Month: May 2025

This post was inspired by this Twitter post:

Your job is to read these to Princess over an audio for her bedtime story

Your thick deep voice with the accent,
The way you soothe people with your voice

We all know these classics,
We all love these classics

But we will love them even more with your voice narrating them 🥹🫠 https://t.co/cFxmgAIBCC

— Princess (@laposhprincess) May 29, 2025

I’ve got a lot of writing to post, assuming it gets finished. Two are stories, currently each over 1500 words with no ends in sight, another is a uniform post about my uniformity kink, also too long, also unfinished. Yet another is a loooong post on limits and consent, currently 2000+ words. Now that the 2024-2025 academic year is done, at least for me, I’m trying to write, that is, do “Mija writing”  for at least an hour a day. So far, so good, but nothing is yet finished.

But while Paul was packing for his epic coast-to-coast journey across the US – from Long Beach, California to New York, New York seeing friends and Big Things along the way, and then on to London (for pictures of said Big Things see his Twitter feed), he pulled out a pile of letters, cards, and postcards from me.

Going through them felt like going through a time warp.  I then pulled out some of mine from Paul. There aren’t as many as he was phoning me most mornings. He was, however, much better than at picking cards, including the one he sent with birthday presents¹The only ones I received from anyone that year, a fact that scandalized him. in July 1997: the worst and most wonderful summer of my life. It was the summer when I was, at least in the technical sense, homeless,²Not “sleeping-on-the-streets” homeless. I’d taken a summer job that required me to sleep in as I was supervising and teaching ESL students, working (or at least on call) 24 hours a day, six days a week. But homeless in the sense of having no fixed address. having left my marriage but, because of that, been refused a bed in my parents’ house. My sister was on the other side of the country. The newsgroup, alt.sex.spanking, where my new (read: “only”) friends were, was inaccessible as I had no phone, no computer, and no way to dial into the internet. I felt like I was disappearing, becoming a ghost. These were not times I’ve ever wanted to revisit.

But, reading through them, I remembered that Paul didn’t let me disappear. When I no longer had internet access, he found a way to call almost every night. All I had to do was find a pay phone somewhere, use my 100 minute phone card to call him, give him the pay phone’s number and he’d call back and talk to me, tell me who was doing what on the group, about his life in Scotland, remind me that I only had to make it until the fourth week of August and I could move into the university dorms. He’d tell me he loved me — that I was special and made him so happy, that he felt so full of life. And I’d remember that in our cyber world I was “Mija” and that in that world she/I got to have fun adventures. Live with Pablo Stubbs in our treehouse. He made sure I knew I was loved, insisted on it until I couldn’t help but believe him. He told me I sparkled,  called me “angel” and while we spoke he made me feel like one. I suspect I wasn’t actually very sparkly those evenings, but certainly by my birthday (July 28) I had fallen in love. That much has never changed.³Talking with our therapist the other day, I don’t think it ever will — it’s part of who I am so losing it would require me to cut out too much of myself.

For my birthday Paul sent me a package that magically arrived exactly on my birthday. The gifts included books. They were books that introduced me to two of his favorite authors who then became fast favorites of mine: Terry Pratchett and Bill Bryson4Bryson Bear, who came to live with me at Christmas 1997, was named after Bill Bryson the author.. There were also (on cassette tapes!) recordings of Paul reading the stories he’d written for me, by then Its, Spelling, Safety, Surfing, and Sleeping. ⁵Despite his feeling super self-conscious, he made those recordings so I could play them through my walkman and listen his voice on nights when I couldn’t get to a phone. And this lovely card, embarrassingly addressed (on an inner envelope) to “The Angel Who Needs to Have Her Bottom Smacked.”⁶Not going to recount the inside… ’cause we’d all blush.

It’s of Winnie the Pooh, of course, our long-time bedtime favorite, something he read to me even over the phone. While he’s read many, many, many books to me, he’s read and re-read the Pooh stories, especially at times of stress and sadness. Pooh and the other animals live in such a cozy, comfortable world. Pooh is safety, a reminder that things gone wrong can be righted. That the best pleasures are small, sweet, and quiet.

Because “Sometimes,” said Pooh, “the smallest things take up the most room in your heart.”

• 1
  The only ones I received from anyone that year, a fact that scandalized him.
• 2
  Not “sleeping-on-the-streets” homeless. I’d taken a summer job that required me to sleep in as I was supervising and teaching ESL students, working (or at least on call) 24 hours a day, six days a week. But homeless in the sense of having no fixed address.
• 3
  Talking with our therapist the other day, I don’t think it ever will — it’s part of who I am so losing it would require me to cut out too much of myself.
• 4
  Bryson Bear, who came to live with me at Christmas 1997, was named after Bill Bryson the author.
• 5
  Despite his feeling super self-conscious, he made those recordings so I could play them through my walkman and listen his voice on nights when I couldn’t get to a phone.
• 6
  Not going to recount the inside… ’cause we’d all blush.