Love With Madness.

I squint my eyes at him as he sits on the bench and takes the shoes out of the box. Plainly-speaking, I hate his new shoes. I could very easily make a case for why they aren’t good shoes—the leather is not so supple, the shape is too oblong, they are too narrow and seem not to be very resilient—but the enthymeme of my case is that all of my reasoning is arising from comparing his new shoes to the ones he is replacing. It wouldn’t really matter if they were perfect in every qualitative regard; I would still hate his new shoes simply because I love the old ones. My loyalty may be misplaced and childish but it is ferocious, I refuse to adjust. I make faces as I watch him lace them up for the first time and when he ignores me, I add dissatisfied sighs to the mix.

“I hope your new shoes give you blisters,” I finally say to him.

I’ve been saying things like that ever since he ordered them. Longer, even. A few months ago, he told me that he was going to replace his shoes and I refused to acknowledge the possibility. I literally pretended I could not hear him each time he brought it up. I know he told me in advance as an act of kindness, he anticipated my maudlin response and tried to afford me some time to prepare but I refused to take it. I’ve loved his shoes for as long as I have loved him. It may be difficult to understand my sentimentality but I love from a strange part of my heart, one that seeks refuge in cruelty, tenderness in pain and anthropomorphizes objects that serve him into sentient beings that own me as well. It’s mad but to love with sanity is eat without spice, and I’ve never understood how anyone can get through a meal without heat. Those shoes were the first part of him I touched. All of this began with him teaching me to polish them and for almost a decade, I did that. They were the first objects with which he beat me, the first extension of himself with which he tread on me. Some years ago, we were apart for a few months and operating on different time-zones, so I had sex with his shoes every day, I kneeled before them, I placed them on the pillow beside me and kissed him as soon I woke up each morning. They’re not just the shoes he wears every day, I could not let him replace them and now that he has, I refuse to get on board.

“You want me to have blisters?” He asks, putting on the other shoe, “Is that really what you want?”

“Yes,” I respond with ease, “I hate your new shoes and I hope they are awfully uncomfortable.”

I know I am pushing it but I’ve timed my harlequinade quite well. He has no time to get into it with me right now. As he stands up in preparation to leave, he gestures for me to kneel at his feet and I rush over to the shoe-stand in the dressing room, bring his old-shoes and place them beside his feet before I obey. He shoots me an orgulous look before he departs and I avoid his gaze. As I hear him turn the key in the lock as he leaves the house, I hug the shoes and lay down beside them, petting them in the way I would prefer to pet my own sadness. I stay on the floor for a while but responsibility calls and I let myself get swept up in my day. It passes as usual. I work, he works, we cook, we go to the gym, we eat and we laugh, the shoes remain in the same-spot through the day and escape our notice, the way only things that are so familiar they aren’t inimical even when you trip over them can. As evening falls, I switch the bright white lights in our bedroom to a dim orange glow I prefer in the darkness, he is out walking the dog and I am tidying the room. I stop as I come to the shoes, I pick them up and sit on the bench, placing them in my lap and draping myself over them. I am so lost in my pity that I don’t hear him enter the room, I don’t notice him watching me and I only look up when I hear him shuffle towards me.

“You look so pretty,” he says, sitting down beside me on the bench.

“Do you hate your new shoes yet?” I ask, looking up in defiance and barely-contained ire.

He sighs. He stands up and begins to walk towards the dressing-room, then he turns back towards me, leans over and kisses my forehead before going back to his pursuit. He returns holding his new shoes. He lets one of them drop to the floor, holds the other by the heel and swings the front of it into my face.

“You’re mad at me,” he says, continuing to beat my face with his new shoe, “You’re mad at me because you’re labouring under some kind of delusion that you are allowed to be mad about this and I’ve been patient, even indulgent, but that is over.”

I clutch at the shoes in my lap and refuse to cry out in pain as he expands the target of his assault to my entire body. As he strikes my shoulders, I pull them closer to my chest, stroking the soles to soothe my own skin. As he hits my back, I lean down and kiss them, holding the tongue of the boot in my teeth to keep myself from crying out.

“That’s right, you should worship them now,” he says, holding my face up to him, “I told you repeatedly that even if I bought new shoes, I’d only use these ones to play with you but that wasn’t good enough for you, so now, I will not do that. Do whatever you want with them tonight because after that, you’re not allowed to touch them for a year.”

“No!” I scream out, getting on my feet and trying to run away with them.

He holds me by my hair and flings me to the floor. I wouldn’t have fallen so badly if I’d let go of the shoes but I cannot bear the idea of what he just suggested so I don’t care about how I fall. I plead and beg in a stream of incoherent syllables that borrow from four-languages but manage to be comprehensible as none.

“Do not test me,” he says, leaning over to place the old shoes before my face, “Go ahead and lick them to your heart’s content but if you fight me on what I have decided, I will make you shred them with a knife and dump them into the trash by your own hands.”

Most of the time, I cannot tell whether he will really do the things he says he will, but sometimes I am as sure as the ground beneath my feet. This is the emotional equivalent of the physical process he uses to quieten me when he’s hurting me. Scream and you get it worse. Protest and you are made to shred what you love. Make an unauthorized move to protect yourself and he’ll arm the peacekeepers to be your firing squad. As gormless as I’ve been about all of this, I know when I am defeated. I focus on the only thing I can do and worship the shoes before my face. He holds my hair in a grip as I kiss, lick and rub my face against the leather. Every inch of it is so warm and familiar, it feels like home. Like the cold night when we first filmed ourselves in acts of violence as he smacked me with these boots. Like the horrible day when he polished them himself because I forgot to do it. Like the countless evenings I spent rubbing myself against the tip. Like all those nights of longing when he was gone but they lay beside me. Like the shoelace he pulled out of them and let me wear as collar for an entire year. It’s like my tongue is trying to absorb all of it, so I can read our love like braille on my taste-buds. As he releases his hold on my hair, I start to panic, and I put my arms around the boots again.

“That’s enough,” he says, pulling me up to my knees and prying them out of my hands, “Go put them back on the shoe-stand and you will not touch them for an entire year. You will not even touch them to move them, ask me to do it or someone else. Do not argue with me, don’t even respond, make a single misstep and I will bring you the knife.”

It’s hard to tell what a misstep is but right now it could be anything. I want to beg him to beat me with them one last time but that could be a misstep. I want to cry and promise I won’t be as difficult as I’ve been about this but I suspect he has been viewing the period of my protest as a period of opportunity for me to make this easier for myself, and I’ve already exhausted all his goodwill. I know him and he does not yield, he does not soften and he relishes this pornographic massacring of my heart just a little bit more than is sane. He follows me as I take the shoes to the stand and watches me put them away, as I turn around to leave, he points to the polish-and-brush that lay at the bottom and I pick them up. He marches me back to our bedroom, gestures for me to remove my clothes and points me back to the direction of the floor. As I kneel, he flings his new shoes at me.

“Polish them,” he says, pulling the bench up to me and sitting on me.

“But they are brand new?” I ask, in a whisper that I may or may not have intended to be audible.

“I don’t remember asking you whether they need to be polished,” he says, holding me by my throat, “You are going to polish them every day until you learn to love them. If I bring you something, you will learn to love it. If I pluck a stranger off the street and tell you to worship them, you will do that too. Polish the fucking shoes and tell them you will learn to love them.”

I hold the shoe up to my face and crack the tin of polish. I lather the leather in thick, black paste. He looks at me expectantly, reminding me to repeat the words he just me to repeat to the shoe in my hand. I look down at it, ashamed, unable to look directly at eyeless leather as if it were staring back at me and promise that I would learn to love it.

“Call them sir,” he says, taking on a tone of cruelty that betrays his pleasure to me with ease, “You thought of the last ones as your owner, didn’t you? These boots own you now. Call them sir. Tell them you’re sorry for how you’ve behaved while you shine them.”

As I polish his new boots, he continues to prod me and make me talk to his shoes. To tell them they own me. It makes me cry. It’s not the reference to an inanimate object as my superior, he makes me use honorifics for his things all the time. Sometimes, he tells me I an object to him so we shouldn’t measure my worth based on that of other people, he measures me in the ranks of other objects that serve him and some days I am not even as useful as his sock or his towel. It’s not even the humiliation of being answerable to a shoe, I’ve been doing that for a decade, it’s this instinct to make me live this replacement as harshly as possible that’s making me tear up. He replaced his shoes, now he is making me replace them. As soon as I finish polishing them, he asks me to turn around and lean backward into the bench, between his feet. My head rests between his knees, turned upwards at an awkward angle and all-too-clearly visible to him.

“Spread your legs,” he says, leaning over and talking into my mouth, “Pick up my shoe and beg it to fuck you.”

As soon as he says those words, I realise a knot of arousal has been stuck in my throat all evening. The tears came so easily but I’ve been holding something else back, a monster that will make all of this easier tonight, and much harder, tomorrow. As I pick up the shoe and say the words he wrote for me, the knot eases and makes my eyes roll into the back of my head. I beg to be fucked like I mean it.

“Fuck yourself with it like you believe an owner should fuck you,” he says, cupping my face and whispering into my ear, “Repeat every word I say to you as you do it.”

“Please, use my worthless hole as it deserves to be used, sir,” I recite the shameful poetry he whispers to me between whimpers of pleasure I cannot fend off any longer, “I am sorry I tried to resist your control over me. I will learn to love you. I will not behave like a worthless ingrate anymore. Thank you for using me even though I cover you in filth that emerges from my cunt.”

For a while, I repeat his words and eventually, I find my own. He continues to lean over me in silence, as I continue to chant the most helpless rendition of a song no one should ever have to sing, let alone, hear. It’s terrible but I lose myself in it.

“That’s enough,” he says, leaning over and shaking the shoe out of my hand, “Go put them back on the stand.”

I fumble around in a daze but I don’t question him. I pick up the shoes and walk over to stand. I place them beside the old shoes and stand there for a moment.

“Don’t forget to kiss them,” he hollers from the bedroom.

I lean over and kiss them but I feel like the old shoes are watching me. I avert my gaze and apologise into the air, I don’t know what I am sorry for nor who the intended recipient of the apology may be, but I have a sick, heady feeling in my head. It’s the madness. I cannot love without it.