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Pebbles | Apr 15 2003

We had a little routine for after. She would get up and walk to the bathroom (always sooner than I would have preferred) and I would wipe myself with toilet paper torn from the roll I kept on the windowsill behind my bed. Then I would go to my desk, which is where the closest trash can was, and throw out the condom, the condom wrapper, and the used toilet paper, being careful to bury the condom near the bottom of the trash can, where it wouldn’t be seen. Returning to my bed, I would put away the lubrication, lay our pillows side-by-side, and straighten the sheets. Then I would walk to the kitchen and pour myself a glass of water, or else drink some orange juice from the container, standing in the light from the open refrigerator.

It was dark in the apartment; I should have mentioned this first. We always had sex late at night, so it was always dark when I did these things.

From the refrigerator I would walk to the coat rack and wait for her to emerge from the bathroom, five feet or so down the hall. I don’t know if she knew about this part, how I would wait for her by the coat rack. Probably she did—otherwise how was I always right there when she finished?—however it’s not something we ever discussed.

Well, none of this was. It was simply what we did.

Regrettably I don’t remember what I thought about as I waited. Probably different things each time. I do know this: I didn’t listen to what she was doing in the bathroom. Certainly I was close enough to hear her shuffling around in there, turning the water on and off, opening and closing cabinets, but I paid it no mind. Her time in the bathroom was hers.

When she emerged—and she never took long, for she wasn’t one to dilly-dally—I would step into the hall so that she would see me there waiting and wouldn’t be frightened. As she walked past, I would lightly touch her arm and say Hey or Hi’ya, something friendly like that, and she’d mumble something friendly in response. Well, friendly and distant. Well, perhaps just distant.

By her I of course mean the one I knew, for by this point she had returned. Presumably the switch had taken place in the bathroom, although it may have happened earlier, even possibly before she left the bed, even possibly while I was still inside her, although that seems unlikely.

Another possibility—and this may be something I thought about once or twice while waiting for her—was that the switch happened at different times each time, within a certain general range. This makes sense, for it mirrors the structure of the larger routine, in which a limited number of familiar elements were repeated in more or less the same order, although for varying duration.

She was naked as she passed, which always struck me as odd. It seemed odd to be together like that, naked. It was the only time this happened outside of bed, and I sensed, perhaps for no good reason, that she didn’t want me to look at her naked body, not that I could see so much of it in the dark.

In the bathroom I would pee and wash up, maybe brush my teeth to be polite, although I loved the taste of her cunt in my mouth. When I returned to bed, she would be under the covers, waiting. As I settled in, she would lay her head in the crook of my arm, although I was never quite sure she really wanted to. It seemed rather, and this again is something I can’t know for certain, that she did it because it was what we did and not so much out of any great desire to do it.

This of course raises the question of how we arrived at this routine, a routine that may have run counter, at certain times, to our desires. My answer is that there’s a comfort in knowing what to do, even when one does not necessarily want to do it, and an even greater comfort in living in harmony with another, even when that harmony is false.

All that aside, I’ve been thinking about the switch again and trying to determine the exact moment it occurred. I now believe that no such moment existed. It’s like the famous example of fuzzy logic. When does a collection of pebbles become a pile? Two pebbles are too few; two hundred, far more than needed. And so the transition between a collection and a pile occurs somewhere between two and two hundred, but where? The answer is fuzzy.