Anesthesia

I have agreed, and you have written the prescription. You are an anesthesiologist, and everything you do is with operating room precision. Were I your patient, I would lay back under a sterile drape, open my arm as if it were a book waiting to be read, and allow you to inject a sleeping potion in my vein. Open my throat so you could insert a tube through which you would manage my breathing. Look up at you as I drift into a dreamless slumber and see your face, masked, and only your studious eyes visible. Know that you maintain my pulse and respirations and blood pressure from an electronic monitor parked somewhere beyond my head as I sink into an almost lifeless, isolation-tank state.

I have agreed, and you have written the prescription. But I am not your patient. I am your lover. I am accustomed to watching your unmasked face, to looking into your studious eyes, as you snap handcuffs on first my left hand, then my right. Affix a collar to my throat. Restrain my ankles. Clamp my nipple between your teeth. I am used to feeling my entire body swell, as if I have been turned inside out and my sera are uncontainable, at the mere sensation of the cuffs, the collar, the restraints. So that it matters little whether your next act involves the hand, the lips, or the tongue, whether you will lean over me and lick, or suck, or penetrate, whether you will whisper, or hiss, or remain silent, whether we will exchange a solitary orgasm, one after the other, or peak, shuddering, in tandem, or spend hours riding waves of increasing intensity. What matters is that I have lain back and opened my arms and my legs, as if my body is a deep bowl that has only to be filled and which is waiting to be defined by the contents that will fill it.

I have agreed, and you have written the prescription. I will lie back and open my arm like the book that it is, but it will be on my down comforter, not under a sterile drape. I will allow you to inject a small dose of a mild sedative into my vein. A sedative which, when given before a minor outpatient procedure – a deep dental extraction, a colonoscopy – induces a phlegmatic, sleepy peacefulness. Conscious sedation, it is called. Light dozing followed by rapid recovery, so that the recipient can be awakened yet remembers very little. You will administer one milligram, maybe two, a quarter of a normal dose, just enough to…

I have agreed, and you have written the prescription. You will inject the medication into my vein, enough so that I dream but do not sleep. Your studious eyes will monitor my face, the pink moistness inside my mouth, the even rise and fall of my chest. You will be unmasked, and I will be uncovered. There will be no cuffs, no collar, no clamp. No conditioned response to your mechanical restraints. Still, I will be as open as a bowl, a bowl as large as a chasm. Restraints will be rendered obsolete. My agreement, your prescription: that is restraint enough.

I have agreed, and you have written the prescription. I have agreed because you yearn for increasing control, and it is my will to satisfy you. You have written the prescription because I crave diminished control, and it is your desire to sate me. My submission deepens as your domination mounts, so that, as if riding waves of increasing intensity, the sine and the cosine, the yin and the yang, we pull in opposite directions, you assuming power, me giving it away, yet we spin entwined, held together by our own centrifugal force. My agreement quickens your pulse. Your prescription heightens my arousal. So that in agreeing and prescribing you have become my prescriptive, and I have become yours. We are each the means by which the other comes closer to attaining what was sought.

I have agreed, and you have written the prescription. I lie back on the down comforter, exposed, unrestrained and open. You hover above. Few words are spoken. Your eyes affix on mine and mine on yours. You will monitor my pulse and my breathing and I will dream without sleeping beneath you. It matters little whether you will use your hands, or your lips, or your tongue. Whether you will suck me or bite me, spank me or penetrate me. Whether you will whisper or hiss, tell me stories or remain silent. Whether you will invite others into the room that they may watch, or learn, or explore, or participate, or whether you will study me, alone. Whether you will find your way to completion or whether this is the first chapter of a never-ending story. Nothing matters now except you, naked, and me, exposed. Except my arm, open, and your medication. Except you and me and this down comforter and your studious eyes. Nothing else matters, because I have agreed.

And you have written the prescription.