Safe Words:

In academe, publishing a book is certainly grounds for congratulations—it’s a boon to any teaching career, a big step toward the goal of all of us adjuncts: to land a full-time professorship, and the time it affords to create our own work. My writing and teaching careers have so far gone according to plan: graduate school, adjuncting, publishing a book, and now pursuing the full-time gig in earnest. Only my original plan didn’t include publishing a book about the most personal and shocking experiences of my life.
While I don’t regret having been a dominatrix or a heroin addict—I emerged on the other side of both with a greater understanding and compassion for myself and other people—I never intended to write about those experiences. When that story of my past hijacked my creative energies I was in graduate school, knee-deep in a novel. On a whim, I had taken a survey course in nonfiction. After book reviews and op-eds, we arrived at memoir. The piece I wrote, about having been a dominatrix, was simultaneously one of the easiest and most difficult I’d ever written. It bubbled forth with the urgency of a story that wants to be told. But I knew it wouldn’t be worth writing with anything less than total honesty. I didn’t want to write a sensationalized account; I wanted to understand the personal transformation I had gone through as well as its universality. But these were not experiences that I had ever planned to share in detail with, well, anyone. Still, when my professor demanded that I abandon my current project and write this book, I knew the advice was sound. So, after having a small heart attack, I wrote it.
I am proud of the book. I did my best to practice what I teach: to merge honesty and experience with careful craft. Nonetheless, the book is full of everything no one ever wants her family to know about her past—or her students, let alone her boss, or potential boss. The material of my book is not the stuff of job interviews.
Like most realistic writers, I expected the book to be received with resounding silence. On some level I hoped, unrealistically, that I would be able to reap the benefits of being a published author without having to confront the vulnerable position that my subject matter put me in. And so, when I was scheduled for an interview on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, and featured on the front page of the New York Post, I was thrilled, but also terrified.
The week after I appeared in the Post, my boss congratulated me at a faculty meeting. “Thank you,” I replied, smiling, but my heart raced. I quickly brought the subject back to grading rubrics.
My colleagues knew that I had a book coming out, but I hadn’t broached its subject directly with anyone I didn’t also consider a friend. In fact, I haven’t yet—now more than two months after the book’s release. I’m embarrassed by my own meekness, but equally embarrassed by the prospect of discussing my past with colleagues. Before my mother read Whip Smart, she asked me to divulge the most intense parts so that she wouldn’t cringe in anticipation while reading. “Mom!,” I half joked. “I wrote it down because I couldn’t say these things aloud.” I had made a decision at the outset to write the book in a vacuum because I knew that if I let myself imagine others’ reactions, I’d never finish it.
My own trepidation is surprising on some level; it’s incongruent with certain long-held self-perceptions. But so many of my self-perceptions have been upturned throughout the process of writing and publishing this book.
I’d always been drawn to extremes, to ways of living outside social prescription. Before writing the book, I would have named my rebellious nature and anthropological curiosity as primary motives for ending up in the “dungeon.” But my motives, like the job itself, were not what I had imagined. The iconic image associated with the word dominatrix—a dominant, self-possessed woman—is somewhat based in truth. However, it is a job that entails embodying the fantasies of other people, transforming oneself into a specified object of desire. It requires the ability, and on some level the desire, to conform to what others want from you, and a need to be desired. Admitting that I have those qualities makes me feel much more vulnerable than admitting that I have a rebellious streak.
Though loath to face it, I care what other people think—my family, my colleagues, and of course, my potential employers. While I privately relish embodying contrasts—I’m a high-school dropout with a graduate degree, a college professor covered in tattoos, a former heroin addict who hasn’t had a drink in seven years—these are not facts I advertise in my classrooms, or on job interviews. And I’m not immune to shame. I may not regret any of my decisions, but neither am I proud of them all.
As much as I’ve always been drawn to dark undersides, I also always wanted to teach. The only thing I’ve wanted longer is to be a writer. My desire to absorb—knowledge, experience, the kinds of education that happen both in and out of classrooms—is matched by a desire to give out as much as I take in. That, I think, suits me to the jobs of writer, teacher, and even sex worker. They aren’t as disparate as you might think.
Although it is part of the sex industry, the job of dominatrix doesn’t include sex. Perhaps for that reason, it is especially dynamic work: equal parts performer, therapist, and personal coach. I’ve heard teachers describe their jobs similarly. As in teaching, you get as much as you give. I brought a tremendous amount of energy into my “sessions,” and when my ability to do that waned, I stopped being able to perform my job. Now I try to bring a lot of energy into my classrooms, and because I believe in what I teach, my reserves are deeper.
At the crux of my pedagogical philosophy is honesty—about the difficulty and compromise inherent in the writing life, the outlandish tenacity it requires, and the transcendence possible. But the challenge of adding to that list honesty about who I am has called my philosophy to task. I often talk to my students about writing as a series of risks. Now that I’ve taken what may turn out to be the most terrifying risk of my career, I’m doing my best to land gracefully—to avoid injury, but also to prove, to my students and to myself, that it’s worth it.
I’m often asked if I think the subject matter of my book will inhibit my chances of landing a full-time faculty position. I worry, yes, but know it’s beyond my control. For better or worse, I cannot isolate my experience as a human being from my work. Increasingly, I don’t want to. I’ve learned that it doesn’t serve me as a writer to view any experience as “good” or “bad” or beyond examination. As my belief in the acceptability of my embodiment of seemingly contrasting traits deepens, my instinct to hide them wanes.
For the most part, my job hasn’t changed since the book came out. My students don’t often bring it up in class. I’m grateful for that. But they do approach me after class sometimes—young women mostly—thrusting their copy of the book onto my desk. I always smile, though my heart races, as they thank me for my honesty.

All couples love to tell the “how we met” story, but especially New York couples. So much of life here is carried on in public that opportunities for serendipitous meetings abound. No doubt, my ex-boyfriend and I could have trumped any unique story, but a mutual friend, we used to say, and leave it at that. While it stung a little to not take credit for such a good one, are were parts of it that I’m not proud to take credit for, and those stung more.

I first saw Barrett outside a vegetarian restaurant near Washington Square Park. Though we’d never exchanged photographs, I recognized him immediately against the brick wall beside the entrance. Lean and long-lashed, he tugged his earphones out and smiled at me.

“Hi.” We kept smiling at each other and awkwardly shook hands. How do you greet a blind date? I’d never been on one.

We took turns sharing hunks of information about ourselves until the food arrived. He grew up in Westchester, had gone to film school, and recently returned from a three-month stint in Mexico, following the Zapatistas around with a video camera.

I talked about the MFA program I was enrolled in, my dog, and cracked my usual jokes about being the daughter of a shrink. We avoided the most obvious topic, though it grew in conspicuousness over the course of our meal, like the small collection of onions on the rim of my plate. When the food came we ate quickly, sharing bites, half-covering our mouths as we chewed.

Chemistry is funny. When it’s not there, I can’t always tell, and often wonder if I’m just overlooking it. But its presence renders that thought laughable.

After paying the check, we stood under the awning over the restaurant’s entrance. Dinner had only taken an hour, and I scrambled to think of the best way to prolong our date. Then the sky opened up. Torrents of rain pounded the awning above us, and pedestrians ran, shrieking, clutching soaked magazines over their heads.

“So,” he said, his body so near I could smell his shampoo.

“Yes?”

“How long were you a dominatrix?”

No one plans on becoming a dominatrix; at least I hadn’t. I was a liberal arts student with no income, an aversion to poverty and taking orders, and I’d always enjoyed a good high. I also loved to feel desired. Perhaps I wasn’t the most unlikely candidate for work in a commercial “dungeon.” All it took was answering an ad in the Village Voice.

Very quickly, I was hired at a posh midtown dungeon. When my first client requested verbal humiliation, I figured it would be easy; my verbal skills were top notch. I quickly realized that an hour alone in a room with a naked man whom you don’t plan on having sex with would be a long one. I trembled atop my platform stilettos and wheezed for breath beneath my borrowed corset, cold tears of sweat streaming from my armpits. As I willed my lips—gummy with dark lipstick—to part around the right words, it occurred to me that I’d never been very good at being mean. I felt my kneeling client’s breath on my fishnetted knees, and fought the urge to flee. And then, I remembered that he had already paid for my expertise. I had nothing to prove! In that moment, my fear lifted like a flock of startled birds, and I became Justine: my stage name, and dominatrix persona. The words came to me then, lots of them, ones I won’t repeat here.

For two years I wore a corset and strutted in stilettos through those opulent rooms as though I’d hit the jackpot. It’s an acting gig, I bragged to my friends. One of the most lucrative ones around. I was good at it: the verbal humiliation, the acting, and pretty handy with a rope, and a whip.

But by my third year, the sheen had dulled.

“You’ve been very naughty, haven’t you?” I asked a regular whose sessions I’d always looked forward to. After so many replays of the same scene, I struggled to muster the enthusiasm necessary to be convince him I really cared whether he’d been naughty or not. He was always naughty. After I’d trussed him in a complicated series of knots and blindfolded him, I sighed, and kicked off my stilettos. Along with Japanese bondage, I’d mastered the art of administering hot wax with one hand, while text-messaging with the other.

I’d also realized that you can only work in the sex industry for so long before you start feeling as if it’s the only thing you’re qualified for. So I applied to graduate school, hoping for a ticket out. And by the end of my first year at Sarah Lawrence College, I had stopped seeing all my clients, except for Jacob.

My specialty in verbal humiliation made me a natural choice for Jacob, but our shared interests didn’t end there. He had a penchant for petite, curvy women, and the same alt-country and indie-rock bands that filled my iPod. For a year, we traded mix CD’s and he paid me to reenact his childhood bullying.

A few days after my 24^th birthday, he picked me up outside my Williamsburg apartment.

“Where are we going?” I asked, sliding into the passenger seat of his old Saab. I assumed we’d head to his apartment in Queens, have a session, then dinner at the nearby diner.

“It’s a surprise,” he said, smiling. I guessed possible destinations all the way into Manhattan, where he parked outside of Best Buy.

“What are we doing here?” I demanded. “This is not a hot air balloon ride!” I followed him, laughing, all the way to customer service, where an employee hoisted a box onto the counter. It was the Bissell 37601 Lift-Off Revolution Turbo Upright Bagless Vacuum: my dream vacuum cleaner, in candy-apple red.

“Happy birthday,” said Jacob, grinning. I threw my arms around his neck.

As soon as he parked the car in Queens, I lodged the heel of my shoe between his legs, and he gave me a sweet smile, tinged with a mixture of desire and regret. The rest of our evening continued as usual: a session at his apartment, then dolmas at the Greek diner.

I enjoyed my sessions with Jacob, but what I looked forward to all week were our dinners at the diner afterwards Though I had a boyfriend during most of our friendship, it was Jacob with whom I shared three-hour phone-calls, Jacob I called when I felt lonely. My loneliness had been incurable for some time at that point. Love hadn’t fixed it, but somehow Jacob did. He made me laugh, and feel known. Occasionally I’d catch a tenderness in his gaze that made me look away, fuss with his car radio, or make a joke, but otherwise I felt more at ease with him than anywhere else in the world.

When I finally stepped out of my rubber catsuit for good, and decided I was ready for a real relationship, I begged Jacob to set me up with one of his friends, ignoring the continuing sadism of this. Couldn’t a man and his former dominatrix be platonic friends, I thought?

When Jacob landed a serious girlfriend, our friendship waned. When he told his girlfriend our how-we-met story, it shrank to a phone call every once in a while. And when his girlfriend became his fiancé, I was officially forbidden. Who could blame her?

It was a fluke that I happened to call him out of the blue on a day when he was fighting with his betrothed. He later claimed to have answered the phone out of spite.

“Hey!” he said.

“Hi!” I smiled for the pause that followed, our mutual knowledge of each other pooling like water into its shallow basin.

Turns out he was with an old friend, one with whom I’d always tried to get him to set me up.

“Put him on the phone,” I demanded, and perhaps out of habit, he obeyed.

A week later I sat across a table from Barrett, a plate of steaming soy chicken and my checkered past between us.

Not one of us expected anything to come of it, but we were all happily wrong. That is, except for Jacob.

Three months later, Barrett and I had moved into a one-bedroom in Prospect Heights, the nesting capital of Brooklyn, where young couples flock to buy their first apartment and have their first baby. I had never lived with anyone before, had never been the type of girl who fantasized about lifelong monogamy, but it’s true what I’d heard people say about the right person at the right time; three weeks into our relationship I was happily domesticated.

We had found each other, but each lost a friend. Jacob couldn’t stomach the reality of having his secret life walk into his real life, on his best friend’s arm. Barrett and I chalked it up to necessary losses, and figured everyone, not least Jacob’s fiancé, would be happier if we just slipped quietly out of the picture.

Over the next couple years, thinking of Jacob never failed to prod a tender spot in my conscience, but I was happy in love, and didn’t think of him very often. That is, until I wrote a book about my experiences as a dominatrix, and then sold it to a major publisher.

Writing a memoir necessitates creating a kind of vacuum, at least until the book is written. I could not consider what the characters in my story would think about my depiction of them, or what anyone would think about the extremity of my experiences, not until I finished. But when I became certain that this book would see the light of day, my elation mixed with terror. I feared reactions: my family’s, my boyfriend’s family, and that of everyone in the book—especially Jacob. I couldn’t seem to stop airing his dirty laundry. I agonized over whether to tell him, or just pray that he never stumbled upon it in a bookstore. I had changed his name; was that enough? Ultimately Facebook decided for me, by suggesting he “become a fan” of the book.

“Please tell me I didn’t rate important enough to make it into the memoir,” read his email to me, the first in more than two years.

I called him.

And then Jacob reminded me of why I had been his friend in the first place. He was freaked out, sure, but also extraordinarily generous.

“I’d never ask you to change it,” he said. “It’s not for me to say.”

I was flabbergasted.

“I’m proud of you,” he added. “This is your dream, and it’s happening. Congratulations!”

That night, I combed through the final, copy-edited version of my manuscript, and cut out every detail about Jacob that didn’t absolutely need to be there. He deserved at least that. I wished I knew how to make a better amends.

In all my time as a dominatrix, I’d never felt as though I’d won while my clients lost; there was always a perfect reciprocity to those relationships. Even if I privately mocked them, we each always got what we wanted. But Jacob was different. He gave more, and accepted less. His final generosity threw that into stark relief. Sure, we were both happy. Sure, the pieces of life fall where they may, and it isn’t always fair, or someone else’s fault, but I couldn’t deny that he’d gotten the short end of the stick. I’d always had more power to wield. My publishing a record of our history was an act that he had no control over, but the grace with which he met it was the most powerful gesture made between us.

I can’t say that our friendship picked up where it left off. Or that he and Barrett’s friendship has been repaired. Or that Barrett and I lasted, in the end. None of us really speak, these days. But I harbor a hope that we might be someday. I sometimes picture us all laughing around a table, a little battered, but relieved to have weathered the storm of our pasts, with bigger hearts all around.

Most relationships after a certain age begin with a body or two under the bed.  Usually these are ex-lovers, whose legacy manifests tangibly in shoeboxes of old letters and photos, those morbid and sentimental curations that pulse faintly from the closet shelf.  Or maybe they are the specters of bad parenting, grade school bullies, criminal records, actual deaths, and surely, in some rare cases, actual cadavers. In my case, it took the form of a garbage bag full of S&M equipment.

I hadn’t been retired long from the “dungeon” when I met my last boyfriend. We had actually been introduced by a former client of mine, also his best friend from college.  On our first date, my skeletons were nowhere near the closet, but perched, rather, on the table between our plates of soy chicken and blanched greens.  He knew before we met that in addition to having a hearty collection of exes, I had been a sex worker, a heroin addict, and that I was writer—an occupation loath to let sleeping ghosts lie.  I had already begun building the frankenstein of my checkered past: a memoir based on my vanquished habits of spanking men and shooting dope.  As a man with possessive tendencies, he should have known what he was getting himself into.  But love makes us stupid, and we were no exception.

Also, I may have had a worrisome past, but my present practically defied its existence.  His girlfriend was a college professor who hid her tattoos under pearl-buttoned cardigans, who went to bed at 10pm, and hadn’t had even a cocktail in years.  The door to my former life seemed firmly closed, and so, three months into our relationship, the door to our new apartment opened.  I left my loft in the hipster ghetto of Williamsburg and moved to the leafy haven of Prospect Heights, where there were more baby strollers than bars, and prepared to enter the next level of domestication.

And then the paddle slipped out from under the bed.  It was black, the length of an arm, and outfitted with a strip of sandpaper on one side.  I found him standing over it one afternoon, brow furrowed.

“Um.  Do I want to know what that’s for?”

“Probably not,” I laughed, and kicked it back under the bed, hoping my nonchalance was contagious.  He stared at the floor where the paddle had been, and then up at me. I scrambled to think of something to distract him from whatever it was he wanted to say.

“You planning on using that again any time soon?” He smiled halfway and cocked an eyebrow.

“Of course not! I just need to get around to selling it.”  I reached across the bed to the window and turned up the air conditioner. He was still looking at me when I finished, so I grabbed a stray t-shirt and began folding it. “You know, what I really need to do is get on eBay.”  I didn’t look up again until I felt his gaze move away from me.

The paddle wasn’t alone. Its sharp edges had simply chewed a hole in the black garbage bag that housed a wide assortment of similar artifacts. Leather cuffs, corsets, rubber (disinfected!) enema bags, and platform stilettos nestled into a cocoon of a latex catsuits, nurse uniforms, and pleated miniskirts I was pretty sure I’d crossed the outer age bracket of eligibility for. When I had hung my floggers up for good, and cleaned out my locker in the dungeon dressing room, I had shoved it all—thousands of dollars worth of equipment and costumery—into the industrial strength bag.  The bag had sat under my bed in Williamsburg for months, and then among the last of my boxes as I’d moved, its fate uncertain. As I’d stood over it in those final moments, the pang I’d felt—something between the feeling of throwing a birthday card from your grandmother in the trash and that just before you answer a phone call from someone you know will probably break your heart—was too strong to override.  The body in that bag was still too warm.  I rationalized that the contents of the bag were worth too much money, and carried it to the moving van.

A month after the paddle incident, a red, leather, riding crop wandered out from under the dust ruffle. My boyfriend was at work this time, and I got down on my knees and tugged the lumpy mass out from under our bed.  When I unknotted the bag’s neck, it exhaled a ghostly breath: the scent of stale incense, body sweat, leather, my old perfume (Dior’s “Addict”), and rubbing alcohol.  My heart and stomach lurched in unison. It was the smell of the dungeon, the smell of my past, the smell of desire and money, of secrecy and sex.  It was the olfactory equivalent of an old mix tape: a sensory time capsule.

I reasoned that the memoir ought to have presented a graver threat of the past’s reincarnation.  But my writing happened in silence; it didn’t have a smell. Reliving the past in writing was intense, but also left the memories flattened somewhat, defanged. I know that the potential rise of that frankenstein, though it gave my partner pangs of his own, seemed at that point mostly hypothetical.  The act of writing down a story places it firmly in the past, draws a line between then and now, the story and its telling.  So long as my alter identity—Mistress Justine—and her interest in the business of desire, stayed on the far side of that line, he could see her as evidence of my depth; she was enough to render me exotic, but not too dangerous.

But the objects in that bag did have a smell.  Their presence was a tangible reminder of my reluctance to let them go.  I knew they would only get louder, their smell more pungent. And I felt his wariness—a texture in the air between us that hadn’t been there before, as he must have felt that body under the bed go bump in the night while I slept.

I didn’t keep the bag around for its monetary value, true, but the straight life was cash poor.  I knew it was time to unload the past, but I wasn’t so dramatic that I needed to burn it in effigy.  Sifting through the contents of that bag, half in inventory, half in nostalgia, I thought of the iSold It On eBay store on Flatbush Avenue, a few blocks west of our apartment.  I’d noticed it the day we moved in, was reminded of Catherine Keener in The 40-Year-Old Vigin, and had since nurtured a warm association to the bland storefront.

So, after a thorough wipedown with said rubbing alcohol, I loaded the corsets, heels, leather goods, and nurse uniforms into a compact wheeling suitcase.  The latex, dildos, clamps, gags, and rope I left in the garbage bag, reknotting the neck.  I dragged both down the apartment stairs, and as I passed the garbage can on the corner of our block, I unceremoniously dropped the bag into it.  The pang I felt this time was manageable.

It was summer, not sweltering yet, but enough that after four blocks in jeans, pulling the suitcase as it bumped cheerfully over every crack and pebble, I boasted sweat-stains and a shiny forehead when I arrived at the door of the iSold It On eBay store.  I had spent the walk awash in memories of my old life, the exhilaration and shame that I’d felt each day, going to a job that paid me in cash and desire. For what? What had I been selling then? My body, fantasies, my own deep-seated need to be desired. As fantasies always had, the ones I traded at the dungeon had allowed me to lose myself, and they’d forced me to.  The symbolism of this imminent act wasn’t lost on me.  I was selling my disguises, the freedom they afforded, and the alienation they afflicted.  Regardless, it hadn’t dawned on me how public an act it was going to be.  When I entered the air-conditioned cool of the store, my sweat turned cold as I beheld the small crowd inside.  Building a secret life almost always happens in private, but eschewing one, it seems, never can.

I joined a short line of waiting customers and watched as they were each delegated to an iSold It employee.  The sellers plopped their unwanted valuables on the long sales counter and the employees examined them.  The iSold It employees performed searches on eBay for similar items, and then affixed tags with a comparable prices to the objects in question, to be posted live at a later time.  As I moved closer to the counter, my palm slipped on the suitcase’s handle.  I wiped both hands on my jeans and cleared my throat, watching the door for other hopeful sellers.  Dear God, I thought, I know I must be some kind of exhibitionist, but let there not be an audience for this.  Two of the employees were men, youngish, not ostensibly the type to have encountered the sort of contents my suitcase held.  But then, I knew better than anyone the misleading superficiality of covers, especially the kind to those sort of books.  Nonetheless, I prayed to be assigned the woman employee, who looked like the kind of bland, hearty stock that could at least affect a nonplussed disposition.  She wore pleated chinos and a face like uncooked poultry.  Hoisting a complicated looking baby napsack over the countertop, she smiled earnestly at the man in front of me.  Nice, she looked really nice.  Not at all like the type to try and trade her services for spankings, like a personal trainer to whom I’d once made the mistake of divulging my work.  I desperately hoped she was nice, as sturdy as her body looked. Perhaps in the narcissism of my own fear I was like a child petrified of a honey bee – oblivious to the outlandish threat of my own size.  A different person would have been worried for her, I suppose.

It only occurs to me now that I might have been seeking such a thrill.  One of the principle pleasures of being a dominatrix had been the shock I could elicit from almost anyone.  In my book, I’d already admitted my lifelong fascination with “the ability to appear one thing, and to be another.”  I had always sought to embody polarities—high school dropout with a graduate degree, marathon-training smoker, summa cum laude heroin junky—because they empowered me to not only defy social prescription, but also upset just about anyone’s expectations.  I loved the look of shock on people’s faces when I told them I was a dominatrix. Because I was nice.  I didn’t hate men.  I could have gotten real jobs if I’d wanted to.  I was a sex worker by choice, not out of desperation. The high of exercising that power was part of what I dreaded surrendering. But I didn’t feel empowered as I stood in the iSold It store in my girl-next-door outfit with my suitcase full of domme gear.  I felt quietly horrified.  There is a high in horror, I know, as a former junky and sex worker.  But if there was pleasure in that moment, I sure didn’t feel it.

I got the woman.

“Hi there!” she chirruped. “And what do you have for me today?”

I just smiled back to the best of my ability, and hoisted the suitcase onto the counter between us.  She tilted her head to the side, waiting for some further introduction.  I knew there was nothing for me to say and so I let the silence swell between us until she finally gave a little, “N’kay,” still cheerful, and unzipped the suitcase.  She opened it, and stared inside for perhaps only a few beats longer than if it had held a collection of doilies.  I surveyed her surveying my old bondage equipment, and didn’t take a breath until she raised her gaze to mine, and mercifully suggested that we “take this to the computer in the back, where there is a little more room.”  Her tone in that moment may have contained a note of humor, but it was so subtle that I didn’t dare to respond except to say that yes, a little more room might be nice.  Though we spent the next 30 minutes head to head, poring through the trappings of my old persona, she went no further to acknowledge the remarkability of my wares.  Not that I wasn’t grateful for the gesture.  It broke my heart a little, in that sweet way, her effort to circumvent both our embarrassment.

“And what would you call these?” she asked me, pulling the leather, fur-lined cuffs from the suitcase.

“Cuffs?  No, leather restraints.”

“N’kay. Leather restraints,” she repeated in her pragmatic voice, typing the words in the search window.  Together we watched similar images appear on the screen.  I could feel the warmth of her shoulder, inches away from my own, smell her clean, powdery scent.  And so on with the stilettos, riding crop, paddle, and uniforms.  I didn’t have the heart to argue when she vastly underpriced the value of my favorite corset.

Leaving the iSold It store with my empty suitcase was like waking from a dream.  Not a nightmare, but one I was glad to wake from nonetheless.  The garbage bag with my dildos in it was still at the bottom of the can on the corner when I passed by on my way home.

My boyfriend was unmistakably relieved when I told him I’d sold the body under the bed.  The checks arrived by mail over the next few weeks, a small fraction of what I knew my past was worth.  I wasn’t done, of course.  I let go of that life, yes, but not the story.  I couldn’t lay that body to rest until I’d learned how it ended.  The book sold a year later, and not to an anonymous buyer on eBay, whom we’d never have to face.  That relationship didn’t survive in the end, not my history, and everything else that weighs on love, and more heavily as it thins over time.  There wasn’t enough room in our home for both my story and ours, and we never managed to fit them together into one narrative.  Now, he haunts me, and surely my new love wishes his phantom gone, as I do hers.

Of course, it is we who are most haunted by our own histories, who absently run our fingers over old scars, our gaze drifting out windows at the familiar notes of old songs and the scent of sweatshirts pulled out of storage. But it is also the living inhabitants of our lives who suffer their presence.  Who hasn’t nurtured the private exhaustion of loving patience, and wished for the exorcism of our lovers ex-lovers? Our lover’s former lives? We want our loves to ourselves; we want to occupy the parts of them that belong to other people, other places, things that cannot be exiled because they are already gone. We harbor this desire out of selfishness, but ultimately, perhaps out of fear.  The most considerate partners try to keep these corpses out of sight, behind the dust bunnies and unused workout equipment, or even better, finally lugged out with the objects we keep out of sentiment. I haven’t always been this kind of partner, but I have tried.  And I’m not sorry to be haunted by my ghosts.  They guide me from one life to the next.  But I am not sorry to let them go, either.