The Rules

I used to have a rule that I wouldn’t sleep with a guy my friend had slept with. Groups of friends get so gross and incestuous otherwise. I don’t want a guy I’ve been with to be able to tell one of my girlfriends what it was like after their own hootchie moment. I used to like to think of myself as a remote sexual island getaway. Not many had been, but boy did they want to come back as soon as possible.

Not now. Now I’m just another boring wife. Another boring wife that if I got a second chance at sex, would do it up right. I’d reevaluate every rule. Including the second hand sleeping rule.

When you think about it, there’s all kinds of things you share. I’ve secondhand touched butts with everyone I work with. You prolly have too. Think about it. You pull your pants down, piss and shit in the same watery hole everyone else does. The worst is when you walk in right after someone else has been in the loo. You think about their sticky thighs and how they were just…. there/here where your clammy whites are hanging out. You touch the same door code buttons and handles and money and utensils as they do. You put your food in the same microwave theirs gets heated in. And while I don’t want to swap husbands, I wouldn’t hesitate to give someone my chapstick to use. My husband and I have been known to share the same toothbrush on vacation and I try not to think of his atrocious breathe in the night and how it smells like he must be dying.

I hate other people’s breath in my face. I’m pretty sure everyone does. I don’t know how people in 3rd world countries do it. I know there’s all that supportive togetherness and that seems nice. It seems like a wonderful idea to live in a village where I can pass my brat off to some 16 year old mother of 3 while I go for a 10 mile strole into town to get antibiotics. It really does. Except then I think of all the people who would sleep in my room. And how their breath would go in my mouth. I know I breath other people’s breath now anyway, but at least its usually been through a plant or tree or some algae or something first. I think how it would fill the room with their smells.

Remember when you were a kid and your mom would lean over to help you figure out how to pronounce cyclone and you’d want her close to you because her clothes smelled so pretty but then she’d tell you “sI-clone” and you’d think “get that coffee breath out of my NOSE!” My next thought was fury at English that makes it impossible for a 2nd grader trying to read to herself about the Wizard of Oz to sound out a word that begins with ‘cy’. And don’t even get me started on colonel. That word is fucking bullshit.
And so are many of my rules. They protect me from germs, or parking tickets, or spam, or whatever. But maybe I’m too protected. Maybe I need to throw some more offense out into the world. Lord knows I’m breathing plenty of it anyway.