But by the fifth guy you were dying inside, you knew this was not for you and wondered how prostitutes did it. You felt like a hocrux – one-fifth of a soul, split for every lover. You had been sold a nightmare by the movies. Sexual liberation came with a price tag, one too heavy for you to pay. You vowed not once, not twice, to stop but you were here, and there was a new erection in front of you, so you thought “why not?” and took off your knickers and did a split. This one did not pretend intimacy like number three had, condom on and he was plunging your depths while you made the right noises, his hands in your hair – your effort-ful red hair. You began to count tiles, books on his shelf, again and again, anything to keep your mind from the pillaging going on below.
You became aware of the cobwebs on the ceiling and the trail of ants coming through a crack in the far left wall. You wondered why his room was so disgusting and dank, a contrast from the big airy and tidy house, you almost fell in love with when you walked in. He mistook that admiration as something for him and you could have sworn you saw his ego inflate just that little bit more. You met him at church and he had felt the need to ask you over since his parents were away on the pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
On the trip home you considered your curfew, it was a pointless rule, here you were on a Sunday afternoon, seething in the aftermath of a one-sided pleasure trip. You sighed within your soul, it was a debilitating bleak malheureuse of an affair. You began to consider your motive for all of this. You wanted sexual liberation, like the women in the movies you loved seeing. This was nothing like it, this was something almost sinister, the surge of desire in their eyes before and the distance in it after. You were unprepared for the silence within you or the numbness that enveloped you. You couldn’t feel anything no matter how hard you tried, not joy, not pain, not sorrow, not elation, not the love of being in love. Your world had gone to sleep. You imagined the numbness was a sort of self-preservation technique employed by your mind to protect itself from the inevitable hardening of your heart which happens when you bend your soul for the fleeting comfort of another’s arms. Your supposed amorous intrigues were anything but, it was a jumble of so much nothing.
You lost.
You were the amuse bouche, a simple sample, never sufficient enough to sate any hunger.
The God you abandoned the Ouija board for seemed silent, you couldn’t even face him. How could you? After you had deliberately flouted his laws for incessant quickies? Pain was the familiar blanket you knew but you were well past its redemption; this was absolutely nothing self-harm could fix.
The Sunday evening found you in the kitchen, unable to awaken yourself inside so you settled for the banality of simple chores. When the plate accidentally slipped from your hand and crashed, something stirred inside you, like a stillborn foetus kicking back to life, so you did it again. Plate after plate after plate until it was empty. You were thawing. You head to the garage where your mother stored plates for her rental business. She had branded them with her initials “AJK”, there, you continued your destruction. AJK after AJK until there was a small heap at your feet and the tears flowed freely.
In retrospect, you did not need to break so many plates, by the fourth the frenzy that came with the crash of crockery was lifting like a mist and the silence inside was giving way to noise, to feeling, to healing or at least the beginning of it. Right there and then you decided that if it ever came down to bleeding or breaking plates, you would find the razor and have a long think.
