Get to me and turn me well, I’m a tired soul. My body aches, sleep? What sleep.
“Why haven’t you been sleeping? Is is your cold harsh room?”
“Sometimes”
“Is it that empty feeling inside? You know, the one where you never quite feel lonely, but always alone?”
“Occasionally”
“It’s the bedtime coffee isn’t it…”
“No, not really”
“Is it stress from work? Is it making you queasy? Unsettled even.”
“I suppose it’s been hard, but nothing I’m not used to”
“Was it that hour and twenty minute long session the other day?”
“That could be it.”
“Do you know why it took her so long to orgasm?”
“It could have been due to that bottle of wine she drank after the second. I suppose.”
“Are you nervous you’ve lost your touch? That you no longer know how to please?”
“Perhaps.”
“Well if not that, is it that no-one can make you happy like that? No matter how long it takes.”
“Yes. Yes, that’s it.”
And that’s precisely when my mother backed me into that proverbial corner where one is forced to come out. It was a conversation that I both dreaded and expected, and through the first two years of my relationship with my partner, I managed to avoid it, even with my mother’s suspicions running high after walking in on us snuggling one night (that, of course, combined with the bad influence of that woman’s college I insisted upon going to). The conversation in itself was unremarkable and unfunny, and it was precipitated by my mentioning that my partner was also, oh so coincidentally, getting her MA at the same school in which i had enrolled for mine.
