perf5.250x8.000.inddA book did it. A hero of our time, by Michail Lermontov. Sounds even better in Russian. Geroj nashevo vremeni. I was experimenting. Not so much with sex. But with identity casting. I was slowly discovering my own identity was so volatile, so kamelon-like, I could piece it together, by choice. And somehow I ended up adopting the identity of a fictional character called Pechorin. A guy oversaturated with life, not interested in anything, only in causing trouble. Trouble for other people. And getting away with it.

And you happened to walk in the line of fire.

You owned a clothing shop in the main shopping street. Looked like a small shopping temple. You’d think you made thousands of euros a month, but no. You made something between 900 and 1200 a month. Rent was steep. Competition was venomous.

You only kept going because your husband was so rich. He owned a company that cleaned bank offices. Talk of niche marketing.

I wanted to seduce you, just to see if you’d take the risk. And because you needed an escape anyway. Oh my, I saw myself as your saviour, can you believe that? Of course, you can. You were 36 when we met and getting a bit, well, plump. But you knew how to dress.

I wanted you to get caught. Really, I admit it. That your husband never caught us ‘in the act’, is really your accomplishment. But I heard you lying on the phone while I had my tongue in you, an acid taste that went well with the sweet lies you told your husband.

I had two girlfriends at the time. Something that both disturbed you and excited you. One of them I took shopping. To your place. The other one wasn’t into mainstream fashion. You were both annoyed and fascinated when we were there, you standing behind the register, waiting. Staring at the girl. Comparing. Evaluating. A woman’s look at an other woman, is so much more taxing, so much more brutal, so much more invasive, than a guy’s look at a woman. When we don’t like a woman, we have the decency to stare at the ground or passed her. But no, you stare, like you are flaying the ‘opponent’ with your eyes. It’s brutal.

I enjoyed that. Really, I did. It wasn’t even me. I was Pechorin. A fictional character. From a book. Some dude who didn’t give a shit about anything. Sehnsucht, you know. No, it’s not a German word for midlife crisis or quarter life crisis, it’s worse than that, it’s a romantic teenage trap for young people who have everything and want only want thing: more. Especially when there is no more.

I made the sex extra good. I made it so you would be hooked. I pushed all your borders. Fucking you in the ass with two boiled eggs in your vagina was as far as the border would bend. You started to wonder if you were some kind of nymphomaniac. Putting eggs up your vagina has very little to do with being a nymphomaniac, but I let you figure it out for yourself. And when you said, with half a smile, I was ‘a pain in the ass’, how did you mean that exactly?

When I think about it, something I have been postponing for quite some time now, I feel like that Pechorin again, and I feel almost the lightness again, of being unburdened of any kind of values or morals. That time when the highest revolution seemed a zealous pursuit of hedonism regardless of any consequences. As if the answer to the world’s problems lay in fucking and anything that wasn’t fucking was part of the problem, a mockery, an uninspired theatre, inane breaks in between fucking.

I do apologize for dragging you into my revolution project and one of my identity experiments. I don’t remember how it worked exactly. Borderless and ubiquitous sex equalling revolution, no, I don’t see the link anymore. And yet I was so convinced of that glorious cause. Now I see sex only in its counterrevolutionary light: how sex is used to galvanize mass consumerism. Nope, I don’t see that revolutionary spark in dipping my nose in pussy any more, I still like it, I just don’t feel like a crusader anymore when I get my nose wet. Or maybe just a little bit. As some member of the Pussy Liberation Front.

I pass your shop from time to time. I don’t avoid it. I don’t walk in anymore, I don’t stop and look at the clothes, but I don’t avoid it. You are 43 now. And maybe you miss it. Or maybe you have some other student jumping your bones. I hope so. I wasn’t completely fair with you, but, come on, you needed me. You needed to snap out of the boredom. The three minute friday run through with that husband drunk of yours. “Not one orgasm in 9 years of marriage”, you said. I don’t expect all-out sex to revolutionize the world any more, but that still infuriates me. And I’m still secretely proud I gave you, let’s say, somewhere round 50 in a few months. It’s such a male thing to try and keep count of that. And I even wonder, for a second, what is worse: to never give you an orgasm or to feed my ego by giving you a as many as possible?

I’ve shed my skin -or Pechorin’s skin- enough to not wonder if you’re still thinking about me, if you miss my tongue sometimes, if you think of me when you see a boiled egg. I don’t care. Using you the way I did, I don’t do that anymore. It’s plain wrong. There’s nothing to be gained by it. Fucking to inflate your ego, it’s fun, for awhile. Until you discover your fellow students were building their future, while you were fucking married women and getting a kick out of jeopardizing their future. 

I don’t even know if it taught me anything. Besides that karma exists and visits you with frustration, dissapointment and depression, when you use other people in your arrogance, till you feel naked, humbled, stripped of ego, and above all, stupid. And maybe that’s a great lesson and you were a stepping-stone towards my awakening. I wish that were true. And maybe it is.