I was away, in my own head.

In the imaginal, I was yours. You’d given me to Audrey for a night, who in turn used me very, very roughly, late into the night. The next morning, she met with you for coffee, slave girl in tow — who’d been very good, she assured — and you received me back.

In the real — just minutes later — you addressed my subconscious, asking me to let you protect me in my dreams.

And in a funny way, you just had. As another has written before me:

I can’t not be submissive, whether owned or unowned, whether actively dominated or not, whether bound or free. My constant inclination is to submit to any other person around me, which apart from a slave master or mistress, is dangerous and leaves me susceptible. For me and others like me, there is a saving grace in being owned by another, for then I am protected from my own submissive vulnerability.

Being given was protection, for in that world I was yours to give; the comfort of being given — that of knowing one’s place to begin with.

My god, progesterone turns me into such a bitch. Literally over night. Guess the world has to deal with this for the next two weeks.

Geez. I even knew a slave girl!

Worked with her; gave her a lift home more than once! Saw her at PAX a decade later. I suspect I follow her on Instagram even now. At the time I simply didn’t understand.

I am not sure I have experienced submissive humiliation. This is probably the next thing to ascertain.

I’ve always wanted to be kept.

For as long as I can recall. My very first long-form creative writing endeavour (age 7) was an obvious self-insert; an anthropomorphic rabbit, kept. Collared in all but name; a wrist cuff, unable to be removed. In a cell, somewhere far away.

Fantasies of being like Mewtwo in the first Pokémon movie, kept in a lab somewhere, never let out. Actually trying to roleplay that out at a friend’s once (age 9ish). He thought I was weird. I guess he was right. We stopped hanging out.

There was the time I had a different, much closer friend literally tie me to his bed (age 13; what we had on hand to effect this purpose was, uh, socks). Cue EXTREME scrambling to cover this up somehow when his mother well-intendingly burst in at the late hour that it was. I should ask him what he made of my asking to do that at the time.

Hell, it’s not a stretch to see it in the way I’d given myself to romantic relationships up until a few years back. Total abnegation of the self. The subconscious rebels, though, because what I want to give is not even what the most possessive of my partners wanted to take. Not that I really had a clue about myself then, either; it was all these strange, wordless longings, and they’d seem to contradict themselves in ways I couldn’t grasp.

The most frustrating thing was always myself, in the end.

This quest for self-knowledge in earnest has been apace for more than 18 months, now, and I think we’re approaching the last crescendo before the home stretch. Not to suggest I’ll be ever truly finished with it, by any means, but once I’ve found it — once I’ve locked eyes with my soul and listened — I suspect that same, once-eternal dread of facing up to what I’ve made for myself will no longer feature.

And maybe I’ll find myself a keeper or two.