How do you do this whole thing anyway?

When you have managed things, your life, your emotions by yourself for a long time. When you have had to deal with things on your own, or compartmentalised your life and shared different bits with different people, but never all of the truth to anyone.
When you look back and realise from an early age you lived your life like a MI5 spy. Not the lying and deception, the manipulation, but just running your life like a spy ring, having mental "Dead letter boxes" and small groups of just interconnecting friends and large groups of acquaintances and one or two people that you trust completely...openness its a challenge.

All of these things make you into the person you are. I remember being told as a child I was secretive; not sneaky, secretive, and as a teenager, and as an adult.
It used to irritate me to be called that. This was for two reasons, firstly, I'm not by nature and secondly, all you had to do was ask the right question at the right time and I would have told anything.

I would have opened my heart up and told you anything and everything  But nobody ever really did when I was younger. I don't know if no body ever really bothered or they tried, and got little response, so didn't bother again.

My grandfather and I were sharers of secrets; how to plants seeds, where the sweets were hidden in the kitchen. How to 'read" clouds to tell if it was going to rain, how to calm a frightened dog, the best walk trough the woods to see the first bluebells in spring...all those were the best of secrets, but when you are five or so, these are important things...

I realised recently that the reason I said nothing to anyone else, wasn't that I was hiding some big dark secret inside, I wasn't.....I just had got to the point where I really thought no one would be that interested anyway, there wasn't a lot to tell.........so on the odd occasion anyone asked, I just didn't say much.
The only person who asked was my mother and I have come very recently to the scary understanding that she wanted to know because she is just damn nosey and likes no one to have any privacy.

It wasn't a wish to understand me and know how I was feeling, just nosiness.

My whole adult life I have managed to keep things inside me. On the surface people will see the person they think I am. I am not being deceitful or untrue, just operating by that inbuilt, and "over the years"   learned behaviour...............if you don't expose yourself no one will come and stamp all over your feeling and destroy you.................except anyone past 20 knows that its not an easy way to go through life and it doesn't work anyway.

At this point I had put some other stuff in here and then deleted it because I felt it said too much............and now I don't know whether to laugh or cry about it..............but it stays deleted.

So when my owner goes on about openness he is fighting years and years of a well learned and managed habit. I think I could never get a  job at wiki leaks.

So yesterday when I was in trouble again for failing to tell him something he couldn't understand why I hadn't told him. I wasn't being secretive, I wasn't not telling him stuff, I just didn't think that it was important enough to register.............and this juicy bit of information that has got me into trouble?
A job offer..............not one on a piece of paper with a job description and a mention of a salary, not one outlining all the benefits and the risk assessment..........no its a job offer of a leaving colleague"if you want t a job in ***********, just call me, there will always be a job for you" sort of job offer.

Well...................very kind of you, thank you, but I don't want a job in ************, too dangerous.
So I had smiled and said, thank you, and not registered it as anything other than that.

THEN, last night when talking I jokingly said something about "When when you throw me out, when I am old, at least I will be able to go to work in ************* as I have a job offer".

 You could have heard a pin drop.

I begged him not to be cross..........tried to explain the nature of the offer etc etc
nine thousand questions later, I was sent to bed with the "We''ll talk about this later".

I wish he could see I wasn't hiding anything, I wasn't being secretive, or not opening up...................its just that it wasn't important enough to register or mention and ................

Oh whats the point....................

I will never get this openness bit right.

This morning we talked again.
He made me look at him, in the eye. After all this time, does he not know how hard I find it? Of course he does, that's why he did it I guess.
Its so hard to hold his gaze, I desperately wanted to do as he says, to obey, yet my heart quaked beneath his piercing eyes, my submissive soul quivered under his domination.
I tried to do it, but no matter how hard, I found myself lowering my eyes.
He did not get cross. I heard him clear his throat. I looked up.
I looked again. It was like a battle inside my head.

Obey, obey, obey.
Submissive feeling don't look, submissive feelings don't look.

Obey won.

Then there was the thoughtful 'hmmmmmmmmmmmmm".

He told me I looked lost, like a small girl, unsure. without direction....................

And tonight he is going to solve this.
He has a plan.
I know what his plans include.

It includes lots and lots of questions, probing, searching deep within my heart. I feel like my brain is turned inside out , examined and put back together the way he wants, the way he likes, the way that is right.
It includes measured control; every moment, every breath, every word.

It includes pain. It is not the pain, it is the control that comes with it.

It includes openness, honesty, truth.

It includes humiliation.

It includes trust, total trust; unquestioning belief in what he does is what is good for me , what is right.

It is submission.

I am his slave.

What does darkness sound like?

Openness is hard for the self sufficient, the wounded, the woman filled with  determined self preservation and yet it is the thing I yearn for, the thing I strive to be...to  be open...the one thing, after obedience, my Master demands of me. 

I try, I struggle.

Its like dipping your toe in the cool waters of a still lake at sunset............you see the ripples slowly spread across the surface of the water, altering the picture created on the lake, moving floating objects,making floating leaves dance, changing shadows, distorting images. And if you peer into the rippled water, you see your reflection, altered, facets of it changing moving, developing......................until you no longer look like yourself.............and for that brief moment you are , to yourself, unrecognisable.

And once again I have been in trouble for the same thing..not being open.

We are at present, thousands of miles apart, and so online, on the phone, is how we have to communicate, and its hard................and for the last two days to every question of "how are you?' and "how are you feeling?" the word that i have used is"fine".....................this is not what he hears...............he hears what my heart speaks late in the night, in the aloneness, the quiet moments, and he pushes and pushes, probes and probes................until he has to resort to pain to get me to open  up.

The hood is something he uses, and I hate it, its not dark, its not tight, its not even tied, but I feel myself shutting off inside, like lights on a stage closing down at the end of a show, hearing my breathing, trying to slow it , until it slows and I can hear it no longer, and I begin to wonder if I am there at all..................and I wait to hear him, any little noise.wishing.............and I hear the silence and it is black and the black is silent.

And I wait..until all I am doing is waiting and breathing.................and I fear hearing him because I know what will follow.................pain...........and questions............and pushing........and probing...............and making me.........open up................. and when I finally answer his question , after an hour of pain, the tears pouring down my face, sobbing, gasping for breath.....................he says.................."why was that this hard to ask for?" How do I answer that? the answer fills my head; letters, words, phrases jumbling as they drip  out, unseen ................asking for more when someone gives you so much, although its not "more" , its "different" what I need..........................something to make the feeling of time and space between us diminish.

And for a brief moment I long for the darkness again, when all it was about was breathing, and then a lightness fills me. He is right; being open is so much better.................it doesn't matter what happens to the ripples on the water...they are out of my control .It is him that tells me to put my toe in, how far and when to take it out again.It is him who manipulates the distortions, the shadows and the changes and it is him who makes me what I am, without him, how would I be who and what I am.

..and what did I ask for, what did I need? I needed him to leave me more off lines...nothing more,,,time differences make life difficult and somehow 12 hours is warped into 20...that is all....it was easy really......all I had to do was ask.