I’ve spent three weeks in bed, in pain, writhing as it gripped my midsection, shedding tears of hurt, of desire unfulfilled, of opportunity lost, of the humiliation that courses through me as I am forced to watch Master fold the socks he’s trained me to do just so. It is a nightmare that I can’t break free from; a newly awoken and horrible prediction of times to come.

My body is failing me for the first time ever. The body that I have given away for use and ownership. It belongs to him now yet I feel helpless as the aging bell tolls in our home.

Do you remember the us of a decade ago? The frantic fucking, the reckless abandon in which we ran through the world hand in hand, how hard we lived? How big those mountains we jumped off were? Would we take those same risks again?

I’ll never forget the first time I knelt to you. Right knee and then left, resting my face into you, heart pounding and soul settling into my destiny.

I will never forget this month too. The same burning desire to kneel to you met with the physical inability to do the very thing that brings me home to you. The pain may be the greatest I have ever experienced.

What does it do to you for me to have to say “no, I cannot right now?” How will you see me and my place in your life? What becomes of a servant who can not serve? A Master owns my life but can that even be at the hands of the master called “time?”

And oh my god this is just the beginning; it’s only the start of the next phase of our lives together. A cruel realization. You and I, kid, we’ve been lucky so far. Years of health and play and pain- the best kind of pain- and maybe that is why this has been so awful. I miss you. Us. Serving. Everything.

But even writing that, it seems false.

Because I still have you. Us. Serving. Everything.

We just have to adapt.

Do you remember the us of a decade ago? The mistakes we made? The lessons unlearned? The uncertainty of self; the inability to express who we were deep down?

We’ve been faced with physical problems but are emerging from our first of many battles surely to come with smiles on our faces and a renewed spirit. I have been able to learn ways to work around my struggle and still somehow take care of you while you take care of me. Protocols have been maneuvered. Your care through it all have made you seem bigger and braver and better than even before (which I would have sworn to be an impossibility.)

Maybe living this way isn’t about how hard of a spanking one can take or how tidy one can keep a home.

Maybe it’s about reverence. Maybe it’s about being able to close your eyes to another human in the precise way that lets them know if you had the physical ability to kneel, you would be doing so at that exact moment.

Maybe it’s about friendship caught on fire.

How can we assuage the master that is time?

The same way we submit to another human being.

We let go of all control, and breathe in the peace that is this moment of being alive.