Recently I’ve been thinking about all the old men who I allowed to take away my life. Loads of little tiny doctor fish nibbles, you fool yourself into thinking they must only be taking away the dead skin, leaving the dewy and the obscene. I think I have turned my terror of them into a flippant love: long may they destroy me, long may they siphon my blood, for they showed me the depths I could fall to, and now I know where I never can go.
But their heaving into you is a deep and ridiculous sloughing; none of us leaves any richer.
I think about Ricky, a 40-something basketball coach with a dying sister and a tight mane of red hair scalping itself to baldness. I think about the throat burning of the neat whiskey, sitting on his kitchen island – marble, in an expansive, open plan, fucking conference hall sized house, with so many French doors – as he rummages to put on a CD. I am 15 and, as soon as he sets the mood just right, he will steal my body. When he is done, I feel nothing. On the drive home, I open his window and know that I am less heavy. Something bone-deep and malarious has been taken from me, but I don’t know what. Instead of fretting, I congratulate myself on my altruism for allowing this ogre the splendour of my time.
I know now that they all chipped away at me, leaving a tiny little Subbuteo figurine, just one more in a busy statuary of all their wobbling player conquests.