my first shibari

letting go of control took me somewhere i never expected

she leaned down and asked
“what do you need so i can make you feel safe”

i answered
be gentle with me

i thought she might have been surprised by this answer, even if she did not show it, because until now all of our games had been rough.

i have not been exploring my sexuality for very long.

sex had been the forbidden apple i was never able to eat from the very beginning. i learned how to masturbate at a very very young age. every time i did it, knowing that god was watching me, i would be filled with guilt. i would make millions of promises to god and beg him to forgive me. a few days later i would find myself again chasing the pleasure he had given me. every time i held that remote control, i could not stop myself from rubbing it against myself.

after learning that i had hpv, sex completely disappeared from my life, and in a strange way this helped me discover myself and my perversions even more.

with an invitation from a friend, although for a long time i imagined thousands of scenarios in my head and always gave up on going to munches at the very last minute, i did not want to miss the shibari show because my curiosity was stronger.

not knowing what to say to the people gathered around the table, i just waited for the show to start, hoping it would begin as soon as possible. i left that place, where i thought i did not belong, actually quite affected.

for me it was a way of proving once again how much i had blown everything up in my head, like it had turned into a huge hot air balloon.

the only thing i did was envy. i envied how comfortable people were. i envied their ability to live this freely. i envied them being able to satisfy themselves. i envied them taking pleasure in it. just as i was beginning to explore, i envied that this had been taken away from me, or maybe i envied the fact that the people there did not care about it at all.

throughout my life i grew tired of a god who watched everything i did and of constantly having to give an account to him, yet i could never fully detach myself from him. sometimes he felt like a friend who was always listening to me.

the image of god that i was taught to fear, whose wrath we were supposed to escape from, yet who was also said to love us with endless mercy, had disappeared in my eyes when i was very young. but he was still there. even when i was with my own body.

when i unite with someone else’s body, it feels as if the me inside my body flies away somewhere and i cannot stay present. i could not hide the thoughts that had been imposed on me for years, almost as if they had been carved into my skin. for me it was never an act between two people. it was always a one person act, and all the weight was on my shoulders.

when i told this to my therapist, she answered me like this. sex is not a burden, it is an act where two bodies should experience pleasure. she was right.

i felt suffocated. as the people around me talked about what they did, it was never this easy for me, and inside it slowly turned into anger. this state started to increase the importance of the number of people i had sex with. every dick, every time, became a protest for me.

when i look back now, maybe hpv was a sign for me to stop, or maybe i created this belief just to make myself feel better.

watching this show opened a door for me to see the fetishes inside me, and it even introduced me to a partner i believed i could live these things with freely. i am grateful to her for never judging me.

in this journey that began with the thought of what it would be like if i put aside the vanilla part of me and the good girl i was supposed to be, and actually tried everything, even though i started tasting things one by one, because i could never ever let go of control, experiencing shibari remained for later. only when things were in my hands and under my supervision could i feel ready and safe.

this time, when i decided to step a little outside of that, i told my partner

‘‘sacrifice me to gods and goddesses.’’

i do not know whether it was a coincidence that the scene we were going to play was this symbolic in my subconscious.

sitting face down in my white dress like an innocent lamb, surrounded by burning candles, she came next to me. with her black floor length cloak and her lingerie, she began to touch my skin very gently, and i felt like i could get startled at any moment. slowly she tied my arms, my hands, my legs. she stepped on me and placed me right in the center.every lash on my skin created an even bigger fire, she told me not to resist, she told me to let myself go, my face could no longer even turn toward her, all the candles had heated the room even more, the feeling of giving myself to someone else and the comfort in that so tightly confined body was completely different,

the sharpness of the jute almost cut into my skin, yet it once again carried me into an out of body experience. then she took me into her arms and did not let me go until i came from pleasure.

as she untied my ropes, silence filled the space. the entire scene had taken away the innocence that was never truly mine, and to the moral guard inside me, the one i had never been able to stand up to, it was as if i was screaming that even if my arms were tied, i was no longer here.

with losing the traces of the good girl image i had long displayed and been forced to display, i truly cannot describe the relief that formed inside me. while not being able to share these things so openly with anyone until now felt like a stone sitting in my stomach, being able to put them into words openly, without hiding, breaks that stone into a thousand pieces.

the eyes of god and the voice of the moral guard have not completely gone silent. but they no longer control everything. i am learning to stay in my body. without running away. without apologizing. maybe this is what i have been looking for, what i have felt was missing inside me, or maybe what i now want to show to the outside world: not hiding from myself.