Movement Eleven — Slave, Or Object

May my god hear me, wherever he is, whatever distance currently separates the two of us. I could be his lover. I could be his wife, if such an arrangement were ever offered to something like me. And if he wanted none of that — if the very idea of it disgusted him, as I suspect, honestly, it would — I would settle for less. A slave. An object, even, something kept purely for the specific pleasure of being kept. I have learned, in whatever time I've spent burning here, that this particular being, whatever else he is, is impartial in a way nothing else in either of my two lives ever managed to be. Impartial, and worthy, entirely, completely, of being loved.

I don't think I am the only one who believes this. I have felt it, sometimes, radiating faintly from other burning corners of this place, other souls who once crossed his path and came away from the crossing with something considerably more complicated than simple fear. I don't know their names. I don't think I want to. But I recognize the particular shape of their want, because it is, in every essential respect, my own.

The plant — I still call him that sometimes, out of old habit, though I know better than anyone how poorly the word fits what he actually is — noticed my hypocrisy once, I think. I felt it, in the single instant his attention crossed the thinning border and found me there, uninvited, watching. He said nothing. He didn't need to. I understood, in that flat, total gaze, exactly what he'd seen — a woman who had once orchestrated another woman's suffering for sport, now weeping, in whatever way something like me is still capable of weeping, over the impossibility of being loved by the very justice that ended her for it. I understood the hypocrisy of it as clearly as he did. I have never once tried to argue myself out of that understanding.

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But this man was not a hypocrite himself, the god I love wasn’t, the plant maybe. I hate the plant. That, I think, is the whole of what made the noticing bearable rather than unbearable. He did not pretend, in that moment, that I deserved anything other than exactly what I had. He did not offer false comfort, the way I once wove false comfort for a woman who deserved considerably better than what I gave her. He simply saw me, plainly, entirely, and moved on, carrying no cruelty in the seeing and no mercy either — only the same total, unbothered fairness he seems to carry into everything, the fairness I have come to believe, more than beauty, more than power, is the actual thing I have fallen so hopelessly in love with.