I feel like at some point in the last couple of weeks, my internal “count” of how long I’ve been doing BDSM somehow started reversing itself — like a clock in in a time-travel movie — and it’s now counting toward zero. Because in two hours, my wife will be arriving in town for my Big To-Do with my daughter and (some, the parts we’re still in contact with) of our families in tow.
When she arrives, the clock will be set at zero — the new beginning. Furtive weekend hookups in hotels will be no more. We’ll be doing the hard part, making BDSM work in a day-to-day marriage, with kids and jobs and bills and drudgery and deciding who does the dishes without invoking who’s the dominant and who’s the sub. We’re going to be in that huge gray area between “scene-only” and “24/7″ D/s, trying to figure out how to make it work.
Apropos of the new beginning, perhaps, it smells like smoke. My landlords tell me the Glades are on fire, yet another Florida inferno. The smoke’s everywhere — in my nose, my clothes, in the house — even getting past the A/C filter — and I can’t help but wonder if it’s an omen of some sort, if I allow myself a moment of superstitiousness. (Maybe it’s an omen about what the California ruling on gay marriage is going to do for the Presidential race.) Regardless, here I am, the smell of something hellish in my nose, and the future ahead of me like some beautiful highway, stretching away to some new and unknown destination.
T-minus Two Hours, as they used to say in the old movies on astronauts and space I used to watch.
