#narrative

And this is why I’m in love.

Eclipses of former selves drape themselves in unseen corners that touch the floor and stretch up to the skyline. Trying to reach that neat straight place: the chalky outline roadmap. But my fingernails are coloured in bright red with matching lips. And she, she stays far from inconspicuous. Trying to take a bite on a burger and keep the eloquent lines of matt finished lippy in tact.

It rains, there is no umbrella. Never an umbrella when you need her.

Instead, you hop down an unfamiliar street wishing that she would inch a little closer but you play it down and cool like the temperate of the evening, as if the night is the first of many. So you shift the focus reminding yourself to stay like those cement slabs, cemented into pavements with neat straight lines.

You see, depictions of self are just that. We meet and we try and expound our best selves. Then we meet those that don’t hide in corners or under shadows but stand up and let you see the crinkles. Let you see the fears of walking into a room first when you’re late. Let you see the fears of mirrors and the faces that sometimes shouldn’t be looking back [now].

I’m trying to focus on work and my mind wanders and I know I am yet to forgive myself. Spent so much time and unwanted effort to reconcile myself in another - when all along it was right here: I am not who I present myself to be. But I am learning to unmask the persona of who and what I should be.

I can list out the reasons the myriad of isms and complexes that sit with me. Those unchartered roadmaps with interlinks, to figure out where to change and what route to take. But like the dark blue and green lines we follow the same path with different stops.

Peace.

There’s a mirror in your heart

That only you can see

There ain’t no mist or worry

Only reflections of you and me

Others will not be there

So who we living for?

No more hiding in the shadows

When love is sitting at our front door

Cuz it ain’t about the money

Or the clothes we choose to wear

So hear the words I speak and let the fears rest elsewhere.

I have spent most of my days either looking up at the sky or down on myself. We met on a late Friday evening and after all these years have passed I still look at you in complete awe. I always knew I would find a love like this but never did I believe I would be so blessed…

I have grown in so many ways and I thank God for bringing you into my life. You have and continue to act as my confidante, teacher, healer, lover and best friend. I reflect on you and there is a warmth that settles.

I grew weary of praising our love to shield myself in case you left… In case I was too much. In case my love was too much. I misunderstood what it was to love and be loved. You hold me down in moments when I am breaking and lift me up as I spiral down our stairs and onto the street.

I am sorry for the many months and years that I have spent with the cracks as my focal point. I do not know what I have done to deserve a love so huge that I stand back and now let it engulf me.

You are the other part of me. Without ownership or without restriction. We share a light that shines. There are times - when you need someone. You are by my side. There is a light that shines special for you and me.

I never knew a la la la love like this…

This isn’t one of those horribly romantic posts. This one is one that probably won’t be seen for the one that inspired it, not for some time anyway. We past the checking each other’s social ish.. lol well; most of the time.

My heart feels heavy and I feel like the things that offer me so much strength are now making less sense to me.. I look at my mother’s life and the dynamic that rests between her and my father and it breaks my spirit. 

She is so accustomed to behaviour that makes me want to scream the house down. I try and be the good Indian daughter, but now my silence seeps out of me in ways I cannot control.

So I sit on a swivel leather chair in the living room, with my aunt and parents and think of you.. I feel calm and I even begin to feel a small smirk turning into a smile hanging from my lips.

I didn’t handle the situation as you would have done; I couldn’t sit and bite my tongue. Not meeing fire with fire, but dousing hatred with water the way you said I should. I didn’t do it, I lashed out and stood my ground and the antlers were coming for me. Reminding me of being young, afraid, without voice.

Things are different now; I feel a slight pang of fear but it subsides. A victory for my spirit and a coat hanger for this ego.

Ego Death has been on repeat in my car, Praise the Lord for an aux output and youtube videos on how to install your own “sounds”. Moving on, writing this I feel lighter. Knowing in a few days I will be back in the sanctuary we made together. 

“[Jasmin] All you need in life is love and a cat.” 

When words escape me I know I must write or speak a truth that must be refined and redefined by me.
Poems stick to the roof of my mouth and as i take them out they retain the mould, that arch, that arch that contains your name.

We used to sit around the park till after dark

With incense swirling uncontrollably

Now we meet over text messages with emojis

Silently refraining from saying:

Our maps shifted but we misplaced coordinates

The only way we knew how

Dot to dot to dot

But my bindi missed the mark - that last time I shouted in the park

Especially as it’s dusk and the spray can is nearly empty

WonderWoman painted in little suns on the shaky balcony

Oh and those old trees in a rose garden that probably still looks the same

Your names are etched onto old clothes and sit in a frame

About Victim

It is not that, so I plot a new landscape

Where sunsets in Southall and Kent

Are closed chapters and I look toward the new horizon

South of the River

Maybe forever.

We talk openly about all things that we know should remain in those velvet boxes, put up high - out of sight. I go and get a veggie patty and “yam it down” with a drizzle of encona. In that moment with wafts of curried goat I overstand what those books talk about. 

We commit to each other. Today.

My he[art] indeed.

• • •  [spoilers below]  • • •

In the middle of a blind date she doesn’t particularly want to be on, The Incredible Jessica James’ eponymous heroine squares off with her equally uncomfortable, male dinner friend/potential boyf/adversary.

They volley back and forth several brutally, “completely honest” questions.

After a few, he asks her, “How do you pay your rent?”

“I… work at a non-profit, in Hell’s Kitchen.” (Pride in her voice, though a somewhat knowing tone: yeah, I know. Very Brooklyn answer.) “I teach public school kids how to write and produce their own plays.”

“So… how do you pay your rent?”

She laughs.

Already – my Netflix ticker says this is barely 13:50 into the entire movie – the two biggest threads of the film come together: (1) an endearing, realistic romantic comedy starring Jessica Williams (that Dope QueenoffThe Daily Show who now does other stuff – namely, this) and rom-com’s staple dorky everyman Chris O’Dowd (because the thinking, even semi-straight woman[**] needs an IT guy); and (2) the female Bildungsroman.

If you’ve taken an English class any time since approx. 1980, you’ve probably had to learn and use “Bildungsroman” in an essay. It’s the coming-of-age novel, the story of growing up, an arc from innocence to experience. Except, as a pivotal cohort of feminist critics in the 1980s argued, the female Bildungsroman means “growing down,” a story of women being taught by society: Lower Your Expectations! Conform! Settle! The debate around what even isa Bildungsroman has wrestled with how gender-specific a story about maturing and (in essence) #adulting can be, given that women in Western society since the inception of the novel itself haven’t really had the options to leave home, discover themselves as autonomous, free, independent selves. The male Bildungsroman, in other words, is about the boy who grows up to be a man, and gets a job; the female Bildungsroman is about the girl who becomes a lady, and finds the right husband. Sure, there’s status and some freedom attached to that – class status and thus economic freedom, as the bourgieness of the novel excels at rewarding. But by and large, no matter how failed the male career, no matter how much the woman takes on a new career of domestic labor, the novels usually emphasize along these lines. Men achieve professional success; women aren’t left to be spinsters.

(A professor in my department, Jesse Rosenthal, pointed out how pervasive this narrative still is within even the most indie, “unconventional” of tales. His case study? (500) Days of Summer. As he recounted to a class on the 19^th-cen. British novel, here’s a movie putatively about the romantic maturation of the male subject – a rom-com trajectory usually reserved for women [i.e.. He’s Just Not That Into You could never be She’s Just Not That Into You]. But Joseph Gordon Levitt’s problematic-nice-guy fairy tale, complete with problematic-indie-dream-girl Zooey Deschanel, isn’t his acceptance of a limited role in his next relationship. It’s a successful job interview. [roll credits])

So the fact that The Incredible Jessica James coupled, in several senses, these two plots wasn’t surprising to me. Less than 15 minutes in, and yeah, obviously, Chris O’Dowd is gonna get the girl, and Jessica is gonna get over her ex by realizing that she “deserves” this more mature guy. Her work is great and all, the story goes, but obviously what we want is Bridesmaids with a lady of color. Comedy + late capitalism’s precarity (Jessica, how doyou pay your rent? Are you going to have to go live with your parents like Kristin Wiig had to after the cupcake biz tanked?) = love story. And bonus points for being about Instagram, and having a WOC lead where a white actress would have been five or ten years ago (slash even now): kudos, my friends. Kudos.

But… that’s not what happened. And here’s where this movie is radical.

BecauseThe Incredible Jessica James is a female Bildungsroman [or Bildungs-Film] that subtly, cannily, definitively breaks the mold. 

It isn’t a story about a woman realizing how wrong she is to be hung up on the wrong, bad boy, and thus the return to the family, to society’s right side of the tracks, to *herself* that is made whole again by giving up her rebellious adolescent wandering and waffling. Instead, TIJJpresents a heroine who goes through a series of rejections not of lovers, but of jobs [displayed on her wall: see first screencap]. It tracks her indefatigable efforts to make what she loves (theater) into a career, even a somewhat uncertain one. It’s about her slow realization – not the sudden “awakening” narrative that critics have ascribed to female/feminist Bildungsroman of old – that what she’s doing, working every day with kids, continuing to send out her resume, writing and reading and connecting with the public circles of her aspiring field – all that, isa career.

Take, for example, a crucial marker of James’s acceptance of herself, and of her status, as grown-up, matured, sufficiently adult that she’s no longer faking it til she makes it: she’s Made It. The blueish-purple jumpsuit spotted in a Brooklyn consignment shop, the kind that is explicitly labeled as male by the sewn patch of its previous owner, “Randolph,” tall enough for even the pretty tall JJ. 

Working-class, second hand, male-identified uniform; natural hair in box braids; red lipstick and bright eyeliner. This is how Jessica meets her parents. But the music slides to an uncomfortable stop as Jessica gets off the Arrivals moving walkway: her parents are bourgie, sweet, stable, and utterly unlike her in spirit. This is the American middle-class dream – as authors from Frantz Fanon to Paul Gilroy to Ta Nehisi-Coates have written – that preys on Black people specifically, the double-consciousness of passing as it works in all its formulaic vapidity. Jessica’s younger sister, too, has bought into this dream: she takes one look at Jessica.

“You look like an auto-mechanic,” Jerusa (her sister) points out in a tone dripping with judgment.

“It’s cool, though, right?” Jessica beams.

“Yeah…” her sister nods, meaning the opposite. “I mean, you’re not going to wear it to the party?” [Her very normative, unironic, and uncritical baby shower.]

“… Nope,” Jessica deflates. Pretending this has been her plan all along.

Because this family isn’t ever going to be the place where Jessica can be anything other than stifled. The prim-and-proper group sits in the suburban family room late that night, merrily gooey-eyed over a romantic drama they’re watching on TV, whose dialogue (that’s all we overhear) is so utterly, sickeningly banal that Jessica doesn’t even enter the room. She hangs back, in the darkness. The entire setting – with all its race and class implications (and the sincere and moving subplot about the James family’s struggles with making their own rent, and how this continues to the present with Jessica’s public school kid whose divorced parents are fighting over custody, intertwines class and race throughout) – requires, in sum, the painful subjugation of Jessica’s self. A “growing down,” a compromise, as its definition of “growing up.”

Women of traditional Bildungsromane, Abel, Hirsch and Langland posit, “are not free to explore; more frequently, they merely exchange one domestic sphere for another. While the young hero roams through the city, the young heroine strolls down the country lane” (8).

Jessica James, by contrast, goes back to New York.

And back, at least superficially, to the romantic sphere of this rom-com. Where her jumpsuit is acceptable; where people like her appreciate thoughtful, empowering arts (instead of, like her mom’s Very White Book Club Lady friend wants, Cats). Where her lesbian best friend (that actress from Master of None) is the elective community James wants, not the family she’s contractually obliged to recognize in her blood. Where Chris O’Dowd is; where her career is.

So how does the movie wrap up the romantic plot without making this aboutJessica’s successful “deserving” of the Right Man™?

(It’s worth noting, before we spoil the ending, that the Boone – aka O’Dowd – subplot of the movie focuses on his not being able to get over the right girl. He stalks his ex-wife, amusingly because it’s Chris O’Dowd, but I think the movie implies cringe-worthily and creepily too: the dude side of rom-coms, it seems, is bleak; not somewhere the film is especially interested in lingering, and neither really are we. He’s eventually ashamed of himself, and this humility is deliberately more endearing than his Every Breath You Take enactment was. Admittedly, we could get into the politics of who says they’re sorry at various points in the film, who asks for and who gives forgiveness, and the ways in which being placed in a position of forgiving is, in a way, simultaneously powerful and powerless. But Nietzsche and feminism is a debate for another time.)

What I’m especially struck by – and I’ve watched this movie myself and with my sister, and then thought about it again after it was praised by another woman I love who watched it an ocean away – is that TIJJends with Jessica.

The final two scenes are crucial here. The penultimate brings together the two guys; formally, the two choices of a Bildungsroman: forward, or back? Jessica’s ex, Damon, finds her backstage after the kids’ theater night concludes, and opens with how he “know[s] how much this means to” her. For a split second, I panicked: OH GOD, fuck, this is why we can’t have nice things. They’re gonna have this guy realize how great she is – because obviously the only way a guy can appreciate a woman is for him to be in competition with another man. She deserves better! I shouted internally. Don’t take him back: sure, you realized you were as responsible for the break-up as he was. So what! You can do better.

But they hug, they sigh, and he leaves. (At which point I breathed a sigh of relief.)

Enter Chris O’Dowd. (At which point I was back to, fuck conventionality. What a missed opportunity.)

Turns out, though, the movie saw me – and the Bildungsroman – coming a mile off.

Because Jessica – unlike Rachel – gets on the damn plane.

Jessica, after all, has been offered a huge job opportunity in the most novelistic of cities: London. But things are just getting back on track with Right Guy; but going is her dream, is her big break; but he, like Damon, just realized how great she is – he read her entire corpus of theatrical writing, and declared – #honesty – that he’s still coming to grips with her complexity, on the page and off; but; but; but…

But… she forgot to tell him about London. And in a sense, this is where swelling crescendos of orchestral joy began filling my head, because if this had been a rom-com like the others, if this had been a female coming-of-age story like the others, she would never forgotten about him. Ever. Not once. He would have been her one phone call; her best friend-par-excellence; her Person. Instead, that honor goes to Tasha, the semi-parodic self-involved best friend who always, though, has Jessica’s back.

And so when the clearly wealthy – loaded, because of an app that is explicitly about the formal gesture afforded by technology of Family, without the actual emotional or affective labor of having to talk to those totally different people who somehow raised you! – Boone mentions “frequent flyer miles,” we can anticipate an airplane that Jessica (by now we can say, of course) will be on.

“Just if you wanted to… bring someone with you… to show you around the town,” he hedges, just before the cut.

“How does that work? […] Frequent flyer miles?”

Cut to Jessica – in the god. damn. JUMPSUIT. Pleased as punch, sitting in – oh yes, we can have nice things – not even economy seats. The nice seats.

At which point, the truly INCREDIBLE part of this movie becomes clear:

Tasha: Dude, I can’t believe your boyfriend bought us tickets to London.

Jessica: Okay, who said anything about him being my boyfriend?

T: Wait. What are you talking about? This is like, the most romantic gesture I have ever seen.

JJ: Yeah, it’s dope. But it takes more than a couple of roundtrip tickets to London for somebody to be my boyf.

T: That is so boss.

Shandra – the elementary school girl whose divorced parents prompted Jessica’s own reflection on her parents/childhood – returning to her seat: What is so boss?

T: Uh, Jessica.

S: Oh, yeah. Duh.[… I]t was really cool of your boyfriend to get me a ticket, too.

T: Hey, whoa, whoa, whoa. Sister. Just because a guy buys a lady a couple of roundtrip tickets to London does not make him her boyfriend.…

[a beat]

S: You know, I like your jumpsuit.

JJ: Thank you. Yeah, it’s pretty bad-ass, right?

S: Hm. Yeah, it is.

They all exchange smiles, the camera zooms in for one final-close up of Jessica’s excited anticipation of landing for the beginning of – not her romance, but – her career.

COME ON! You’re telling me the final scene of this movie is a new affinity, a new definition of family, in which the white, straight, married couple form is reshaped into the female solidarity of friendship, while the child of that hetero dyad of yore is now the dark-skinned girl who herself is a budding author, having been mentored by Jessica, who is – onscreen – mentored by another strong, Black female playwright??? You’re telling me that throw-away moment in the corridor backstage with Chris O’Dowd that seems like the lead-in to a kiss is in fact his last appearance onscreen??? You’re telling me the movie, moreover, goes out of its way to stress – TWICE – that whatever erotic/romantic relationship they’re in, Jessica didn’t accept this trip as the quid pro quo of settling down??? YOU’RE TELLING ME THIS NEW COLLECTIVE IS SO AWARE OF ITS MEMBERS’ QUIRKS AND FOIBLES AND SELF-AUTHORSHIP/FASHIONING THAT THE FINAL LINES OF THE MOVIE UNDERSCORE THAT JESSICA CAN, IN FACT, DRESS HOWEVER THE FUCK SHE WANTS, AND THAT SOME PEOPLE WILL LOVE HER FOR IT, AND FEEL THE SAME ABOUT THE THINGS SHE LOVES???

Get out of my face, TIJJ. You have *EXPLODED* the female Bildungsroman, and maybe the Bildungsroman full-stop. There is no return to the original society, no compromise, no settling. Jessica isn’t the one forced to the margins of the story by choosing either independence or submission: the family is.

For that matter, romance sort of is. Jessica has no “boyf”; Tasha has no (onscreen, stable, couple-form) gf, but neither is she a hypersexualized lerb. She masturbates on/off-screen, but it’s one of her quirks! She and Jessica go to a lesbian bar, where Tasha chats with several recognizably-styled queer ladies: but she is neither reduced to her own romance plot, nor denied any sexuality at all. She and Jessica, however queerly you read their relationship (and I don’t especially, but I see how one could), are the empowering couple of the film, supporting each other not just in romance but in their mutually-reinforcing careers.

This is a rom-com about aiming high, about finding a career not in, because of, or in spite of a guy, but because it’s the one through-line of the entire story. Jessica begins and ends loving her work, and the slow build of that love rewards her by the end. She has Made It. The fact that she probably goes home to an attractive dude who boosts but is not himself responsible for her career – sure, he gets her upgraded tickets, but her confidence, “forthright[ness],” and drive suggest she would have made it to London without him, no question, by whatever means necessary – is icing on the cake. Yes, there was a maturation narrative within the romantic plot (she learned to leap in her relationships; she also learned, as Boone did, to have realistic expectations of where both partners are at any given moment in a relationship). But this, the movie stresses, is not the end of the story. It’s a subplot within herstory.

[gif from x]

I don’t think it’s unimportant, either, that Jessica Williams – a fine actress in this movie, entirely winning the screen – plays the heroine. By which I mean, I think it’s all the more radical that to play the romantic interest to gaze adoringly at rom-com’s Irish nerdboy Chris O’Dowd, the director/producers/writers picked a woman whose best-known appearances are in scathing condemnations of male privilege,white supremacy, and American patriarchal, racist, and just terrible norms in general. That such a woman is the new face – but I didn’t even get to talk about the fact that in a few scenes, Jessica J/W’s complexion is a little spotty, which made me (with a long history of struggling with the medical and psychological reality of being a teenager and then adult woman with terrible acne) want to cry with gratitude: this is what a heroine looks like? 

Sure, Wonder Woman is fab, but damn I needed this representation so much – maybe more – than the superheroic, impervious demi-goddess from Themyscira. I needed a strong, self-loving, no-nonsense, tall, Black, not-quite-starving artist in Brooklyn, jamming with headphones in the concrete stairwell of her building, who proudly declares, “I’m freakin’ DOPE.”

I needed a new female coming-of-age story – especiallyin 2017 –, and, somewhat subtly but unquestionably, The Incredible Jessica James delivered.

***

{** I use “women,” “men,” “male,” and “female” throughout this piece to refer mostly to the historical categories of those identities/concepts. I also want to be clear that I’m not trying to gloss over this film’s missteps; rather, I’m trying to celebrate its major, but possibly missable, wins. Lastly, I know that in German Bildungsromanmeans *novel* of development/maturation, not *film*. Don’t @ me.

Thanks to Jesse Rosenthal (JHU) for getting me thinking about the basic understanding of the Bildungsroman in such concise, formal terms. For the debate about male vs./and female Bildungsromane, see – to name just some –, Abel, Hirsch and Langland (eds.), The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development (1983); Lorna Ellis, Appearing to Diminish: Female Development and the BritishBildungsroman, 1750-1850 (1999); Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change(1989);Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (1987); and Susan Fraiman, Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of Development (1993).

The Incredible Jessica James (2017), dir. and writer Jim Strouse; produced by Beachside Films/Netflix. S/o to casting, Kate Geller and Jessica Kelly. Thanks also to Springfield! Springfield! movie scripts for their transcription, which saved me time. }

The claim that repression cannot succeed – and consequently that we are not free to create our own past – seems to me to rest finally on faith in the justice of the universe. What we gain in repressing what we do not want to remember we have to pay for via the subterranean poisoning of other aspects of our life. But there seems to be all too much evidence that such faith is unfounded.

– Coetzee, The Good Story

renthony:

I want to take the word “redemption” away from fandom until people stop wielding it like a club and parroting shit I heard in the Catholic church growing up.

“Redemption requires forgiveness from the wronged party” is a bad way to look at media. And, just…life in general. People can learn, grow, & change, & still NEVER get forgiven for the things they’ve done in the past. The same is true of fictional characters in media.

The insistence that a character isn’t “redeemed” until they are explicitly forgiven by every single person they hurt? Weird.

I would take this a step further.

We will all hurt people. All of us.

Sometimes there is something you can do to make amends and repair that relationship, sometimes you can get explicit forgiveness, but sometimes the most mature thing you can do is just let someone hate you in peace and for everyone to move on.

Be better, sure, but better in your own space because you’ve learned something from your mistakes and not to make everyone like you.

Cindy Comes To Hear Me Read
Jill McDonough

Cindy: not her real name. I met her
in prison, and people in prison I give
the fake names. I taught her Shakespeare, remember
her frown, wide eyes, terror of getting
things wrong. Her clear, arguable thesis
on Desdemona’s motives, Desdemona’s past. The last
days were hard on her, it taking visible work
to see things could be worse. Imagine: I did.
But now she’s out! In jewelry and makeup, new
clothes, haircut she chose and paid for. We hugged.
We’d never hugged; it’s not allowed. On the outside
you can hug whoever you want. She told me she has
an apartment now, a window, an ocean view. She has
acar, she told me, and we both cracked up. The thought of it
wild, as farfetched then as when you’re a kid playing
grown-up, playing any kind of house. She has
a job. She drives there in traffic. Each day
she sees the angry people. Sweet, silly people,
mad—God bless them—at traffic. At other cars.
She laughs, she told me, laughs out loud alone
in her car. People around her angry as toddlers. Whole
highways of traffic, everybody at the work of being free.

==

More Jill McDonough.

Today in:

2020: from This Magic Moment, David Kirby
2019:Poem In Which I Become Wolverine, José Olivarez
2018:In the Beginning God Said Light, Mary Szybist
2017:from Contradictions: Tracking Poems, Adrienne Rich
2016:I Said Yes but I Meant No, Dean Young
2015:Cardinal Cardinal, Stephen Dunn
2014:Ezra Pound’s Proposition, Robert Hass
2013:Wistful sounds like a brand of air freshener, Bob Hicok
2012:Not Getting Closer, Jack Gilbert
2011:Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway-Car, Dan Pagis
2010:The Moss of His Skin, Anne Sexton
2009:It’s This Way, Nazim Hikmet
2008:The Problem With Skin, Aimee Nezhukumatathil
2007:Serenade, Terrance Hayes
2006:The Old Liberators, Robert Hedin
2005:Morning Song, Sylvia Plath

“Sit up, Baby.”

Reluctantly I rose, pressing down and hard as my body would allow against his hips. He pushed up in unison. I could just see the pain on my face. Mixed with pleasure and excitement. He lifted me slightly and began a steady pace. The pleasure was overwhelming. My Master. My Daddy. My Lazarus. Taken completely by him.

My head fell back as the experience began to sink in. My mind explored my body, searching for anything to distract from the pain. I wanted to please him. I couldn’t pull away. I couldn’t. I opened my eyes and looked down at him. Bliss. I was pleasing him. I held on as long as I could.

“Daddy, I… it’s too much.”

His eyes opened. Bright, caring eyes.

He smiled.

He thrust in deeper than ever before and held me there. The pain was almost intolerable, but the look on his face made it worth it. After a moment his hands gripped my hips tightly and lifted me up. He fell out of me, and I suddenly felt empty. Something was missing. Something inside begged for him to return.

His hands left my hips. One went to his back the other vanished behind me. I felt the brush of a rag against me and felt the motion of him cleaning himself. The rag fell to the nightstand.

The hand on my back pressed down and my body responded in kind. In one long, endless motion he slid into me again.

“But I just….”

My eyes darkened.

“Baby. You belong to me. And I will have you now.”

He eyes fluttered.

I ran my free hand through her hair and kissed her forehead as my finger slid up to caress her clit. She turned. Back now on the sheets, she ever so slightly thrusted her hips forward, begging for pressure.

“No. This is about me. You will have what you need. But I will have what I wish first.”

I gently pushed her hips down with the heel of my hand. Raising myself to my knees, I took hers in my hands and pressed them together. I slid my hands down to her panties to pull them away from her hips, nails digging into her flesh. She hissed, but the look in my eyes silenced her.

“You know where I want to be, my pet.”

“Yes sir.”

Turning to her side, her hands joined mine in their journey down her legs. I tossed the panties to the side as she reached for the small bottle on her nightstand, the top still glistening from being used just moments before. I laid back as she sat up to prepare me for her. Her hands were like magic. Every slip of her fingers ran courses of pleasure through my veins. As many times as she had done this before, I still felt like I would reach release just from this simple action.

“Where do you want me, Daddy?”

I patted my stomach.

“Here.”

Her eyes widened. A mix of fear and excitement shown on her face.

“But… it will hurt!”

“Yes. Yes it will. But it will please me.”

With obvious apprehension she obeyed. She fumbled her way to a straddle around my hips and looked up to me for instruction. I gripped my cock and lifted it slightly.

“Sit back, kitten.”

She closed her eyes and slowly began to shift her weight. She winced at the contact of the cold lube against her hole, but kept going. I thrust forward, forcing my head into her. My hand jumped to her cheek as she let out a tiny cry of pain. She opened her eyes to meet mine and gave me a forced smile, an ever more difficult task as she slid further down, her ass finally making contact with my hips.

“Good girl.”

The heat of her body swirling around me, I basked in the ethereal bliss of the moment. The feeling was familiar. Comfortable. Soothing.

“This is where I belong.”

“Yes, Daddy. Yes.”

12am.

Her door creeks as I slowly open it, careful not to wake the children. Kink.com was still playing on her laptop while she slept soundly in a sea of sheets and pillows. A nightly ritual.

She didn’t expect me home tonight, but my last minute babysitter finally came through. I had explicitly chosen to to inform her. She shifted slightly as I pulled the covers back and slid into bed. She must have been sleeping for a while.
Her body heat was swelling in the sheets. I pressed my chest against her bare back, wrapping my arms around hers. She took in a short breath and returned to her reverie. The feeling of her skin against mine always did something to me. I could feel myself swelling.

My hand began drifting. Running up and down her arm. Caressing her sides. Cupping her luscious bottom. I whispered in her ear as I had so many times.

“Mine.”

After a few moments I stopped. I couldn’t take it any more. I had to have her. The body that belonged to me and me alone.

My hand slid under her soft cotton panties and gripped tightly. She winced in her sleep, then calmed. My lips contacted her shoulder and lingered as my hand explored…sliding back and forth between her cheeks. Gripping each one tightly. Spreading her open and teasing…my cock pulsing throughout. Receding my hand a bit, I rand my finger around the band of her panties, toying with the idea of when I would remove them. As my finger made its way to her stomach, I felt the soft caress of her flaming red pelt against it. I had instructed her to keep it well groomed, and she had. For me. Her Master.

My full hand dove deep, gripping her sweet, warm pussy. Her body instinctively reacted by spreading her legs slightly, giving me better access to her. She was soaked. I easily slid one finger inside her to explore.

She began to stir. Her eyes opened slowly. I rose to meet her gaze.

“Da….?” The shock of seeing me combined with my hands in just the right places made her eyes roll back.

“Oh. Daddy…”

I smiled.

“Shhh, my kitten. I’m going to enjoy you now.”

ding-dong.
ding-dong.
ding-ding-ding-dong.

the clock strikes twelve,
yet there is still so much
that I need to say.

I’m not sure why,
but something doesn’t sit well.
there is still so much
I need to say.

as I sit at my desk
writing sloppily
because my hands are
shaking non-stop.

there’s a feeling
I can’t wave.
something clawing
against my thoughts.

but still
the writing will not stop,
for there is still so much
I need to say.

“I don’t know the year
and the past has been
long forgotten.
my mind is not my own
and there is no longer
hope for salvation.

so please,
for the love of god,
read what I have to say.

the people who live up-stairs
have taken away everything
that made us who we are
and have turned us into
mindless slaves.”

my hand quivers in great pain.
what have I done?
what have I written?
did they hear my thoughts
as clear as day?

ding-dong
ding-dong
ding-ding-ding-dong

I must go on.
I cannot stop.
they will hear what
I have to say.

“desires are
gone, pleasures a
sin, all they want is for us
to be mindless slaves.

telling us what’s right and wrong,
who to be friends with, and
that nothing is more important
than working every day.

those with new ideas are
slaughtered.
those who act differently are
hanged.

even now
as I write in this
journal they will
want me dead.

freedom has been
taken.
the concept is
now dead.

our language has
been sullied by
lol’s and
jk’s.
while arming children
with guns and telling us all
will be okay.

my hope lies with the people
since the politicians can’t be trusted.

please,
oh please,
stand up for yourselves
or your rights will be taken away.”

ding-dong
ding-dong
ding-ding-ding-dong.

panic fills my mind
as the door slams open
as I try to hide my journal
somewhere safe, for my time
has just run out and
I am no longer safe.

large men rush in
and grasp
my shoulders roughly
and start to
drag me away.

the journal falls to the floor
holding the words
that may change
the future as I kick and scream to be
released while my
heartaches with exceptional pain.

my time has come,
but there is still so much I have to say.