The things we do for love

I did what no sane man should do - I deliberately headed down the shore towards an oncoming hurricane. After spending most of my adult life around the ocean, I had a good idea of what to do. I gassed up the cars, I bought extra water, I kept my kids safe.

I was fortunate. Two very large trees came down in the backyard of a neighboring house (it's abandoned), but other than destroying a weight-bench and pinning a rattletrap fence, no damage was done. No more than fifty yards to the north, a tree too big for me to put my arms around pulled loose and fell on top of a car and house, ripping several high-line wires with it. Three sides of my block lost power, but my power just blinked long enough to reset the microwave.

The shopping district around the corner was without power for over a week. I lost cable - which means no internet - for five days (I'm such an addict). My kids were out of school because their school was under water.

I had kept informed of the storm's movements, and I knew it was going to be a bad one. Like I said, I've spent most of my adult life around the ocean and I've been through half a dozen tropic storms and/or hurricanes. It is crazy to move closer to the path of such a storm. But my kids were in the path of that storm - and no matter what happened, I was going to be with them.

That's what love does. It moves you to bear the unbearable. It makes you forget what is best for you...or, more precisely, it redefines what is best for you. That day, what was best for me was being with my children. No matter what.

So it is that my love for Mistress continues to redefine me, too. When we met, we had long talks about what we wanted from a relationship. One of the things that I told Her was that I didn't enjoy pain, and I didn't want to be with someone who would enjoy hurting me. I was sure of it.

It has been a great surprise to me to discover that I am, in fact, a bit of a masochist. I'm not really sure when I figured it out, but She has hurt me from the first time we were together - small ways at first, and then larger and more exciting ways. But it is not something that I'm always at ease with.

This desire, new and unfamiliar, throbs to life at odd times. At times, I almost ache for the experience of Her inflicting pain on me. So much so that the pain itself is nearly a relief. At other times, all I can think about is how wonderful it would be to lie before Her, purposefully helpless, and let Her desires take Her where She wants. Of course, not being able to hear Her desires in my head, my thoughts fill in the blanks with numerous fantasies...not all of which are even possible.

As much as I want Her to hurt me, and as much as I enjoy it, it also scares me, and on a couple of levels. First of all, it's a bit scary just wanting to be hurt. It kind of goes against human nature. Like most people, I tend to avoid things that hurt me. So it's rather puzzling to suddenly want to be hurt, and especially by someone who loves me so well.

On another level, though, it scares me because I want it so much. When I met Her, Mistress had another pet, one that also enjoyed being hurt. In fact, he wanted it so much that it turned Her off. That wasn't what ended things between them, but it was a part of what led to it. I guess I'm just insecure enough to fear losing someone I love to something we enjoy. I really don't know what my limits are, and I don't know what Hers are. I trust Her to take me where I need to be and to get me safely back, but I don't want to push Her to take me there too often, or too deeply.

That, I suppose, is the final level of fear. My family has wrestled with addictions for several generations, and I've seen men destroyed by their pleasures - drawn again and again to a trough of their own destruction long after it ceased to offer any pleasure. I fear that I could lose myself to my desire. I fear that my desire to be hurt could come unharnessed and wreak havoc.

It's sort of like driving into the teeth of a hurricane - it doesn't make sense to mess with something that holds such promise and threat. But love changes a person. Love makes it worth facing the threat in order to reach for the promise, because threats don't always materialize. And love...love is always worth reaching for.