For me, time has stopped being a progression and become a form of waiting.
That is what bothers me most to admit.
Not obedience.
Not stillness.
The waiting.
For years I thought submission was supposed to feel a certain way. More intense. More obvious. More rewarding.
I thought there would be some recognizable payoff.
There isn’t.
Most of the time, I am simply waiting.
Waiting for a word.
Waiting for a correction.
Waiting to find out whether something will happen today or whether nothing will happen at all.
And the strange thing is that this should be unbearable.
Sometimes it is unbearable.
Yet I am still here.
When the Owner starts counting, the numbers stop feeling like numbers very quickly.
Not because I fall into a trance.
Not because I lose awareness.
It is something much more ordinary than that.
I start paying attention to ridiculous details.
The way certain numbers sound in his voice.
A pause that lasts slightly longer than the others.
The faint sound of fabric shifting.
The rhythm of a breath that is not mine.
I do not know why I keep noticing those things.
But I do.
And then I notice them again.
Ten.
Twenty.
Thirty.
The numbers should be what matter.
Yet afterward, what I remember is rarely the numbers.
It is a speck of dust suspended near a light.
A wrinkle in a piece of fabric.
The feeling that my left shoulder was sitting slightly higher than my right.
It is stupid.
But it stays.
More than anything else.
There are moments when I catch myself thinking that I could leave.
And it is not a fantasy.
It is an objective observation.
I could.
There are no magical chains.
No hidden mechanism.
I could stand up.
I could disappear.
I could rebuild a life where nobody occupied so much space inside my head.
Then I try to imagine that life.
And that is where the problem begins.
I can imagine it.
And it feels empty.
Not because I need this.
Not because it makes me happy.
Not because I enjoy being this.
Simply because entire parts of my perception have learned to orient themselves toward a specific presence.
Like a plant that has spent too many years growing toward a single window.
It does not love the window.
It does not even understand the window.
Yet it keeps turning toward it.
Sometimes I am irritated by how much I think about him.
Genuinely irritated.
There are days when I want a simpler existence back.
To read something.
To walk somewhere.
To sleep.
To think about literally anything else.
And yet I end up staring at my phone.
Or replaying a conversation.
Or trying to remember the exact wording of a sentence.
Not because it was important.
Because often it wasn’t.
My attention has simply learned an orbit it no longer knows how to leave.
The counting continues.
Forty.
Forty-one.
Forty-two.
And somewhere between one number and the next, an uncomfortable realization appears.
I am not afraid of disappearing.
I am not afraid of staying either.
What frightens me is the possibility that even if I left, I would still be waiting.
That the orientation would remain.
The habit.
The tendency.
That strange reflex of remaining attentive to something that does not always bring pleasure, relief, or peace.
Only presence.
And perhaps that is the hardest thing to explain.
There are moments when I do not want to be submissive.
I do not even like being submissive.
Yet I still cannot stop wondering what happens next.
Whether he will speak.
Whether he will correct something.
Whether he will appear.
Whether he will not.
And while I keep telling myself that it should matter less, I discover that I am still listening.
Still waiting.
Still here.
The neck I am not moving it the neck has locked I should…
