I wept on the vasectomy operating table. Legs spread, balls clamped. Dr. Yasser tried to make a few jokes, but he’s Egyptian. My tears were not caused by pain - but by the immense burden of guilt I’d built up over the years. I’ve become accustomed to it now - all the heartaches, all the loveless fucks, the abortions, the wasted time, the incongruence of my words and the feelings they betray. I saw all their faces as I lay there, passing before me one after the next like a chain I’d forged out of my own misery.
Romina from Argentina, who I almost married in Borneo and love to this day, who had a miscarriage on the toilet which, I suspected, was because of the visceral distress my reaction to the pregnancy caused… Jenny from the Philippines, who had been taking the pill whenever she felt like it, had to go to Hong Kong in the middle of the riots to get an abortion… Then Jessica, the stupid wench who wiped my cum off her belly onto her vagina, that abortion was in Japan… And recently Tryness, from Ghana, it must have been the discharge, no other reason, we were careful and I didn’t cum inside her. So many truly blissful nights. For a decade my appetite for the sensual became an obsession and took my place. Sometimes I was intimate with 3 women in one day. Sometimes with 2 women at a time. I couldn’t count to the nearest hundred how many there have been. Yet I’ve been depressed and isolated throughout. And today all that misery suddenly weighed down on me. But I also cried because of a deeper sentiment: being irrevocably stripped of the fundamental purpose of existence: to reproduce, to share life with a family. Immeasurably valuable and wholesome things, to be sure. I’ve often adored the thought, idealistically, but the fear and self-centredness and aversion to responsibility always kept me well away from it. So I’m lying there on a metal table with my arms outstretched like the crucifixion, in a green open-back robe, being sterilized. With Afari it was close. She was with me there, lying on the table, watching my crucifixion. She gave me all of love. It overspilled around my heart. So much so, I took it for granted. I forgot to pay it back. I kept it all for me. We were so close. Yet I loved her from distance. I could never give myself over to someone. But somehow she always felt like home to me. She even offered to pick me up after the operation. That broke my heart. Not even the perfect girl could pull me away from myself, from this wretched freedom I’d cultivated over the years, that amounts to little more than dull thrills and uncertainty. So far from the quiet idyl of the bohemian-in-the-wilderness kind of freedom that was the original seed of all this. At some point I gave up on life. All I know is anguish. Now there’s no thing and no one I want or need. Nothing I’d like to see or do, I’d just as gladly not see or do. Instead I’m holed up in this halfway house of hedonism, biting my nails, waiting around to die, fanning myself and my vanity. In the end Afari came to see me after the operation. We went to the cinema, and she held my hand. The next day I sold my cat and slept with a girl I hardly even liked.
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AuthorEnglish teacher from the UK. Living in Granada. Currently working in Doha. Archives
February 2022
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