Dark Night of the soul

Dark night of the soul when there is no sleep anywhere but in the slack face of this strange lover. Flaccid penis heady with cheesy sleep-fug, hair sweating into my pillow. Dead to my pacing and my wringing of hands.

Sex like a drug buzzing in my bloodstream. I am calmed by the pheromones the chemical release that accompanies an orgasm. Still I am all wound up. I am awake and pacing and I would run out into the dead night, the hot night teeming with the little scuttering of cockroaches, the insect hum of traffic lights. I am held to this prison of my own bedroom by this sleeping stranger who may wake to an empty house.

What if he wakes and I am gone? Will he leave? Will he take something of mine with him? What is mine to take? I have nothing of great value, an armful of photographs torn from magazines, some notebooks with words more precious to me than jewels, some paperbacks, scuffed with love, the pages all turned down and underlined.

The walls are a cage and I bump against them in my flurry. I think of lionesses, baboons loping back and forth in their lumber to escape.

The boy will wake in an empty flat and he will think badly of me. Odd predatory girl, a house full of twigs and fairy lights, the frightening intensity of the lovemaking, the strange post-coital pacing. All wound up.

I should wake him and make best use of him, another shot of my drug, another round of mouths and fingers and genitals.

I read somewhere that nymphomaniacs are obsessed by sex because they cannot achieve orgasm. This is not my problem. My problem is the space between orgasms, the terrible chasm of daily life, the social imperatives, the pointless living. I press my face against the window and look at all that wakeful night. A thousand places to run off into.

Soon, I whisper into the balm of dark. I will not bring strangers home tomorrow night. Tomorrow night I will escape and race through the electric buzz of the sleeping city in peace.