Each Man Kills The Thing He Loves

When Garce invited me to write on this topic, I jumped on it without thought: write about an erotic fantasy you love but would / could never do. I thought that nothing could be easier because I don’t do much of anything these days.

But when I really sat down to consider it, it became much harder. I don’t ‘do’ things out of choice. It’s not fear or squick or physical limitations that are in my way. Given the right person and the right circumstance, there is very little I wouldn’t do. Well, animals and children – but then neither of those hold any interest for me, so they don’t come under the fantasy heading.

To reach into a place I truly wouldn’t go is hard. It involves venturing into the part of me that seeks annihilation. Because I do have a penchant for courting my own erasure, and my most compelling and forbidden fantasies lie in that realm. I don’t act on them because I’m a responsible adult. Because there are people who love me and depend on me. But it’s not just that.

This isn’t a game one person plays. To ask another human being to take on the task of destroying you is to ask too much. Of course, there are lots of people who might off you for money, but that won’t do; an essential part of my fantasies in this direction require that the person who erases me knows me in my totality.

‘Each man kills the thing he loves’. It’s a line from Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Ballad of Reading Goal’. but I’ll always associate it with the inane ditty sung by Jeanne Moreau in the Fassbinder film ‘Querelle’. And somewhere in that movie, for all its many flaws, is the attempt at an explanation as to why the lure of destruction is an erotic one. It would be easy to say that it implies an abiding self-hatred in a certain portion of the homosexual population, but I find that a pallid and superficial answer. It isn’t self-hatred – it’s the acknowledgement of our essential ephemerality and the desire to, once and for all, stop clutching to it so doggedly.

But the lure of oblivion is a strong one and, for me, very sexual. Not surface sex. Not genitalism. The kind of sex that connects you to the act of being / not being. The kind of sex that sets you free ultimately and for always.

I suppose I have these fantasies because we are all going to go sometime and I’d rather not do it coughing up my lungs in a sterile ward in a single bed. And yet that is where I will probably end up, because the alternative is so unforgivably selfish.

Now that I have done such a good job legitimizing these types of fantasies, you are wondering if I’m going to actually put one to screen, aren’t you? Well, I have to admit to being hesitant. Not because I can’t write them, but because one part of me – the socially responsible one– worries unaccountably that they might be somehow infectious. The other part of me feels this is highly patronizing. So I will write one. But only with the advisory that you should be engaging your critical decision-making processes right about now.

I can feel his skin through mine as if we had none. As if we were peeled creatures of visceral mass. Muscle and bone and throbbing arterial pathways. The ravenous mouth that covers mine is a nameless sea creature curling in upon itself to pull me in.

And always, his cock is inside me, displacing the inconsequential details of me. Reminding me of how very permeable I am.

Sometimes it is the heat of his wide-palmed hand around my throat. Sometimes the chill of metal. The muzzle of a gun tucked into the hollow beneath my jaw. Today it is the silky steel of a razor just under my right ear.

I want to choose when and I want it to be now. Now, as my neurons go supernova. As my muscles constrict around him hard enough to force a groan.

Now he draws the blade deep and fast towards my chin. The blood that has been pumped into my brain will be the last because the rest of it fountains onto his chest in a cherry bright spray that marks the final moments of my consciousness and, subsequently, my existence.

Luckily, and conveniently, I am dead and don’t worry about the bloody mess that now requires cleaning up or the body that will need to be quietly disposed of. Nor do I have to consider that I have also probably voided my bladder and my bowels. Is it any wonder the man in my fantasies is always faceless? Well, that’s what forbidden fantasies are for, isn’t it?

(previously posted on the Oh Get A Grip Blog)