Eat the Moon, Then Give it Back
[Image description: a watercolor painting, of an open mouth is rendered in greyscale, tongue sticking out as the teeth bite into the moon as if it were a jawbreaker. The moon cracks open, seeping honey across the tongue. The honey is rendered in color and contains the blobby shapes of people entangled with one another. ]
Content Warnings: Discussion of navigating potentially unhealthy desires, insecurity, possessiveness, BDSM and Kink,
Sometimes, there's a little black hole where my heart should be. It sucks in everything, every scrap of attention, affection, and care others pour into me, yet still it is hungry.
It goes against my values to ask someone to prioritize me over any other relationship in their life. To come when I call, to drop everything to hold me, to keep me more precious than anything else. To stomp my feet and demand they pluck the moon from the sky and place it in my waiting hands. It goes against my values to prioritize any one relationship in my life to the detriment of all others. To run when called, to draw down the moon at the mere hint of such an ask.
Humans thrive when we have healthy support systems of multiple deep and varied relationships. No one person can meet all our needs and we cannot be everything to one person. That ask is unsustainable, straining both the asker and asked until the thread of the relationship snaps under the weight. We can not be everything to any one person, and they cannot be that to us.
And yet.
Yet, sometimes, I want this anyway, with the gnashing hungry teeth of a wolf in the dead of winter.
What do we do when our desires are out of step with our values? When we want something that is not sustainable or healthy to actually have?
In my case, I spent years terrified of my hunger, attempting everything to smother it, to ignore it, to will it away. I believed no one in my life would ever endure me and this frightening horrible need in any long-term, deep way. As a child, I felt I must be bad, for the ways this want in me sent me into crying fits, into long moody spells when I craved attention and could not get it, or did not get it in the way I was looking for. As a teenager, I was certain I was a monster, as the crying spells worsened and introducing dating relationships into my life gave this endless yearning new pastures to tear through. As an adult, I felt broken, convinced that the trauma I'd experienced rendered me unsatisfiable, and had wrecked my capacity for healthy, balanced attachments.
I settled for very shitty love in a lot of places in my life, as a kid and as an adult, because I was convinced I had unreasonable expectations and needed to check my shit. In other places, and sometimes in those same settling ones, I boiled over. After long periods of hemming in this hunger, avoiding asking for anything afraid that I would ask too much, I would snap, dissolving into resentments and desires unfulfilled. In those moments, once the dam broke, I couldn't repair it. The foundations of connections sloughed away beneath my feet as my demands overran their banks, overwhelmed the channels and ditches of my loved ones.
I am not balanced in this hunger yet. I don't know that I ever will be. Therapy has helped, given me a space to unspool my thoughts, hang them out and understand what I actually need, measure them against a standard frame to better judge when I'm asking for the moon or just asking someone to change a lightbulb. I've gotten better at asking others to change lightbulbs for me, rather than letting all the lights burn out until I am desperate and clawing for the moon to drive away the howling night. I've also gotten better at spotting when someone's treating a lightbulb request like I'm asking for the moon and leaving rather than quietly, resentfully changing my own lightbulbs.
Recognizing how many lightbulbs I need in my life, and the ways in which they get changed has done a lot in satisfying the wild, aching hunger in me that I feared could never be full. Building relationships where my requests are honored, and where I’m offered explanations for when a request cannot be filled rather than simply being told I’m asking too much, has helped me believe in other’s love and trust that I won’t be discarded without being the center of their world.
And yet.
Yet what about the whispering voice in me that still wants the moon? Wants it plucked from the sky and fed to me by warm, loving fingers, wants to roll it on my tongue, crack it open and let its light run thick and sweet down my throat, wants to know what it feels like to be everything?
No single one of us can have the moon, it's a part of all of us, belonging to everyone and no one, inherently shared. It wouldn't be nearly so bright if we plucked it from it’s home in the sky, dragged it from where the sun feeds it, where our collective myths and wonder feed it. But, in the right contexts, for little moments, we can pretend. I can pretend.
Exploring dominance and submission, in sexual and nonsexual ways, has given me these little moments.
Kink and BDSM isn't therapy, isn't innately healing, or innately harmful. It's a space, a tool, a potential, an element waiting for you to mix it up with something else, to use it to whatever ends suit you. I love kink because it creates little pockets of context where the impossible becomes utterly ephemerally true because everyone involved has agreed to transform the world inside a bubble. Please note, the rest of this essay is not a treatise on how kink and BDSM are the secret sauce to snaring your moon, sexual, erotic or otherwise. I cannot tell you that, though if you’re curious about those avenues, I do encourage you to go sneaking behind the curtain. Kink is not the only avenue for play in our lives as adults, nor should it be, but it’s offered me an important refuge for the internal worlds I haven’t figured out how to unfurl elsewhere.
For me, kink is where those intense, macabre fantasy games I played as a child went to roost. The ones where my dolls were a secret witch coven hosting rituals in the woods; where the crawl spaces under the school held gateways to other dimensions, ringed with human bones; the ones where my friends and I were werewolves, witches, monsters, where our claws were sharp and our teeth sharper, where we wrestled and bit and shrieked with laughter and that little thrill that comes from safe pain. These fantasies, filled with fascination with death, transformation, sacred connection, euphoric pain and giddy fear and discovering a hidden power that makes you special and dangerous, didn’t fade with age. Instead, they took root and bloomed as my understanding of the erotic grew. I found words to explain them in books, in fanfiction, in kinky blogs.
—--
Kink is where, sometimes, I can swallow the moon.
A place where I have permission to have too many teeth, that stand too sharp in the cathedral of my mouth. A place where I shed the clammy shame that pulls my hunger up short, yanks its chain before it can take its first bite. Dominance and submission in particular, offers skeleton frames to smear the clay of my wants over, to lay the seeds and hold up the creeping vines, keep them from strangling the tender shoots on the ground. Alone, or with others, I can construct pocket dimensions where I am all-consuming or all consumed.
With others, regardless of who we are outside this world we make together, in that little place, we are everything and nothing. In that liminal space, I have permission to flood them, to fill every ounce of their awareness, to bind them as I wish. I can stretch them to their limits and lap up the magma at their core when they come apart at the seams. I get to swallow their screams like sweet water and sink my teeth into the soft ripeness of their skin. I consume them, body and spirit, a devotional gift to me as I deserve. I wrap myself around them until I am their sky and earth and know that is wanted. In that liminal space, I have permission to demand, to want, to glut myself on pleasure, on sensation. I become my lover's obsession, their prized possession, enthralling and all-consuming. I surrender my body, my soul as their water, their best meal, my every scream the sweetest song as the edges between us dissolve, as I am held like nothing else exists beyond us.
The moon vanishes from the sky into my lover's hands. Its shell is so delicate, cracking like fine sugar between my teeth. My lover's tongue catches the sweetness that runs down my chin. Our wholes merge, become something bigger, stranger, impossible. I am we. We are they. I forget what hunger feels like.
I blink. The moment ends. The moon is back in the sky, shared by us all. The lines between my lover and I reform. We become whoever we are to one another outside that space, partner, friend, playmate, mystery. Maybe we will merge again, maybe not.
For the moment, I am full.
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Crushing our less-than-healthy impulses is not always the answer. I'm not sure it ever is, actually. Attempting to entirely repress desires that we recognize as harmful without examining what that hunger is trying to tell us won't fix the issue. We'll still be hungry, roaming around in a house of burned-out lightbulbs, our want growing harder and harder to satisfy with each light that fizzles and pops into darkness.
We're taught way more skills around repressing what we want than we are around safely examining our desires before they go feral, becoming something that steers us rather than something we steer. Allowing ourselves permission to want the impossible is not the same thing as asking it of others. Building up the muscle to explore that grey space, creates a space for us to examine that impossible want, find things that fulfill it, soothe its raw, aching edges.
I confess my own unease peeling back this layer for you, showing you this feral, snapping little hunger in me. This is not a self rumination, neatly dissected and labeled in a shadowbox up on the wall; it’s a larval colony hiding in the plaster beneath, frenetic, tender bodies and sharp pinchers making a home within a home, too lively for me to pin down, tunneling too deep for me to see fully.
Desire is like that. I don’t dare ask you not to be afraid of it, as if goose pimples don’t run down my own arms in the face of my wants. I ask you to be afraid, be half-formed, be changing, and share anyway.
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