When I lived by myself I kept my Hitachi in the living room, plugged in behind the futon. Toys out in the open meant I didn’t have a lot of visitors, and I really liked masturbating. Always ready when I was, my power tool waited for me to get home, like a puppy. Or like a kitten, ready to purr.
Only three channels made it to the tv in my tiny apartment. I stole the internet from my neighbors. The girl upstairs (who had a buzzcut and wore combat boots and had a small leather pride flag on her truck) would make fun of my sex moans by mimicking them through her window after my fucking was done. When she moved out a new woman moved in, and the new woman’s boyfriend threw her around the apartment one night, and she kept screaming at him to get the fuck out and I could hear her body slam into the ground, and I stood there frozen with my phone in my hand. I didn’t call the cops. I felt sick the next day, like a bad bad person, an awful woman, a terrible feminist. A negligent participant in this world where we need to take care of each other. She ended up chasing him out into the street, screaming at him to give her back the fucking rent money.
The bathtub in that apartment was tiled in yellow, and there was a tiny barred window at the top of the wall beside the tub. I would close the curtain and turn off the light and sit in the dark, in the water, quiet. Sometimes I could see the moon. Sometimes ants crawled in through gaps in the caulking and grout, and I’d stuff wet toilet paper in the holes. The ants always found a way to get out of the wall, through from the outside to the inside. My toilet paper barricades only worked until the insects saw light in another tiny tiny crack.
The first time I tried taking a bath in my newest apartment I laid there, naked, in the tub, frustrated and sad. The water slowly dribbled into the basin; I started getting goosebumps as the water already under my back cooled. No water pressure, no moon, no ants, no quiet. No tension releasing into the warmth.
The new neighbors at the new apartment are are mother and son. A yoga-loving lesbian and her teenager. He yells a lot, Mom! God!, and she yells back, and both voices get louder and louder. I never think to call the cops, he’s young and easily upset, they’re doing what parents and teenagers do. But every now and then I stop, and listen. In case maybe there’s another, stronger man in the house. I don’t want to be frozen again. I have lived here for three years.
Although there are still few visitors to my house, which I share with my girlfriend, I moved the Hitachi from behind the couch to deep within a locker in the bedroom. I have a dog who howls at firetrucks if I do first. My lady curls up to me in the morning, and can’t sleep if my body is touching hers. We have cable.
And I still absolutely love to masturbate.
In frozen and in warm
In house and home
jameson.
