Confession is good for the soul. I've long followed everything you share here on DA and elsewhere, Shiniez, and I love it all. But when I first encountered this particular chapter, I parked the file. I was very preoccupied with other non-related issues in my life good and bad. I simply didn't have the time or will to push through this, even though it wouldn't have taken an hour to get through it. Because I knew it likely would stay with me, re-orient me, and draw me back, getting me away from serious real-life matters that at that particular time needed my full attention. Life is what happens when you make other plans.

So here I am, two-plus years later, serious RL matters resolved and me reinvested in all things DA. I remembered I've got some shiniez catching up to do. It's an otherwise boring evening and I'm stuck alone and so why not? I opened up this long-deferred installment and began deliberately and slowly, savoring each panel, looking more at the technical effort than the story, as if I was a neo treading through that bdsm store for the first time. I was deliberate, lest like those two would-be soul-mates I might lose my nerve and my way, at least before I was ready for the plunge.

Well, my cautious plan went right into File 13 soon enough. What a rush. What an absolute treasure of a tale. Flowers and thorns, all carefully disarranged. A real beginning-to-end story of a complex relationship between two complex people who aren't quite ready yet to assimilate all their unresolved feelings and desires, pushing against obstacles in order to distill strength and purpose. And, of course, to take boinking to a new level. With, as well, an eye-opening yet sweet BDSM story overlay or perhaps undergarment.

Lovely, wonderful, touching, sad, hilarious, unnerving, synergistic moment after moment. Built up as any good story teller would do, with bits and pieces that glimpse the essence of an entire person at a given moment, before they can know themselves that person anywhere near as well. But we who know ourselves (yeah, right) are allowed fresh perspective into things we either think we know or simply don't.

A genius at your work you are, someone who truly groks the human condition and its many onion-thin layers, uncovering essential cross-sections with complete ease and mastery.

This will stay with me a long time. I'm personally past all the emotional sturm und drang of my past few years. But there's a lot more where that comes from, as anyone my age might agree. So catharsis is always in order. I signify. Youth, it is said, is wasted on the young. The good thing is that with your kindly assistance I feel newly young and I'm not wasting a moment of it. [Did I mention this turned the historical iron mask into my latest fetish object?]