They Cut Me Down and She Said Go. I Am Already Back.

The rope in The Dismissal Hallway is a particular weight. I don't know the technical term for it. It's not harsh — it's precise in a way that is different from harsh, the way some things are precise instead of comfortable. They cut me down on Thursday and Mistress Lynne said go, and I went, which is the arrangement. I went and I came back and I prepaid for another session which is scheduled for next week, and I have been doing this for twenty months. Each time they cut me down. Each time she says go. Each time I go. Each time I prepay to come back and have her say it again. I had not thought of this as a pattern until somewhere around month eight, and then I thought of it constantly, and then somewhere around month twelve I stopped thinking of it as a thought and started thinking of it as just the shape of things. The purple light in the hallway is on when I arrive. I look at it before I go in. I have been looking at it for twenty months.

I have always been the one to leave first. Every relationship, every room, every situation where I could feel the thing shifting and didn't want to be there when it shifted — I left first. I got good at it. I developed the specific skill set of a man who can read a room three weeks before the room reads itself and be gone before anyone knows to look. I left my first girlfriend two weeks before she was going to leave me. I knew the signs. I left. It is the most consistent thing about me across four decades and I have turned it into something that looks, from the outside, like freedom, and from the inside looks like whatever the thing is that I felt when Mistress Lynne told me to go on Thursday and I felt it as a relief. Not the relief of escape. The relief of being told. The relief of having the leaving be hers, not mine, for the first time in anything I can remember.

They cut me down and she said go and I am already back. That is the post. That is the entire account of what happened and what is happening and why I prepaid again. I don't want to explain it more than that because explaining it more than that is what I do when I am trying to make something mean less than it means. They cut the rope — the precise, non-harsh rope — and I came down and I was in my body and Mistress Lynne said go in the flat, complete way she says it, and I went. And somewhere between the dismissal and the next payment I became the version of me that has prepaid again, which is also me, and which is the version that has been showing up to The Dismissal Hallway for twenty months. I have always left first. That is the one thing that has been true across every version of my life. In this room, she sends me. I am already back.