Someone broke my kite.
It's not really a kite. I don't own a kite. I can't tell you what the thing really is because it doesn't have a form and it doesn't have a name. It's invisible and weightless and silent and it only exists for me except that's not true is it, because it existed for someone else too and they broke it.
They broke my kite.
I didn't even know it was broken. Not for a long time. It was, after all, invisible, weightless, and silent. But I knew something had happened to me and I knew that my skin didn't fit properly anymore, like a suit made for someone else. I knew that hearts aren't supposed to beat this fast for this long and I knew that closing your eyes wasn't supposed to take courage and I knew that being touched was supposed to feel nice.
I knew that I used to sleep shirtless.
Someone broke my kite and they did it skilfully and with patience and in a way that made sure I wouldn't notice.
And I didn't notice. Not really. Not at first.
They had broken other kites. I think they enjoyed breaking kites. It's hard to protect your kite, it seems. Even if you're big and strong.
I'm big and strong, but my kite was still broken. It was horrible act of emotional vandalism, but no less than I deserved.
I hate that sentence. I keep reading it back but I cant bring myself to edit it. I know that if I saw that someone else's kite had been attacked and disfigured in the way my kite was, I wouldn't think they deserved it. I would say no one deserves that. I would believe it for them. I am trying to believe it for me, but I don't.
This isn't really a story about kites.
I write in metaphor. I hide in characters. I can talk about kites but I don't talk about me. I want to talk about me this time. Just this once.
I have loved three women in my life.
The first of these woman doesn't feature much in this story and that's something of an injustice because she taught me what love was and I loved her the longest. Even today she is my closest and most beloved friend. She is those things even though I hurt her and made the biggest mistakes of my life with her. First love is powerful and it imprints itself on you in a unique way that stays with you forever. How lucky I was that my first love was also selfless love and funny love and love that never vanished, it just changed into something else and for all our flaws, and the fact that our relationship didn't last, it was formative and beautiful and, I have come to realise, exceedingly rare.
Part of the reason I didn't know that kites could be broken was that on her watch, my kite flew high and untroubled.
The second woman I loved doesn't count as love. The woman I thought I loved didn't exist - she was a puppet held up by by string and I couldn't see the real hand above. She was a work of fiction designed just for me. The designer was clever and intuitive and she used my guilt and my self loathing to create a bespoke character with whom I would fall in love. And it worked. It worked perfectly. I am galactically stupid.
Once she sold me her on the character, she began to start fires in my life and then took credit for putting them out. As the flames died down I showed her tearful gratitude and released myself to her even more, not knowing that she was already planning the next blaze.
I thought I knew her soul, her heart, and her pain. Turns out I didn't even know her name.
For those of you keeping track of the metaphors, she was the kite breaker.
A therapist gave it to me in stark terms: someone who creates terror and panic in you in order to get you to sleep with them is coercing you. This is not consensual sex.
That this is a form of sexual bullying and even assault.
It is with some shame that I tell you how quickly I rejected the premise. How easily I became a masculine cliché as I informed them that I was 6'4. Enormous. Confident. A successful professional. The owner of many leather bound books. You aren't addressing some shrinking waif. My size parts football crowds. No one touches me without my consent. How ridiculous.
I have written so much about consent and yet I immediately dismissed the power of coercion. My height is of no use when pushed to the emotional edge. My frame provides no immunity against being terrorised to the point of blind panic. Heavy men still worry and weep in the arms of those they trust.
I can now pluck every memory out of my head and re-examine it, knowing what the true goal was. Sometimes she needed me because she was sick. Or because she had been attacked. Or she had been threatened. Sometimes she manufactured danger was on my side and I existed, sleeplessly, on my last nerve awaiting her help. I struggle to think about it now, and even to write about it here. There are so many moments. So many stress points.
She put me into a perpetual state of fear and worry, with relief only coming from her. Always from her.
Every crisis was tailor-made to hurt me in the most effective way. All of our discussion had been hoarded and then weaponised so that threat could be delivered like a smart bomb, wrecking me completely over and over again. Each time I rebuilt, it never occurred to me to mount defences because I didn't even know I was being attacked. I was always emotionally exhausted and then flooded with blissful relief as the moment of "safety" arrived, also delivered by her, without suspicion.
So, flinching and frayed, I gave myself to her. She saw me at my most fearful and my most grateful and she feasted on it all.
Am I galactically stupid? I ask myself this question every day. On the few occasions I can stomach talking about these events with someone, I scan their face for evidence of incredulity. How could he have believed these things were true? Why didn't warning bells go off?
They did, a bit. But the truth is, once you are conditioned to accept an extraordinary person has an extraordinary life, filled with extraordinary events, you lose the habit of cynicism. You replace it with horror and empathy. I became like those pilots who fly on instinct, not bothering to check their instruments, only to find themselves flying out of dense cloud - upside down.
How could I be suspicious of someone this sick. Or this emotionally abused. Or who had been repeatedly harmed and assaulted. No. No suspicion from this stoic bedrock.
There was a sliding scale of realisation that began with nagging suspicion on one side and shocking discovery on the other. After revelation, I felt poisoned. Soft moments, tender moments, vulnerable moments - I judged all of them as the folly of the easily manipulated and I vowed to never, ever allow anyone that close again
I know now I was targeted. Of course I was. All the things I liked about myself had put me in the trap and for someone already prone to self loathing, that was extremely painful. My openness, my sentimentality, my romanticism - I strangled them all in anger because perhaps if I was colder and meaner I would also be stronger. Perhaps a person without those things would be safer.
And so I built walls. I built walls on the walls. I stationed guards on the walls on the walls and I gave them scary weapons like crossbows and buckets of oil and I told them to shoot first and ask questions never. I hadn't ever attempted to thwart the kite breaker but this time I was armed to the teeth with battlements and troops and aircraft carriers and photon torpedoes and lightsabers.
The third woman I loved sauntered past them all.
I don't think I've ever used the word "sauntered" before, but that's what she did. She sauntered past and began to repair things before I realised they were broken. The absolute cheek of it. Sometimes I wonder if it was because the sliding scale of realisation was still in progress. Maybe she just timed her run well. But no it was a saunter.
My fascination with BDSM power dynamics emerged with the kite breaker and as I developed an almost academic understanding of it, I became aware of another side to me. A side that wanted to reassure someone when holding their throat. A side that wanted to paint affectionate bruises on someone with whom I was obsessed. A side that wanted to praise someone for being my good little slut. A side that wanted to make someone pant with nervous anticipation while somehow feeling completely secure.
A side that wanted to earn and give trust so that we could be dangerous in safety, and have safety in danger.
I wanted to meet the other me and it was like an intellectual puzzle. I would experiment with the kite breaker and try to give voice to something I couldn't even see - but it wouldn't fully emerge. Perhaps it was my inexperience as a baby dominant. Perhaps these things take time. Or perhaps, with the perfect narrative of hindsight, I can now see that the other side of me knew something I didn't: it isn't safe out there. It isn't safe with her.
Whatever the case, it stubbornly stayed in its cage.
The third woman I ever loved opened the door to that cage and the other part of me leapt out and mauled her giggling body to the ground.
We talk a lot about how submission requires safety and rigorous discussion around consent. Because often, not always, the dominant is a man, and because often, not always, the dominant is bigger and stronger than the submissive, and because often, not always, men abuse the fragile eco system of a power sharing dynamic.
Because often, not always, physical safety is the driving force of BDSM sex.
Her submission was not handed over easily which is what taught me it was real. She taught me that submission isn't the gift that memes would have you believe it is - it's an exchange of trust and vulnerability and that my dominance of her was just as beautiful and risky as her submission to me and she would protect it with pride. It was wonderous and magnetic and it shifted my whole world.
The third woman I ever loved was more intelligent than me and more empathetic than me and she could see something had been broken. With her, exploration became expression. Role play became identity.
With her the other side of me of me ceased to be the other side. It became me.
That happened because I needed just as much reassurance to hold her throat as she needed to have her throat held. Because she was hilarious and nerdy and treated my heart like it was important and fragile.
We talked for hours about our kinks too, but academic study gave way to enthusiastic mapping, like children sharing football stickers - "I have that one. Ooh, I want that". I discovered my kink for the kinks of others, realising that I could connect to anything her darkly innocent appetite might crave because it was her, because it was me, and because it was us. I wrote about us endlessly (you may have read the stories) constructing a fictional couple to carry all of our love and obsession. She is an extraordinary writer and that made me better because I wanted to impress her just as much as I wanted to thrill her or make her feel safe.
We are no longer together and that's another thing I deserve. I struggle to articulate what she did for me. I have re-written this paragraph a dozen times. I could tell you how funny she was and how weird she was or how sensitive she was. I could tell you about how she could finish a book as fast as I can finish a pizza. I could tell you how stunning her writing was or how silly she could be. I could tell you about how she found comedy in the darkest places and cackled with unproblematic joy when she unleashed it on the world.
I could tell you that she elevated me. Released me. Thrilled me. Healed me. That her touch was both electric and soothing.
I could tell you that she was my muse, or my great lost love. I could tell you that she changed my life forever and that I hope that she knows that.
But the simplest thing I can say is this:
She fixed my kite.
