Turn and Face the Strange

I haven't written anything all month long.

This is one of my longer hiatuses. I have gotten a few concerned emails, asking if I'm alright, or if I've retired from blogging or something. I'm just fine, and I've certainly not gone away for good. I haven't *meant* to go away at all. It's just been difficult to update recently, due to a combination of circumstances.

The changes in my life sort of began in earnest several months ago when Malignus and I ended our romantic, and then later, our D/s relationship. At the time, I didn't feel that I could write about it without being dramatic or excessively emotional, so I simply didn't. It wasn't a secret, obviously, but I didn't feel that it was appropriate to sit down and write a big post about how we'd split up. The process was obviously not easy, but it was ultimately the right thing to do.

Additionally, and un-relatedly, YS and I have recently decided to end our D/s dynamic. We've grown and changed as people, and our dynamic was no longer serving the same purpose that it originally did. The dynamic had become punctilious, and more of a formality than anything else as we both developed in different directions.

SF is currently taking a hiatus from the scene because a horrible personal tragedy befell him recently, and it's taking a long time for him to recover from it (quite understandably). I know he'll eventually be back, and he knows I'll be there when he is! PTL and I have a horrible combination of impossibly busy schedules (hers much more extreme than mine!) and therefore have little time for bossing interactions these days. That was mostly just "for fun" anyway.

In the meantime, this means that my flowchart has become pretty straight-forward:

Current Bossiness Flowchart

As opposed to this, 9 months ago:

This didn't happen by design. It's just been a year of changes. Nothing's quite as sure as change. There's lots of room for off-chart bossing in my life, of course, and there's a good handful of people that I choose to listen to when they tell me to do something.

There's another very big change that's happening in my life: I'm in the process of moving from Sioux Falls back to Los Angeles. It was time for that, and it just makes sense right now. Last week, Epipelagic came to visit and she helped me to pack ALL MY STUFF into boxes and space bags. Space bags are one of the greatest things of all time, by the way. Watching all the air get vacuumed out of the bags is extremely gratifying. Once everything was packaged, Epipelagic did most of the organization of my car. It nearly defies the laws of physics. She turned my car into a bag of holding. She's a wonderful friend, by the way, and I'm so glad that I'll be living near her again. I value our friendship so much, and I can't wait to see how it grows and develops in the coming years.

Leaving Sioux Falls was hard. It's never easy to leave a place where you lived, even if I was never truly suited for life in a small, Midwestern city like that. I'll miss everyone that I got close to there very much. I realize that I didn't have a very drawn out or formal goodbye process as I left. I can't really say why that is-- it just felt like leaving quietly was the most comfortable thing for me to do. The other day, I drove from Sioux Falls to Denver, where I had a few shoots before continuing on my way. Driving away from the place that had been my home for the past two years was difficult. I was dazzled by the beauty of the landscape as I passed into the part of the state that wasn't so flat. The sun was shining through the clouds, and it would start to rain, but the rain never lasted long.

I'm in Denver for a few more days and then I'm going to Texas to see Mila, WYO and LLB, do more shooting and sessions and probably swim in the pool in my underwear some more, because that's how I do. After that, Mila and I are going to drive from Dallas to Vegas, stopping in New Mexico to visit Heather Green for a bit, and in Phoenix and or Tucson for shoots on the way. Vegas, of course, will be Shadowlane, the superlative spanko gathering place! We'll be heading to Los Angeles from there, where Mila will visit for a few days and then I'll begin my new life there. It's tremendously, amazingly exciting. I can't wait. I love everything about the life that I'm going to have.

So, that's the state of things right now. I'm ultimately in a very good place, and my life is only going to get better and better.