Kink: Stories

by R.O. Kwon

In Life magazine in 1963, James Baldwin said, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”

It is difficult to gauge one’s own desire when one is calibrated to the desires of others. She had not even particularly wanted to have sex with her date, though she would have. She had just wanted her date to want her, to mistake that pleasure, even briefly, for desire. As she walked home from the restaurant, she thought of something her therapist had once said to her: You can’t get enough of a thing you don’t need.

Masculinity was a glass vase perpetually at the edge of the table.

When someone says, I freak out and run away, what they are saying is, I am freaking out and about to run away. Life is easier when you take people at their word. Also, it’s good to be wary of people who are afraid of what they desire.

Because to tell him the truth would be to endanger the possibility of being loved by him, and all she wants is to be loved totally, without reason or question or sacrifice. Love is her hands above her head.

She always takes photographs of him looking away, or down. She’s worried she will see one expression in person, but another expression in the picture.

She is prone to this, to disappearing within her own life. Everything seems to happen to her.

There was no lowest place, I thought, I would strike ground only to feel it give way gaping beneath me, and I felt with a new fear how little sense of myself I have, how there was no end to what I could want or to the punishment I would seek. For some moments I wrestled with these thoughts, and then I stood and turned back to the boulevard, composing as best I could my human face.