I close my eyes and let it happen.

It's a funny thing, to surrender. To be pulled out with the tide, to be swept away, agency denied, choice forgotten, to accept the here and now as real and sovereign, indisputable. To discover the ability to bend, down inside myself, to see that when the world will not yield, I must, and that there is strength in that flexibility, safety in that mutability, what bends doesn't break, and there is always a deeper capacity to bend.

I'm on an invisible rollercoaster, finding my way through the black. When I think of the future or remember the past, the fear overwhelms, so I do neither. I exist on the head of a pin, anchored with precision to the now.

I'm one with what's happening to me. It's new, it's different, but it's not unbearable. And underneath it there's the familiar ache, the build of tension, the knowledge that this war within me pleases you, that it's a sacrifice for you, contained within my little body as I suffer at your feet.