The Tragedy of E

Reading Time: 5 minutes

This time I’m going all the way back to the time when I discovered Mrs Silks chat room and held my nerve long enough to stay there.  It’s a time that can’t be disentangled from E and the effects she had on my development.  Over a long period of years there were many downs alongside the ups which make this a hard piece to write fairly because some of those who made themselves known from reading my memoriam piece for Mrs Silk may recognise E, even with few clues.

Part of my job in the early to mid-90’s was developing the technologies of the Internet as we now know it.  I had access to the very earliest NCSA Mosaic browser to help test the underlying communications.  I still marvel at how the WWW has grown, there were fewer than 20 public web servers in the world at that time.

Only a few years later there were thousands and in amongst them was a place to get certain individuals very tingly and apprehensive, Mrs Silks.

SecondScreen
The AJAX chat app was a big upgrade for Silks.  The original was based on BBS terminal.

From what I remember my thoughts and ideas of what I was and what I wanted were very mixed up.  To dress and act feminine, but only so far.  To be submissive to a female, but only so far.  All quite laughable now but so earnestly and innocently hoped for along with dozens of similar others on that platform.

My first problem was in how to behave to flag my presence.  Some subs have no problem dropping in to private conversation with a domme without a by your leave and generally it’s not a good approach.  That’s not me, I need permission and I’m too tied up in confusion to ask for permission.  Sat quietly observing the working of the room I got my fair share of “twoo doms” sliding in to private chat.

In the end I gave up on my hopes of some domme metaphorically sidling up to me and fishing me out of the sea.  I decided just to have fun in the chat room.  And here was another lesson for later.  When I can’t be bothered to be on best behaviour in order to impress and instead just enjoy myself, there’s a chance things might happen.

And they did.  E was the doyenne of the chat room.  She was the queen of the room with a group of a few other females.  She was lively, witty and intelligent.  She could be thoroughly withering and disparaging – a survival attribute I discovered most females require in order to last in that type of environment.

She inserted herself in private chat and started a multi-year roller-coaster.

Online and long distance relationships are part and parcel of social interactions these days, back then, they were a kind of absurdity.

We were heading in to verdant green pastures, looking to meet up etc and then – Bang !! she disappeared.  I spent a frantic week terrified something had happened to her and with that sinking feeling in the heart and stomach.  Then, there was a tearful email.  She’d taken a work contract abroad for a few months.

It was a pattern to be repeated, fearful of commitment she would stretch until the emotional elastic snapped and she’d run away.  Outside of this the intellectual and emotional compatibility was very high.  We could talk about the Arts for days and she really gobsmacked me by being quite fanatical about cricket.  I kept believing that we would smooth out these crises and be able to move beyond them.

To a degree we did smooth them out – once.  Just enough to agree a meet over a weekend.  I was scared witless in that no one had ever seen me in a dress before.  Experiencing absolute fear when I heard her knock on the hotel door.  I then proceeded to learn about one major aspect of my interaction with the submissive role – I go introverted, incapable of speech and articulation.  She took that as rejection, especially when it lasted in to the following day and I couldn’t explain that I was actually blown away.

She ran off home, PDQ.

Lessons.  Lessons.  Lessons.

What I learned about my own reactions stood me in good stead with later relationships in that I could talk about them and warn of them before they asserted.

I learned the difference between a dominant and a top.  She was most definitely a top and could not concentrate in a way that you find dominants can.

The first big ending came from a betrayal.  I had some tickets for an event months in advance when she booked herself another contract abroad.  She explicitly said that the contract ended the week before.  Nearer the time, I asked when she was coming back and she gave a date two weeks after the event.  Cautiously I asked if the contract had been extended and she blithely replied that this had always been the end date.  I made no issue of it but it was the start of a drifting apart.

A chance exchange on messenger brought her back in to my life a few years later.  My reaction a bit like Pavlov’s dogs.  Once again the patterns were repeated, a building up of emotional intensity punctured the moment she feared her next step would be commitment.  Again, I ran out of energy to keep on trying.

Riding-the-Emotional-Rollercoaster
Took me a long time to actually get off this particular roller coaster.

The final chapter was a few years later when she again popped up on messenger.  She was a complication in that I now had a mistress.  She said she wanted nothing more than friendship and didn’t want to transcend boundaries.  It worked for a while until she became jealous of my mistress.  I cut her off dead at that point, I should have done it sooner.

I was involved with her off and on for around 15 years.  The early promise of compatibility wasted in our own frailties and insecurities that we couldn’t communicate to each other.  That taught me the essential nature of communication which worked for me in later years.  On her reappearances in my life I never detected her address those insecurities.

When I first encountered the muse of Mrs Silks chat room she was the fantasy domme for most of the room.  I found a lot of reality with her that blew away many of the worst of the fantasy myths.  Yet, I grew and evolved where she didn’t and couldn’t.

If she ever popped up again I’d have to fight against that Pavlovian response even though I know she would have nothing to offer.  I couldn’t enter that time warp she would want to inhabit, I’ve gone to places she could never imagine and I have further to go ….

…. but that first encounter of what passed for FemDom, it’s still a powerful pull of a memory of someone who held my heart in their fingers for a long time …..