The Rope I Didn’t Know I Needed
When bondage and sexuality offer a way to healing
I extol the virtues of BDSM and ethical sluttiness quite often. So often, in fact, that one of my best friends calls me the “great perverter” and “a walking destruction of innocence”.
Me? Never!
Well, ok. I’ll take what titles are given. But there are reasons why I believe the exploration of limits, both in and out of the bedroom, are important for a balanced breakfast (and life!) — I even wrote an entire article on it.
A lot of my soapboxing comes from an impersonal standpoint, however. And one day, while corresponding with the owner of SPNKD, I was reminded that personal stories are what make things interesting and relatable.
So let’s get personal.
Warning: This is a sob story.
I met Andy many years ago through my BDSM network. He was a crack hand with a whip and deft at spanking, but more than anything, he was a brilliant friend.
We had our mutual flirtations but they never much led to anywhere. Rather, he’d swoop me up for an evening of surprise adventuring or lavish dinners and we’d while away the night watching old Danny Kaye movies and drinking spirits he’d brought back with him from eastern Europe. It was an easy and relaxed friendship with very few limits, but it was always played by ear and with no expectations.
We grew very close in a very short amount of time, and I believe this was due to being in very hard places in life. We reached for light where we can find it and held it close as the precious thing it was.
So it was little wonder that I was there when he was diagnosed, went into remission, met his to-be-wife, got married, relapsed, and eventually, after years of experimental treatments, passed away.
His widow is a champion of all circumstances. Also a fellow kinkster, she both indulged him and supported him in equal measure, and gave him the happiest last years of his life, all while accepting and loving the strange perverse creatures he had come to befriend (such as myself) without hesitation. She’s amazing, and I still am honored to keep her company to this day.
In the weeks and months following his death, I felt as most people usually do. Adrift, afloat and unable to ground myself again. I’d had my ugly crying, my gentle tears, and eventually my chuckling at memories. I’d lamented while stupid drunk and stupid sober. I vowed to live a fuller life in his stead and then believed I had moved on.
Now, let me interrupt myself to rant a little.
If you’ve gone through a loss, as many of us have, you’ll already know there is one undeniable truth about death.
Death is awkward.
Sad, sure. Confusing, undoubtedly. Complex, usually.
But awkward? Always.
People mill about in the wake of the vacuum left by a life lost and wonder exactly what to do and how to be supportive. We create rules and rituals to follow, from Tibetan sky burials to baking yet another lasagna in hopes that those aggrieved won’t have to think about cooking.
Then there comes the secondary shuffle of wondering who was closest, who was most affected, who has the right to speak on the behalf of the deceased, who just thinks they do, and who is mostly there for the open bar at the wake.
People contemplate why they are so torn up for the loss of somebody they only knew in passing, or why they aren’t more torn up for the death of a very close loved one. We feel that we have to justify our sadness to ourselves and others. There’s a social hierarchy that we unconsciously form when somebody dies, and we all place ourselves somewhere on it.
How freaking awkward is that?
I find that the goodness of a person and the company they keep can temper this tendency. So does age and experience and a million other factors. But it’s a strange social default that I’ve seen time and time again, and I’ve never been able to grow used to it.
How does anyone grow used to something so tragic? I hope that one may never have to grow used to it, or learn how to navigate it. I hope nobody has to experience so much loss in their life.
If I’ve learned one thing over time, it’s that those affected the hardest feel the losses in the small moments, when the sudden rush of support has withdrawn and moved on. Check-in on those people. Make sure they’re hanging in there one, two, three years down the line. That’s when they’ll need it most.
But I digress.
I thought I had handled it fine.
Fast forward six months, which as I know now is too short to properly call a heart healed but too long to wail about it to your social groups for any length of time.
I don’t know why, but when I’m sad, I crave sex. I crave intimacy and touch and connection in all its forms to a point where my poor exhausted husband, who works a 9–5, throws me out on my ear and tells me to get thee to a BDSM club or go find myself somebody to cuddle.
(Might I mention here, that when your partner doesn’t have the bandwidth to give you all you need, the ability to be ok with you seeking it elsewhere is an incredibly hot and wonderful trait.)
So I went to the local bondage jam. Again. And again. And again.
I thought I wanted touch, touch, touch! I wanted to be bound and held and pushed and pulled and titillated. I wanted fingers in naughty places and tongues in even naughtier ones and I wanted to feel all this life around me!
Now, at this bondage jam, there’s a few people I call dear friends. They’ve seen me at my rawest and have always held me accountable for my actions.
(Find yourself friends that can call you on your bullshit and still love you, folks. They’ll see right through you and accept you anyway.)
One of these friends of mine is Al, who happens to be quite an adept rigger and wonderful play partner. He’s beaten my ass raw and hung me in every torturous shape my body can manage in rope, but also feeds me sushi and gives me cuddles and walks my dog for me while his wife and I go play in the snow.
Al saw me that night, six months after I had attended the funeral of a close friend. I was topless and chatting with his wife over a glass of wine that I had barely touched. He got a look about him and asked me if I wanted to tie.
I will never be more grateful for the insight of close friends as I was that night.
Yes! Sexy play, here I come! I was ready for Al to twist my tits and tell me I was a good girl and make me count my beatings in various languages until I had a headache while his wife watched and smiled. I was ready to be groped and bound and be a plaything.
But I wasn’t expecting this.
Al loves semenawa. For the uninitiated, seme is the martial arts term that means “psychological disruption”. Per Wikipedia, its scant description also describes it as “an attitude meant to disrupt the opponent’s confidence and resolution”.
Nawa means rope. No complicated terminology there.
Semenawa is the act of tying someone in a way that slowly removes options of movement for the bottom, increasing the difficulty of the ties and the mental strain of being within them. Semenawa is a wonderful cruel art that speaks as much of the mental endurance of the rope bottom as the physical.
Al didn’t hold anything back. What followed was a beautifully wicked set of ties that ended with me inverted in a chest harness that was taking my breath away. I felt strained to my edge, and he could tell I was ready to be let down and finish up. He could read my body, and my body was saying my mind was done.
So Al began to lower me to the floor. While I was just a foot away from touchdown, he stopped and tied off the suspension line one more time. I was gasping, I was panicking, I was trying to maintain control and keep my composure.
Then he lay below me and faced me, placing on hand on my cheek, and said simply,
“It’s ok.”
My body was screaming and my brain was trying to hold it together and I began to babble mindlessly, “I can’t do it, please, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t do this, please, I can’t!” I never uttered a safe word, because I believe part of me deep down was reaching for what he was offering.
“Yes, you can. It’s ok. It’s ok. It’s ok.”
And then came the break.
It’s an amazing thing that our brain does to hold us together for our day-to-day. We build up the infrastructure within ourselves early on in grief so that our life doesn’t grind to a halt as we continue on, even when we do not feel wholly prepared to do so.
I was not prepared. I was never prepared. There are so many beautiful little lights that I held close for so long that had been snuffed out too quickly, and Andy’s was still burning within me.
So I had switched off the brain that delved within myself and put myself on auto-pilot, the one that runs off of sex and routine and distraction.
Al was laying below me, telling me to shut it off. He was still lying there when the tears came and dropped from my eyes to his cheeks. He was there as I sobbed helplessly, remembering everything I missed and tucked away to keep going.
Then he was there to let me down, hold me close and kiss my forehead before removing those cruel, remorseless, exposing ropes, the ones that, in his hands and with his skill, had laid my innards bare to everyone around me. That auto-pilot fizzled into the background and disappeared as I wept on the floor.
Nobody batted an eye. Nobody asked questions. Everyone had hugs to give if I needed them. I finished my wine and went home, spent, and exhausted.
That night, I finally slept well for the first time in months. I called Andy’s wife and a few of his best friends. I listened to the voice recordings of poetry he used to read me over texts when I couldn’t sleep. I cried a little more, and stayed in bed the next day, then began to pick up the pieces and figure out how they fit together again.
Sometimes we need to break ourselves down to see the little fragments that we’re made of, to recognize when they’re cattywampus and out of alignment, and need a bit of rebuilding.
How we break ourselves down is the question. There’s a line between maintaining surface level functionality and the deep cleansing of the soul that defines our internal housekeeping. Do we lift the heavy bits to sweep at the hidden dust beneath, or do we only tackle what we can see?
Andy had felt impossible to lift on my own to see what lay beneath. But we often forget that we can achieve more than we think we can, given a little push.
I still miss him. It still aches. I still reach for warm bodies and sweat and sensuality and primal engagement when nothing else makes sense in the world, because it’s visceral and raw and tangible. I still turn on the auto-pilot from time to time.
I’m stronger than that, though. Sometimes I merely need a reminder.
