As her hair spills over her rolled back eyes and she emits frayed whimpers with a trembling lip, I can’t help but think that there’s some kid somewhere tossing and turning in bed while a warped version of this plays out in his nightmares. I bet he didn’t envision a guy like me. I wince at how many times I’ve been him, and feel guilt for the role reversal. As I thrust at her like a foaming junkyard dog, I can’t help but think of the sounds a woman from my past used to make. I wonder if right now she’s making them under someone equally as animistic who isn’t quite so concerned about what she thinks or what she was like as a kid. I can’t help but think what the girl underneath me is thinking currently. She’s here for one of two reasons – a good lay, which I’m too strung out and lit up to provide, or she sees something in me, which stems from disillusion and can only end up disappointing.
I find myself disgusted with her for settling on me. I find myself dismayed that she’s not Her. I find myself weary over the whole sad act that got us here. I find myself angry that I feel this way. I find myself perplexed as to why I continue to sidestep the landmine of a sexual partner I care about. I would gladly pay her if it let me slip my clothes back on and leave here agreeably immediately upon curtain call.
This used to be one of the last surviving distractions capable of leading me to lose myself entirely in a moment. In younger years just about anything was able to do the trick — music, television, baseball cards, rescuing Zelda, walking through the woods, buying things, sunny days, popularity, dates, kisses, parties, visits with old friends. But in the last five years or so all I’ve had is fucking and the Browns. Lately, I can’t stop thinking during fucking and Browns games are beginning to feel as much of a chore as church.
I want to find something, someone, anything, that can bring me back to that mindless and skyrocketing feeling that comes with an orgasm, a touchdown, the peak of a rollercoaster, an unexpected dip in the road, a Bo Jackson rookie in my deck. It doesn’t need to be a grand love or a good fuck. Just something that – for one second - makes me want me to scream and sing and take my fists to anyone who dares to tread upon something so sacred. I just want to lose myself again. I see it in other people’s faces everyday, often for the most banal of reasons, and I want it back.
I want to have a crush on a girl I don’t know. I miss still having butterflies when the game was in all likelihood out of reach. If I could just say the right thing to her, if Couch could just convert this next first down…it’s not that I’m too jaded anymore to believe that those things could happen. It’s just that I’ve somehow lost the ability to lose myself in the magic. I need a switch to go off in my brain. I’d like it if it was one that isn’t flipped by a pretty face or an illegal drug or a legal pill or a false prophet…but I’m so desperate that I’ll take anything.
In an effort to fall asleep, I imagine taking cross-country road trips with past lovers. We sing along to Hootie & the Blowfish while the South Carolina sun glints across the highway, and we don’t have to pretend it’s ironic. We figure out where we went wrong, but are prudent enough to part ways at the trip’s end. The thought is nice, but it still can’t carry me from this foreign apartment bedroom.
Around four in the morning I decide to slip out into her living room, where I crack a beer and watch a Roseanne re-run, nodding along with myself that John Goodman really carried the show. I think about Her during commercial breaks.
