My hands have become a bit autonomous, and it’s a huge relief. I love that they now pick up dishes on their own, turn the dial of the washing machine to 0 while I sit on the toilet, pack bags and turn door handles without a negotiation with my soul now. She brought this to me. She is the executive of my efforts and I have internalized our team goals so that departments run themselves with much less oversight than before she was there. We were more of a collective. It was heavy, before. This freedom of hierarchy makes limits and set expectations that required years of discussion and conflict previously. We set the alarm, all together, by habit though the numbers vary a bit between 6 and 9, depending on the project of creating the new world for the new day we begin often before the sun arrives in the office. My legs take me to pee in the night so that the communications branch can refresh and and deliver reports for tomorrow. It’s darkness, but we must contribute through all time zones, through all health epidemics. Her expectations are boundless. We are more focused, our business far more efficient than before she placed her restrictive needs on our movements.
It’s also never enough. The floor isn’t clean and when it’s not she licks it for emphasis and our group conscience makes another promise.
She manipulates our work ethic with her displeasure; is it our conduct or commitment, is it her own personal problems, the lines are so smudged and crusted with old yogurt we know we will never know which, yet we add “decipher the code of her sadness” to our list for the day. She tests our endurance, and we writhe with pleasure, we see how we weaken and falter under our sleeplessness, we submit to the fury of frustration under her implicit demands, we witness our own crumbling, with the pride of one who knows that their will and abilities are limited, but surge with amazement at our own lasting and staying and coming back for more. She plays with electricity as a lesson to us, she opens her own head until we question our beliefs. We are autonomous. I am not my hands. She and I are in the industry but there is a line; an employer, an employed. We worship her teachings we heaved for 3 days with 8 people, sick with trying just to please her, to show what we were willing to do. She models our way and metes out the consequences. I have become more self-starting under her reign.
The rewards are like pirates sailing on a street car, the benefits package from this life and others. She knows her disciples, she hires and she fires. My hands fondle shit like my nose doesn’t know, my mouth can work too if all digits aren’t enough. We see both sides of night and we welcome the task. A brain that checks the number, turns the dial, throws itself in with the sheets. She’s giving us that. It’s such a relief. I’m a better machine, much softer, and faster, and more accustomed to failure.
Text by Sadie Lune
website: www.sadielune.com
tumblr: www.sadielune.tumblr.com
Illustration by Lo Pecado
Sadie Lune is a multimedia artist, sex worker, pleasure activist and mother. She has won awards for her films and performances, exhibited explicit whore-positive work in venues from a former Army barracks latrine to the SFMOMA, and shown her cervix internationally (in homage to the great Annie Sprinkle). Her writing on art and sex is published in books and magazines in the United States and Europe such as Bend Over Magazine and $pread. She is featured in Too Much Pussy, an explicit documentary directed by Emilie Jouvet about the Queer X Show tour of Europe, and appeared in the adult comedy Mommy is Coming by Cheryl Dunye.
