kept
I’ve always wanted to be kept.
For as long as I can recall. My very first long-form creative writing endeavour (age 7) was an obvious self-insert; an anthropomorphic rabbit, kept. Collared in all but name; a wrist cuff, unable to be removed. In a cell, somewhere far away.
Fantasies of being like Mewtwo in the first Pokémon movie, kept in a lab somewhere, never let out. Actually trying to roleplay that out at a friend’s once (age 9ish). He thought I was weird. I guess he was right. We stopped hanging out.
There was the time I had a different, much closer friend literally tie me to his bed (age 13; what we had on hand to effect this purpose was, uh, socks). Cue EXTREME scrambling to cover this up somehow when his mother well-intendingly burst in at the late hour that it was. I should ask him what he made of my asking to do that at the time.
Hell, it’s not a stretch to see it in the way I’d given myself to romantic relationships up until a few years back. Total abnegation of the self. The subconscious rebels, though, because what I want to give is not even what the most possessive of my partners wanted to take. Not that I really had a clue about myself then, either; it was all these strange, wordless longings, and they’d seem to contradict themselves in ways I couldn’t grasp.
The most frustrating thing was always myself, in the end.
This quest for self-knowledge in earnest has been apace for more than 18 months, now, and I think we’re approaching the last crescendo before the home stretch. Not to suggest I’ll be ever truly finished with it, by any means, but once I’ve found it — once I’ve locked eyes with my soul and listened — I suspect that same, once-eternal dread of facing up to what I’ve made for myself will no longer feature.
And maybe I’ll find myself a keeper or two.