'how to'

Tonight’s a night for fucking. You can hear it in the bass.

You wouldn’t have known at 9:07pm in the confines of the bathroom, pre-sleep rituals being carefully carried out in a logical and practical order. Face first, then teeth. But having stepped into this air - the kind of air which lingers around beds - it is obvious. It is anything but logical. It’s rough and scratched and out of order and not at all practical.

Especially on a Sunday night.

For one thing, fucking messes up the sheets. The beautiful, orderly sheets. Impractically chaste in colour. Folded like origami to mimic the shape of the mattress. They end up on the floor like discarded paper. Shredded. Torn. Crinkled. They end up on the floor; they always do. It seems more natural there.

And it is only Sunday.

My mother used to make a roast on Sundays. Sunday night dinner: A roast. Every Sunday. 6:30pm. Without fail. It was served on floral patterned china plates. Knife to the right and fork on the left. Everything just right, left, right. Immaculate. We’d eat it nicely, our pretty little family. Would you please pass the gravy and isn’t this divine!

And then they’d go upstairs to fuck. My parents. Fucking on a Sunday night. Messing up the sheets. Left-right-left-up-down-in-out. Genetic hand-me-downs. We do it the same now and have done for millennia.

It is absolutely a night for fucking. So I listen to Impulse, I find creases in his body, breathe in the dusty mattress. I make swans from the bed sheets, cut them into squares. I improve my cardio, open the dresser drawer, don’t read the label, ignore the warnings, know how to already, find faces in the dark, know where I am going where I am who we are Vitamin A and oranges and red and blood and heart rates and I don’t know anything except for this and now and that I’m fucking in the dark on a Sunday.

Our trash bin is a shrine for empty noodle cartons, because Sunday night is take out night. And that’s all you need to know to do it right.