The first time is supposed to be special, a memory that remains in memoriam to a more innocent and naive version of oneself before the world expanded and you became aware that the slow expansion was the heat death of all that is. First times have never stood out to me though. My first kiss was unremarkable, memorable only by how little I felt affected or engaged. My first alcoholic drink a nothing blip in my mental landscape. Should the first time that I felt arousal by some outside stimulus have been a moment that I categorized and filed away in my mind Palace? Apparently I didn't think so at the time.
I don't remember the first time someone gave me power over them and I realized how addicting it was. I can vaguely remember the excitement of making the agreement to dominate, of accepting submission. The feeling is raw like it's in my bones, and it's vibrating away making all of my marrow hum at a resident frequency my ears can't begin to imagine, and my tongue could never imitate.
It’s not the clean outline of a single memory but a smear across time, a stain that spread until I realized I couldn’t scrub it out—because I didn’t want to.
I've spent so many nights analyzing and pondering and trying to determine or decide whether or not the want, the craving, the desire that could become obsession if I let it... Whether it was a part of me, or something left over from whatever I was made of.
And somewhere in that questioning I learned that it didn’t matter which—what mattered was how alive I felt when I stopped resisting and simply leaned into it.
What really mattered was living for myself, and serving something greater than I myself alone. Not to believe that this was some pattern assigned to me at birth by the unique composition of chromosomes figured into the recipe that made me. I don't have any fantastic beliefs insofar as the predisposition of sex to a dominant or submissive personality. If such a thing were true, I don't know how I could explain my aversion to the TPE lifestyle that just sounds like a long-term recipe for stress to my mind. But that's a me-thing. You have you things. They have their own things too.
And it’s in that space between—where wants diverge and overlap, clash and complement—that the real beauty of it lives: not in fate or fixed roles, but in the deliberate choosing, the sharp thrill of saying yes, here, now, with you.
I don't fret too much that I don't remember the first time I told my first partner to do something, to sit some more specific, to speak to me a certain way. The first time was the best time at that time, but the next time will be so much better. Of that I can be certain, because I only grow wiser and more sure of what I want as time goes on. And next time I won't need to speak, just a point and give a look.
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