Anaïs had fought fiercely in her private life for freedom from ownership. She longed to find a love that did not restrict either party; that did not put her in a gilded cage, or an ivory tower or on a pedestal so high that she would feel the sickening wave of vertigo or worse, the urge to jump. She wondered if love could even exist without restriction. Without restraint.
While this yearning to not belong or be answerable to anyone dominated her waking existence, her deepest desires, when allowed to prevail, found her longing to feel the physical restraints of ownership. To be consumed. To be picked up like a dolly, flung about even. These deliciously dark and submissive moments intruded on her most Arcadian dreams, swirling in like drops of oil on water.
It was as if she had too much strength. Too much potential energy. As if she needed to be slapped down. For her own good. For her own salvation.
In a recurring dream she is in a dark Victorian passage; the floors boarded with wood reclaimed from antique school desks. Names are carved into the surface in aging ink, the rebellion of the bored and brutalised student. There is a smell of stuffy erudition and the dusty fear of corporal punishment beneath her feet, on which are tightly laced roller skates in hard cream leather. In the dream she is rolling without effort or movement, her legs stiff, as if on a conveyor belt.
Her ash blonde hair is pulled back tightly and pinned in place by long black grips; her eyes glassy and fixed like a doll. She is wearing a starched white shirt, savagely tailored so that every swell of her body wrestles with its cotton containment, and fishnet tights that cut into fleshy places around her thighs and calves. At the front of the body her wrists are bound with brown leather restraints. Dull brass buckles and a small brass separator hold her hands together but apart.
Anaïs had come to regard this strange fantasy as her safe place. And in truth she knew it to be anything but safe. It was the dark contrast to her real life, which was more like a fairytale than she could ever have imagined possible. The strange magic of her life with Chrissie and Daniel, the almost overbearing love she had received from her mother and in turn felt for her brother. She sighed, smelt spring on the evening air and dropped the butt of her liquorice roll up into a spent bottle of Dom Pérignon.
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