I've spent quite a few years trying to puzzle this one out, you know. When I still lived on the coast, when I was going to a horrible private school, when I was still dragged to church each day, already I was writing. I couldn't find the things I wanted to read, and I sure as hell knew I couldn't talk about them, so I wrote. Piles and piles of stories, all of them written late at night, burned soon after. No way in hell I was going to let my mother dig THOSE out. She'd kill me. She...

...she bought me a book once that was all about a Satanic cult, or rather, written by a woman who clamed to have been a member thereof. My mom thought it would be a warning. I thought it was porn. She burned it eventually.

I don't know why I read these things. I go back over some of my stories and the sensation... gods. There's an entire genre of stories called Hurt/Comfort - they are pretty much what they sound like, person A being hurt (often by person B) and then person C comes to their rescue, protecting, caring. There are millions of these stories out there, slashfic, fanfic, original works... I know I'm not the only one who dives into them.

However, I find myself in the awkward position of wanting to be person B and person C at the same time.

This is what I keep trying to explain to Ryan - whatever it is that my more bloodthirsty instincts and cravings feed off of, it's almost worthless if done to someone I don't care about. It's like dry toast. But if it's someone I DO care about, someone I love... ahh, then it's bliss. I KNOW their movements, their sounds. I KNOW when it hurts, I KNOW how they feel. And after? After, I can hold them, comfort them, take away the same pain I was so delighted to give them.

I don't know why it works like that, why ~I~ work like that, any more than I really know why I keep reading the stories.

I don't know.

Right now... it's horrid hot, sunlight streaming in the window. I'm tired, aching, hurting. I feel like someone's been beating me with sledgehammers.

I want to curl up somewhere cool, somewhere quiet. I want to have one of my boys there. Mine. Mine to hurt, and mine to comfort. Mine to hold. Mine to touch. Someone that I can actually trust. That's a large part of it too, you know... if I can hurt someone that deeply, and care for them afterward, if they stay with me after that...

...how could I not trust them?

*shrugs slowly, pads off*

I don't understand myself.