And yet I can promise you that unless it happens to you, you will NEVER really understand it. You won't know why that darkness lurks just behind someone's eyes, their voice, their actions. You won't understand the tension, the times when all they want to do is run or hide. You sure as hell won't get the bliss, the will to LIVE, that can be found in a few sharp cuts of a knife or the strokes of a carefully-handled whip or the burn of hot wax or the emptiness found in humiliation, submission, violence, masochism, sadism, a hundred different ways to adapt to the same thing and unless you have been there you Do Not Know.

You don't wake up sometimes with your breath cut short and memories crowding into your head so fast and so furious that you can't sleep the next night for fear of them.

You don't find yourself queasy, feverish, dizzy, trembling, physical reactions to the slightest things that normal people take for granted, ignore, don't even see.

You don't wonder if maybe somehow it was... fitting.

If there was something in you that called out for it. If somehow your very nature demanded that the universe arrange this. If perhaps you had done something, said something, that revealed your guilt and shame and filth. Karma catching up from a past life, maybe. Who knows? You don't.

It's not just the physical violation that brings this on, although that's the most common and often the most effective, as it were, way. Sometimes it's words, growing up with words and actions and gestures that left you feeling less-than, your spirit as brutally shredded as your body might have been. Sometimes it's a relationship, the little things slowly wrapping around you and strangling every bit of innocence you ever thought you could lay claim to. Sometimes it's just one thing, one moment, one hour, one day, that lasts your whole lifetime. Sometimes it's years that add up, drowning you in too many memories to fight off.

You try to fight back, but all you can really fight against is yourself; the one, the ones, who hurt you are long gone. You try to somehow make up for it, for yourself, penance for a sin that no one can convince you wasn't your doing, your cause. You seek forgiveness, absolution, forgetfulness, normalicy.

All you find, at the end of it, is yourself.

Sometimes that's enough.

Sometimes it's not.

And sometimes, so rare but GODS, sometimes, if you are truly fortunate... when you've come face-to-face with yourself, you find others. Ones who've felt it. Ones who've been there. Maybe just ones who connect to you, who care, who may not understand it all but who honestly ~try~.

The real trick? Not doing to them exactly what was done to you. It's hard to resist, the justification internalized, constant. It would feel so good. You could show them. They would understand. Somehow, it would redeem you both. Somehow it would make it all OK. The funny thing is that it does, in a way. D/s relationships the world around started out as coping mechanisms and turned into commitments, partnerships, love. It hurts, though. You have to be careful, so careful, because there's a fine line between that odd backwards redemption and simply sinning again.

Since you fucked up once, it's so, so hard not to do it again...