On his time.

The Dominant Guy nudged me a few days ago about writing something. This immediately popped to the fore, but the past few days have been too thick with Things to focus on it. Thankfully the short hop from SeaTac to SFO cleared me enough to get this out. SO, here’sfor you, sir.

 

Sometimes it is three hours. That’s pretty standard. Or two, occasionally one. It has gotten up to six, but then dropped back down to five due to the vagaries of the calendar. Occasionally, there is no difference.

I track this with a fairly simple device: my ESQ padlock watch, and what I’m talking about is the difference in time zones between the places I find myself vagabonding and where The Dominant Guy resides.

Not long after the first (and last) time I was in his presence I decided to leave the analog watch on his zone. At first, it was a quick way to connect with my sense of where he might be. Sleeping, or at work, maybe online. I felt a little dumb, mooning around imagining what some guy on whom I had a crush was doing. Idly staring at my watch until our planet’s rotation shifted, until our Venn spheres slowly o’er-lapped to reasonable alignment for real-time communication.

It felt a little obsessive, and I don’t necessarily like to foster that sort of shit.

As the days and weeks past I slowly accepted that my “crush” wasn’t some one-way obsessive fucked up stalkery thing. I trusted that I wasn’t off on some flight of fancy, that the pull I felt wasn’t imaginary. It was inexorable. Tidal. My watch told me a story glance after glance. And it didn’t change. On an average month? I’m in every time zone in the US at least once. In the past six months, I’ve been in time zones in four different countries in Europe, and in Canada. And the frenetic pace shows no sign of slowing down. My cell phone seamlessly panders to the whims of my location. It too carries several streams of information, time all over the world, at a glance. But my analog watch no longer shifts. It is anchored. Fixed.

Several weeks ago I mentioned to TDG that I’d stopped changing the time on my watch, that it now stayed on his time. His response was the somewhat cryptic yet (kinda sorta maybe) bemusingly reassuring comeback I’m learning to accept from him. When he asked why I had made that choice, I tried to explain that I liked having that connection to where he was, where the sun was for him, how his day flowed in relation to my place on our Earth. It probably came out somewhat garbled. He jams my frequencies…and I am pretty sure he does that shit on purpose.

Recently I realized that having my watch on his time was a rather potent reminder of what submission is for me today. For those keeping score, you’ve probably noted TDG’s not in my home time zone. He’s got his life, his wife, his partners, his job, his business, etc, etc, etc. Lots going on. I am no stranger to the full life: much of my own time is spent moving. Moving myself in relation to the sun, moving my boundaries in relation to his direction, his needs and desires. I would love to say this is easy but it is, on some days, really fucking difficult. I don’t WANT to wait six months in between meeting him and seeing him again, but that’s his time. I don’t want to be out of touch for what feels, to my longing spirit, like painfully long stretches of hours or days. But that’s his time. I am on his time. Willingly. Reluctantly. Petulantly sometimes, yes. Joyously, too. But a part of me is firmly on his time, because it fulfills me to be there.

Relinquishing control to God was something I did at three months sober. It wasn’t entirely voluntary, as I had a rather visceral, stunning, illogical connective experience with power beyond, above and around me that had previously not been manifest. And I knew that the rest of my journey would be within the hands of a loving and magnificent energy that may put me through difficulty but yeah…I was Safe. Loved. Cared for. Sometimes the things I want don’t come to me when I want them. Sometimes shit is painful and burns and I scream and bleed, and still I feel my God there. On the other side of that fire, beyond that icy pain, is a newness, a learning, a lesson, a fierceness. Me becoming myself, forged in strange crucibles.

But my peace comes when I do NOT fight the forces that pull and push and rend and wound and heal me. When I let go, jump off, take the fall, absorb the hit…THEN I know the real joy.

I sit and stare hard at this watch, so many times a day if one was to count they’d fret for my sanity. But it reminds me to trust. To trust that this person to whom I am relinquishing control, to whom my submission is a sweet inevitability, has the vision to see past what my own fretful energies permit me to see. That he is on his time, and owns it, and invites me to live there too. Blind faith. Trusting as a child does. With every smooth movement of tiny silver hands, this timepiece is telling the story of how beautiful it is to release the illusion of control, and of how fulfilled I feel in those moments where my waiting on his time to overtake mine is, in fact, a meditation.

A song.

A prayer.

Right now? He’s asleep.

And the mute testimony of the little clock, on a chain,  on my wrist reminds me of my place, my calling, and of the power of waiting, with patience, on his time.