The Master’s Voice.

In the midst of listening to my friend Midori conduct her most excellent class on “Aural Sex,” I had an epiphany and a small heartbreak. This is awkward when one is trying to simply listen and learn and absorb the teachings flowing through the moment.

While she was describing how one might use the voice to seduce, I thought about how perception of one’s own voice often varies from the reality of others. This is a science problem- we will not ever be able to hear our own voices as others hear it, because the speakers we carry in our skulls and ears will not have the emotional fidelity that hearing the voice of another carries. Add to that I am hyper-critical and hear each and every pitch break and plosive and slippery lisp whereas others give that shit a miss and just listen, and you’ll have a clue what is going on in my head and why it confuses me when people say they find my voice pleasing or sexy or what have you.

I realized though that the people who have triggered, in me, very visceral submissive responses all have had their first incursion via some particularly telling moment where they conveyed, in whispers and growls and lilting accents, their will, their lust, their desire, their curiosity, and that brought me to my knees.  Once surprisingly, once quite literally, and once a bit reluctantly but inexorably. I remembered these people as pivotal people in my life, and how the mere recollection of the texture and flavor of their voices excited bittersweet memories. Of submission, of new and unimagined explorations, of surprising yielding.

The problem I have when I remember things is, if I am not highly vigilant, my head and heart will be pulled right back to the moment of which I‘m thinking.  And as I remembered the man who would become my first dominant whispering in my ear just before I found myself kneeling at his feet in a haze of confused and heretofore unimagined desire… as I remembered the British musician’s grosgrain smoky voice breaking with a barely contained sexual aggression that defeated every defense I had, to the memory of The Dominant Guy cornering me in an alcove in a hallway at a kink event and within 90 seconds my blurred vision and babbling tongue giving lie to the idea I’d had any control in that situation, and my heart squeezed a bit. I missed that. The control that can be exerted without lifting a finger…how I long for and miss that connection.

Scant moments later, my cell phone vibrated silently in my knapsack by my feet and as I looked down to see what was up, my guts twisted. I’d received a text from The Dominant Guy at that very moment. Now, yes, it has been a little while since we parted ways. And no, it was hardly acrimonious. And, in fact, and perhaps tellingly, we had very recently been at the same event and spoken here and there between classes. And the worst part of it? The fact there was nothing surprising about the seeming coincidence of his message arriving when I was thinking about him. That was par for the course while we were together. Since then, I’ve spent so much time trying to dig up the emotional kudzu of the network of connectivity left behind in the aftermath of the dissolution of that relationship.

Apparently, it isn’t all gone.

Apparently, it may never be.

I still have the very sweet memories of the voices of those who have commanded me living in my heart. Bittersweet to not, this is an issue I cannot stamp out by simply trying to deny that I have these resonating in my heart.  I would not wish to erase them, even if there were some “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ scenario that could facilitate that. And while I do have the faith that there will again resonate in my head the voice that brings me to my knees and silences all of the others in my head with its calm, sweet command and unswerving resolve.