“Oh, god, it’s morning.”
Waking up next to her, a body in the sheets, narrowed eyes watching
me, hair a halo behind her.
There’s the ideal morning, though it doesn’t happen after
your 25th birthday. I don’t
mean to say that 31 is old but, let’s face it, certain things have begun to
fade. Falling down a hill is now panic
inducing and, no longer, is it a fun challenge.
Drinking deep into the night has consequences. I no longer wake up to the sound of birds
singing with beautiful women beside me and decide to skip my 10am class so we
can mingle together on the sheets and eat stolen bread from the cafeteria while
finishing last night’s scotch.
Now, I wake up with a beautiful woman, and then share the
mutual agony of waking up. Gotta go to work.
Or, worse, the consuming need to make a day off and weekends useful in
some way. Can’t lie here all day
because, firstly, I’m getting a strange sort of hospital bed headache and,
secondly, these are the only two days where we can do anything because we both
work 29 hours a day and, on Sunday, I want to be alone so I can cut my thighs
and swallow fistfuls of xanax.
Maybe we could still be youthful if it wasn’t for our
jobs. Even on Saturday, if somebody
mentions working the next week, I sort of have a quick cut-my-thighs
moment. Next week?! Oh god, you’re right. There will
be a next week.
That said, there’s always something amazing about waking up
next to a woman. I continually worry
that it’ll disrupt my sleep patterns, but it never does. Therefore, I extend my manic Woody Allen-esque
worry and convince myself that I’m disrupting her sleep patterns and,
therefore, imposing in some way. Any
imposition is, of course, grounds for dissolving the relationship and sending
me back to my treehouse where, once again, I have to cry myself to sleep and
clutch My Little Pony’s to my chest.
There’s no calming me on fears like this because, apparently, I’m
insane.
I’m very comfortable sharing my bed. I should relax and go with that. I should relax and go with lots of things,
actually. There’s a caveman sort of
warmth I get from women. Skin on skin,
hair in my hands, the tangle of bodies at 3am when I wake up with the fear that
I’ve lost my arm and, screaming because I dreamed it had been cut off, I rip it
out from under her head and tearfully work the blood back into it while she
stares at me with a mixture of deep hatred and horror. Then, pulling myself together, assuming I’m
still welcome in the bed, I love that early hour’s reconfiguration. Half waking, pulling bodies together, kissing
in our sleep. I always liked the
scissored legs, because I can think about her pussy with the 97% of my brain
that stopped ageing on my 14th birthday. Overall, falling asleep with someone else’s
body rhythm is more relaxing than the white noise of my cousin’s hamsters
multiplying at an alarming rate in the house walls.
In the mornings, I’m always pleased with breakfast
girls. I think the liberated woman’s
dark secret is that they like cooking breakfast and making coffee on a
lazy
Saturday. There’s a certain sort of
nostalgic charm. You can always trust a
breakfast girl, but don’t be misled by continental breakfast
girls. Here are some pastries! Here’s some thin, weak
Folgers instant
coffee! That was a great night.
While breakfast isn’t a requirement, of course, because all
I expect is cereal, coffee does define a woman.
Heavy, rich, imported, snooty coffee.
Not yuppie coffee. Upper class
coffee. There’s a difference. There’s the coffee that the coffee houses
serve and then there’s the Nacho-standard, illegally imported Cuban coffee
religiously brewed with purified water and a dash of spleen-burning love. Angry coffee.
Confusing. Sophisticated. Atomic. Slightly beyond reality on a hot day and
brutally violent on a cold day. A woman
is her coffee.
The coffee test may well be why I’m still living alone. That and the 97% of my mind that stopped
maturing. And the homicidal
schizophrenia, yes.
A girl once served me coffee so weak, you could see the
bottom of the mug. She whipped it
together like it was a painful favor, using a filthy drip machine that had
ancient coffee skin floating around in it.
You know what that says? Get out
for good. And I did. I have no hesitation leaving a woman because
of her coffee. I will tolerate bad
habits, but I cannot tolerate weakness.
I’m never very active in the mornings, unless I’m on the
road. At home, I take about four hours
to finally put on clothes and do something.
On the road, I set the alarm for six and I’m out by seven. For some reason, I can’t bring the two
together. Some women don’t understand
this and become frustrated, I’ve found, when I sit there drinking coffee and
refresh the Greatsociety Forums while darkly sneering out the window at all the
happy people. The trick is, of course,
to just drag me out to an event. I’ll
complain and scream like a child but, once we hit the road, things get into the
groove. This fault has ruined many
relationships, oddly enough. Darling, if
you want to do something, get proactive.
Disagreements, bad coffee, lies and pain. Love seems marked by
these things. I leave them, they leave me, and I think
about all the lost time. A year gone for
someone who hates me now. But I never
regret the shared bed. The power that I seem to absorb. There,
after the long night, each of us
wrapped together, sharing breath and space and dreams, a woman is at
her
weakest. A strange sort of expectation
seems to wash over her. Perhaps waiting
for me to say the right thing? That, of
course, is wasted effort because I have no idea what to say besides
“Oh, god,
it’s morning again.”