - not just down on her knees, down on her back, belly exposed, neck bared for his teeth, I yield - but when he keeps her mind down, in that space. Where she has the task at hand and nothing else to focus on for now, or he is controlling what happens and her only responsibility is to take it, or where he is demanding her full focus, dragging that part of her into alignment with the rest of her brain to pay a-bloody-ttention.

And for a little while, there is silence.