My Master and I started our journey only a few months ago, but what we built was incredibly profound. I got attached quickly. He got attached too, I believe. We had just begun to build our world, and then the world outside crashed in: he was diagnosed with cancer.
In an instant, the man who was my protector and my guide became a stranger behind a wall of silence. Instead of letting me hold his hand through the biopsies and the terror, he pushed me away. He told me he is doing it to "protect" me from the ugliness of his decay, and to protect himself because he no longer has the emotional or physical bandwidth to maintain our dynamic. He says he cannot lead me while he is fighting for his life.
I understand the logic. I truly do. I can't find it in me to blame a man fighting for his life. But knowing the "why" doesn't stop the "how" from feeling like the most violent form of abandonment.
I am dissociating so hard that I barely recognize the person staring back at me in the mirror. I feel utterly unchosen. I am grieving someone who is still alive, mourning a bond that didn't break because of a lack of love, but because of a lack of strength, and fearing I will never know what happened to the man I only now had started to love.
I am exhausted. I am heartbroken. I am terrified for him, yet I am furious that he won't let me be the sub I could have been for him. I feel more alone than I ever have in my life. I understand why he is doing this, but God, I wish it didn’t have to be this way. I wish he knew that being protected like this feels a lot like being discarded.
I have a major exam in less than four hours. I just needed to vent this to a community that understands the weight of a severed dynamic. How do you keep going when your anchor has locked its doors and left you outside in the cold?