The Last Hurrah

It catches her.

Every so often, it sneaks up when she thinks she’s past it and resigned, floods over her with no warning, a pyroclastic flow of ash and rubble and the detritus of youth.

It takes a half a Valium to stop the flow of tears. The drug leaves her listless but numb. She sleeps it off until it’s time again to don the face of a rational middle-aged woman and do what employed, rational middle-aged women do.

And thank god for that. Thank god for appointments and meetings and responsibilities. Thank god for obligations that stretch out across the face of the day. One and then another, stepping stones across the brook of time. The gloriously inexhaustible to do lists that drive over the hump of the day. If she didn’t have them…

In the tepid, drowsy wrap of the benzodiazepine, she attempts to identify the trigger. The word, the glance, the time of day, the way the light falls on the warm tiled floor of her bedroom, the smell of furniture polish married to the jasmine that grows in pots outside her door. But if there is a single cause to the sludgy cataclysm, she can’t identify it. Perhaps the drug robs her of the motivation to find one.

She doesn’t look at her ass in the mirror anymore. She straps on her bra with the studied disinterest of a nurse performing a breast exam. There’s no point dwelling on cells that have taken to reproducing in eccentric ways. Only when the precision required by the application of her make-up demands she face her reflection does she have to acknowledge the banal cruelty of time. And she’s learned how to brace herself for that. You can’t put on mascara while you’re crying.

It’s not as bad as she thinks, she has assured herself. She has a year, perhaps two, before she is rendered nothing but a list of internal and external disaster zones. But she has been telling herself that for a while now, and it’s time to stop lying.

Love, it is said, is blind, but she’s not. And she’s passed the vain hope that love will strike some poor bastard terminally myopic. The prospect of badly camouflaged looks of disappointment or compliments with qualifications loom like terrifying inevitabilities.

Fifty.

Half a century.

The bulk of it caught in the throws of what now seem like nonsensical reservations. Having worked herself into a series of hysterical paralyses over the possibility of breaking someone’s heart or having hers broken.

Now.

Her heart seems to be the only part of her body that isn’t failing. It reaches and leaps, pumps hot blood to her brain and down to her cunt, seemingly ignorant of the fact that the vehicle it’s chosen to ride in is falling to pieces.

She packs with care, glad that there’s no need to find room for the high heels or the nice lingerie or the black suit that covers almost – almost – all her flaws. All those things she bought for the day that will not come, the hope chest of her vanities. There was only one reason left to be vain, and he has declined the invitation. There’s no comfort to be had, no prospect of redemption from those quarters now. He said there would always be another time, but he was wrong.

The clock has run out on her temerity. She will not be forcing the wreckage of her body on someone she actually cares for.

And so she has laid alternate plans. After waiting seven years for the right person, the wrong one will do. Somewhere, in the length and breadth of that shoddy little town, there will be someone drunk enough, or bored enough, or simply horny enough to fuck her. Not well, or with emotion. Just the basic mechanics of sex will suffice. And if she has moments of concern that she’s forgotten how to do it, she reminds herself that it’s just like riding a bicycle.

One last lungful of someone else’s skin. One last handful of cock. One last mouthful of it. One last orgasm in the presence of another. Once last bone-jarring thrust. One last breathless exhortation along the lines of ‘don’t stop’ or ‘oh, god’ or ‘fuck, that’s good’.

Before her cunt dries out and the gates slide down and she ceases to be a woman forever.

One last hurrah.