[Indefinitions.]

[Indefinitions.]

Mem•o•ry
The intersection between conscious thought and unconscious regurgitation.

My favorite room as a little girl was the one that had a bumpy dirt floor with wooden tentacles growing out of it, and walls of dirty brownish green leaves woven together with spider webs, and weighed down with apples that would sooner fall down rotted than get picked.  I leaned against the only furniture, a knotty rough column that shot up through the middle of my room, up until it sprayed out in spiny wooden arms to ward out any evil sights and sounds.  The battery operated transistor radio cancelled out the background wailing of false feelings.  It scratched out a warning from a band called Foreigner: Hot blooded!  Check it and see.  I’ve got a fever of a hundred and three.  Come on baby, do you do more than dance?  I’m hot blooded, hot blooded.  And in my EZ-Bake oven, I easily baked fresh miniature chocolate cakes, because the lightbulb glowed hot as long as I could keep fresh batteries inside it.  I could feed myself in my room, with dirty, wormy apples and cake, and I could last forever, even if it got cold in there, even if there was KFC and canned green beans and corn in the house, even if granddaddy was passed out in his chair and I could sneak by without waking him up.

In•spir•a•tion
The act or force that motivates or facilitates the revelation of what is already known, but has yet to be acknowledged or communicated in specifically defined terms.

I take whatever Susan says very seriously.  The reason I do is because she’s one of very few long-term relationships (meaning over two years) that have contributed positively towards the effort of my self-inhabitation. I sometimes need reminding that our weekly appointments, paid out of pocket though they might be, are a legitimate form of relationship.  No doubt others call it a simple business arrangement: services provided for fees paid to the provider of said services.  I sometimes tell myself that we have a relationship because I take the term “rent-a-mom” more seriously than the tone of my voice gives effect.  But there’s more truth to the fact that I classify ours as a relationship because we’re deeply involved in the effort of relating.  To each other, sometimes, though mostly me to myself.  Either way, it doesn’t matter, it seems I have to go through her to get to me.

I take whatever Susan says very seriously.  She speaks quietly, usually in questions, every so often in statements.  When she told me (in her statement tone, during a regularly scheduled appointment) that I’m counter-phobic, I believed her.  As a result, I am not surprised when I notice myself interploding into a state of stasis as a result of the suggested initial phase for an assignment based on inspiration.  But Susan is right.  I am not frightened, because I know what comes next: I regroup, check my artillery, put my heavy boots and black fatigues on, and plow headfirst into inspiration, right through the front door.  I’ll take the door with me if I can.

Truth
The internal acceptance of any series of sounds or symbols that have been put in a specific order toward the semblance of accurate interpretation.

Maybe this is bullshit, but it stinks of the kind of truth that’s been buried under bullshit for decades.  If not decades, for months, because in one second, a single truth is spoken that undoes eight months of what were truths before this moment came.  It’s the nature of words, they rearrange themselves into new disorder to suit the second, this very second, already dead in its tracks.  Truth is the new revelation, even if the present disorder of words wants to change back almost immediately to the old truth.  The new replaces the old, even in the case of new truths that are less true than old ones. 

The truth is, I can’t believe any of it.  Or I can believe all of it.  And the truth is, it doesn’t matter which I choose to do.  Or, it only matters to me.  The truth is, words only have the weight I give them, or superficiality I allow them.  Truth be told, to what end?  Truth be told and then what?  Retold as a lie, a new and improved truth?  Or retold as a memory, to join the other memories that turn tireless shades of gray according to how much time I allow them to hang on to the nails in the unlocked halls of my mind?

Love
An alchemical emotion useful in radically transforming one’s thought process.

Lately I catch myself thinking how good it would feel to smack someone.  I dream about various confrontations, then I imagine myself backhanding them, or open-palmed bitch-slapping them.  This is a new development, though perhaps any long time observer (who would have to be fabricated, since there exist none) would say that it was about time I admitted this.  This observer might say that I’ve been a sadist in pacifist’s clothing, and that the past year working in a dungeon, honing my more violent of interactive skills, has been nothing more than the guise of control.  This observer might go so far as to say that the time I spent on my mother’s back as a baby; part of the crowds chanting slogans tying peace and love together; waving flags against the mass killings of the day; riding my mother’s back, my mother riding the wave of make love not war toward the final killing that would be her own; this non-existent long time observer might say that those were my formative years.

Perhaps the most adhesive aspect of those war protests was their subtext of violence as a platform for love.  If history is a template, as far as I can see, love is a pastime, not a solution.  Making love certainly didn’t mean not making war, not in my mother’s case.  What I do count on as temporary fact, as part of my physical makeup, is the cementing of a violent pattern indicating proof of love, of passion, in the concrete history of the last day I saw my mother.

Time
A game of distortion the mind plays with reality.

Little pieces, over and over, elaborately presented, pitched back, overlapping.  Little pieces, once beautifully strung together, laying on top of each other, now on some sort of hovering heavily weightless and invisible machine, pulling and pulling and twisting and forcing me to watch as each tiny little piece gets drawn and drawn and drawn out and pushed back into itself to be drawn and drawn out again.  If it’s taffy at least at the very least it’ll be pink and sweet when it’s ready. 

If I lay here and watch the trees make taffy, if I just lay here, there won’t be any work to do, hunger to put food in, mouth to scrub the filth from, water to fill the struggling dehydrated cells of my liver and other organs that say they’re working for me, not against me.  But I am hungry, and the leaves continue to wave, or have they just started?  When did I roll over again?  And I am hungry, which I don’t believe in, because it’s more a concept than a biological function, it’s my alarm clock.  So I rumble, turn onto my side, betting on the snooze button.

In•ti•ma•cy
The infinite space that keeps one from another, no matter how imperceptible the chasm.

“Sorry I threw that,” she said.

“It’s just that there’s all these bricks, and I’ve been taking them down,” she said, “brick by brick.”

“I didn’t feel it,” I said, “because in the space of one another hundred goes up.”

“I can put them up,” I said, “faster than anyone could ever take them down.”

“Even you,” I said.

“Then why do I bother with bricks?” she said.

“And will I ever see you?” she said. “And when I do, how will I recognize you?”

“Keep trying,” I said.  “I get slower with age.”

“And the sport is losing its appeal,” I said.

“You’ll know me when you see me,” I said.  “I’ll be the one right in front of you, with pale skin, covered in dust, and calluses.”

Death
An explanation for the passage from the somewhat known to the unknown.

She was killed in a violent way, as if she was a casualty that could pay penance for the jealousy and neuroses of her shooter, who was all the while trying to shoot these feelings out of himself.  I’ve fought against this violence my entire life.  I’ve been opposed to the death penalty and to the owning of and shooting of guns around me, throughout my adolescence and early adulthood.  I’ve struggled with the resolution of violence for so many years.  But now that I’ve found an outlet for it, I’m concerned that it’s becoming more of a convenient solution than an expression of retaliation, a tool in searching for power, a shorthand method of proving to myself that no man will ever wield a weapon of any kind, not again, not against her, I mean against me, ever again. 

I’m conscious of this violence. It lives within me.  It’s been struggling to escape in its various bleedings.  In the past, it’s come out in punching and biting and stomping, often imprinting on those I’ve loved the most.  It’s as if in doing so they’ll know they’ve been marked; they’ve got proof of my love imbedded in their skin.  In the past I’ve done so in the guise of drunken playtime, when all time stops, when all is forgiven, when those left with my bootprint see it as a token of my love. 

But now, I control the seeping valve of my fury. I watch carefully as I meter punishment to those that deserve it, and by deserve I mean want it, pay for it.  I exert myself as if I were the full measure of their punishment, and the fact that it’s something they’ve asked for has no bearing on what it means for me to be the one who delivers this pain.  I’ve been waiting all my life for this. I’m the one who will return the favor.  The only thing better than killing Larry back, is hurting those who reflect his image, and watching the manifestation of their pain, seeing them jump, hearing them yelp, witnessing this process, over, and over again.  There is no death for him, because that would be too easy an escape.  No; since there is no death for me, there will be no death for him.  He and I will continue to dance until it’s time to stop. I will be the one who decides when this dance is over. 

[top]

[Close my eyes just to look at you.]

Existence, non existence.

Impossible to exist in the same space at the same time.

Crawling inside perception, waiting for hindsight.

I forget what your face looks like, because of all of the layers of dust and air and false memory between now and the last time I looked at you.

Sometimes I forget what my own face looks like.  No.  Always.  I always forget what my own face looks like, and sometimes I need to look at your face to remember what it feels like to know what my face looks like.

It’s not as if the you is even you.  The you is what I tell you to be, not when you’re listening, but when you can’t hear me.  I fill in the you all around you, and when we’re together, I check to see that you’re really there. This is why I sometimes look at you without speaking.  This is why you think I’m staring, sometimes strangely, sometimes smiling.

There are parts of you that you don’t know exist, the parts I’m creating for you, bits of yourself that weren’t there before but I know you’ll want to assume.

I’m creating you in your own image.  You exist, as much as you can feel yourself, as much as I can reach out and push my hand against your skin, feel moisture, heat, the flesh underneath your flesh.  I’ll add what I know can be there.  You’ll feel it.

These layers of yourself aren’t pieces of my imagination.  They’re under your skin, I’m looking through you behind you and I can see these bits, these layers, these dimensions of yourself.  They hide from you but they wait for me.  I’ll reach inside you if need be, but I will draw them out of you.  You will become more than you are.  You will become the image that I see.

Sometimes I forget if the you is even you.  Sometimes I mistake the you I’ve created for another me.  Sometimes the me I don’t see, the me I forget is all over my face, sometimes that me is swimming somewhere inside the creature you’ve become.  Sometimes this is the greater creature, sometimes this is the reflection in your dilated pupils.  Sometimes I dig into you to affect blackness I can see into.  Blackness I can see myself in.  At this point, you can not only feel me enter you, but it’s as if there is no separation between the two of us.  There is no memory of seperatness.

When we leave each other, we can feel the residue of this disseperateness.  You’ll feel it when you walk, when you sit, when you focus, when you remember, when you rest, when you close your eyes, when you touch the skin I’ve already touched, claimed, marked as my own.  I’ll feel you when you move, when you look inside yourself and see me.  I carry you with me.  I wear you like animal skin.

You come to me in the moments you can’t be anywhere else.  But time is abstract, and at times, moments overlap, collide with the one that looks like the present.  These moments don’t exist outside of the present.  All that you know and remember happens when you’re with me.  This is not captivity, this is freedom from the abstraction of time.  And this is captivity.  Because time is the tightest constraint, and you will survive for a few moments with me, inside the cavity of the time I’ve constructed for you.  The consciousness we share will fluctuate and become fluid, the air around us reflecting inward on itself as if it were liquid.  We’ll breathe the same pieces of time. 

The silence of time and breathe and heat and sweat will fill seconds and minutes that will turn in on themselves and fill this now with every past and future.  Don’t think.  I already told you time is abstract.  You’re not expected to understand.  What you’re feeling now is all you will ever feel, so don’t think.  Thought exists logically only on timelines, and there is no sense in thinking about time when it’s soemthign that’s evaporating in heat distortion in front of your eyes. 

See me clearly.  Your existence in this moment that is not really a moment but a represtentation of life and memory and sensation, your existence in this moment depends on it.

I’ve been waiting for you.  But waiting has no weight, because time has no definition.  So the waiting feels like looking at myself through the mirror of your face.  And I can’t remember what your face looks like, so I’ll leave here, to find you, to find me.  I’ll drown in the process if need be.  I learned how to swim late, but not too late.

[top]

[Lorimer Series: Deviant Sea.]

Erika sat across from me sipping the four-dollar coffee I had treated her to.  She wore a vague smile of recollection on her face, and a scarf tied artfully around her neck and pinned into place with a big, sparkly piece of costume jewelry.  Her makeup and nail polish were carefully applied, and her hair was piled up like pale yellow cotton candy.  Not that she was bragging, but there was clearly pride in her voice as the former porn actress and peep show dancer thought back a few decades, and told me how frequently the cum cleaner would visit her booth at the peep show parlor. (That was back in the days when Times Square had the other kind of stench, one that didn't smack so much of Disney.) 

“Moppin’ up!” the cum cleaner would say. He’d come to her between every customer, after they came in to her booth, dropped coins in her slot, and shoved tip money under her glass so they could see more of her. Enough tip money would get her to spread her legs wider, squeeze her tits together, and moan out an expert fake orgasm just as they spurted a Pollack-like design on the partition. After every customer came, the cum cleaner dutifully returned with mop and bucket, which must have been teeming with the swimmers of a hundred guys.

“Moppin’ up!” he’d always say, and it sounded like money to Erika.

The cum cleaner was her best friend those days. More important than his talent at making her booth appear clean, as if it wasn’t actually smeared with DNA soup, was that the guys outside were watching his every move. They stared harder at him than they stared at Erika’s only real competition, the woman with the biggest tits in the place (and probably the zip code). You’d think the cum cleaner had tits of his own the way they stared, but they weren’t looking at him or his bucket. These guys were like gamblers at the OTB, the way they tallied up the favorites, tracking how many times the cum cleaner’s “moppin’ up!” was heard outside which dancer’s dirty booth. Whoever’s booth needed the most cleaning must have been doing something right in there. She must have been shaking her ass just the right way, gyrating her hips like a hypnotist, while making goo-goo eyes and fuck-me faces.
These guys had one thing in common: the goal to shoot, and to do it fast because time is money. They’d wait as long as they could before paying, wandering around, eyes flickering back and forth from the girls between performances, to the cum cleaner, and back around. They’d get as horny as they could stand, with hard-ons pressing tight against zippers so that when they stepped into the booth, they could whip it out and jerk it off for as little pocket change as possible.

“Oh, you’re hard already, wow!” Erika would say when a new customer pointed his dick at her. The tone of her voice as she told me about it was completely deadpan and sarcastic. No doubt she said it the same way back in the booth. Maybe not though.  She was an actress after all, but even if she did, I bet her customers couldn’t hear it, with all senses locked in to her high heels, long legs, bombshell curves and fluffy blonde hair. She was on a loop, as she had to be, mouth open, pink, wet and smiling, all white teeth and promises. If it’s true like she told me it was, that she saw five thousand dicks in the five or so months she worked at the place, that’s somewhere around forty dicks a day. She said maybe a half dozen were impressive, another half dozen really puny, and the rest forgettably average, but she blew kisses to every single one.

Her only other experience in the sex industry was doing girl on girl porn films, fairly innocuous compared to squirming in a booth in front of a furiously pumping voyeur. She was paid to have sex with other pretty women who were paid to have sex with her; a win/win situation, especially for someone who was bisexual “under the right circumstances,” as she said.  The circumstances must have been favorable about 80% of the time. Erika told me that walking down the street on any given day, that was the percentage of women she found sexy, as opposed to a pathetic 10% of all the men. She figured if she ever got around to it, she’s do much better as a lesbian, since the numbers were clearly in her favor. She chose to primarily do lesbian porn scenes, maybe because she liked doing them, but also because she didn’t feel like doing the more hard core, bent over, cock plunging, finishing-with-a-facial type of scene. She was more of a lady than that.
Erika was a petite sexy blonde bombshell type in the 60s and 70s, an intellectual into the kind of sexual freedom and experimentation that was raging in Manhattan then. She met Jamie Gillis at a swing party, before she got bored with them because “somebody was always getting left out,” as she put it. I imagine it just wasn’t her thing. Fun while it lasted, but I bet she got sick of the all the work it takes to keep so many people happy while you’re fucking them. I went through the same phase myself, going to sex clubs and drug-induced orgies. The first few were a blast, the next few fairly entertaining, and during the last ones I was literally bored stiff. As it turns out, she met Jamie in one of the first. He was acting in porn films, and wanted to introduce her to some people who could get her into the industry. (As it turns out, Jamie Gillis was the man to know. He’s still a semi-famous porn actor, who’s appeared in over 400 films over the last 40 years.)

As we spoke, I wondered if it the fact that she had been struggling as an actor and writer for too long, and that sex was something she didn’t have to struggle with that opened her mind to the industry. She couldn’t really say, but she was sick of being broke, that she did know. And she wasn’t one to be intimidated. The sex industry wasn’t good, it wasn’t bad, it was just there, and paid her the money she needed to go back to school and study journalism. When you’ve got the kind of face and body that makes people think of sex when they look at you, and you’ve figured out the balance of consciousness it takes to entertain people using that kind of sexuality, it’s pretty hard to turn the money down. It feels pretty fucking powerful, and artistic license often comes into the picture to save you from wrestling with certain moral issues.

Erika worked in porn for about half a year just like her stint later at the peep show. She seemed to be able to sense when it was time to get out. She got out of doing porn when she did because she didn’t want to poison her "straight" career. She’d make her money, put it in the bank (something I definitely did not have in common with her), and get back into acting in “regular” films, and writing art and theatre reviews. But most of the time her looks got the better of her, and she’d get typecast as a stripper or a hooker in mainstream films anyway.
Like many successful women that got into the sex industry by choice, Erika had a knack for the business. She created a persona for herself that changed as needed. She’d nod like a nurturing mother when some guy was in her peep show booth, dick out or not, telling her about how he got raped by his father as a child. Once again, she reminds me of me. She’s got the same kind of clients, who may be horny most of the time, but also need some attention, some intimacy, and they’re willing to pay for it. As she talked to me, telling me all these stories, some of them funny, some of them sexy, most of them sad, she changed the tone of her voice to match the content. She used words like “breasts” and “vagina” in one sentence, “jerking off” and “dick” in the next, and constantly vacillated between “cum” and “ejaculate.” It’s as if she had different sets of vocabulary she used depending on who she was talking to, or what she was talking about. I got the sense that she wasn’t really sure how to talk to me. Was I one of her clients? I wasn’t paying, except for the coffee, but the subject matter and the familiarity it affected turned our hour into a kind of session. She was trying to please me. She knew I wanted to hear racy things about when she was young, who she fucked, who she exposed herself to.  She sensed I appreciated her unaffected sarcasm and deadpan tone, and played it up for me.

She reminded me, “The sex industry always has its doors open to new talent. I created this persona Mistress Erika that I’m willing to revive.” She wanted to work in my dungeon.

Of course I was all nods and smiles with her when she told me she wanted to be a dominatrix.  She wanted to hear all about my take on it. Is it fun beating these guys up? Is it dangerous? There’s really no sex? Do I think she could do it? Of course I do, I told her. And suddenly she was my client; it became her session, and I was telling her exactly what she wanted to hear. I told her about the five-minute consultations with potential clients to talk about their fantasies, their fetishes, their limits, and how I could work myself into or take them outside of their parameters. Then I talked about the range of activity, like giving someone a good thrashing, or acting out some fantastical roleplay scenario. I have this one story in particular I like to tell when I’m explaining how random roleplays can be. A client once asked me to act like I was superwoman, straight off a page in a comic book, and eventually faint dead away on the floor when exposed to his “kryptonite.” The scene ended with my fully dressed foe humping my stiletto like a bad puppy. Erika and I laughed about it as I wrote down my boss’s phone number for her.  I told her who to ask for and what to say when she called for an interview, but she never called. She must have had the same thoughts I did.

Professional domination might have the highest age ceiling in the sex industry, but the fact is, the closer you get to 40 as a ProDomme, the fewer customers you are likely to get. I’m in my late mid thirties, which is starting to feel dangerously close to 40. I’m surrounded by little hotties in their early 20s, younger even, and there will always be much more of a demand for them than there is for me. Even though I know what I’m doing, I’m more intimidating, and I’m likely more talented, in a sexually charged environment, even the kinkiest of perverts want to soak up some of that youth. Come to think of it though, the kinkiest of perverts might just be the ones lining up to visit Mistress Erika, if she ever actually went through it.

No doubt she was drawn to the sex industry once again, thirty years later, because she needed the cash.  My intuition tells me that she might also have a latent addiction to the kind of sexual power you can only wield when you’re in the room with a paying client. The likelihood of success as a dominatrix in her 60s (she never did tell me her age, so I have to guess at the window) is slim. The potential is definitely there, especially for an actress who’s a former sex worker, but she’d have to put a lot of energy into plugging that niche market, the one where hard core infantilists and the like are found.

But could I work with her in my dungeon? I wouldn’t want to. I’m as bad as any of my customers. I love being surrounded by those hot, sexy young things in their high heels, ass and tits exposed or barely covered in tight, black stretchy fishnet or lace or shiny pvc or rubber. And the girls I work with know it, they know I love women. They know that when I’m torturing the fuck out of a client’s cock it’s because I’d just as soon see it fall off as get any closer to me. And they smack my ass and stick their faces into my cleavage as much as I do theirs. It’s more work etiquette than anything else. We are there to feel sexy, and we make each other feel sexy in our down time. But back to my point: do I really want Erika working with me in that atmosphere? I can’t smack that ass, or make lewd jokes to someone that reminds me of my grandma. Even though she’d love it, even though that’s one of the reasons she’d be there, to feel sexy and make money doing it, but probably to feel sexy first and foremost.

So yeah, I admit I’m selfish, and I don’t really want a coworker whose ass I can’t bring myself to smack.  It’s not just Erika; the same thing goes for this 18 year old that worked at the dungeon for a few months last year. It didn’t so much bother me that she was only 18; it bothered me that she looked like she was about 14, without a smidge of Lolita. She had braces and brand new titties, and that red lipstick and those high heels made her look like she raided her mommy’s closet. And she was a hit, even if it was only a matter of time before she moved on to her next counter-culture adrenalin rush experiment. She could go in there with any client and be a complete idiot, stumble over her commands, giggle and blush, get pissed off and embarrassed, use a flogger or a cane badly, maybe dangerously. She could do anything she wanted in session, because the clients that would pick her were the repressed pedophiles that needed someone like her to fuck them up for it, or else they were the ones that saw her as a rare commodity, and they needed to get a beating from her while they could, no matter how incompetently delivered it might be. And just as there’s a niche market for a girl like her among the kinkiest customers of the sex industry, there is for women like Erika. And who am I to judge anyway?

[top]

[Manifesto: A Gift To My Reader.]

I will write what you will read.  You will read what I write, and you will form conclusions that I give you to form.  My prose will be clear and concise, and you will have no room for interpretation.  This may feel stifling, you may feel suffocated, you may feel like a rat in a cage, but you will trust me as you must trust someone who’s writing you’ve picked up to read. You wouldn’t have picked it up otherwise, you wouldn’t have made the agreement you made by acceptance of the printed word.  Perhaps you didn’t purchase it, perhaps you picked it up, perhaps someone gave it to you, perhaps you feel held captive on a subway or in a doctor’s office.  No matter, your eyes have sold you.  You will continue to read, you will remain still, you will submit.  You will understand what I explain, you will acquiesce to my every assertion. 

You think now, as you look away from the page, away from this combination of typeset that draws your reading eye from line to line, you think now that you are in control of your own experience.  You laugh a little bit to yourself, but you don’t listen to your laugh, you don’t hear its inherent nervous quality.  You tell yourself that you’ll read on, your eyes are master of what allows entry via their doorways into the soul of your mind.  You don’t tell yourself this in so many words, it’s more in the feeling of comfort you prepare and provide yourself, with television remote nearby, a safety mechanism in case your mind leaves you, in case it starts straying, making new assumptions, connecting new patterns, believing what never could have been believed prior to your assimilation of the text before you.  Your hand caresses the buttons which when powered on, flip by networks filled with electronic representations of people just like you, or just like you’d like to be, people whose lives are encapsulated for your pleasure, any time of day or night, on a multitude of satellite or cable television channels. 

You turn back to the text.  Perhaps you’ve warmed some milk, or poured some scotch over a few ice cubes, or refilled a glass with wine that would stain the most intellectual of all gums and lips red, teeth gray.  You drink, your eyes focus, brush lightly across the page, skipping words they don’t recognize or understand. You stop again, you remember those days back at university when you’d copy down words to look up later, sometimes read with a dictionary by your side to look up the word right away, but now you skip it, you look for context, and when there is no literal context you look inside your eyelids for the context provided by your past experience, and the collection of those you’ve known vicariously.  Your mind wanders, and you follow it to just the other night, when you once again sat following your wandering mind. 

"I am empty. Fill me," you said to her.

It wasn't sexual, it was sad. The problem is, you don’t like sex that’s not tinged with sadness, and so you touched your collarbone when you said it. You know the collarbone to be one of the most suggestively ignored pieces of the body, and so you ran the top of your forefinger along it at certain specific points during the conversation.

What you wanted as you listened was for the entire body of her narrative to enter you, its noise drowning out the droning of your incessant inner monologue. You were desperate for her emphatic interruptions, the way she would correct and chastise your every third or fourth sentence. You longed to crawl inside the cage of her perfect grammar and clear diction.

She asked you a question, for your reaction to an explanation of her theory of practicality, which you had apparently begged the details of forty-five minutes earlier. You found your hand wrapping itself around your throat, thumb and fingers spread out to rest on both sides of your  collarbone. Even in the dim glow of the hotel lobby bar, it was clear that your martini was sweating in neglect, a single polite lipstick stain on its rim, olives marinating safely in gin.

Her face revealed a thin smile with corners that threatened to produce a nervous laugh, all that would fill the air you left empty.  She looked at you, mouthing a word that sounded like a name that should reference you, call you back into your body, into her mind.  The name sounded familiar, though a few beats passed before you realized it was yours, and that it had no place in the framework of her dissertation.  Your hand flew from the pulse in your neck to your glass, you were confident the cocktail would prove inspirational.

"You have such a way with words, I admit I got lost in their rhythm."

You suddenly looked right into her eyes, forcing them into an inventory of the bar to catalogue spectators.

"Your clarity is disarming, have I told you that before? I'd love it if you'd define your terms again for me," you said. You stared at her, waiting, listening.  She began again.

But now my narrative.  My language.  The only censorship is that which I will provide you during your experience of reading my text.  Experience.  The imitation of your experience will mirror my description of experience, and will replace your memory with actuality, the actuality I define.  My definitions are embedded in the text I provide for you, the text your eyes assimilate into symbols of thought, of meaning.  You compare them with the hieroglyphics of your past, your memories are representations of life as you know it, but I am about to change all that.  You will read what I give you to read, you will digest it, you will assimilate it, it will change your perception of present and distort all of your memories, forcing you to apply a new brand of hindsight, that which I feed you through a slow drip of narrative.

You stop, you remember those days once again, you reflect on your time spent in university libraries surrounded by reference materials, the consolation of a millennium of information at your disposal, comfortably within reach but never discernibly within range of your periphery.  You yearn for definitions.  You wish the text you’re reading would stop to expose itself, to strip down to bare structure, essence, and detail, to define itself and fill your licentious gaze with the satisfaction of understanding.  No, you realize soon enough, you will not understand that which I have not given you to understand.  The definitions you seek will come to you when I unwrap them for you myself.  You are destined to receive the only gift ever offered to anyone on the page, that which defies explanation, a definition of your own personal narrative.  You stop trying to think.  Your thoughts are in the process of rearranging you, and you will be still.  You will absorb.  You will not struggle. 

This narrative you seek, without knowledge of your desire, lies within definition of terms, of emotions and images and memories and theories and symbols, all the things you think you know but that are now being reshaped, redefined within the confines of your consciousness, using all the tools I have in common with your unconscious.  No longer a search for definition of the narrative you see on white page decorated with black ink.  Now narrative defines definition.  The narrative breathes, no longer a story, no longer a dissertation, a description of time passing, of events building upon events, of content containing this time and these events in various combinations of fact and fiction.  This narration becomes its own entity in a definition of ideas, of ideals, of mirroring what you thought you understood, of what I explain to you now that is different than anything you thought you understood in the past.  Your eyes on this page implies consent, implies permission, no waiver necessary, you are responsible for your own absorption.

My narrative surrounds you, providing you with somewhere to be and something to watch within the construct of your mind.  You will sit still as I unravel explanations and apply filters to information you thought you already knew.  You put the text down once again, puzzled, thinking to yourself, this text means nothing when my eyes don’t acknowledge its existence.  But then you wonder, is that true?  You say to yourself that your thoughts are yours and are private and no one’s going to tell you what to think, what to feel.  But you are thinking and feeling exactly what my text allows you, it has provided you with this opportunity to reflect on your own thought process.  You will digest this piece of information, take another sip, and return to me, willingly, knowing the page is holding you, the page turns you, you are no longer rebellious.

Now that you’ve given in, you find yourself blissfully enveloped in a new environment, the structure I’ve built for you, a textured framework of perspective, point of view, and style.  You will feel what I want you to feel, and you are content to give in, giving up your sense of control over what you think you think on your own.  You realize that though once you thought you created the narrative in the act of your reading it, you have now given in to the restraints I’ve placed on your thought process, you feel comforted in the tight parameter of dark, breathless uncertainty.  You know that I will give you everything you need.  You relax, take another sip, you read on.  You happily think thoughts I have provided you with, the clamor of your own thoughts subside, and you sink deeper into yourself, out of your body, into the newly refurnished crawl space inside your skull.  You are not surprised by new information, you begin to crave it, and you take it in obediently.  Your vocabulary becomes mine and you nod your head, again and again, and you smile softly, as if you and I shared the most intimate of secrets, and you are calm, you rest in the tightly wrapped consciousness I have provided you.

You once looked for your own interpretation of text, of the symbols that matched your own internally webbed slideshow.  Now you question ever having done so.  You ask yourself, what is interpretation?  What is meaning?  Who have you allowed all this time to shape your thoughts and emotions and desires? Can it be true that your entire life has been manipulated by every single person you’ve ever come into contact with, and not just them but every person that has existed in the town you were born, every city you’ve visited and lived in, and within the culture of every society you’ve studied?  And what is this “culture?”  Who determines the patterns of human activity, who combines the symbols that represent life?  And why have you always craved such a representation, when you’ve been living it the entire time?  Have you really wasted your life up to this moment in reliving a thousand times what you could have been living just once?  You’ve finally thrown off the burden of thousands of years and have shut your ears to the clamoring voices that are not your own.  You turn away, and you turn the page, and my page continues to turn you.

You are no longer alone.  Before you picked up this text, you had only your own thoughts to listen to, confusingly mixed in with all those thousands of voices, or millions, or numbers uncountable in a human lifetime.  You couldn’t pick out the sound of your own thoughts in the midst of the maddening din, and you felt lost.  You felt diluted, unconnected, and alone.  But you now hear just one voice, and that voice is mine.  You listen quietly and contentedly to my voice as you play it in your head, the voice that keeps you company, that has created a safe place for you to let go of yourself and all of the others in your head.  You feel solace in the vibrations of my voice in your head.  I offer you companionship. You are no longer afraid.  You are no longer alone.

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