velvet
Indulgence is my first language, the one I learned alone. Not in spectacle, but in ritual: a glass of wine that coats the mouth just right, the weight of perfume at the throat, flowers arranged like a secret. I take my time getting ready, not out of vanity, but as offering. To the version of myself that believes, still, in eventual satisfaction.
I’ve always turned to beauty as a way of speaking what I couldn’t ask for. Touch, scent, color. Gesture. It gave me something to hold when nothing else did.
But I know where pleasure goes when left unchecked. I've taken it farther than ease and into something sharp. Without boundaries, indulgence becomes a pointed thing. It insists. It names what you crave. I've learned that the hard way.
I don’t think I’m exceptional. Everything about me is ordinary—almost laughably so. Still, pleasure remains this velvet chamber under the sternum, private and humid, undetectable to anyone but me. I hold memory there like a secret, like inherent shame. Ordinary that I am, I wonder if others carry that room inside them. Do they name it? Do they fear it?
I tend to survive on what never arrives. Appetite as pulse. Desire as proof I’m still here. It becomes a private hallucination—sustaining, but dangerous.
Sometimes tuning out is indulgence. Sometimes so is tuning in. Sometimes we fantasize to endure. Sometimes we fantasize to betray.
What I’ve come to believe is this: we don’t fear pleasure because it’s frivolous. We fear it because it’s unsupervised. It grows. It seduces. It transgresses. It doesn’t know when to stop.
Maybe that’s how repression takes root, not from prudishness, but from self-preservation. Because to feel good is to risk undoing what you’ve carefully stabilized. The fear of giving in is the fear of losing safety and having to start again when new desire takes hold.
And still there is a moment, quiet and untraceable, when the body lets go. The hips loosen. The chest softens. The breath disappears. Not just surrender, but envelopment. Not just consumption, but being consumed. And the mind follows—too late.
Maybe indulgence was never about pleasure. Maybe it was about endurance. A way to shape absence into something I could survive.