to tell or not to tell

Having had some time to think things through, I realized that I'm at a point in life where I have to make some difficult decisions.  Relationship with D is as bad as ever, even though neither of us is really making it difficult to live with each other.  She's really doing well at work these days, and really on her way to be floating along the partnership track.  Yesterday she asked me where I would like to take a vacation, Aspen or Bora Bora.  Ridiculous question if there is ever one.  Ever since she turned 30 I've been finding her more and more attractive, especially with her erstwhile slightly pudgy cheeks carved sharper by the imperceptible blades of time.  She washes herself more carefully now, and her privates are more invitingly pink and lasciviously delicious between my lips, with only tender sensitivity that burns me with flames of desire every time I put my head between her smooth, sparkling thighs.

"Wherever I can get a good fuck," I blurted out naughtily, with a mischievous grin.  It was a flashback of our earlier years of incessant tickling flirtations.

She rolled her eyes, of course.  She went on to talk about getting the kids to take skiing lessons.  All I could think about was how I need to bring up this conversation because I could not stand it any longer. Yet words invariably escape me.  

The fact of the matter is, my wife and I have problems that run much deeper than our lack of sex, I think.  I think she wants things that I cannot offer her, and she sees the world differently than I do.  As our twenties rolled by, her talent mitigated her insatiable desire to roll over everybody and everything, including my admittedly fragile ego.  We have less and less to talk about, and the meals are full of silences, dark, enigmatic silences.  Five years ago I was make substantially more money than she did, and that streak didn't continue.  I felt the traditional gender roles collapsing onto me, and yet she sneered and stayed utterly oblivious to my constant insecurity and self-scrutiny.  

When I bring up these topics of conversation, she dismisses them.

I am a shell of a human being, stuck in a cliche that is as old as time itself.  Of course, I can try to escape, but since there's nowhere to break out to, there is no where to go.  I'm an ant trapped on a sphere, or a Mobius strip, and the faster I run the more I determined to leave the sooner I return to where I started.  What I do know is that I love my kids and I can't leave.  At least, not now.  If I can't leave then I can't have the heart to put my words into action, and D would be able defeat me so easily.

Last night D fell asleep next to me, and I had a monumental hard-on.  Drops of pre-cum oozed out of the orifice, and I used my thumb and index finger to make circular, tortuous motions, and it erupted embarrassingly and silently into the blanket as I held my breath.  I need to think about this, I think.  

flickering

It's been a while.  Over Christmas, we went back to my parents for a little bit.  I took a couple of weeks off from work, and D decided to join us after a few days.  My parents are old and finicky, constantly harassing my children about trivialities.  My old room was converted into a guest room and my brother's room was cleared out for a little in-home gym that nobody ever used.  My day consisted of waking up at 9:30AM, eating a bowl of cereal, going to the backyard, and sometimes lighting a covert cigarette.  One night I called up a good friend, Tommy, from high school and he offered me a joint.  His house is literally 2 blocks down the street.  Tommy is married too now, though still in his old pudgy self and never had the physical metamorphoses that one would expect given how much money he made right before the housing crash as a contractor.  We sat by his large, pristine, artificial, Japanese inspired heated pool, watching the snow weighing on the bleak pine trees in the back, barely made out, covered in a fine, pink crepuscular haze.  He got married way before I did, and his daughter is now in middle school, doing well.  He relayed to me how little sex he's having too, that poor bastard.  I suppose it's normal.  I deeply inhaled, and felt the little ripples rising from deep within my scrotum up my spine, emitting a sad, sour moan.

In any case, I spent many of my days with parents beating off on an air mattress in the guest room, being stuffed with semi-processed food that they love, jogging in that patch of suburbia, not unlikely my own in the Southwest, but covered with the distinct, airy flora of the Northeast.  I remember one day I had a flashback of Lester from American Beauty saying "This is my life...and in one year I'll be dead," jogging in his little anomic paradise... Am I not a bit young for my mid-life crisis?

Lately it's been difficult for me sustain an erection with D.  We had sex perhaps once in January and once in February.  She likes to get it over with quickly, and when I went down on her I felt the dread, the heart pounding, the thought of the imminent collapse of our marriage, and our children being abandoned and kicked around like dreary urchins in a Dickens novel.  I don't have the heart to say anything to anyone.  I tried to create an artificial hard-on, but when I was inside of her I couldn't feel anything, which made me even more distressed.  Perhaps the final verdict is in.  Perhaps I am no longer attracted to my wife.  The lack of feeling only sparked another round of fanatic self-stimulation for penetration, only to be met by a quick, unsatisfying orgasm.  I offered to give her an orgasm by oral, but she said she just wanted to go to bed.  The end.  I lied alone next to her, and I cried.  I actually cried.  Of course she wouldn't know or care.  This is me, 6 foot 1, muscular, in shape, working in the financial services, perfect American life.  This little tableau for some reason brought back memories of Greek life in college, all the clueless meatheads, and my pretension of my disinterest in arts and letters, and my phony jocular mien.  Nothing ever happens in three months, right?