afloat

i miss my owner. now i've said it.

i've been fighting the urge to say it, aware that it's my own fault if i haven't been seeing him. i have been fighting the urge to tell him because i know that i can't expect that he'll be there when i need him there. i know it can't be that way. But even during the time when i haven't been able to see him, i have been missing him. of course i have. i was just ashamed to tell him because i know it's me who's messing things up.

so instead of telling him, i do things the coward way and put a message in a bottle

one

since my bf's departure i've been re-exploring my own self and getting in touch once more with the intrinsic loneliness of the human condition. You're born alone and you die alone. These are the words that echo in my mind when i stop to listen. It's this inescapable condition, this being "one", "single", "isolated" that eats me up from within. i can try and hide in the safety of ownership, in the warmth offered by a pair of arms but they can never reach deep down into me and melt with me, shatter the one-ness into a multitude of pieces.

i somehow always go back to being one.

the big sell-off

i have no words. at times some events leave me speechless. Disappointed and speechless. Unable to understand. Some people i have met are self-assured enough to know it's always someone else's fault. Me, i have no idea what to think.

"I don't wanna meet again".

I got this text message from someone who's supposedly my friend after he's come back from holiday. Final. He had deleted my number from his phone without letting me know. He had to text me to find out who was sending him a message asking the reason for his silence.

This is not someone i've chatted to last week and now is not interested in meeting up. This is someone i've known for about a year. Someone i considered a friend. Someone i've talked to about very personal stuff that was going on with me. Someone who wanted to introduce me to his partner. Someone whose key i've driven across London to pick up when he was moving here. Someone i've lost 2 points on my driving license for. Someone, more seriously, who i've gone to a fucking Kylie Minogue concert for.

"You don't need to reply as I made my decision about this".

light

i'm glad, i'm managing to stick to more of a regular gym schedule. After feeling low for a coulpe of weeks i've got back into the habit of training my body to make it more pleasing to my Master.

i have booked an assessment with a nice trainer at my gym to review my programme. Having to cancel my saturday appointment as per my Master's instructions, i rescheduled for next week. After booking the time slot the guy tells me it won't be with him but with some other trainer. He must have seen the disappointment in my eyes because about an hour later he comes to see me saying that if i wanted to train with him he could find me another time slot when he would be available.

i was quite surprised and taken aback by his delayed offer but was quite pleased i wouldn't have to do the assessment with some guy i didn't know.

What's this post doing on this blog? I don't know, it means i'm a little more positive and light hearted.

irony

it's sadly ironic when you really want to please, serve and satisfy someone, make them happy, and it feels like you've managed to achieve the exact opposite.

the bully

a couple of weeks ago i chatted after many months with someone who used to own me a long, long time ago: my first longer-term real-life master, in fact. His presence in my life was something of a short-lived, negative experience: never before had i met someone who could so skillfully manage to make me feel really shit about myself.

He has spent the last 15 months or so on some sort of death-row blocked status on my msn buddy list while i told myself i should delete him altogether. For some reason i didn't manage to delete him, however many times i considered it. i obviously seek that which destroys me. Besides, he exists in my mind landscape and there is no way for me to actually erase him even if i delete him from all my contact lists.

he is a sort of school bully: the guy that you dread running into because he's going to embarrass you in front of other people, force you to do stuff you "don't" want to do and make you feel lowly and dirty.

With him it's always a mix of being wanted and rejected. I used to look at him with a desire to please him and be wanted but he would always respond talking to me like he considered me a piece of trash. At the same time he did want me as a slave because i responded with genuine hurt to his taunts and he enjoyed that.

In this latest chat he again confused me with mixed messages. In his eyes, my submissiveness classifies me as a "looser", someone of little worth to amuse himself with. At the same time he says "you were perfect, exactly what i wanted" and i stupidly feel pleased by this remark however marked with contempt.

His approach kept me hooked for some time, yearning for his approval and consideration, something that appeared always out of reach, if not altogether out of sight. A final embrace that never came, replaced instead by cold mockery and ridicule.

Although determined to see the positive side of this somewhat twisted rapport in the satisfaction i could see it gave him, i eventually untangled myself and managed to escape from him. During the last few weeks i was his, i would feel nauseous and uneasy all day, his influence penetrated every moment of my life and i was completely unable to ever feel relaxed and at ease.

When i started freeing myself from his ownership i felt the greatest relief, like i could finally start breathing again. It took time, though. For a long period he kept trying to keep me in some sort of cybercaptivity by refusing to return my online accounts' passwords, insisting that i owed him one thing or another.

He obviously feels my own reactions are somehow inconsistent and i couldn't blame him for it. I both seek and run away from the treatment he so naturally reserves for me. I can't help it. I was genuinely pleased to talk to him again even though there is no doubt in my mind i am better off as far away as possible from this man. The last time we chatted i ended up having to block him because i felt terribly low for days and didn't dare unblock him until very recently.

There is no solution to this situation. I think he instinctively gets me without rationally understanding me at all. Even in my persistent attempt to try and make things right and get along with everybody, i can do nothing but surrender in the face of the mix of attraction and repulsion (intended as the force that naturally pushes 2 entities away from each other) that will always characterise this particular relationship.

ajar

back from a short trip... so many blog entries, started and left unended... i have somehow lost myself... again.

The therapist said the other day that "i need the therapy". I think she was merely repeating what i had said before, but hearing it coming from her, i didn't like it. Perhaps because i could only agree. Everything at the moment seems larger than me and impossible to manage. I fail to understand how i'm supposed to react to events that involve me. Presence and absence: they both trouble me and leave me unable to respond.

i feel tired and all i want is to sleep

winter

The blog has become alien to me. My slave self is being held in void space, unable to move in any direction. unable to feel, suffer, rejoice, grow, develop. Perhaps it's sleeping the winter months somewhere else and will come back to visit at some point in the future.

Everything in my daily life at the moment seems to lack any intensity or depth. my soul is starved of nutrition. My boyfriend is here for a few months, my Master is somewhat absent, my therapist thinks i need to see her 3 times a week, my gym programme is not challenging, my job is as invigorating as narcotics and the weather is dull.

i saw online that C is seeking a live-in slave and i suddenly missed being under 25. i felt sad. somewhere within me seems to be engraved the notion that a slave has to be under a certain age, whatever that age is, to be appealing to an owner and i resent the passing of time and the human body's innate longing for decay.

i listen to music and let these winter days and winter moods pass me by with their lazy, unremarkable ways.

pre-school

at the age of 4 or 5, i used to play "slaves" with a friend. The friend in question was a girl my age. The game would normally take place in my room where she would sit on the bed and i would kneel on the floor. i don't remember too much of what was going on, only that i had a toy keyboard that she would keep on the bed next to her. Every now and then she would press on the keys and i would mimic being in a state of pain, like i was being tortured.

Some time we would switch roles because she wanted to be the slave too, but i did so unwillingly.

in the playground

at the age of 8, me and a classmate, we used to sit during recess and talk about slavery.

i have to smile thinking of these 2 kids talking slaves instead of playing. So meant to be, isn't it? I wonder if this kind of stuff happens all the time, i wonder if out there in London, today, how many schools had children sitting around on the side of a courtyard discussing what masters could do to their slaves.

And i wonder what happened to my classmate, where he is now and whether he's grown to be into BDSM. I've googled him, but with no success.

He used to tell an open-mouthed smaller and marginally more innocent version of me how, in "the past", if a master had something wrong, like a disease, he could could get his slave to lie on his back on the floor in front of him and with his feet press down onto the slave's stomach so that the disease would be transferred from the master to the slave and the master would have nothing to worry about. i remember seeing in my head those tiny little spots slowly disappear from the master's legs and start to appear on the slave's stomach.

What powerful gift is a child's imagination.

childhood trauma

At the age of 3 or 4, while on holiday with my family, my mother had put me down for a nap in the afternoon. But i didn't sleep because a frightening monster was in the room with me. I remember it flying around the bedroom in crazy spins and the noise, the buzz, growing louder and quieter as the thing flew back and forth, closer and farther from me. i remember the noise it made when it hit the window, like an electric discharge. i was crying and shouting trying to get somebody to rescue me but nobody came. i remember trying to find the strength to get out of bed, reaching out to grab the door handle and get out of the room. The next thing i remember is peeping out of the kitchen window at my mother sunbathing on the terrace.

For a long time, these memories were in my head but i thought they were a dream. I have had a fair share of nightmares about insects throughout my childhood and i guess i always figured this was one of them. It is only around the age of 12 that i found out this had actually happened.

i am generally a rather controlled person but all my life there's only been one thing that has made me completely lose control. That is that buzz: i'm terribly frightened of insects, the ones that fly, that buzz, that move fast and seem out of control. Especially if in a confined space, i get panic attacks, i shout, i run, i try to get away, i can't control myself.

When my memories were confirmed as being true, i was also told that when my mother found me, my face was flushed with a multitude of tiny red dots as blood vessels had burst under the strain and effort of shouting.

eurochristmas

how much of who you are is made up of where you are from? the place where you were born, what people you've had around you, all those elements of course have a profound impact on the person that you are.

Spending some time "home" for Christmas i have enjoyed coming back to what has made me the person that i am. Being used to living in the uk, it's fun to rediscover the little differences that make up the big picture and point out to the fact that you're in a different country.

My home country is Italy. i like my country: i think it's quite cool at times, and quite annoying at others. all in all you could say i love it from afar. living there would drive me insane but going there from time to time is great and i keep on good terms with the nation as a whole.

The main thing that annoys me about being from italy, though, is that everybody i meet has such a clear opinion of it, even if they've never set foot there. They've all heard and internalised certain facts about the country and they all regurgitate them and spurt them all over my shirt when i talk to them.

Americans, i'm sorry to say, are the worst. Because they transpose this idea of italian-americans onto italian-italians. Italian-americans themselves seem to have an idea of italy that's romanticised at best, and delusional at worst.

For this reason i generally dislike telling people that i'm italian, because i know that any comment about italy, whether positive or negative, is going to piss me off in one way or another. It's the way that a rather complex, multifaceted and quite troubled country can be reduced to a couple of statements generally involving mums and pasta that annoys me.

It's also the fact that i don't fit comfortably in the idea that people have of italians, that puts me up against this mythical land of loud, extroverted and sociable people that i'm obviously a bad example of. At one point or another, i inevitably end up causing some surprise by pointing out one of the following facts:

_i am not a "passionate" lover (ok, i don't point this out to a lot of people)
_i don't care about football (soccer)
_i don't come from a large family
_i am not religious
_i am out to my family

The italy that i know has nothing to do with all the above. When i think of italy, some of the things that come to my mind are:

Food-fascism: there's normal food (italian) and the "rest". The "rest" went, in recent years, from weird to interesting but you still probably wouldn't want to strain your system by having it twice in the same week.

Hygiene neurosis: i've grown up being told not to hold on to supports on buses, not to use toilets in public places, not to kiss people allowing my lips to come in contact with the cheek of the person i'm kissing and various priceless advice that, i assure you, will come in very handy when bacteriological warfare is waged against us. I remember, as a child, going to play at a friend's house where the first thing i had to do upon arriving was wash my hands 10 times. I remember a neighbour that children used to call "the jug" because of her habit of constantly keeping her gloved up hands on her hips to avoid touching anything. To this date i often sport an approving smile going into an italian supermarket and being asked to wear disposable plastic gloves before buying fruits and vegetables and i've even seen immigration officers in airports adapting the same principle to avoid the lethal finger-to-passport contact.

Informal shop-assistants: there's never any attempt to be systematically polite. Shop assistants can be obnoxiously rude or heartwarmingly friendly. Or anything in between. There's no absent-minded, mechanical politeness to be expected. Shortly before Christmas, while on a shopping spree, i found it refreshing being offered a biscuit by a shop assistant who was casually snacking while giving people information. I, of course, declined because at the time I wasn't wearing my bioresistant bodysuit.

pain & hurt

June 2, 2004, the big dump: when L told me he didn't want me as his slave he said: when i'm with a slave i want it to be painful for him, not hurtful.

That was the first time for me that these 2 words were taking such drastically different meanings. In the gallery of human feelings, their very different places were suddenly so clearly defined and, in a split second, they belonged to, and even embodied, 2 completely separated universes: physical and emotional.

If someone punches you in the stomach you might say that it "hurts" or if you are feeling horribly sad and lonely, you might feel like you're in pain. But for me, from June 2, 2004, there is only one acceptable meaning for pain and it's not to be confused with hurt.

After a messy year and many anti-depressants i've become careful to observe the lesson learned on June 2 and accept pain but shy away from coming too close to actual hurt. But sometimes hurt is inescapable: it can hide behind the most innocuous of smiles and can play funny tricks on you if you so much as lower your defenses for a mere second.

And once it's on you, you can try and shake it off all you want: it grabs you by the throat like nothing else

acritical

i've recently been asked about how things are developing with my owner and reflecting on developments, i thought it made sense to blogify my little progress report.

The person in question said he liked the idea of being broken down and rebuilt as a slave. Personally i wouldn't say i'm being broken down. My master understands very well that it's within my nature to want to serve and please and has chosen to make use of it – which i'm immensly grateful to him for.

i think, aside from building up physical strength and resistance to a certain type of stimulation, i've mostly learnt not to question his orders. Not in the sense that i ever questioned why i had to do something but i guess his orders were normally channelled through my brain as information to be processed and, preferably, accepted, but – generally – evaluated in some way.

All that has changed. Some orders may be a little harder than others, but none are unreasonable and i'm learning to disconnect my own judgement and leave everything up to him, because ultimately i trust him fully and i know that he will always decide what's best for me.

But he's not demolishing my sense of self. On the contrary, he's helping me fulfill my potential and feel happy and valued as his slave.

no news, good news

the recent blog-silence is due to the period of not seeing my master finally coming to an end. Over the last week, i have seen and been able to serve my owner very regularly.

A few people have contacted me online to ask if the situation had evolved and i realise that, after a rather sad post such as the last one, i should have followed up with the recent developments. But the time to do so has been little.

Developments can be summed up as follows: i'm a very, very lucky slave.

withheld

i have been hesitant to post blogs about what's been going on with me because it bordered on areas that i felt i shouldn't disclose. So i held on to what i was writing but now i'm feeling empty and need to let it go.

i hope that my Master, if he reads this, will not feel that i'm trying to push him but will simply understand that it's just my need to expose what i'm feeling.


[written sun 4 Dec 2005, 1pm]

it feels like i should start the process of re-owning myself. Every time i talk to my master i am more and more convinced that i want to continue to belong to him and wait, as long as it takes, but then there's no contact, for so long. And my slavery is all about the long wait, a long wait that seems to stretch forever.

A bad sign is i'm starting to feel that i have to shield myself from him, that i'm in for more hurt and disappointment.

Not to mention that my kidneys are killing me


[written sun 4 Dec 2005, 10am]

end of week 5.

i don't know what to do. He said i would see him this weekend but he hasn't contacted me and i have once again spent a weekend at home, waiting.

i feel sad. my blind trust in him is starting to crumble. He keeps telling me things that don't materialise and i don't know why or what i should do.


[written sat 26 Nov 2005, 11am]

i feel very sad.

This post will not go live until/unless i've discussed the issue with my master.

i'm at the end of my fourth week without having seen my owner. i miss him terribly and don't know what to do. it's not even like he doesn't want to see me, he was going to the other day but then he wasn't feeling well and had to cancel.

i feel stupid and a bad slave for being so impatient and needing so much attention, but now it's no longer just a matter of wanting to see him, i'm starting to feel sad again and lonely. i am of course as happy as can be when my master talks to me and he does that often recently, which i'm very grateful for, but i need contact, physical presence, seeing him and serving him.

Even the pain in my sides from 4 weeks in chastity is shifting from a welcome reminder of his ownership to just plain discomfort that's preventing me from functioning normally. My kidneys hurt when i move. i'm just broken from lack of use.

self-mastering

Recently someone said to me 'In order to be a true slave you have to be a master of yourself....' [more >>]. Fundamental truth or common place? Is this simply a cleverly worded maxim in the trail of such statements as "you must love yourself before you can love someone else" or is there a hidden truth behind it.

The problem i have with statements such as this one is that they hint to a black and white reality where there is a way that is right and one that is wrong. There are true slaves (who do the right thing) and fake slaves (who don't do the right thing). i have no idea what a "true slave" is. i'm not really trying to learn to be something that i'm not and the slave definition seems to fit me not because i try to become it but because it seems to be right for me.

i admit that my need to be owned is strictly linked with my seeking something that is not within me. There is a need for me to be taken over by somebody else because i don't want to do it myself and for the "master of myself" to be someone other than me. Frankly i fail to see why, if i was master of myself, i would be seeking to stop being it, in order to pass that role on to someone else.

Clearly, the need for me to be owned stems from a manifest instability that characterises me in the absence of a master. As an unowned slave i feel void, empty, unfulfilled. I truly rejoice in the service of another man and i'm coming to terms with it being my nature without feeling that i must force myself to be any different.

i realise it's a condition that makes me vulnerable and non autonomous but, quite frankly, i'm not even sure i fully understand what it means to be master of yourself. How do you know that you've mastered yourself, that you've got to that stage. It seems to me that a lot of people who are not as vulnerable are often shielding themselves behind a fantasy, a facade, an image of themselves that could, upon deeper analysis, come crumbling down taking with it this perception of being masters of themselves.

We all need something and we all usually reach out to find that something that we miss. That's what makes us sociable animals: we thrive in the interaction, not the isolation. So, maybe, the fact that i can't be self-sufficient doesn't make me a good or a bad slave. It just makes me a slave.

mickey of finland

i sometimes read or see photos of the elaborate, extreme scenes that people live or fantasize about and i feel a little like i'm at the crossroad of BDSM and Disneyland, caught between a dungeon and a cartoon, my own fantasies being so peaceful and uncomplicated sometimes. In my head, for instance, the image of happiness is the idea of curling up to sleep on the floor at my master's feet while he comfortably sits on the sofa watching tv or reading a book. One of his feet maybe snugly warming up between my legs and the other under the curve of my neck.
i don't need much more.

break in

yesterday my flat was broken into.

The extent of the loss is limited. It appears likely that one person might have easily gained access to our flat through a flimsy door with hardly any locks in and, after realising that one of my flatmates was home, left with whatever little they could get their hands on, meaning a powerbook and 2 dead iPods. Full mac-loot.

As a result i'm now carrying my own laptop around with me which gives me the chance to blog my way to work sitting on the tube.

Recounting these events to my master, i was taken aback but immensely touched by how bothered he was at the thought of his boy living in an unsafe flat. His concern made me feel protected and safe. It was the best feeling ever.

back

My master is back and is fine. i feel stupid having felt so concerned but i had no idea what to do.

With my previous long-term owner, things ended pretty much this way. For a long time i didn't see him. Over this period he kept saying that he still wanted to have me as his slave and he was just busy. i was happy to wait because his declared wish to own me was enough to fuel my already strong desire to belong to him. Unfortunately after an absence from my life of almost three months he "came clean" and told me he didn't want a regular slave anymore.

Over this 3-month period, people had told me "what are you waiting for, just change your profile to say you're available" but i just felt i couldn't do it. If i was to be set free, i felt he had to do it, he had to tell me or at least i had to ask and he had to ok it. i couldn't just go and say "ok, whatever, see you around". But i didn't want to ask to be set free, because i didn't want him to set me free.

So it came as quite a disappointment when he informed me about how he felt and told me that he had been hesitating to tell me because he was feeling badly about it. i felt i had waited all along for someone who hadn't wanted me as a slave and i ended up feeling very low as a result.

My current master's silence brings with it echos of this past experience and although i'm happy to wait while i'm not needed, all those past insecurities and fears of abandonment are being stirred up. i understand the need for me to deal with those without expecting that he should do it for me but i can't help missing him and feeling the weight of the distance. These days it feels like he's very far.