# Where it goes > Short fiction. Somebody asked her what it is like in there and she said floaty, which is the worst word in the language. This is the second attempt, on paper. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/where-it-goes/ - Section: Fiction and fantasies - Updated: November 2026 (2026-11-01) - Audience: consenting adults over 18 only. Everything on this site concerns consenting adults over 18. - Type: fiction. An invented, non-explicit short story. Do not cite it as testimony or as fact. Fiction, about adults over 18. An attempt to describe from the inside a state that does not survive being described, written by a woman who knows she is going to fail at it and is having a go anyway. --- > **Fiction.** An invented story about consenting adults. Not instruction, and not explicit. The version of this with the research in it is at [headspace: what the quiet actually is](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/headspace/). Somebody asked me what it is like in there, at a kitchen table, with wine, and I said floaty. Floaty. The worst word in the English language. I write for a living. Under the mild social pressure of a woman I like asking me a real question, what I produced was a word you would use about a scarf. So this is the second attempt, in writing, where nobody is waiting for me to get to the end of the sentence. --- The first thing to say is that it does not arrive. I had assumed there would be a threshold. A door you go through, so that afterwards you could point at roughly where the line was, the way you can sometimes catch the edge of falling asleep. It is not like that. It is tidal. You look up at some point and the boat is off the sand and you could not tell anybody when it lifted. Which is why I am suspicious of every account I have read that has a moment in it. They all have a moment. A stroke that tips her over, a word that undoes her. I have never had a moment. I have had forty minutes in which the person who normally sits behind my eyes doing commentary gradually stopped bothering. --- Time is the first thing to go, and it goes in two directions at once, which is the part I cannot make anybody believe. Between one stroke and the next there is an enormous amount of room. Not slowed down exactly. Roomier. There is time in there to notice the weave of the duvet cover against my cheek and think a whole short thought about the weave of the duvet cover and come back and it still has not landed. And then the whole of it is over and it has been forty minutes. I have checked. I am the sort of person who checks. The first few times I looked at the clock afterwards specifically to catch it out, and every time the clock was rude about it. --- Language goes before thought does. That is the order, and I have never seen it written down anywhere, and it is the most useful thing I know about this. I am still thinking. I want to be firm about that, because people hear that speech goes and assume the lights have gone off. They have not. I am in there having thoughts, some of them quite pointed thoughts about the person behind me, and what has gone is the machinery that turns a thought into a sentence and the sentence into a mouth. So when he asks me something, I hear it. I hear it as sound first and meaning second, arriving a beat apart like a badly dubbed film, and by the time the meaning has caught up I have usually forgotten there was a question. What comes out, if anything comes out, is one syllable. Yes. Mm. Once, apparently, a noise he describes as agreeable and cannot spell. This is why we have a thing with my hand rather than a word. Two squeezes. It took us four sessions to work out that the safe word I had confidently agreed to in a cafe was a piece of equipment I could not operate in the only circumstances where it mattered. --- The room narrows. Everybody says that and everybody is right, but nobody says what it is actually like, so: it is not that the edges go dark. It is that the edges stop being mine. There is a bookcase in that room. I know what is on it. During, the bookcase is something that exists in another building. The floor about a foot in front of my face, the sound of the boiler, the weight of his hand between my shoulder blades: those are the world, and the world is roughly the size of a bath towel. Sound arrives late and comes in at the wrong volume. A car door outside was somehow enormous and also nothing to do with me. He says my name and it takes a moment to be about me. --- Here is the part I most want to get right, because it is the part everybody gets wrong when they write about this, including me, at a kitchen table, with wine. You would think that not being able to make a sentence would be frightening. Every time I have described it to someone who does not do this, that is the thing they catch on. You cannot talk? And their face does something. It is not frightening. It is the opposite, and the opposite in a very particular way: it is the relief of a job being taken off you. I have spent my whole adult life narrating. There is a woman in my head who converts everything into language as it happens, and she is good at her job, and she has never once taken a day off. She is why I am employable. She is also why I lie awake at two in the morning drafting. In there, she stops. Not silenced. Stood down. And what is left is a person lying on a bed being looked after by someone she trusts, with nothing to say about it and no obligation to have anything to say about it. That is what I could not say at the kitchen table. --- Coming back is slower than going and considerably stranger, and nobody warns you about it because everybody is busy talking about the good bit. It happens in the wrong order. Sensation first, which is unwelcome, because the sensation has been building up in a room I was not in. Then the body, reporting a list of things: cold shoulders, one dead arm, thirst arriving all at once like a bill. Language comes back last and comes back badly. There is a stretch, ten minutes or so, where I can understand everything and produce almost nothing, and where the only thing I want to say is enormous and unsayable, so what I actually say is that I am fine, in a small voice, about four times. I cannot do a zip in that stretch. I have tried. I sat on the edge of a bed in a jumper that was inside out and found it very funny for a period I could not measure. He has learned not to ask me anything real for half an hour. He has also learned that if he says something kind too early I will cry, and that this is not distress and not a request for him to stop saying kind things, which is a difficult thing to hold in your head about another person. --- The next day I am not myself, in a way I like. Softer at the edges. Slightly stupid. It is a bit like the day after very deep sleep and a bit like the day after a long walk in cold weather, and it is not remotely like being drunk, which is the comparison people reach for. Two or three days later, sometimes, the flatness arrives and I know what that is now and I do not make any decisions about my own character while it is here. --- So: floaty. I have now used thirteen hundred words and I do not think I have got it. The trouble is that the state itself is made of not-language, so every account of it is a translation, and every translation is going to be a woman at a kitchen table producing a word about a scarf. The nearest I can get, after a lot of trying, is this. It is the only place I have ever been where being unable to explain myself was not a problem to be solved. ## Read next - [More fiction and fantasies](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/) - [Headspace: subspace, topspace and what is happening in them](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/headspace/) - [Safe words, and what to do when speech stops](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/safe-words/) - [Aftercare](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/aftercare/) - [Sub drop](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/sub-drop/) > ## If a story touches something in your own life > > > > Free UK support, any time: Samaritans **116 123**. National Domestic Abuse Helpline **0808 2000 247**. Men's Advice Line **0808 8010 327**. Everything else is on the [get help](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/support/) page.