Milton's Letter 2

My Dearest Austin,

Today was awful for you, maybe more awful than the very first few days when shock and disbelief allow people to function without thought. I watched you cry as the snow drifted down onto the bare branches, dusted the few footsteps, and dribbled onto the granite headstones. I doubt if you cried sufficiently before; you were the age where budding masculinity was at war with your real emotions. Tears are not childish or feminine, but a natural display of suffering. Perhaps under the whip, you have begun to understand that and allow a true display of your emotions. I hope, and this hope may be nought but wishful thinking and convoluted logic to ease my own conscience, that the path of submission will help you survive as a strong and independent young man.

I know it sounds strange to speak of independence when I declared your autonomy to be ended when you pledged your submission to me. A submissive grants the dominant power both to hurt and to cherish. You understood the pain; you wanted the pain. You neither understood nor were prepared for my intrusions into your thoughts or my demands to cherish and protect. You are a teenager; adults are to be brushed off with the ubiquitous fine or OK. As you have discovered, sometimes painfully, this is not permissible. You gave me your submission, and with that you ordered me to know your thoughts and your fears and to guide you down the treacherous path toward submission and the adult Austin.

What is the independence of which I speak and write? It is the independence to truly be yourself. You are not the proverbial Tom, Dick, and Harry, but a precious boy with unique needs and wants. You have the independence and the courage to declare yourself outside the norm. Friends your age are finishing high school, maybe thinking of the color of their cummerbund for their senior prom, or nervously awaiting an envelope from the college of their choice. They are testing waters in rites of passage toward adulthood and away from the regulations of childhood that you will never challenge. You’re my submissive. You don’t have the freedom to kick your heels into the air and suddenly turn your hair purple. I try to give you something else. I try to give you the freedom to discover who you are: a young gay man, a submissive, a beautiful boy who longs to hand himself entirely over to a dominant. 

Many will chastise me for taking a boy so young. I understand the accusations, and I must live with the possible consequences. You will hear words that I have stunted your growth, or forced you into the path of submission, that you cannot possibly understand, or worst of all that I abused my power as a parental figure. As I watched you sob today, you looked young and small and innocent among the silent graves. I longed for you to have a parent, the mother who carried you for nine months and the father who held the tiny bundle at the hospital. I saw your lips move. I suspect you were telling them of your life now. I do not know if you ever had a chance to tell them you were gay or share your dreams of adulthood. I know you never spoke of your submission, but this is something that is often an ill kept secret between a child and the adults who love and raised him. To speak of something that private with a parent is impossible, but yet the sensitive ones will have guessed. I was raised by men who knew and understood, and keeping that secret as I struggled to find my footing as a dominant was not necessary. Sheldon’s parents certainly knew even if they didn’t have a name to put on their son’s needs or any true understanding of what lay at the heart of his outrageous behavior. I suspect they knew before Blade knew himself. The Zaths are not a willfully blind or insensitive family. Unfortunately they didn’t tell either Sheldon or me and left their youngest son to struggle as he came of age and flounder in a world where he couldn’t fit inside the designated normal paradigms. I’m sure they feared interfering with a boy so young or projecting their own fears or concerns onto Blade or even inadvertently pushing him toward a lifestyle which they accept but don’t understand. I’ve known them for many years, have stayed at their house, and have eaten at their table, but they are still unsure if they should see me as a savior for Sheldon or a perverted torturer. The truth lies somewhere in the middle, but it is not a subject we discuss.

I watched you today, kneeling in the snow with shaking shoulders, and wished I could be the parents who were so brutally snatched from you. None of us could be your parent. You came to us at an age that was too old to parent from scratch, but too young to bind with a pledge of submission. Tilden and I knew immediately. For Tilden it was perhaps the greater burden. I have come to understand and even be at peace with the force that lurks behind my dominance. Tilden is by nature a very gentle man. In years past, he might have been a solitary monk lost in the contemplation of God to tame urges that he fights every day. He is a dominant who caresses and cherishes with joy, but when he must hit anguishes over each stroke and tortures himself for finding pleasure in the pink skin over his lap or the cuddle of a tearstained boy. In conversation he is a powerful dominant. Endless glasses of tea and the samovar will often bring the most ill-mannered submissive to a willing heel. He has incredible power with his voice and his steady and unhurried control. 

Tilden tried to bring you into the fold with talk and reason, to use logic and language to explore your future. You, in a continual teenage tirade, trampled his gentle reason and scoffed at him as weak. He is not weak, my boy, and I think you understand that now after you have knelt at my feet. He is a strong and unwavering dominant, but he is bound by a code of ethics that prohibited him from doing what we both saw. He dreaded handing you to me, and I could see in his eyes that he saw it as a failure on his part. He hadn’t protected your childhood, but fed you to the lion. 

I am that lion. I snap and snarl, and cuff you hard for perceived imperfections in obedience and submission to me, but, my young cub, I am also your guide and protector in a world that should still by all rights be in your future. I hope I can live up to those demands. I hope I can guard and cherish a submission that is tantalizing in its sweetness and total surrender. You are a challenge, a burden, and a joy. I hope to draw out the bright flicker of gold that flutters and disappears across your usual dark and sometimes hostile eyes into a steady ray of joy and completeness. There will be pain for all of us on that journey, and may we all find the strength.

With Love,

Milton