It's that time of year again- time for me to leave my beloved London for my exile to San Francisco.

Before you say I'm being melodramatic, yes, it really does feel like that. In London I have great night buses, a lovely flat, my partner, a flexible job, health care... here, I have a basement in the hills with no way to escape. Ugh. But I'm stuck here til November and I'm going to try to make the best of it if I can.

Leaving the boy behind has to have been the hardest thing I've done in a long time. We're rarely apart, except for these exiles, and this will be the longest yet- twice as long as the last one. It feels like Victorian surgery to my heart, ripping into me, a scalpel with no anesthetic. Horrible, horrible. But then, he is my best friend along with being my lover and submissive, so no wonder it hurts.

He did ask me to marry him, however, much to my delight! I know we're playing a long game, really... we won't be getting married any sooner than a year, I imagine... but it's worth it. I never really thought I would meet someone I would feel so passionately in love with a year and a half in (forget 7 year itch, I had the 7 month version!) but I feel like I have met my soulmate. He is totally my other half (and sometimes, jokingly, my twin... people do ask if we're related, which adds a hot taboo edge to our kink).

I didn't anticipate when I met him at a female dominant club that I would be thinking about living together or whose name we're going to take when we marry. I figured we'd go on a few dates and things would be fun and then maybe it would all crumble, because I've never had a relationship work for any length of time, particularly with distance, and, I'll admit it, kink and non monogamy. I haven't found lovers in the past really devoted to working on the relationship, to working on issues around keeping the sex hot and fun, to be willing to discuss what works and what doesn't with nonmonogamy. And yet here I am, in couples counseling with my lovely boy sorting our shit out together, contemplating how I went from fiercely poly to weirdly emotionally monogamous. Far more than I expected from a night out, but god, am I glad I spoke to the pretty boy in the bunny ears!

Yeah, yeah, I know, mushy emotional stuff, let's all vomit in our mouths a little. But I'm allowed sentimentality. :) Plus, it was a very romantic proposal, in a gazebo by a castle in Whitstable, with him on one knee and everything. I'm wearing my engagement ring over my promise ring that he got me in December. I miss him dreadfully.

But I'm doing what I always do- unpacking my things, reading, buying food that reminds me of the UK, drinking buckets of tea. Thinking of stuff to keep me busy. Trying to be strong, even without my Daddy-submissive-foxboy.

I think I can do it.

For us, I can do it.