Content note: drugs, alcohol, and hypnosis.
We were high a lot of the time that we were in Portland. Portable weed vapes were readily available in stores, after all. That drug cast a vibrant glow over my memories from the trip. I am always awed by traveling to unfamiliar places, and I am always awed by Matt; stoned, I was extra-awed by both.
One late night, at a fancy restaurant, I sipped wine through a druggy haze while gazing lovingly at my beautiful partner across the table. We were waiting for our entrees when I glanced up and noticed it: to my right, a wine rack, several wine glasses hanging from it upside-down. One of the glasses, having just been haphazardly slid into place by some rushed-off-their-feet server, was seesawing back and forth a little in its spot. Dangling. Swinging, like a pendulum, or a pocketwatch.
“Yeah, that’s a little trancey,” Matt confirmed, seeing where my eyes had gone.
The thing about Matt being my hypnotist – in the sense that hypnokinksters use that word: they’re my dom, they’re my top, they’re my hypnotist – is that their words can change my reality. What they say can become true to me simply by virtue of the fact that they said it. So when Matt identified that swinging wine glass as trancey, just as my own mind had arrived at that conclusion itself, that truth became doubly true. My eyes stayed locked on the glass until I felt the familiar sensation of my gaze starting to soften, my brain starting to dim. I went slack and dropped down into trance. The sounds of the busy restaurant around me faded into white noise. My heavy eyelids dragged me deeper. I relaxed into the softness and the quietness and the depth.
“Open,” Matt said curtly, the command that jolts me back into the land of the living. I snapped awake, eyelids and spine and brain all re-solidifying and coming back online. “Whoa,” I said, barely registering their smug smirk. Our food arrived and I ate mine with the sludgy slowness of a fractionated girl.
For the rest of our time at the restaurant, my eyes would periodically slide back over to that wine rack. Sometimes a glass was swinging; sometimes they all lay still. Once, someone bumped the rack en route to the kitchen and all the glasses started to sway: gentle, calming, seductive. I felt myself starting to drop again, and the sensation was so sweet that I made no attempt to pull myself out. Matt kept me safe, waking me in time for our waiter’s every approach. And though I tried not to look at the wine rack so I could stay engaged in our spotty conversation, it drew my eye inexorably toward it.
“I’m sorry about this,” I said vaguely, knowing the average person wouldn’t want their dinner companion to be so spacey, so absent and distractible.
But Matt isn’t the average person. “Don’t be sorry. I’m enjoying watching you,” they said, and they visibly were.
Eventually we paid the check and made our way out into the world, which still felt to me like a music video, or a kaleidoscope, or a trance.