Mistress Appreciation

It occurred to me that the casual reader may derive a negative view of my relationship with my Mistress, given how much sadness and self-doubt can be found in my posts. Let me reiterate that these are the reflections of someone surprised by her own behavior and not the complaints of a dissatisfied submissive. As I write in an earlier post, I am recording here my internal monologue, not a historical record of objective facts.

But I would like to write a happier post, to state why I like my Mistress and feel that She earned my loyalty. Such a post is overdue, because of course this appreciation is also a major part of of my internal monologue. In no particular order, here are some nice things that I want to say about my Mistress.

• She and I have great conversations, in which She shares her thoughts and takes mine seriously.
• She tries to understand who I am so She can make my second life happier.
• She protects me when I get into trouble, which isn't often, but it's happened and She was there and strong for me.
• She strokes my hair when I am sad or particularly well behaved.
• She treats me with dignity, even though I am her sub.
• When I've needed discipline, she has provided it with both firmness and humanity.
• She made me (by more than one account) the most adorable animation in Second Life (in which I jump and clap my hands).
• She puts pictures of me on the walls of Her studio.
• She often drops everything to be with me when I log in.
• She teaches that RL>SL, which means both that She understands when I can't log on and that I should understand when She can't (not that I'm terribly good at that).
• Her rants are hilarious and yet also insightful.

With a Mistress like that, can you blame me for being depressed when She is not available to me?

It is late spring now, and the coming of Mother's Day and Father's Day is on my mind, since I live some distance from my parents and I have to factor in mail when it comes to getting presents. It seems to me that there should be Dom/mes Day, where all the subs express their appreciation for all their Dom/mes do for them. If I ever get to attend a Hallmark Board meeting, I will make this proposal--and see how quickly I get invited back to said board meeting.

/me smiles broadly....

The Guilty Abandoned

She felt as though she were a statue of ashes--bitter, useless, damned--like the salt statues of Gomorrah. For she was guilty. Those who love God, and by him are abandoned in the dark of the night, are guilty, because they are abandoned. They cast back into their memories, searching for their sins.

--Pauline Reage, The Story of O

The quote from The Story of O typifies how you feel when deprived of contact with your Master or Mistress. The isolation is hard to bear, and your imagination takes over and you start to wonder what you did to cause it. Of course, often you have nothing to do with it in reality, so you are just swimming in your own paranoia. So it is this state, where your own mind tortures you with relationship chimera, that is most dangerous to subs. It is dangerous because it is an unhappy place to be, and also because it makes you more needy when you finally get to see your Master or Mistress again (running the risk that you will frustrate Him or Her with your neediness).

Understanding this state in turn helps explain what what one does (as opposed to merely thinks) during the twilight girl times. Visually, it looks something like the following, with me kneeling before Her image or Her empty chair:



But what is going on while I'm in that pose? A couple days ago, I had three "accomplishments" from that position.

1. I IMed but declined to visit some friends. I had a bad connection, so that was a part of the motivation for not going out to be with them.
2. I watched a photo album wall hanging in Her studio and fretted that the number of pictures with me in them may have decreased as a percentage over the past month or so. Note that the images are randomly displayed and in reality I think all that happened was the script didn't show any pictures of me for a few minutes. In other words, I was just being paranoid.
3. I hunted through my calling cards list and friends list to see if any of my friends deleted me. This would be a paranoid activity, except in fact one of them had deleted me, someone whom I really like and respect. I IMmed her, and she told me that her master had asked her to remove all friendship cards that he didn't know about. In other words, it had nothing to do with me, per se, or at least that's what she claims.

OK, so this all probably sounds pretty dark and maybe a little pathetic. But let me clarify some things. I write this not because I am depressed and miserable in RL (probably I am both of those things, but not because my Mistress and I have been on different clocks for much of the past month). It is not my desire to complain or blame anyone. I write entries like this because I am surprised by my own behavior, surprised that in Her absence, I do things like act out the twilight girl routine. My purpose here is to describe my internal state, no matter how divorced from any reasonable reality it is, rather than to describe objectively what is going on.

Emotional Noxema

RL has been emotionally trying lately, and if you've read anything else here in the past month, you know I haven't seen much of my Mistress, either, much to my disorientation and sadness. So RL and SL have both been rather painful of late.

So today I logged on, and of course She wasn't there. I sent Her an IM, just fishing, basically. After a few minutes, She didn't log in, so I started wandering around alone. I wound up at one of Her stores, looking at Her picture in a vending machine. More pathetic twilight girl pining, but that's where my head was.

Suddenly, a blue dialog appeared on my screen: "L--- is online." My Mistress and I were actually online at the same time!

Immediately, I teleported to Her studio, and we hopped onto a hammock and snuggled. We talked about this and that for a half hour, nothing earthshattering or particularly deep. But the experience was to my emotions like Noxema to sunburned skin.

Twilight Girl

This blog has been quiet of late. There is little to report, hence the silence. My Mistress's absence continues (actually She tells me She is online often, so I guess we're just missing each other). In the past three or four weeks, we have spent about one hour together. My emotional rollercoastering is past: fear, anger, hurt, blame, self-recriminations have all been replaced by a serene numbness that doesn't really hurt, but which isn't good.

Before I had a Mistress, my virtual life was fun and diverse. I was seeking some steady companionship to be sure, but I was content tagging along with various friends, meeting new people, going to new places, having new experiences. Since our courtship and my collaring, I became (appropriately, I believe) focused on Her. For weeks, I experienced the world with--and through--Her. It was a happy and fulfilling time for me. (Did I focus too much on Her and inadvertently push Her away? I hope not.)

But with the two of us pretty much disconnected of late, I've found myself in an awkward spot. With Her unavailable to me, I cannot see the world with and through Her. This leaves me with several possible options:

• I can stay offline
• I can log in, go to Her space, and wait/mope by myself
• I can log in and return to my life before as much as possible
• I can log in and do something "useful," such as learn to build or script, go to a library and study more on how to be a good submissive, etc.

I have not really settled on any of these options, and have actually done a little of each. All are vaguely unsatisfying, since they underlie a basic lack of purpose, hence my notion of "twilight identity." In my everyday activities, I am neither Hers nor not-Hers; regularly online or off; a tagalong socialite or a budding contributor to SL. Some people, sensing my new freedom and availability are starting to hit on me. But they will not get anywhere with that: I belong to my Mistress and that is not about to change (unless She releases me, of course, which I hope She doesn't do). My loyalty runs a lot deeper than a couple unhappy weeks!

I can honestly say that sitting around moping is not a lot of fun, but of the four options listed above, it is surprisingly the most common option for me to do. Sitting in a tower (submissive) position in an empty space waiting for someone to log on who doesn't (and whom you don't expect to) seems like a ridiculous way to spend time in a virtual world as rich as Second Life; you become a piece of furniture, a disused toy, waiting for someone to use you. This is not the best person to be, and yet it is true to how I feel, which I guess is why I do it. (And for what it's worth, I do IM friends from that position.)

An avatar is already a strange mix of in-world persona and real-life person. As we form relationships online, we perform our roles but we also develop and experience real emotions. Online, we are always twilight people. When you add the present disorientation I am experiencing to that, I am even more so a twilight girl.

A citizen of the sunset, I follow the Evening Star while the silent Earth spins beneath me.

Worlded Companionship

This week I had a realization about virtual relationships, and that is how dependent on the worlds in which they take place they are. This should have been obvious, and in many ways it is: I cannot separate my notion of my Mistress from the image of Her avatar or from Her studio where we often hang out. But this week I discovered a new way that is less obvious (at least to me). Let me explain.

Last week, my Mistress, who can be scarily focused when She wants to be, got into a groove with a build She was working on. In two days, She took the sands of a desert sim and built a sizable castle-like structure and a separate pavilion with a speed and on a scale that I would have never thought possible. Kudos to Her for Her amazing ability; kudos also to SL's screwy modeling environment, which for all of its shortcomings, was robust enough to enable this particular accomplishment.

Anybody after a productivity marathon like that would require a little downtime. My Mistress didn't take it, though, first continuing to build Her pavilion and later moving onto all manner of related business matters. Also, I am ashamed to admit, I demanded some of Her time, in part because She had been so focused on other things the preceding days.

And after that, She crashed.

She disappeared from Second Life for four days and counting (as long as I've known Her, She has not been gone so long). Surely this is a healthy thing. Maybe She's spending some quality time with her RL husband. Maybe She's killing orcs in some other MMO. Maybe She took up knitting. Whatever She's up to, She isn't up to it in SL.

My realization in all of this was this: Once She was burned out on the world, She was burned out on everything in it, including me. I don't believe Her departure was allecto-related. Maybe I flatter myself by thinking perhaps Her departure was in spite of me (rather than in part because of me). Either way, I will confess to having the hope that even if She blew off the rest of SL, She would still come on to see me, when she knows I am most likely to be online. She didn't.

Thus, whereas we all like to believe that amor vincet omnes, that our relationships matter more than the material surroundings in which they take place, I think that such a notion is naive. Even when our material surroundings are pixels and chat interfaces, they are constitutive of, rather than incidental to, the social relationships we form within them.

During the time of Her absence, I have also barely logged onto to Second Life. I have friends there, ones I really care about, ones I like to hang out with. But with the absolute absence of my Mistress, I just lack the motivation to go in. It works both ways: the world is constitutive of my social relationships, yes; but my social relationships are also constitutive of the world. When the relationships aren't there, the world itself shudders and blinks out of existence.