Memories of wax

This morning, the scent of wax brought waves of memory.

Dripping wax on my own skin when I was a teenager, long before I let myself admit that I was kinky, soaking up the feeling of inflicting pain. I used up a whole box of fancy blue and green candles, four different shades, very slowly.

Bottoming to wax play for the first time, where it had very little to do with pain at all. Just a warm wash on my skin, and the feeling of being encased and decorated. Wax melted on slow heat in a crock pot and poured on in big splashes. So different from what I imagined, so much about sensuality, with no sharp notes in it. A confusing disappointment that I had no words to articulate.

Teaching myself to do wax play in my late 20s, from books and websites and experimentation. Testing it on myself, savoring the long sharp drips of pain it could bring, imagining creating that kind of pain in others.

I was never really interested in play that was about decoration or how things look. Was not into play that was about sensuality.  When I fantasized about wax, it was outside the common ways that I have heard a lot of folks in kink community talk about doing it, as sensation play, as being about creating art. I wanted to play with pain and cruelty, and because I taught myself, on myself, I could use the techniques I learned to my own ends. Wax was the first sort of play that I claimed for myself, and I made it about pain, and about fear.

I bought my first two knives intending to use them for wax play. The first was a hunting knife with a very sharp blade that drew my own blood the very first time I tested it on my skin, even before I tried to remove wax with it. Drawing that bright red so seductive, the scent of metal coming from my own skin, the shock of the blood to my core, all twisted round desire. The second remains my only serrated play knife, and it has taken so many layers of wax, from my own body, from other people’s bodies, one slow inch at a time, without drawing a drop of blood.

My kind of wax play shifts how time works. It doesn’t create the same kind of arc that often occurs in a pain play scene. It is this slow dance of pain and anticipation, with a lovely counterpoint of draw out fear that comes with a sharp blade slowly removing every little bit of wax. I love the jolt of it, that’s where the juice is, watching those tiny spurts of fear, those delicious bursts of pain bloom in a bottom’s eyes. Drinking those down, one drop at a time, is where my pleasure resides.