I adore how in kink we call intimacy “playing.” I can go up to someone and say, “Would you like to play with me?” The same as when we were children. This dark obsession of ours is pure and bright, like when we forget ourselves pretending to have superpowers in the schoolyard or when we grow so enamored with a book we tenderly sew it up inside our hearts and spend hours over laptop screens and notebooks spiraling into its universe. We design our own toys and research different ways to make someone scream or pose properly on our knees, and we realize we never left those days escaping into our fantasy dimensions. Those who did not understand branded us odd, and that hasn’t changed either. As we graduate from playgrounds and swings, we isolate ourselves too much in our own strangeness; in our own imaginations. We must reach out and teach ourselves to play again.
Playing is giddiness and enthusiasm and innocence. Will you play with me? Will you share this love of mine and laugh it across our bodies in bruises, cum, and blood? Will you hold up your hand to slap my face as if you are a candle in a dark attic between two grade school friends sharing secrets when their parents think they are sleeping? Help me arrange my pain and pleasure alphabet blocks. You are a knight and I am a warrior. Your flogger is your stick sword, my skin is my cardboard shield. I am a dragon and you are a princess. Rapunzel, Rapunzel, I’ll leave scorch marks and pull your hair.
In our taboo corner, we seek safety under shadow. Our fantasies and longings stir inside us misunderstood and denied like the desperation with which we waved wands and secretly believed we were wizards. We sometimes find someone like us. Someone who knows magic and that other world one can’t put into words; the one that feels like fireflies in your belly. And in an excited, hushed encounter like two am at summer camp under the covers with comic books and flashlights, the only right way to ask is, “Do you want to play?”Love love love this
