1.

Our relationship has always been propelled forward by apocalypse. After declining his house key many times (let me fuck you with a strap-on, then we can talk about moving in together) the coronavirus has propelled us into a living together experiment. It’s Friday the thirteenth. If there was one person I wanted to be in quarantine with, it was him. Him, with his smug smile, with his silly jokes, his musical gear and his adventurous hand slapping my ass. 

The night we fucked for the first time, I rang his freezing doorbell at two a.m. wearing a dirty baby blue ski suit, topped off with a mind full of climate change apocalypse. Christmas had passed uneventfully; my family being nomadic, I got high on a secluded goat farm of a friend. Just hours ago, I had read an interview with a climate change activist dropout, who had retreated to a small farm in Northern Ireland to underline his “it’s too late” mindset. His advice: write a eulogy for nature, go into deep mourning. 

If things were really too late, what was I doing waiting to fuck him? Why was I experimenting with celibacy? I had not had sex for two months, and wore it like an activist button. FUCK YOU, I’M CELIBATE. Of course, I didn’t stop meeting interesting men with big throbbing dicks by accident, who then accidentally slept over, but hey, dry humping isn’t sex. And hours of fingering isn’t sex either, right? I fooled myself with a smile. But now, climate apocalypse. Let’s fuck.

“I’m going to bed in an hour or so,” Sergei tells me four vodkas later. We’re in his sparsely decorated house. He only has one speaker. Two speakers is just a capitalist trick.

“If you go to bed, will you take me?” I smile back.

A conversation follows. “What are your expectations? I’m done with serial monogamy, I want to find THE ONE. Do you want children? Why did you make a dating profile?” Sergei’s questions bury into my passion like a hatchet. At thirty-seven, he is the oldest guy I’ve ever dated.

I would have preferred him lifting me up and carrying me upstairs. Or an explosion of passion right there on the couch, until we fall, fucking, to the carpet all animalistic rage, a tornado of ass slapping and deep throating. I suppose this is my debt; female karma, from all those women asking these questions to all those men who aren’t even thinking about it.

“Do I want kids?” I just want to sit on his dick. Okay, focus, do I want children? Theoretically yeah, it seems like a great spiritual growth adventure. Kids right now? No. I start thinking about consciousness, how hard I find it to navigate through consciousness and emotions. Why would you want someone else to have to experience that as well? I think of the interview with the environmental activist dropout. If Sergei and I create our interracial baby right now, she will be eighty in 2100, living with a gas mask on ’cause she got good genes and became some rich sultan’s private slut, a ticket to survival. A future Scheherazade, full of stories and quick wit, postponing the death sentence night after night.

“Do you have condoms?” I ask when we’re in his big brass bed, the interview section behind us, we now go into oral exams. He is first, and an excellent student. I run my hand over my erect nipple, down my torso and grab a fist of his dirty blond hair to feel his head movements on both my clit and my hands. His moans reverberate through my lips and draw out a light honey which he laps up with long licks that end with a playful swerve around my clitoris.

The bed is black. I approve of the frame, great for tying someone down. Size-wise, no complaints. I could roll over seven times and not reach the other end. The mattress is Ikea, a typical I-have-no-opinion-about-mattresses purchase that’s tolerable if you don’t lie on your side too often. I fell asleep with my head on his chest.

Back at my apartment, my housemate, Summer, was coughing. She coughed blood, so we took her to the hospital. It was a lung infection. The first time I met Summer, I was taking a bath in our secret hallway, and she came to offer me bonbons and a joint. I declined both but I shook her hand with my wet one and we instantly became friends. I defended her from people before I even knew her. Because I knew myself, and we offended people in the same way.

Summer had recently “remodelled” the bathroom at our atelier, and turned it into a golden princess extravaganza, category is: “Squatter goes tacky. Done well.” The tiles were given a chequered pattern, and everything else she touched became gold. The bathtub, also on the inside, the cabinets, the toilet, the inside of the toilet bowl, but that didn’t stay on too well, though it felt incredible to shit on a golden platter and then flush it. The water pipes going up were sloppily sprayed so the tiles behind them also became gold, making it seem like the golden toilet had golden vines growing out of it climbing the wall.

Summer had spent a hundred euros on spray cans and inhaled all of them, until she coughed blood. She hung up Christmas lights around the bath. “Oh yeah, I love the water and electricity combo, very edgy girl!” I smiled. Summer put flea market trophies next to the tub, and filled them with candles. All in all, the bathroom looked very rad, very statement, and also, much better in low-lit lighting or when squinting your eyes a bit. Management didn’t like it. Summer got shit for it, rather than appreciation. But now, at least one lover of hers revealed that he had had sex in her golden bathroom more than once. That was the recognition. She made sure that the next time he fucked in that bathroom, it was with her.

“Do you think I have corona?” Summer asked me. 

“You’d be the first case in the Netherlands,” I answered dismissively. Summer hadn’t slept for four days, had had three lovers in that time and taken more drugs than get confiscated at the border on a Friday. Clearly a Case of Corona. I tried not to roll my eyes. “I’m off to work,” I said, and then disappeared for two days. Come-down Tuesdays, with Summer’s major depressions, the curtains closed and the crying, were things I naturally avoided, like small alleys. 

“I took myself to my GP, and I have antibiotics. Lung infection.” She wrote me. “I’m on my way to Marty.” Marty was her forty-seven year old lover with whom she did LSD last Monday. He had a daughter who was twenty-one, a year older than her. Naturally, I had given Marty the finger when we were introduced. It was five in the morning; me stumbling to go pee, him, grinning on our kitchen stool. I went to work, lectured  for six hours at a University of Applied Sciences, and then avoided my house for forty-eight hours. Marty was still there when I came back. I opened the curtains, aired the house, started taking out the trash and glanced at Marty. “Do you want me to kick him out?” I said loudly to Summer. Marty wondered if I liked him, Summer told me afterwards. 

“You’re in this powerful bitch phase, and I support you in that girl. It’s empowering, it’s what you need to do after your ex, and it’s totally okay for me that you treat your lovers like crap.” She laughed loudly. I covered my face. “Really, it’s what you need, and it’s working!” Again, her laughter. “Both Marty and Gino asked me: “Does Evi hate me?” But they’re fascinated by you and want to know more. So it’s working!”

I was banging my head on the table. Please stop! I can’t handle feedback. 

“But you know Evi sweety, I didn’t sign my lovers up to the treatment you give your lovers.”

Okay, okay, okay, okay I get it. I’ll be nice. 

“And I know you’re being nice to me, and you’re being territorial, but trust me, I got this.”

I took that day off, and we spent it together, concocting a plan on how she is going to seduce Johnny Depp at a festival this summer. I am going to make a documentary of the whole thing, including the final scene of sex. I had worked in porn as a camera woman, so this is my forté. She’s still deliberating between either selling the sex tape or using it to extort Johnny Depp into giving us a grand a month for the rest of our lives.

“And you need to go to interview my childhood friends!” Summer exclaimed. “They’ll tell you: when Summer was eight years old, she wrote on the wall: I love Jesus and Johnny Depp. Later she wrote on the wall: Sex, Drugs and Johnny Depp!”

“You had a Jesus phase?” I ask, passing her her cigarette back.

“Yeah, I like hot guys. Jesus is hot. And good. I like good men, mmm. Jesus and Johnny Depp; you have the good, sweet guy and the bad boy. I’ve always been into multiple men at the same time you see.”

“I do see. And hear.” I grin at her, raising my arm to stop the bus. We’re going on an adventure.

In the morning, when I went off to work, and she went back to bed, she told me, “I read something quite scary, which kept me up all night. Apparently, somewhere in China they measured increased levels of CO2. Turned out it was a mass burning of dead bodies.” She coughed. And coughed. I put my hand on her forehead; it’s flushed.

“Have some paracetamol and stay in bed,” I advise her, already late for work.

“What if I have corona?” she calls after me.

“Summer thinks she has corona,” I text to a friend. In this moment in time, the idea is so preposterous, it’s only in China. 

“With corona, she means hangover,” he replies.

***

to be continued…