Lying on your bed in the darkness, I count all the things that I know to be true. There aren't many anymore and that might have scared me once, but even the word "once," is barely a shadow in my mind. The past and the future, the day and the night, they are all distant memories to me; concepts as faded as a pastel painting slowly blurring their way from green to gray and then to nothing.
I know I'm in a cabin, somewhere deep in the woods. You drove us here from the city when the roads were still passable. On the ride I wore no clothes: only a hood, a dog collar and cuffs connected by heavy chains and masked from the world by the tinted windows of your jeep.
It's still winter, of that I am certain. Even helpless, bound by to the four posts and with the leather hood around my head, I can tell. The air from an open window sweeps violently across my naked flesh unmoved by my shivering and unyielding in its intensity. There are moments when I can feel a single ray from the low winter sun on my upper thigh but it doesn't warm me. It's more like the memory of heat than anything else. Only you, my Mistress warms me. You are the only light in the world where all the fires have gone out.
You have trained me so perfectly that all I long to do is bend myself to your will. I feel more powerful blind, bound in naked submission than I ever felt as the man I had once been. You told me this would happen if I truly surrendered to you. If I let you take everything from me. And I did.
Time was the first thing you took from me. The first real thing. Perhaps to be technical, it was my belongings you took first. I remember the smile on your face and the way your eyes lit up as you took my suitcases in the front room and told me they no longer belonged to me. I've never seen them again, nor any of my clothes or keepsakes I had once thought so precious. Perhaps they are in storage somewhere. Perhaps you burned them. In the end maybe it makes no difference. They belonged to someone that no longer exists.
From that day everything I've ever worn or eaten or sat on has belonged to you. I own nothing anymore, except the silver steel collar locked around my neck. "That," you told me, "is yours. Something you can touch when I'm not there and need to think of me." That's what I'd be doing right now if my arms weren't bound above me by chains.
But time, that was the first thing you seized from me. You already had my love and submission. You had all of my will. All you needed to do was shape me. First came the hood. It was leather, black and tight with only the mouth and nose left open. It locked in the back and was impossible to take off even when my hands were free. You had me wear it for days at a time. Days when you knew I had nowhere to be and no one who could come looking for me.
It was a frightening world without sight. Still, my body tried to keep itself orientated to daytime and night. I got hungry on schedule, at least for the first day. Then you fed me pills to make me sleep. Then I woke up, how much later I'll never know, but I felt you hovering above me.
"Open your mouth," you said in such a quiet, yet strong voice that I had obeyed even before I had processed the words. You placed a baby bottle between my lips and told me to be a good slave and drink. I'm not sure what was inside. Maybe soup. It was lukewarm and unpleasant but I did as you commanded and finished every drop. After I finished the bottle you let me drift off to sleep again. You kept doing this, sometimes waking me only two hours later. Other times, letting half a day go by so my body had no way to know what time it was. I only remember the sleep, the way you made me beg for the bottle and the sound of your voice.
Your voice was the most powerful, most beautiful thing that had ever existed. In the darkness it carried the force and the light of absolute truth. Your words more radiant than the sun. If God was a woman, then this was the voice of God. And if God was a man, this was the voice of his lover.
"Winter," You whispered into my ear, on our first day in the cabin, "is the best time to train a slave. This cabin is three miles from the nearest house. Maybe I'll set you free, hooded and blind and watch you crawl through the snow in any direction you choose. Would that make you feel helpless, slave?"
"Yes, Mistress" I whimpered in anticipation. A long silence followed. Finally your voice flashed through the darkness like a flame.
