Name Game

My tasty splendid k and I were talking about names last night. I first knew her by her chatroom nickname, and the day she told me her real name was really one of those early moments of honesty and trust that I think about all the time. Here on the blog, we use variations on our chatroom names, but really she's never anything but her real name in my mind.

Well, unless we're talking about other kinds of names. Pet names, "role" names, etc. I never in a million years thought I'd like being called Master, for example. I'd never insist on it, in fact resisted it for a while. But I've come to see it as a gift from sweet k. It's an aknowledgment of my place in her life, of what I do for her and what she does for me. I don't consider her to be my slave (though heh, once in a while I'll use that word anyway, mostly when I want to drive her deep into her subbie headspace), and really I don't want a slave. But our roles in each other's lives have expanded outward from the bedroom to encompass a lot more, and as that has happened, she's used the word Master more. It has meaning for both of us, and I'm not ashamed to say that it gives me a deep jolt of Domliness each time she uses it. A one-word testosterone-trigger.

And I've tried various names for her as well, though her real name is so mellifluous I tend to use that more than anything else. I have used "girl" a lot - feels kind of transgressive and it took me a while to get past the age thing. It's a lot more comfortable now. And then there's "pet," which I used for a while, and is now starting to come back. Again, there are some connotations attached to it which I have to work through. Both these names have the power-relationship going the right general direction, but they skew in arcs that aren't the ones I am fully comfortable with.

It's a shame that language is so powerful and yet so confining sometimes. Ideally there would be a word that would express the myriad and subtle interplays between us, that would capture the way we complete each other, that would encapsulate the rich slow-cooked love between us. But I guess that's a lot to expect out of a handful of phonemes.

So I settle for what seems right in the moment. I called her "My slut" last night, and it was just the correct name in that situation at that time. Expressed everything I wanted to say (I'll leave just what the situation was to your vivid and twisted imaginations, dear readers).

The act of naming, even cute little pet names, carries so much power. It's a way of ordering the universe, mapping it to better fit the contours of our minds. Language is in many ways our primary interaction with the world. And in the case of my ebullient k and I, it's the main mode of personal interaction as well - we can't "speak" from body to body yet, so choice of words has a greater impact. That's one reason I like having her write my name on her body, to try and blend the linguistic and the physical - the word become flesh, so to speak. One day my hand placed calmly, quietly, claimingly, on her thigh will express what before might have taken a long rapturous treatise. (Let's all say it with bad Maurice Chevalier accents: "zee international language of love")

Till then, I'll keep ruminating on names, and see which ones work and which don't. I know that I'll never get used to being called "Master," hearing k's sweet bright tones pronounce the name that means so much to both of us.