I knew it was time to leave my Master when my friends stopped telling me their secrets. Because they knew everything went from my ears to my pen, and from my page to his eye. Was that fair of them, of me? I miss him. I did not dance at my former Master’s wedding—I did not stay even long enough to eat falafel and chocolate cake. I was in the middle of getting over the flu, that was one excuse. I went because he invited me and I love to please. It’s not something authority figures are always prepared for in me, but I like following rules, and I enjoy doing what I’m told. I know everything is in my best interests. I left when I realized it was not. How can I stand naked before someone whose eyes are elsewhere in the room? He beat Anna and went out to smoke a cigarette, leaving us, her harem sisters, to bring her back to earth. Perhaps she found nothing wrong in that, perhaps it is even what she preferred, but I could not forgive the possibility that it could have been me. My relationship was between Robin and Sassi, and suddenly there was Kassi and Akasha and Lady Aliyah and Sassi was at home in a tactful silence and Robin outside smoking a damn cigarette. Menthols, Kools. The same brand as me. I used to smoke Newports, then Newport Lights, what does it say that I switched, that still over a year later all I smoke is Kool Milds? And none of my friends know why I left him because none of them understood why or how I was his in the first place. And he didn’t even look surprised, terribly, when I told him. And then I stopped keeping a journal altogether. I stopped keeping a journal when I left my Master—why? Because there was no longer anyone reading it? Because suddenly it was neither one thing or the other, not private as it used to be nor public as I was used to? Did Robin even read all those notebooks, after all? I think I wrote them faster than he could read. He admonished me for sitting in a chair in my own fucking house, at my own party. Maybe that was when the tide really turned. Was I still being overly impressionable? Did I leave because I couldn’t stand the weight of my own friends’ disapproval? How much did the Celexa have to do with it, really? Sometimes I still do those exercises, kneeling, placing my hands. I still even remember some of the Gorean names. Not the standing up straight bit, though. And I wear those black low-heeled sandals Tim helped me pick out. I like to think he and Sassi would be proud of me |if they saw me in them.|

¶ 7:06 AM