Water, Lung, Desire
m.e. gamlem

Part I

These wounds, and the violations that brought them to the inside of me will never be forgotten, and yet I can forgive them with ease. The trauma will live in my body forever. The nervous system can not repair itself and cannot be removed. So this is the same challenge, intellect over the body’s response to abuse. 

I learned about my predilections for breath play completely by accident. I was having a sonogram of my heart, the beats were all off. It was an early morning, so many flights up the elevator and then down a dark corridor into an even darker room behind a large, heavy, wooden door. The tech’s name was Stephanie. Even then she seemed too young to be charged with the care of my body, of this most vital organ. More shocking, while she didn’t lack anything in stature or composure, I didn’t expect to find her so commanding. 

“Take a deep breath. Now hold it. Keep holding. Keep holding. Good. Release.”

If it hadn’t been for the arrhythmia I might have had to hide my arousal. But at that time, erections were not so easy to come by. Instead my shame and embarrassment, two emotions I was not familiar with, blanketed my face in cringing crimson. Stephanie smiled at me when we were all done. It didn’t feel innocent. But I wanted her to tell me when I could breathe and when I could not. It wasn’t submission in a more broad term that excited me, nor was it the power exchange, the sensation of giving over to her. It was the surrendering of the most automatic function. Her commands and my compliance about controlling the possibility of life itself was both terrifying and tantalizing. I would have stayed there all day and let her play with the expansion and contraction of my lungs. I find myself thinking about Stephanie often. 

Against the wall, with hands I did not invite around my throat, two or three of her fingers in my ass, I can’t be sure, the feelings of madness returned. I felt sick, weak, the way I imagine an animal feels when it is in the grips of the predator's jowls.  

“Spread your legs, faggot.”

Perhaps it was the pejorative that saved me from internalizing the humiliation of this rape. The anger produced with her awful use of language far outweighed the unwanted physical invasion and the temporary pain that I would endure. Skin and flesh heal easily. Over time the inflammation recedes, the red blood cells turn to scabs that fall off, the worst you might get is a scar that leaves you disfigured and in most cases those eventually heal over too. The language of violence is eternal. Those words cannot be unsaid, they hang in the molecules that push them from breath into air and reverberate through all borders and boundaries, puncturing anyone  touched by the wind. The vibrations of sound burrows into our souls. Language spoken is a poisonous gas when we are not careful. The outcome of this is obvious. Look at the state of the world. 

I don’t engage in breath play with any of my lovers. Won’t even suggest it. There is a level of trust in such an act that I cannot fathom finding through negotiation or discussion. The sensation, the high obtained that accidental weekday is reserved for Stephanie. Often, it seems to me, there is more danger in handing over your body to someone you are intimate with on multiple levels than with a stranger. Willingly handing over your body to someone in a purposeful context takes a level of trust that seems impossible to truly find with people. The titillation that I experienced was accidental, unexpected. To replicate that would require the same ignorance from me, from the other that it would be impossible to achieve. 

Part II

“A person knows when she’s going crazy; it doesn’t happen overnight, not even after trauma. Everything, everything in the body is a process.”  - from “My Sad Dead” by Mariana Enriquez

It’s not enough to say that the corporeal experience is a prison of suffering. There is an entire religious philosophy dedicated to this idea with many rituals, a confusing vocabulary of steps and jewels and paths, deities that lack actual significance, and even a sexual mysticism that to my knowledge no other major religion has. The body is a prison of pleasure as well. Our five physical senses entice and deceive us just as much as they help guide us through this dangerous and painful world. This is where it becomes tricky, because no one seeks the void because of too much pleasure. But pleasure is a distraction from enlightenment. Again, there’s a whole cult you can join and get nice orange robes and cut your hair.  

Can you tell I haven’t been feeling well lately?

Since August of 2023 I have been doing mental checks everyday. I stop and look at the world around me, take in the sights, smells, sounds, feelings (not smells because my nose is fucked and I can’t smell anything) and ask, “Is this real?”. It’s not a constant practice, but it’s something I must do to keep my body safe. Keeping my mind safe is a lost cause. Lately I’ve been researching DSBM (look it up square) and thinking way too much about cannibalism thanks to Yellowjackets. My body is so tremendously fucked that it’s a lost cause in trying predict how it will feel or respond from one sleep to the next. I do my best to get by with a weird heart condition, degenerative cartilage, and the lack of mobility both of these conditions increasingly cause me to have. The only thing I have left to maintain is consciousness. I’m accepting to the fact that the body and the synapses in my brain can be fucked, as long as I am aware, able to seek knowledge, able to watch videos about Silencer and Life Lover (neither of these bands are actually good) while doom scrolling wikipedia entries about crimes of people eating other people. 

With pleasure no longer on the table, the perversity of accepting discomfort, what I assume others would call chronic pain, has become an absolute focus. What do I see right now? My computer, my headboard, my speaker. What do I hear right now? Predatory Light playing, the soft clacking of keys. What do I taste right now? Sour morning breath and my parched palette. What do I feel right now? My tongue in a half-toothless mouth, stress in my back down my lower left thigh, pain in my shoulders, uneasiness in my chest that is either my heart or anxiety.  I am in a reality of benign to unpleasant sensations. My consciousness is intact. I cannot guarantee that I will remain grounded today, I can’t even be sure if what I have described is real, but the experience seems typical for me for a Thursday morning. I can know these things to the best anyone can know anything. 

The fun part is not knowing anyway. And in that I have found a new inner peace. Even if I loose my fucking marbles, something I am betting on at this point, as long as I have some sense of consciousness then the experiences of whatever perception of my senses is doesn’t really matter to me. That leaves me open to being exposed to some unhinged shit I guess and probably doesn’t make me the safest person to be around, but the senses are gonna sense and the nervous system is going to go haywire anyway so, fuck it. A person knows when she’s going crazy. But knowledge of a thing does not imply the thing can be prevented. 

I know, for instance, that ghosts are real. Not unlike the narrator in “My Sad Dead,” I too have been haunted, only on one occasion, by a spirit. See, I lived in a house where a woman had died. I slept in the room that she died in. She came to visit me. I felt her presence one night. I watched her leave the house when I performed a simple ritual my witch friend told me about. And I assure you, dear reader, that knowledge is not the same as belief. I don’t believe in ghosts. This is not a matter of wishful thinking as a means to comfort myself about death. Ghosts are not a concept I even have much interest in. But I had an experience, I can not explain it in any other language of what I saw, heard, or felt and I certainly didn’t seek it out. 

Part III

The concept of healing, the concept of being cured, of being restored to a former state is our most foolish way of thinking. In that way, modern western medicine makes much more sense. You break a finger. The doctor resets it with a splint. Bone grows in the cracks and the appendage straightens. But it’s not going to be exactly as it was before. It functions alright, you can move it with relative ease and maybe without discomfort, but it’s crooked, turned inward, or loses some dexterity even if it’s not preventative. The promise wasn’t restoration back to zero sum. The negative integer of your existence was reduced from pain and dysfunction, but the deficit remains in some form.

I was in bed with a lover once and after we finished a scene I lay on my back, breathing heavily. I folded my legs up and in so that my feet were touching, making a diamond shape. I felt elated in the moment, light, free of anxiety but certainly full of “painful” sensations in my body. She told me that laying like that was a sign of processing trauma. “Do you feel traumatized?” she asked. I did not, I thought, though certainly what had just preceded would leave marks on my skin, sting for a few days if I was lucky. A few weeks later she would hold my head against the wall of her living room and my hip would sufficiently dislocate so that the pop would be loud enough to back her off in fear. Everything, everything in the body is a process. Displacement as a means of protection, as a means of healing. Even during trauma, the body knows what you need to survive. 

Part IV

The body is a map of the trauma we endure.

Part V

We were bathed in light from the TV. The music was far too loud for the tiny, shitty speakers to handle. Every sound produced crackled as it was dejected outward into the room and beyond the space that contained us within. I had entered into this space willingly, the promise of touch and attention started out consensual, exploratory, and exciting. But cautious care gave over to a lust for violence. In an instant the property of pleasure became a playground for destruction. 

I’m overdue for another heart check up. I have grown tired of doctors' hands on my body, the invasive and uncomfortable tools they use, plastering electrodes on my torso, my legs. The language of medicine is text book sterile and meaningless to me now. They speak in nothing but words of information and don’t say anything that I don’t already know. Plus, medicine is not the art of healing, it’s the work of maintaining and creating new, less comfortable and inefficient normals while we are to maintain productivity at the same levels. 

I take the medicine for my heart to keep it beating as best it can. I take the medicine for my brain so I don’t collapse as fast into the madness and sadness within. I do my best to engage my body in activity, my mind in dexterity: exercise - read - sleep - repeat. There are moments of release, moments when I am able to feel maybe not peace exactly, but stasis. The hours in my bed, typing this bullshit or reading about other weird shit doesn’t flush the toxins out. Finding the most tortured musicians on the planet and then listening to their sad, fucked up music doesn’t stop the descent down the creaky, dark staircases of my mind. At least I’m only reading about the hundreds and hundreds of acts of cannibalism that have been documented. I’m not looking up the pictures of the killers. Yet. 

You could rewire the electricity in the house if you needed to. You’d have to shut off the breakers, cut up the drywall, pull on the copper and then reverse the process. If there were shorts in the electricity everywhere, lights flickering when you did not need them, or not turning on when you did, random sounds playing that you could not find but were constant, crackles and pops from the electricity being unable to contain itself, all of that could be addressed in a home. 

I think the key to immortality lies in a similar, but seemingly impossible process for us. Cool the brain down, put the mind in a state of hibernation and then one by one clip and replace the strands that run from the base of our necks all the way down the spine and into the other parts of our body. It would be a costly, time consuming process I’m sure. But the memory of the trauma we hold would die out. Better still, the knowledge of all our pleasures would be reset and the experience of newness would be restored. Sadly, none of us here will likely live long enough for this horror scenario turned science experiment of mine to ever be realized. 

At least I hope not. 

m.e. gamlem is a non-binary queer anarchist and writer from New Mexico. They are a MFA Fiction candidate in the Low Residency MFA program at the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe. Their work most recently appears at Hello America Stereo Cassette, new words {press}, and is forthcoming in the Potomac Review. find more from m.e. on  patreon and on their website