Cycle II · “The Hidden Life” · 01

She’s supposed to be doing something else.

There’s a half-finished drink nearby, a notification bubble she keeps ignoring, a tab open that actually matters. Instead, her thumb is flicking through a feed that feels like a hallway of people shouting over each other.

On one side:

Someone explaining why anyone into D/s is secretly broken.
Why “power exchange” is just a cute name for abuse.

On the other:

Someone turning their label into a logo.
Every piece a declaration, a demand, a sponsorship opportunity.

She doesn’t see herself in either of them.

Her own browser history is quieter and worse:

“Am I still submissive if I hate everyone right now?”.
“How to disappear from kink Twitter without deleting everything”.
“How do you know if you’re normal enough for normal life.”.

Most days she just… opts out.

She laughs at the right things, nods through whatever conversations she has to, answers “I’m good, just tired” when people ask how she is, leaving out the part where she can’t remember the last time anyone said good girl and meant it like a key turning in a lock.

At some point, the algorithm betrays her.

A screenshot of a post, then the link.

Back Among the Strays.

She doesn’t click right away. She knows what that kind of title does to her. It sits there in a tab while she finishes everything else she’s pretending to care about.

Later, in the dark, she finally opens it.

The lines that catch her aren’t the kink words. It’s the small, ugly truths:

for you, it’s tectonic.

for others, it’s “oh” and a half-attention thumbs-up.

and

when you keep your real wiring offstage too long, everything starts to feel like you’re quietly deleting yourself.

She reads that part twice. Three times. Her chest does that weird half-ache, half-relief thing it does when someone names something she hasn’t had language for yet.

She thinks about all the little deletions she’s done in the last year:

Scrubbing pet names out of chats before showing screenshots to friends.
Changing “kink” to “complicated” when she talks about exes.
Un-saving pictures that made her feel too much like herself.

It hits her that she’s been trying to pass as “standard issue” for so long that she’s started to believe her own edit.

When she gets to the part that says:

You don’t owe anyone a clean label.

You owe yourself the truth.

she doesn’t cry.

She just opens a blank note on her phone and types, very slowly:

“I’m not factory-standard. I’m just quiet.”

It’s nothing dramatic. No coming-out thread, no new username, no profile overhaul.

But she doesn’t delete the note.

She lets it sit there, pulsing softly on her screen like a low-battery warning.

For the first time in a long time, she lets herself consider that maybe the problem isn’t that she’s “too much” or “not enough.”

Maybe she’s just… not alone.

And maybe, if the strays are really back, she doesn’t have to keep pretending she was never one of them.

Cycle II · “The Hidden Life” · 01

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