Love is...

Valentine's Day is quickly approaching. I don't pay this particular holiday much attention since every day is a celebration of the love between my Owner and I, but I have been reflecting on the nature of love lately.

I recently read one person's definitive statement of what love is. It was a narrow definition and didn't describe my experience at all. And it excluded all of the other types of love that I feel in my life - the love that I have for my family, friends, old lovers, and all those who I may love in some capacity in the future as my relationship grows.

But the love for my Owner...that is the most difficult to describe because there is so much there. Just off the top of my head, I would describe our love the following ways:

• Our love is accepting each other as we are.

• Our love is giving ourselves completely in order to please each other.
  

• Our love is great sacrifice, knowing that everything we give will be returned a hundred-fold.
  

• Our love is opening our minds and hearts to experiences that will let us grow together.
  

• Our love is not giving up, no matter how flawed we may be.
  

• Our love is devotion and security, even if it looks like control.
  

• Our love is pain, taking and receiving, recognizing our need to have pain in our lives, and the trust that is required to experience that pain.
  

• Our love is seeing each other, even the ugly parts of ourselves, and truly embracing all parts of each other.
  

• Our love is caring for each other every day and making sure that the other's needs are forefront in our minds.  
  

• Our love is respect in our words, actions and attitudes toward each other.  
  

• Our love is expecting each other to be only exactly as we are and sacrificing any preconceived notions of an ideal partner.  
  

• Our love is loving each other more than anything, even as we share parts of ourselves with others.
  

I invite you to define your love - for anyone and everyone in your life - in the comments.  Happy Valentine's Day!

On Fear

Things are not always as they seem.  There is fear, but I am not scared.  There are tears, but I am not upset.  There is pain, but I am not hurt.  So much of what you see here, dear readers, is a small sliver of the experience.  Think of this place as a singular moment in which you get to peek through the crack in the door.  Your eyes may deceive you.

Take fear: I have described many times my experiences with fear, too many to link to here.  One of my earliest memories is running away from a parent who was about to physically discipline me.  In that moment, as I ran up the steps of the house and locked the bedroom door behind me, I felt a pure rush of adrenaline.  It was something overwhelming, something I had never experienced before.  The feeling recurred in my dreams over the years, usually in a scenario when I was being chased.  I could feel that enticing and terrifying rush in my sleep and I held onto it like it was a precious treasure of an experience.    

When we are together, he recreates that feeling.  He pushes me to a point where I feel like I am in jeopardy, either physically or emotionally.  He brings me to that point of terror and I let him.  I let him.  I trust Him to do that because I know that I am safe in his hands.  He pulls me in opposite directions - between fear and safety, pain and pleasure - and I feel the extreme emotions at each end.  That is the essence of the experience.  That is a delicious feeling and one that I would be hard-pressed to describe to anyone who has not been involved in such an experience.  

The experience of fear feels very real but is buffeted by the ultimately safe nature of the entire framework.  It ends, but I often write from within that experience because it is so world-bending that I cannot keep it inside me.  But I do not live in fear of Him.  I am never really afraid, after all.  I am just experiencing fear in a safe way.  I love him and trust him more because we have the ability to experience that together.    

Same with crying: By now, he knows me well enough to see that I have trouble letting my anxieties and emotions out in a constructive way.  I do not have a place to release those anxieties in my life.  I am too busy placating my family members and pleasing my bosses.  I cannot unleash an emotional torrent on them and I do not know what to do with these feelings.  I suppose I could take up kickboxing, but that's not my cup of tea.

Instead, he helps me exorcise those demons in a constructive way.  He may bring me down with verbal humiliation or push me past where I think I can go.  He is very skilled and knows just how to lead me.  The goal is to allow me to release these emotions, to sob with the grief that I feel and to cry out like I have been longing to all week.  He absorbs everything as he holds me.  Again, there are the emotional extremes, the humiliation and the comfort all in one place.  I am not really upset by the experience, after all.  It is safe for me and it is a wonderfully freeing experience.  Sort of like primal scream therapy for kinky people ;-)

In both situations, if you happened to peek through the crack in the door at the moment when he is holding me down and I am flailing with a look of terror in my eyes, or when I am crying and racked with sobs, you would naturally think "My god, what is that man doing to that woman?"  But your eyes deceive you.  I have been deceived in the very same way.  I have spent days wondering if I should be afraid of him or why he made me cry so, only to talk it over with him and realize that the emotional whiplash of the experience was the purpose, not the fear or the crying.  I get wrapped up in my myopic perspective sometimes and miss the point.  While I am working that out and until I come to a place of understanding, I come here to write.    

That's my excuse.  Yours is that you don't always get to see everything that goes on inside this relationship.  That is understandable.  I don't give you a running account of my whole life that would provide the context for much of what I do.  But it is not my job to provide you with a comfortable experience every time and it is not my job to make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside every time.  Many of you do feel comfortable and warm and fuzzy, judging from a great majority of the comments.  For everyone else, I don't really owe you an explanation as I do not expect you to constantly explain yourselves to me, although I'd like to provide a little understanding from my end.  

And that is the point of blogging after all.  To open up my world to you so I feel less alone, and maybe open yours up to an experience that you have only dreamed about.  Or to educate you about different perspectives or to educate me about my own limitations.  I feel a profound amount of love and peace in my relationship and in my submission, and if you can grab on to even a tiny piece of that, then we will have connected in a meaningful way.  All you have to do is open your heart and see that I have been here, pouring mine out all along.    

Myself

I only ever wanted a place to be myself.  All of this is so hidden and I didn't want to continue behaving as if I felt ashamed about it.  I wanted to air out some of this, give it room to breathe and let the light of day burn away all of irrelevancies.  In more than a year of posting, I have shared many things, even things that I knew would not be welcome for some.    

It took so much for me to get here, 29 years of reflection and self-discovery.  I never knew that I would end up here, but I am happier for it.  I am happy every day, even when a post does not reflect that.  Maybe I wrote because I was working through something that had actually happened, or maybe I was spinning out ideas that were only based on fantasy.  Maybe I had already resolved  to make a change by the time you read my words, maybe I did change, or maybe He backtracked and things leveled off before I could even process it.  I come to this from all angles.  I only wanted to allow myself to think.

I write for myself and for you.  I give you maybe 1/16 of myself, if that.  I keep so much of myself back, but I do want you to understand.  There are many of you that never will.  And to you, I would simply ask you to move on.  There is the whole wide internet out there.  Find your people and be with them, and leave me with my thoughts.  

Forever and Ever

"I'm never happier than when I'm next to you," He whispered.

"Me either," I sighed as I held Him closer. "I hope it's like this forever."

"I want that more than anything."

Faults

I am impatient. I have been my whole life. I don't want to seem like I'm skirting responsibility, but I learned from the best. My mother is the most impatient person that I know. I can't tell you how often she snaps my father's name, as if he were the cause of all of her problems. The poor man. He is so quiet and can never catch a break, not in 40 years of marriage.

Anyway, back to me...I'm impatient. I used to have a roaring temper, but now I am merely occasionally short-tempered. I tend to get lost in my moods and forget that everyone else isn't ruled by the ill wind. I can be petty and argumentative and childish. I can be frustratingly blunt. I can really put my foot in it. I can be short-sighted and give up too easily. I can be needlessly rebellious. I can be rigid, and at times I can be careless with the rules. I can be over-sensitive and I cry too easily. I am excitable and easily distracted. I am difficult to live with. I am too hard on myself.

I am all of these things. These are my faults and I keep a daily running tally of them. I see them all the time. But Him? He thinks I'm perfect. He thinks everything I do is perfectly adorable, from the way that I excitably greet him on the phone ("HI! Hi Daddy! Hi!"), to the fact that I still drink milk every night with dinner, to the way that I hum while I brush my teeth, to the holes in my socks. Even through all of my failures and my faults, of which there are many and which crush me daily like a lead weight, he loves me completely and thinks the world of me.

There are times when I am sure that he is going to give up on me, or at least start to be a little less than 100% charmed by everything I do, but that never happens. Not even now, after 16 months together, has his ardor faded. How is that possible? I've had longer relationships, but never one where the lovey-dovey phase lasted this long or where we didn't start getting on each others' nerves to some extent. I wonder if we will always be this way.

I hope we will always be this way.

Daring

I thought I was over my period. Actually, I was, but it came back while I was fucking Him the other night. When He told me to get off of him and suck his cock, I saw a smear of blood on him and recoiled. I wasn't going to take him in my mouth like that. I just wasn't.

He saw what I saw and pushed me down toward his cock anyway. I whimpered and then shook my head slightly. I didn't want to disobey him, I feared bluntly saying "no," but I just couldn't do it. My eyes filled with tears as he persisted.

"Please Daddy, no, don't make me," I moaned, but he was unrelenting.

"Yes Kitten, now, take me in your mouth."

"But...but...," I sputtered, flailing my arms around helplessly. I balled up my fists and crushed them against my eyes, trying to block out what seemed inevitable.

"Just fucking do it," He growled.

I inched down toward his cock, looking anywhere but at him, trying to get out of this, trying to think of a solution. When it looked like I wouldn't be able to escape, I opened my mouth reluctantly and moved toward him.

But at the last possible second before my mouth touched his cock, he pulled me up and tenderly said, "That's enough." He sighed as he held me against him.

I should have felt relieved, but I was irate. How could he do that to me? It was a mindfuck, pure and simple. It was manipulation. It was humiliating. I was so stupid. I pushed against him, unwilling to feel grateful that he had let me go at the last second. Instead I felt a surge of hatred at what he did to me.

As he held me tighter, I struggled. "What do you feel right now?," he whispered, touching himself and watching me closely. "Mad," I grunted. "How could you do that?" I lost all sense of obedience and let my resentment course through my body.

"More, tell me more," he urged. I let the words spill from my mouth. "You can just do that, you can mess with me. You knew that I would do it if you asked. You fucked with me." I started beating my fists against his chest and I could see that he was growing more excited.

"Tell me, I know how you feel about me right now," he growled.

"I hate you, that's how I feel, I hate you," I shouted as I hit him in a frenzy. I was a blur of aggression, but he kept me held tightly to him throughout. I was angry but I was safe, venting everything that I held pent up inside me.

And then he came all over me in a rush of sighs and moans. He brushed my hair back from my face as I laid next to him in stunned silence. What had just happened?

"I control all of you, Kitten," he said, looking down at me. "I can bring everything out of you, everything that you've been hiding. I know that you hate that I can make you do anything, but sometimes you need to be reminded."

I smiled at him ruefully, giving him one last bump on his chest with my fist before cuddling deep in his arms.