Thank you for your letter. It’s good to hear from you and be writing to you once again.Your words reminded me of a small moment that happened when we were talking some years ago as, I recall, I was massaging your feet. We were discussing the topic of writing, and I mentioned in passing that I thought you were a natural writer. It was a studied gesture on my part, in that I’d had the thought many times and kept it to myself, because I believed that if I said it too directly it would sound like empty flattery rather than something I had come to believe. So I just dropped it like a seed and let the subsequent conversation wash right over it. If the seed took, well, then it would take.I thought this about you not because of how you wrote then (although that college paper you wrote for a lit class impressed me with a kind of raw genius that felt true and original. I remember your professor used the word splendid to describe it. And as overused as that word is, she was right). I sensed how much effort went into the emails you crafted (and yet the commitment to those carefully composed emails also spoke to the stoic spirit essential to a writer), but because of the raw materials I’ve noticed in a lot of the writers I enjoy and respect. The radical, almost mystic-like openness to the world, seen and unseen. The paradoxical urges to perceive the world for all while remaining as hard to know as the world itself. The relentless appetite to seek out the unorthodox and the unknown in film, music, even your own instincts. Any insecurity you ever felt about about your own writing abilities – because you so deeply cared about good writing – was itself a kind of early credential for becoming a writer.Anyway, the moment passed just as I thought it would. I doubt that particular seed took root, but I think I did anticipate in some instinctual way the journey you’ve taken between the day I uttered those words to you and the words in your own letter to me. Writing is not the easiest way to spend your time, more ready to yield grief than reward, but if it calls you, and you hear the call, there’s not a lot you can do. This is why affected ideas of writerliness or what a writer is supposed to be are nonsense. A carpenter builds. A baker bakes. A writer obsesses over words, first those of other writers, then her own. Writing is like playing Go, or practicing meditation: The instructions are so simple. The execution can take a lifetime to master.With respect, and while I hear your apology as the sincere gesture it is, II want to suggest it’s unnecessary. One of the hardest things about being a sub or slave is remaining vigilant about your fantasies taking over, essentially willing the Dominant into a factotum. Submission becomes a fraud when it’s dictated to someone whose role is to pretend to be in control. I understood that you entered our scenes willing to, as you said, get lost in my fantasies. But there were also your instincts. There were also the moments when this dark, beautiful presence would emerge, and when it did, my own actions and responses to it were directed entirely toward calling it out into the dungeon, befriending it, even at the cost of it devouring me. I have never seen anything like that energy.In hindsight, what I was looking for was true pain and powerlessness in order to save myself – not a safe simulacrum of pain and powerlessness. I didn’t want the amusement-park ride, but the feral, dark landscape that stood just on the other side of the chain-link fence surrounding it. If you look at the last chapter of the book you mentioned, it describes the healing that you gave me, a healing that I came to believe couldn’t ever happen when I met you, but which your instincts led to you make real for me. It’s still not clear to me how much of what I saw in you was my own projection, despite my best efforts to not project onto you, and what was actually emerging inside yourself in front of me.It’s interesting that one of the titles you’ve taken on is “shamanatrix,” and another “educatrix.” Both were evident in our time together. Looking back, our scenes of years ago feel to me more like therapy than anything else. A kind of extreme therapy that can step in where conventional psychotherapy falls short. You healed ancient pains and helped me live a better life today. As I’ve said before, I will always remain grateful for that.

Macaulay