Category: Personal (Page 12 of 15)

When I’m at work, I sit in the break room every lunchtime and think about how much I’d like to go home and wank. It’s not my only thought – usually I’m thinking about how unsatisfying the work lunches are (but they are free, and that’s what matters) or shooting the breeze with my colleagues. Today, I spent most of the time astounded that one of my workmates had never heard of Waltzing Matilda.

But most of the time I’m just unspeakably horny, which isn’t helped by the fact that I’m scrolling through Twitter or catching up on the blog posts I’m missing. It’s the only time I check my ‘phone during the day.

And so I think to myself, I want to go home and pleasure myself. In the moment that is all I want to do. Perhaps I’ll have a particular scenario in mind – is there a porn scene I want to revisit? Is there something I want to read or remember to help me get to where I need to go? Maybe there’s a fantasy writing itself for me. Or perhaps, like today, I’m remembering the warm splash feeling of a vagina contracting around my shaft.

I want to go home and pleasure myself.

On the bus on the way home, when I have my head down pretending to sleep, I have other thoughts.

I no longer wish to go home and wank. Now I want to go home, eat a chocolate chip cookie and watch Battle of the Planets. In fact, I realise, I have hot chocolate available now, and maybe I can have hot chocolate and a cookie and Battle of the Planets and nobody can begrudge me for any of that.

[Short interlude while ILB actually goes to make himself a hot chocolate. Here’s some hold music.]

When I get home I find my girlfriend half-asleep on the sofa watching The A-Team, so I watch some of that instead. I muster up what remains of my energy to make something for dinner. It involves pasta and vegetarian bacon and grated cheese. Very simple; an idiot could make it. I’m an idiot, so I make it. They are very grateful. I watch more of The A-Team while they decide, at some length, that they would be happier in bed.

Then I watch Battle of the Planets with some pistachio nuts.

I have long since made the decision that I’m not horny any more. It has faded, I tell myself. My horn has faded and it won’t be coming back.

The executive decision is made to take my clothes off after I turn off the TV. I’m not sleepy – although the hot chocolate now is making me so! – but I need to wash what I’ve been wearing, and it’s easier to do that if the clothes are in the washing machine.

I take my clothes off, put them in the machine, and then return to the living room.

Naked.

And I’m not not horny any more.

Last Thursday, while trying to explain to a friend what my recent diagnosis means, I managed to accidentally demonstrate by falling spectacularly to the ground and cutting my knee, grazing my head and shoulder, and winding me, to the point that I couldn’t get up again. I had to be hauled to my feet and hobbled to the nearest safe place, bleeding freely as I did so.

Which means I was, under the advice of the triage nurse, not at work on Friday, which means that I was at home when I got the call from my mother to tell me that my beloved cat Willow was about to undergo an operation, and half an hour later, the call from my father to tell me that Willow had died on the operating table.

Willow has been in my life for sixteen years. By the end of the first day, she was sitting on my chest as I lay supine on my gran’s floor; when I went back to university soon afterwards, it was very hard to leave her.

For the last tumultuous decade and a half, she has been there for me. By the time I started writing ILB, Willow was there. She was curled up on my bed as I was setting up my first Blogger account. Three girlfriends came (and, in two cases, went) and every single one of them adored her. I carefully combed her for fleas once and she was so grateful she didn’t leave my bed for a week.

As my sexual identity grew, Willow was remarkably tolerant. She wouldn’t bat an eyelid if I masturbated with her in the room having forgotten she was there. If I remembered, and put her outside, she would wait patiently for me to open the door so she could resume her napping spot on the bed. If I cried because of heartbreak, she was there. If I sat up in bed reading, or on the ‘phone to a loved one, she’d be there. If I lay in a pool of sweat and cum, or weeping with frustration because it didn’t happen (and I’d forgotten to let her out), she’d be there.

Willow was a constant throughout a good portion of my life. She wasn’t just my cat – she was a member of the family and, in certain points, I saw her as something like a daughter. I loved her, and I still do, and I always will.

I can’t describe the noise I made when I heard the news – it was something between the sounds made by a banshee and a werewolf. I was still in paroxysms of grief when my beloved called, and then for a hew hours afterwards, I was sobbing on and off. By the time I got to bed, I was feeling nothing but a dull, empty numbness; my uneasy slumber that night punctuated by waking moments feeling small holes opening all over my body.

The bit that hurts the most – unequivocally – is that I didn’t see Willow at all during the past few weeks. I’ve spent quite a lot of time at my parents’ house for one reason or another – including just after being in hospital, when I asked where she was – and didn’t seen her once during that time Every time I used to go there I saw her, and would give her a tummy rub or scratch behind the ears, and was looking forward to doing so again… and again… and again.

My parents didn’t bring her body home. I will never see her again.

And suddenly nothing seems to matter any more.

Last time I was an inpatient in hospital, I was there for a night. Just one – as it turns out, there wasn’t anything wrong with me, but my chest was hurting, I had an odd ECG reading and my grandad died of angina when I was two, so I went to A&E anyway. I was there for hours, got a bed in a ward, and was discharged in the early hours of the morning. It was still dark when I left.

I remember vague things about that. I had a Harry Potter book with me. The nurse brought me a sandwich once because I said I was hungry. I remember the shape of the room – a sort of irregular pentagon – and the sound of the cars outside.

And I masturbated. Twice.

Are you meant to masturbate in hospital? I’ve no idea. There’s nothing wrong with it, I suppose. I was horny by the time I got into my hospital bed (although I wasn’t triggered by anything – just horny), and since I had a room of my own with an en-suite bathroom, I doubt my rationale process went any further than, “hey, there’s a toilet; I’ve got a dick, let’s have a wank.”

I’m still not sure why I did it twice. I think I just got bored at some point.

I’ve just spent an entire week in hospital. Go back seven days to last Monday early afternoon and I was already well-ensconced, semi-conscious, hooked up to a heart monitor in an MAU. I’ve been through multiple neurological procedures, CT scans, MRIs, one EMG and a myriad of ECGs. Healthcare professionals drifted in and out of my life trying to figure out what the fuck was wrong with me – it was clear that I was ill, but why?

Unlike the time I had my accident, I don’t remember much of the ambulance ride. I remember being given NO₂ and wishing that they’d given me more, although they did also administer morphine, which I have to assume worked. I wondered, at one point, if there were flashing blue lights on my ambulance, because there was certainly a siren going. Getting to the hospital didn’t even take that long, even though it was a different part of London.

Memories of the first two days are hazy. I remember a lot of pain and an initial diagnosis which was later canned in favour of a different one. Towards the end of the week, as a result of an off-the-cuff remark I made on day one resulting in further tests, I was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy – which was both a surprise and a relief at the same time.

I was there for a week, and I didn’t masturbate once.

I tried, on the last night. I couldn’t really do so in my bed, even with the curtains pulled: I felt a lot more self-conscious and the guy in the bed opposite me had a General Grievous-like coughing fit every half minute, but I did manage to escape into the bathroom and try a few times while perched on the edge of the toilet. The problem being, I suppose, that without anything to rest my back on, any sort of visual stimulus (my imagination having been fried after a week of tests), or the sort of silence or comfortable environment I usually set up for myself, it just…

…didn’t…

…work.

I went back to bed feeling both guilty and frustrated (and possibly a little angry at myself, for all the missed opportunities). Wriggling and struggling in my bed for a bit, I made the conscious decision that I couldn’t do this alone. I groped for the call bell and pressed it. My night nurse appeared.

“What can I do for you?” she trilled.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” I started with, “I know you’re busy.” (I started every conversation like this – I used to work in healthcare; I know it’s a universal truth!) “But I’m not sleeping well. Could you get me some warm milk?”
“Sure,” she smiled. “I’ll be back in a second…”

She genuinely could get me warm milk? It was only a joke.

I sank into a fitful slumber once I’d had my milk. Orgasm-free, perhaps, but sleep, at least. My dreams went to odd places, too: not sexy, just odd.

My nurse wrote “anxious overnight” on my notes…

…which was as good a way of putting it as any.