You can never judge a box by its cover!!
People have referred to my life with Ted as a golden cage. But a cage is airy and spacious in comparison.
No.
The box Ted kept me in resembled those I used to get for Christmas or birthdays as a child. Covered in shiny, pink opalescent fabric, embossed with silver, piped in gold and with jewels… for the sparkle.
Remember the ones that opened to a tiny, little, plastic ballerina dancing in circles to a tune in front of mirrors that reflected what was supposed to be her graceful dance, but was really a spastic ticking and sticking of the mechanism attempting to make the figure twirl.
Those boxes always looked nice at first from the outside, but they never really were. The tunes always turn sour in the end.
Each time their sickening sound made me want to vomit as they slowed. And as the ballerina wore out, the pitch would become even more nauseating.
A jewel box, Freud told his famous patient Dora, is a symbol for a man. A woman offers a man her jewel… and he provides the box. In exchange.
But for Ted, the box itself was a game that he thought only he controlled and in Ted’s little head he intended the spectacle to go on indefinitely.
So each time, when he would wind me up, he’d want even more. And the more he got, the more vertiginous his desires would become.
Oh yeah… Ted kept our friends oohing and aahing certainly in response to his generosity and his showmanship. But they never imagined that his show was without end for me, Ted’s party girl acolyte. No part time gig.
In the beginning Ted would open the box and let me dance joyfully, watching in awe, I thought. He loved my free spirit I told myself. And tried to believe it.
But then Ted would wind and rewind the key, over and over, and watch me in the little mirror with his big, bulging fish eyes as I spun for him, without respite, without rest. Never imagining, nor ever considering, my ideas or desires, my limits or my fatigue.
My body was his to use. The rest… were not his concern.
When he’d tire of constantly turning the key or get bored or perhaps when his fingers hurt too much, he’d let the music slow, to that waning, yucky pace that made me, and others, feel uneasy.
His preference though, was for having the key tightly wound so it would be ready.
Then he could flick the box top open to see me dance and clap in shut again.
Flip it up, I would I turn in circles, pound it down, I would fold with the weight of the lid.
Crack it open. Slam it down. Release it. Pound it shut. Expose the dancer. Smash her, crash her, pound her down.
Give her slack. Smack her back.
Dance. Stop. Shop. Party. Snort. Fuck. Sleep.Wake up.
Take another line.
“I want to fuck again,”
Ted would say.
There was no end. Never an end.
The power he must have felt when he’d open the box and see me jump up to spin circles, must have been hallucinating for a man like him.
And then he’d slowly lower the lid, woefully and cruelly, to just a crack, just slightly enough, to watch me prostrating, to the notes, on my little silver spring, now bent on all fours, trying to turn around with no space and no light; to the now sickly sounds, no longer music at all.
He could do whatever he wanted. He liked to control the dance and…
“it was his box anyway,” like he always used to say.
