Three years of an online friendship. Three years of blog posts and comments, instant messages, e-mails, postal mail, even small gifts exchanged. Three years of digital photos and Webcam images and the occasional physical photo to hold in my hands. Three years of the occasional telephone call and multiple Skype conversations. Three years of helping her to learn about this strange realm which I inhabit and which has intrigued her for many years. Three years and half a world of distance.
...and she is finally coming. Her career has reached a milestone, and she has been transferred to the States. After only two weeks in the new office, she has already impressed her new bosses and colleagues. Yes, she is a beautiful young foreign woman with an easy-on-the-ears accent and a soothing personality matched by a gracious heart and a fashion flare which attracts all eyes in a room, but from the recent conversations, her colleagues are only now truly beginning to realize just how intelligent she is, that she did not sleep her way to her position, that behind the bright blue eyes she scrutinizes the world and devours the details as she processes information with the facility of a supercomputer, providing the output in elegant reports and to-the-point speech which makes it hard to believe that English is not her native language.
That is the friend I have come to know over the past three years. That is the woman who will soon be landing at Hobby. That is the aspiring submissive who is coming to finally gain firsthand knowledge of the theory taught over the past three years.
Perhaps only one other person on this planet knows me better than she does. She knows my strengths and my weaknesses. She knows my fears and my desires. She has shared my victories and consoled me following my defeats. She knows that I can be gentle and loving or mean and sadistic. Yet she is airborne at this moment, surrounded by perhaps two hundred other people heading to the same airport, perhaps some of them also meeting someone in person for the very first time.
I know that this first face-to-face meeting will be significant. I need to ensure that I present the proper image, for she is coming to meet a longtime friend, but especially to learn... and possibly to escalate what we currently share from a deep meaningful friendship to something more.
My clothes are already laid out: all-black shirt, jeans, socks, shoes, and even underwear; my usual silver rings and the old Japanese yen coin strung on a black leather strip. As I walk out the door, I will pick up the sunglasses with the lenses so dark that someone could be standing directly in front of me and not be able to see even the outlines of my eyes. I know that I will present a very foreboding image, that most people at the airport will see me and fall back.