Everything God Screwed Up
Dieter rolls off Sandra and lies there, spent. She stares at the ceiling, eyes wide, saying nothing. Months of work went into this moment—all the flirting, the engineering, the imagined futures involving beach trips and a proper wedding and small children tearing around a well-maintained front garden. How was I, babe?
Dieter manages, using his last reserves. Sandra answers with one word: Small.
Nobody falls for someone because of their body alone. You fall for the accumulated weight of a person—the specific way their humor works, the promises encoded in how they move, the version of the future that suddenly seems plausible when they’re in the room. That’s a thick bond. Hard to cut. But small things can do it. Very small things. Or limp things. Or curved things. Or things that carry an unexpected smell.
There’s a moment—and enough time on earth will acquaint you with it—where you unwrap someone like a long-anticipated package and find something that doesn’t match what the box implied. The penis is degenerate art: too small, too crooked, architecturally surprising. The breasts are degenerate art: too flat, too soft, nothing like the shape assembled in your mind. The body presents itself and you perform rapid, involuntary triage. Can I want this? Can I get past this? Can I—given enough time and goodwill—arrive at the place where I can’t imagine wanting anything different?
Sometimes you can’t. The cold wash of disappointment—the smell, the shape, the texture of something you didn’t choose and now have to decide about—can be stronger than everything that preceded it. That’s not a moral failure. It’s desire, doing what desire does, which is not to care at all about your intentions.
And yet. People do get past it. You hear it from everyone: it’s not size, it’s technique. Love conquers all, including the physical incompatibilities of mismatched anatomy. Small cocks are made for anal sex—as anyone who has thought about this for thirty seconds will confirm—and every structural anomaly carries its own compensating possibilities. Maybe you even arrive, somewhere down the years, at the point where the specific wrongness of someone’s body is part of what you love. The crooked thing, the soft thing, the thing that made you flinch the first time and that you’d now genuinely miss.
Sandra made her peace with Dieter’s situation. She had to start somewhere. Love is nothing if not resourceful, and the ceiling, once the shock wore off, stopped being so interesting to stare at.