The next day I called one of my closest friends in Vermont. I was a little giddy. I couldn't stop looking at my cheeks in the bathroom mirror. Checking that the redness was still there, like a mottled sunburn, and tracing the vague prints of his fingers with my own. I didn't want those patterns to go away. I wanted to keep them, and more importantly, the feeling that went with them. Like those folks in the chat rooms, I was proud of my marks. I felt evangelical, and I wanted to spread the word. So I called my friend, Peter, who of all my friends is the most intrigued by taboos and the least judgmental. I recounted every detail, the electricity, the surprise in the strength of that hand and the submission that felt so powerful. Peter asked about the sex, and I told him it was sweet, but I wanted to talk about the blows. And he asked the questions friends ask to make sure you're being honest with yourself.

"I'm just wondering," he said, "why isn't it abuse?"

Without thinking, I gave my most honest answer: "Because it feels good."

I learned two things when I hit puberty. One was the power that comes from the self-control to take pain, the other was the ability to disappear from my life. These sound like the lessons of abuse, but my abusers weren't other people.

"I'm just wondering," he said, "why isn't it abuse?"

They were my own genes. By the time I turned twelve, my spine was already twisting and bending itself into an eighty-seven degree scoliotic angle. I tried my best to ignore it, and it was pretty easy since there wasn't yet much pain. I simply stopped looking at myself in the mirror, denying myself any chance to see the hump forming on my back or the evolving bow of my torso. It was made all the easier when I got my first body cast, which encased me in plaster from my neck to my hips. I just adopted the habit of not taking notice.

The pain, though, came with the surgery, and it got my attention. In the worst moments, when the simplest movement of raising my arm a few inches made me go blind from the hurt, I stumbled on another trick. Rather than trying to occupy my mind with something else, trying to forget it, I focused on it. I really had no choice. I drilled into it with every thought in my brain until I smoothed down the jagged edges. I took control of it, and having control turned it into something else. It still hurt like hell, but it wasn't altogether unpleasureable. And each time I got better at it, and each time I learned how to be in my body again. I learned that I wasn't quite dead.

But then I healed, and the most I had to contend with in the next year was a succession of more casts, which weren't painful but were nasty to look at. The last cast came off just before I turned fifteen, and by then, once again, I had mastered not quite being there.

For twenty years, I had the memory of that pain tucked away in the back of my mind, but I'd never picked it up and held it in front of the mirror. Not looking had become the routine. Since then, I'd had a normal life. I'd had vanilla sex. I'd enjoyed it, and sometimes it was really, really lovely. But I was never quite there. Even when the man knew how to touch me, how to elicit those post-orgasmic shivers, even when he loved me, there was always a part of me hovering in a corner of the ceiling and looking away — not quite alive.