Nothing Wrong with the Dark
Five in the morning and you came home alone. Again. The guy on the bus had no interest in a midnight coffee. Your parents kicked the door open with a birthday cake at the worst possible moment and your date bolted into the night. Whatever the failure mode, the solution is always the same: close the curtains, kill the lights, and handle it yourself. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this.
Masturbation is probably the world’s largest industry, it just doesn’t have a stock ticker. The internet is one enormous, partially legal pornography archive—Wikipedia and everything else is alibi content so the address bar looks respectable. You can order dildos from mail-order catalogs. We used to steal teen magazines every week not for the music coverage but because somewhere in the middle a lightly medicated teenager would take their clothes off and describe their first time in blunt clinical terms, and that was enough.
What actually interests me is what happens inside your head when you lock the door. The sitcom mythology says it’s all celebrity fantasies—some famous couple on permanent rotation in everyone’s skull. I doubt that. I think it’s more likely the teacher from third year who smiled at you once. The ex you should have gotten over by now. The guy from the café last Tuesday who probably didn’t mean anything by it. White sheets or a back alley. Something you’d admit to or something you’d take to the grave.
The variety is the whole point. The thoughts that race through your head, the methods, the elaborate personal choreography of it all—it’s as diverse as the species, and we’ve been at it since before written history, across every culture and every moral framework ever constructed to talk us out of it. We know now it doesn’t grow hair on your palms or drain your spine. So we shake and shove and whatever else until the neighbors start yelling, and call it a night.
Eventually, though, you do have to close the laptop and leave the apartment. Not out of obligation—fuck that—but because you need new material. New memories. Something to think about the next time the curtains are closed. So drag yourself to the nearest bar, let your eyes adjust, and see who’s there. Maybe it leads somewhere. Maybe it doesn’t. Either way, you’ve topped up the imagination. Lights out, blanket over, off we go.