After two days, bored. The daily routine, broken. It’s regular punctuation, meals, now uninspiring. Normally it’s a pleasure, go to the supermarket, pick out vegetables, go to the meat or fish counter, choose some meat or fish, bring it home, start the cooking. Throughout, working out how to cook it, which combinations to try, thinking about its presentation on the plate, seeing my wife’s response.
The telephone ringing, my daughter. Can she have some money, her friends are going to a theme park on Saturday, she wants to go too. Sure darling. Further conversation, some fatherly teasing, daughterly protestations, giggling. Putting down the phone. The house seemingly emptier. Nobody to share the phonecall with.
Watching television, quickly getting restless. Going to bed. Reading. Getting sleepy. Turning the light out. Settling to sleep. Nobody to say goodnight to, stroke her shoulder, hold her hand.
Never mind, she’ll be back soon. Funny, any other woman returning from a week away, you’d celebrate with some lovemaking, refresh your knowledge of each others’ bodies, release some tensions. A beautiful human interaction with intense therapeutic effect. Denied however to me, I know her well, it’s not how she works.
Once I’d have thought, the absence of sex, that means the glue’s not there, no point in being together. Now I think different. Sexual glue, it’s good at first, then it hardens and loses adhesion, then it’s just an impediment. Man and woman, the thing that holds them together isn’t sexual glue, it’s something deeper than that.
Strange how everything seems to point the same way. Let marriage do the things marriage is good at, find sexual release elsewhere.
