Going without...

I didn't think I would be adding any further posts to this blog.  With each passing week and each passing month, a bit of the "me" who wrote all those entries atrophied until I woke up one day and the life that made this blog possible was gone.

It was a gradual loss.  A slow dulling of senses and numbing of feelings.  An almost imperceptible seeping away; the cracked bucket of water on a sandy beach.  One minute it's filled with water and you think it'll just sit there waiting for you, but the next time you look it's empty.  While you were busy paying attention to something you thought was more important, while you took the water, secure in its bucket, for granted, it escaped.  It escaped so stealthily and slowly that the sand underneath is already bone dry.  It's as if the water was never there to begin with and you can't help but wonder if you imagined it. 

Had I imagined the whole thing?  Had there really been a time when a single look from Him could send shivers down my back and make my stomach contract with pleasure and fright?  Had I made up the bruises and the rope marks and the long red remnants of a knife dance?  Had I really swung, tied up and naked, in front of strangers in an exhibition hall?  Had I really enjoyed that?

My body held no memory, no scars, no residual afterglow and there was no one around to remind me.  The insidious numbness has set in so slowly and so thoroughly that by the time I realized the full extent of it, it was far too late for recovery.  Still, I tried.  I turned to the books and stories I loved, I went back to my own writing, I even came back to this blog and nothing helped.  None of it made sense, none of it connected or found an answering echo of a sensation.

So I stopped trying. 

I put away the books.  I filed away the stories.  I pretended this blog didn't exist.

You might ask, so what's so wrong with a life without D/s?  Nothing...  There's nothing wrong with it.  It's a fine life.  A fine, dull, boring, lifeless life.  A life lived at half-volume.  It's not too sad and not too happy.  On a scale of emotions from one to ten, a life without D/s is compressed to a scale of three to eight.  By all accounts, it's a safe and normal life.

It's a life that leads me to take a knife to my own arms just to feel something.

I may not remember what a life with D/s feels like, but I remember that it's better than this and I'm ready for this to be over.