Property Report

All clear.
No cancer.
No pre-cancer.
No D&C.

I hung up the phone and e-mailed my Master.

It's funny what happens in our minds. To our minds. It's funny how usage changes thought and then changes reality.

I say: "He owns me."

Well, you know, I can say anything I want. He can surely say anything he wants. The patterns we have set, the way we relate to each other, the rules that he established from the beginning and which I have compulsively taken further on my own...

I do not wear a collar. The marks he leaves in my flesh do eventually fade away. Well, maybe... his initial scratched into my left buttock with the sharp end of the stick he uses as a cane... I can still detect that one with my fingertips, weeks after he inscribed it.

I have not been given any formal category of status. I'm not his slave - that he has made clear. To be called his submissive seems inadequate to what passes between us. He calls me his pet, which has a certain affectionate underpinning that seems appropriate, but I can't imagine looking it up in a BDSM glossary and finding a definition that suits.

Still, he does own me. He owns me in some deeper way than can be conveyed by my being listed in some registry or by the signing of a contract. He has trained me, continues to train me, developing my natural skills and imposing the kind of structure and discipline with encouragement, correction, and punishment that is needed to make me achieve the potential I have always shied away from.

The leash never falls slack.

And inside, I do feel different. My brain certainly, as I write according to a strict schedule every day - although I insist on taking off Friday nights. It's Shabbos, after all.

And my body feels different. Not my body as this abstract thing, or as this collection of sensations and skin and fat and bone. But this body that I live in. I really don't feel like it is mine.

I inhabit it.
He owns it.

And so I reported in, although by right my doctor should have called him directly, to say that this piece of fine art that he treasures as part of his collection has not developed a fatal crack.

But others can be funny about such views. So I made the report, and at that moment I truly felt as if my body - as if I - belonged to him.

And I felt very, very safe.