An Experiment In Power

My Beloved is before me, and I lock the collar on. I take the key. I sit somewhere between jubilation and uncertainty.This is an experiment.Aiden and I formally ended our D/s dynamic in November, though it began to unravel a few months earlier. I overstepped some of the hard limits established in our relationship agreements. I have come to own this, for it is the truth. It is something I carry shame around, shame I am working through as he and I reconnect and heal our relationship.We entered into an egalitarian dynamic, a partnership of equals. THIS is new to me. Across my life, I have had very very few relationships of equals. It just hasn't really worked for me, sexually or emotionally. I feel better in my skin when there is a top and a bottom, as it were. It's just how it has always been, since I was a kid. Like age 6 or so. My first boyfriend was an M/s dynamic, with me on the S side. It's just what it has been... even when it was outside of a kink dynamic. I've held a LOT of sides of the coin, as it were... but the coin has been there.I've had to learn about myself and relationship within this thing called US. For what is a relationship between beloved ones, where oaths of service and surrender have been sworn, if a D/s dynamic has ended?He said to me a few weeks back that one of the challenges in submitting to me in play for the past year has been the fact that I want it all, or nothing. And it's true. It has been hard for me to have someone submit to me, hand their will over to me, to not have that carry over into the world at large. To be seen in all the ways we interact with each other. SM is different, bondage is not always the case. But to have someone on their knees, crawling before me, calling me Sir... it's hard for me to separate play from existence beyond the scene.The wall began to crack to this possibility about 2 months ago. I am in my bedroom, and my friend before me is breathing with me. She laughs, she holds my heart, she hears my sorrows. She has me feel my skin again by speaking out the names of power called lungs, mind, finger tips. And, she kneels before me. She kneels before me, and I ask her to stop. I begin to cry tears that will not come.I am too fresh, too raw, I say. I am too fresh, too raw. I am hungry for a dynamic that does not exist any more in the shape that it was.I am nostalgic. and mourn what was... and through the haze forget to look fully at what it is that IS here.The wall begins to crack.He tells me that he has been flirting with a certain someone about serving them for a weekend. I fume, I brood, I try to process through the sorrows that ache within me. He has not been able to serve me... in quite a long while. I am not just envious- I am jealous. Green eyed monster waves its tentacles, pulling in on me, strangling me with fear. Will he want to leave me? Will he get his needs filled elsewhere, leaving me behind? I am so hungry, so hungry, so desperate, don't leave me!  I pause, and look at the ridiculousness of it all. The moment passes. And yet, the feeling nags.Until I am there, and there they are. They both are glowing, and for the first time in ages I see the Boy who I wanted at my feet there before me. He is with someone else... but he is himself. He is alive, and jubilant, and beautiful. And I remember why I love polyamory, in a wave, it hits me. That I can fall in love with him all over again. I fall in love with him all over again.My heart begins to heal.We find a quite space, and kisses erupt across bodies and lips, pants pulled down and hope erupts under my fingertips. A boot touches his chest and I dive in deep. Mine, mine, mine... and as we return... we return.Mine for the moment, under my boot.  We return to the cabin and he is mine, my Beloved, not under my boot, not under an iron fist, not my Boy. But my Love. Still mine, still part of the truth, but in a different way.He said in November that we might be able to go back to what we were. We never would I said, because time does not rewind. We will live lives, and we can go forward potentially to a new D/s, but not to what we were.We will never be what we were - but we will become what we are to be.Saturday picks up his collar, the collar I bought for him, my collar. Elegant intertwining of metal on metal, that matches my claws.I lock it on him, and we go out to do pony play.  I've never handled him as a pony before. I have always been his Owner, not his Handler.  We realize that the experiment is not a good fit, even if it was fun.We've gone back to experimenting.We play. We explore. We discover. We laugh. We share.We process the pain, and the joy, alike.He comes to me and asks to be let out at the end of the day. No sorrow passes through my hands as I let him out.  It is simply what it is.Hope. I have not felt you in quite a while, when it comes to this topic.  Hope. Hope between his lips and metal and desire and laughter on his Ma'am for the weekend's lips.What is power exchange, in a relationship ever evolving? Currencies and voltages shift, move, transform. We become who we will be, not who we were.The experiment is *playing* with D/s. Can I do it? The world will see. I think it is an important experiment for me right now... learning to draw lines between "always" and "right now." The power of sitting with a gift in the moment, rather than bemoaning it's absence when it is not there any more.I can love for one breath at a time. I can fuck and be blessed with the whole world in one thrust. Now my heart says it is time, it is time.Time to put on the lab coats and grab the clip board. Time to slip on my leathers and slip out of my preconceived notions.Let the experiment be underway.