“What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her.” Of course, when he says this, I think he’s talking about his beloved daughter. The one he allows to sleep in the cum-stained sheets on the only bed in the apartment when she shows up for her regularly-scheduled weekend visits. He tells her it’s toothpaste, if she happens to ask. It’s only later that I realize what he was really talking about, with that old adage, was me. And my naïveté with regard to him already starting to fuck other women without officially saying it. Suddenly, he didn’t “believe in” monogamy. Not that any man ever did, I suppose. Even though he seemed to believe in it for much longer when he was with his wife. Maybe that was because they shared a spawn. “Stay together for the kids,” and all that rot. 

But I wasn’t about to produce a child just to secure a few more paltry years. My body, my time was not worth that bullshit. Especially with someone as ill-equipped to raise a child as he was. Treating her like an overly precocious bia in a Roald Dahl-meets-Tim Burton narrative. He was bound to turn her into some kind of psycho. If not because she knew too much too soon, then purely because she would resent him later when she came to find just how much she didn’t need to know that early on as a result of being “treated like an adult.” But at least the cum on his sheets was written off as “toothpaste,” if addressed at all. Whether the stain was his or mine, the only thing for certain was that I was to make myself scarce when she was around. The place was too cramped. As all city apartments are. That, too, set the tone for being gradually ousted. Something he finally saw fit to do on a Sunday night, after his beloved daughter left. Naturally, we stained the sheets again before he felt obliged to tell me he was already going ahead with his long-ruminated-upon plan to see other people. But that he “wouldn’t mind” if I lived close by and we still saw each other now and again. As though an arrangement of that nature would be such a privilege for me: living apart while he fucked whoever, whenever. So long as it wasn’t on weekends when his beloved daughter was there. 

Even though Woody Allen is hated now, somewhere deep down, on a cellular level, men appreciate the somewhat mainstream precedent he established in living apart from Mia Farrow back in those “glory days” of twentieth century misogyny. As Carrie Bradshaw phrased it (at a time when she, too, wasn’t so maligned), “Ever since Woody Allen described waving to Mia Farrow across the park, single men…had yearned for that kind of separate togetherness.” And all men are ultimately, in their minds, single. There’s always room for another bitch (and if you don’t believe me, read BUtterfield 8). Especially when he’s grown tired of plowing the old one. He’ll eventually want to try “new things” with a different snatch. One that feels different (often a euphemism for younger). And if you’re not changing, you’re not growing. So why shouldn’t that apply to “mixing it up” in terms of which woman’s orifice you choose to taint? 

Maybe the next woman he manages to trick won’t be so foolish. Won’t be daft enough to still let fairy tale and rom-com notions infect her brain with ideas of “forever” (or at least till somebody dies). Because there is no such thing. As for whoever comes next for me, if someone comes next, he’ll not only have even more baggage (because that’s what happens as people get older), but also end up “bowing out” “gracefully.” So what’s the point? I want to surrender here and now to the life asexual. I don’t trust anyone to fuck me anymore. They’re not fucking worthy anyway. They’re all disgusting. “Do this, do that, suck my dick, let me fuck you up the ass, let me cum on your tits.” How about you all fucking choke on your own fucking cum with your stupid, puerile desires? It’s as though every man secretly read Portnoy’s Complaint at some point and decided to get in a metaphorical circle jerk with Philip Roth. “Just looking for a mum to nurse me”—an actual headline in the Craig’s List jobs section, which I’m sifting through because I need to get the fuck out of this town, move somewhere else. But what would it change? They’re all the same. Underneath. Just little boys who want a doting, big-breasted mother figure to make all the pain go away despite the fact that all they do is cause pain in this world. I shudder in that moment as I think of the times I let him suck my tit during sex, not realizing how much it meant to him on a psychological level. 

Goddamn, I shoulda been a fuckin’ nun. At least the lifestyle is consistent. Instead of constantly being batted around like some easily disposed-of ragdoll. It’s too late now. Too much work goes into a career change. You have to choose something and stick with it early on. The same goes for relationships. Anyone I know who is still in a relationship “found” the person in question at the exact “right” time in their lives. The time before the age bracket of nothing but divorcés with their surfeit of children. But I had missed the window somehow, it appeared. Just as I had when it came to studying for a viable métier in college. Another massive waste of time and effort only to end up like this: insolvent and solitary. 

“What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her,” he said. And what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him either. Not just yet, anyway. For I decided to make one last entry (not necessarily achieved through legal means) into the apartment to leave a very lurid set of nude Polaroids of myself protruding from an envelope on the nightstand that his beloved daughter will inevitably discover this weekend before he does, being that she lets herself in prior to his return from work. In one of the photos, I’m sucking on a toothpaste bottle like a cock, in another series, I’m squeezing it all over myself—rubbing my tits, my pussy with the abrasive components. She might be confused by the images, at first, but she might as well learn about what “Daddies” want. 

I deliberately chose to save the best image’s placement in the pile for last. A dick pic I took while he was still spewing. But at least I was kind enough not to include his face in the image. Anyway… maybe, just maybe, she’ll finally fathom the need to demand that he must wash the sheets immediately. That it was never really toothpaste at all.