Out of the Shadows

My mind was flooded. My body was happy. This was her kind of town.

We had made contact on the internet.

I was by that time quite good at finding, selecting and meeting men. I had found them in London, San Francisco and Sydney.

I had no great hopes for Bangkok, but I made dates. Of course. I always made dates, and apart from him I had a few back-up dates.

Well, actually, my Nai was the back-up date.

That’s why we met so soon, just hours after I flew in, into the new continent. It was the only way I could fit him into my dating schedule.

So tired, the top of my neck was a glass fibre skull, I lay down on the strange hotel bed – run down and shabby like many before but filled with a different kind of air.

The smells were everywhere and I couldn’t decode them.

I could feel the moistness and remembered that the city swam on a vast underground river.

I took out my little golden book that had become quite plump from its journey and I looked at his phone number.

Part of me kept shouting: ‘I want to sleep! I want to sleep!’, another part was drifting off without speaking, and I kept waking, clutching the little book, staring at the number, looking at the small sturdy clock that was efficiently showing the passing of the new, Bangkok, time.

It’s always scary, hearing the voice for the first time. It is often so disappointing.

It confronts me with my dreams.

Today, swimming in the jungle with my eyes closed, it didn’t feel so sharp. How to judge anything? I was in a different world.

Still, when I heard him, I felt a little amused and I felt a little wary. Now I look back on it I smile how my impressions shifted – from the way he talked on the phone I thought he must be in his fifties. He spoke American with a softness of accent that seemed a little British and that reassured me. He was a man of many nations. He told me that he used to work for a newspaper, so I imagined an older journalist, maybe left over from the Vietnam War, maybe a correspondent who was no longer up to date and chose not to return to the Western life. Drinking gin tonics and relaxing into another rhythm. He talked to me with an old-fashioned American politeness, and he listened to me so that I felt less like a total stranger. Who had just flown in from another continent. Who he was meeting to discuss playing BDSM with.

But what did I know? I had only been here for a few hours.

I fought it but I did fall asleep again, just woke up in time to stagger up and put on my lucky red velvet t-shirt. And go out, into the smells and the sounds and meet him. In a place I would have to find without a map.

Crickets were waving a carpet of silver sound the night we first met.

The night we first met, boats and stars threw lanes of golden light on the river.

They did, they did.

Mosquitoes danced to their deaths.

Exotic rum circled our blood.

This is not the kind of observation that makes people take you seriously, and so maybe I shouldn’t say it, but it is true. It was that kind of night.

I walked through the evening crowd, pavements submerged under stalls selling more smells, and many colours, swimming through the reef of people who belonged here. I didn’t, but I did not feel out of place. I just floated along with them. I could see the bar at once, it was quite big, open air, very loud. The sun had already set, at 7 p.m. in the summer, and the mosquitoes were flirting with electricity.

I did see the bar but I didn’t see him. That is, I did see him but not the man who went with the voice of the afternoon. This was a young man’s bar.

But he saw me.

Maybe I described myself better to him than he did to me. Maybe I look more like my voice? Or maybe there just weren’t many white women of my age wearing dark red velvet tops moulded over DD breasts around. (In all my time in Bangkok I never saw more than four or six of them, including the two in my mirror.)

He called. He called my name. ‘Senta. Hi, Senta.’

I love it when I hear that name, and it means me.

‘Yes, I am here.’

‘Yes, I am Senta.’

Yes, I am Senta. You just created me. Well, I created myself. But you called me. Called my magic like a spirit.

Less than half a day in that strangest of cities and already I was Senta.

Someone had called me by my name.

I recognised the voice.

It must be him. His voice came out of a slender young man sitting by himself on a bench against the wall, a well-worn backpack by his side. He was wearing a loose white shirt, he was very pale, and he had deep, dark eyes. Later I was told by other women that he was a very attractive man, after the fashion of the day. I have to admit I didn’t see that. All I thought was: he talks so old and looks so young.

Out of shock I said ‘yes’, and there we sat, next to each other in the evening.

When I think about it, the most wonderful lovers I’ve met never made much of an impact on me with their looks.

At first I was just sitting there, looking at the young face, listening to the old voice. I decided to drink an orange juice.

He looked at me, his eyes blazing, and he drew me into easy conversation. I later discovered that he was very used to making conversation with first time strangers, even when he was a boy, and that for most of his adolescence he used to show his parents’ post-colonial friends around when they came to Bangkok. So he seemed quite fluent in this situation, making small talk, laughing with me, putting me at ease, welcoming and open, but not too smooth.

But I could also tell he wasn’t as used to dating as I was.

And that was how it would be: he was the one who lived here, who knew his way around, who had done many things I only dreamed of, and he was the one who was a little shy, and unused to things, and had never done many things that he himself was dreaming of.

He led and I followed, I led and he followed me. Not as easily, not as magically as on that first night, but always a little bit.

It was the magic of the power loop.

Looking at him, sitting in his white shirt against the wall, talking about something or other that was the custom in Bangkok, I felt suddenly very happy. This is how it was supposed to be, in other people’s books, mostly men’s, mostly fantasy, flying into a new continent and meet a lover by nightfall. And now it was happening to me.

I was by that time an expert at first dates, and I kept all the precautions. I listened for things that didn’t make sense, I tried to connect his talk about himself and his real life experience as far as I could tell, and I tuned into the feeling between us. I had developed a sensor for the kind of relationship I wanted. I asked him all the right questions, and he gave me all the proper information.

So yes, I listened to the voice of reason, but already I couldn’t hear it so well, maybe because of the night carpet of silvery mosquitoes. Under my bones, my blood was singing.

We walked over to the restaurant through a temple, no monks, no visible sign of religion except the buildings, but many people strolling around in peace and moonlight, and then we sat, outside, under a wide canopy, straight by the river.

He spoke Thai, of course, ‘I grew up over there,’ he said, waving his arm in a mysterious direction that called up visions of tropical gardens and high society ladies drinking gin tonics in the afternoons. The waiters looked astonished, he didn’t speak their language like a foreigner, but he looked like one.

He politely answered what must have been very familiar questions and then turned back to me.

‘My mother was away a lot so I learned Thai from the servants. People are confused when I speak, I speak Thai with a local accent.’

My image of him was changing. He was more relaxed in the semi-darkness, light gliding in from the river, surrounded by a whole table of food to share, exclaiming at the fact that I was vegetarian, ordering fried morning glory for me, asking the waiter to write it down, in Thai.

He looked at me more freely, and more deeply.

‘I have something for you’, he said, reaching towards his backpack and opening its top just enough so that his hand could reach in.

He gave me a fragile garland of jasmine. It was smaller than my hand. I smelled its intoxicating scent. I pressed my face into it and then looked up at him.

This is the way I look up to my Nai.

He looked back, and he didn’t smile. He held his hand out to me and I touched it with jasmine fingers.

Behind him I saw the river and big working boats floating through the night as they had for so many centuries.

It almost felt as if he was a local spirit come to welcome me.

I told him that.

‘No, no, no’, he said.

But I didn’t believe his denial. I had power too.

We ate, a little. We drank, a special concoction, mixed by the waiter on a separate table with precautionary high rims, more than we ate, but again, not much.

I realised quickly that he was very different from me, and from most of the people I knew. The reason why he was so easy to talk to, and why he knew so much about such different things as photography, Thai princes, internet games and the stock market was that he was rich. Not the kind of rich you get when you work very hard. The kind of rich that allows you to be open and genuine. The kind of rich that comes from your ancestors and makes you a citizen of this world. He bore a well-known name.

My own ancestors were peasants who were not even citizens of their countries. And, I worked very hard all my life but I was on a tight budget.

We looked at each other and we talked. We talked.

We talked about sex.

We talked about bondage positions, about impact sensations and the various instruments that we loved and desired.

We talked about blindfolds, about leather straps and ecstatic altered states.

It is the way of the BDSM people.

Talking like this is our tradition.

I believe it was originally introduced by the name of ‘negotiations’ between people who might become play partners, perhaps for a while, perhaps only casually.

Negotiations were and are considered necessary to establish the ‘limits’ particularly of the submissive partner, the boundaries of what could happen between them.

For me, and certainly on this evening with my Nai by the river, it was much more.

It was a way of talking about our identity.

Both our separate individual identities, a much more intimate way of introducing yourself than telling your date a potted personal history, and of course much more to the point.

But even more so we were establishing our common identity.

With every cautious, polite and gentlemanly question we showed each other our most intimate sexual desires and revealed our secret and carefully guarded true nature.

I saw the look of recognition in his eyes when I told him how much I loved to feel the touch of the bonds holding my wrists so tightly behind my back.

He took his fork and wrapped it round a morning glory stem, coated in garlic sauce, and put it down again. He ran his finger along the old seams of his backpack.

This was not just a statement about sexual preference, not just a more precise identification of where we stood within the world of BDSM, although it was that too.

It was finding, against all odds and all experience, someone who shared the dream.

And who might, if all went well, perhaps, possibly, eventually share it with us.

Right now, though, it was all the magic I could take to just see him share my dream, and I his.

And to talk with each other in the ways of the BDSM people.

I sat there, just as ineffectual with my food as he, raised my glass to my lips and put it down again.

I closed my eyes experimentally. He might disappear.

That would be the reasonable expectation.

When I opened them and he was still there I knew that a new age had descended, or perhaps I had been translated into another, unearthly realm.

Transformed into the person I wanted to be.

He made no assumptions. He never touched me except for that one time with the jasmine garland. He said who he was. And he was who he said. Against all attacks, he had preserved his innocence. In the strangest way, he was like me.

And, of course, in many other ways, we knew nothing about each other. When I finally said to him, over the roaring of a defective tuk tuk, so that I had to shout in his ear like a public announcer at a sports event, that I would like to have sex with him that very night, I had no idea and maybe not even any intention of anything beyond that.

Through a cascade of sparkles from the roof of the Royal Palace and hundreds of smoking and argumentative tuk tuks and sudden desperate hunger satisfied with deliriously sweet banana goo, and late night fears and confusion we somehow made it, we made it into our first night, in the way of the BDSM people, but even more so in our own way, the first night of Senta with her Nai.

I never bothered with the back-up dates.

How did I get here? – I was a BDSM hermit

That is a journey longer than my life.

When did it start?

I was lying in my bed.

My whole body cramped with longing. I had tied my ankles together so that I could feel the sweet surge to my vagina.

They say that self-knowledge makes you free.

Maybe. It counteracts the demons inside your soul.

But it also makes you feel your pain more acutely.

All these years I knew who I was.

I didn’t feel guilt, I didn’t feel shame.

I felt this was just me.

But I didn’t know how to make it real except in my own bed and within my own mind and soul.

I was a BDSM hermit.

Sometimes, most times, I could live with it.

I said to myself: yes, I want to be a Submissive to a Dominant in real life.

But I couldn’t be.

I said to myself: yes, but I’d like to have my own opera house too.

Some dreams are only possible for a fortunate few, a very, very fortunate few.

So then I was lying in my bed, awash with longing.

So much longing it spilled out in tears.

I saw my shadow on the wall and it was all I had.

I did have lovers.

Of course, throughout my long life before I found my Nai, of course I had lovers.

But they were not the lovers I saw in my deepest dreams.

I had sex, but I did not live my true sexuality.

What was it like, in the long, long years before I found a way to meet my Doms? (Yes, I did meet them, on my journey, even before I met my Nai.)

Before I even thought of having the courage of trying to devise a way to go and find them?

Telling a man

Lying in his arms, holding him tight and wishing he would hold me tighter, feeling his hand on my naked skin.

My body there, and my mind was dreaming and longing.

I sighed and shivered, but not from my lover’s touch.

Outside I was with him, inside I was with him too, but with a different version of him. Him as the Dom.

Inside myself, I tried to magnify his tentative stroking of my back so that I could imagine a spanking. When he put his hand between my legs I longed for him to be more forceful. I wanted him to take me completely and shake my whole body. I wanted to look into his eyes and see the joy and triumph of domination.

Instead I was alone, trying to amplify faint signals on my skin into the huge waves and towering storms that are my true home.

I often felt like a hollow doll.

Then sometimes, though less and less often as I learned from experience, I would tell him.

How to tell? So difficult. Particularly when what I wanted was still only a desire, a reality inside, the inner life of the doll, stuffed full to bursting but divided from the air by her porcelain shell.

Now it is easier, now I can start by telling a story from my life. I can hint lightly. I can watch out for signs with so much more knowledge.

I can also not have sex with vanilla men. At all.

But then?

When I was very young I sort of knew you weren’t supposed to be into BDSM. But at the same time I was so joyfully aware of the full range of my sexuality that it was hard to take that seriously.

I liked to welcome a penis in my vagina. I equally liked to welcome a hard hand on my ass, and a rope forcing my wrists together.

The men I dated then were very young too.

Maybe that was the reason.

Maybe it just was the times. People just emerging from the deadly shadows of enforced respectability.

But every single time I brought the subject up, stammering, blushing, fearful and hopeful, I got the same reaction.

I was rebuffed, rejected and despised.

The nice boy looked at me and told me I was disgusting, I was sick, I had a mental illness.

I was a pervert. He was not. He was normal.

I stood there like a witch found out. In my white shift of condemnation. I was lucky I wasn’t burned.

Only thrown out and quarantined from his healthy life. I don’t know what he told others.

There were a few of him until I shut up. For many, many years.

Before I travelled round the world.

Before I found myself, high above the dark red city of ancient kings, forced naked through the liquid glass by my master, by my Nai.

My Nai

It was a lovely room.

The style was ‘retro-colonial’ which seemed appropriate for my Nai, with a nice big white bed and dark oriental mirror and furniture. It was quite new, and in the light of the new old lamps a sudden happiness bubbled up inside me. Everything was strange, unknown, never happened before. Everything was here, together. He looked back at me, he had me, I was here. All his.

I did feel my usual mixture of soft expanding exhilaration (We’re really here! It is really going to happen!) and fear (I don’t know this man, I am a stranger with a stranger in a strange place, what if he kills me?).

It was not an altogether rational fear, because he had told me his real name, and some further details, and I realised that he was quite well known here, and I had taken a few other safety measures like leaving his details on a computer record.

And with him the fear was not so very strong, maybe because I felt that he had a deep sense of having a place in the world, of being himself, of having little to prove, I don’t know. In a way, my Nai is one of the least macho men I have been with, and that is quite curious considering all his conservative opinions and extremely dominant sexuality. Maybe it was also partly because he looked so young, and was so open, and maybe, just the tiniest bit, because he made me feel a little motherly.

On the other hand, the fear is always there, in this life, in the way we BDSM people have to live.

And of course there still was, there still is, always is, a risk, a possibility that this is the one psychopath who I couldn’t detect, that this is the price I have to pay for my way of life, for daring to be myself, to become myself, for daring to offer myself to a world that may contain my killer (of course this world contains my killer anyway, a microbe, a virus, a weakened blood vessel I carry around within myself night and day).

I have sometimes, at this point, pulled back. I have also, sometimes, gone on, against my better judgment. I wish I could say I only took the considered risks. I didn’t. I wish I could say I was only bold when it was really worth it. I wasn’t.

I know I could die this way. I also know that it is very, very unlikely. And I hate the fact that I have to take this risk. I don’t want it. It doesn’t excite me. On the contrary, it makes the first time a little, no, actually a lot less full and enjoyable than it could be. But until I find the one Dom who is the last one I will play with until the end of time or until BDSM becomes acceptable and we all walk the streets tall and free, I will have to continue to take this risk.

So I looked at my Nai, not my Nai yet in so many words, in fact I didn’t even know the word Nai yet, and what it means, I looked at the bed, the white sheets which might become my burial shroud, and the dark carved wood which might become my coffin, and then I looked at my Nai again. He smiled then said, a little more strongly: ‘Go and take a shower’. He looked very beautiful, and I had a good feeling. But of course you can never ever, ever know.

I took a last look into his eyes, I felt a connection, but I also knew that, ultimately, there is no connection that you can trust, and I looked at the risk and I looked at myself and I gave my soul a little nudge: this moment, if I have to? Am I ready? Yes. I am ready to die.

I am here! I am here! With him! With an intelligent, sensitive, secure male Dom who looks into my eyes to turn my body into spicy banana goo. And now I was going to feel the delirious sweetness.

He looked around the room and put his bag on a stand. I was getting really curious about that bag. A little old backpack, a bit torn at the edges. He slowly undid the clasp, it was an old clasp and stuck for a moment in rusty hinges. Then he slid both hands in and widened the opening, just enough to take out the first of many treasures. That bag looked so small but it turned out to be a bottomless trove of delights.

The first thing he took out was a long, long rope of sky blue material. I remembered how he had talked about it over dinner, over his spicy dish and my cooked flowers, with the lights drowning themselves in the river behind him, how he had said that the best material for bondage that he knew were the silk and high-tech fibre ties that he used for flying high in the air with just the support of a little engine, his body harnessed in just such a blue leash. I liked the image of him flying in the air, tied the way I would like to be.

He laid them out on the white white bed.

Then he ran his fingers down my spine, the first touch.

Less than a day since I arrived here. And I already was at the heart of things.

My Nai’s desire

I always knew exactly how precious it was.

And how unlikely.

To have found someone whose desires matched my own.

Not in the sense that they were exactly the same, of course not. There were many areas of difficult compromises.

But in the sense that when we played he was fulfilling his desires just as I was fulfilling mine, by fulfilling mine.

What we played exactly, the exact actions and practices evolved slowly over time.

The first few times were like very tentative sketches. We did a few things straight away that we both loved. We did not do many other things for a long time.

But what was right there, right from the first moment, was the matching of desire.

This was my true sexuality, my true life.

And it was his.

I knew that very soon, before I even touched him. It was like meeting someone who speaks your own, very rare and secret language.

The curious backpack

The backpack was old. A little torn at the top, where you had to draw a string together to keep it closed, and with rough edges that showed a pinkish colour underneath the black skin.

It was the backpack he carried on the night when I first met him. When he had looked so much like a man who had remained behind from former times.

He told me later: ‘I was very surprised, on the first night, when you said you would have sex with me’.

‘But,’ I said, ‘but you had your backpack.’

‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘always keep the doors open.’

It was a lot to carry just for an open door.

And then there were the freshly cut bamboo sticks. He had cut them that day in his garden.

All the objects in the pack had been put carefully together. They were both a snapshot through the layers of that moment in his life and a collection from his whole history in BDSM.