I have a gripa. Not only with the grappa but with a few other things as well. With the corporate intent, for one, and its tiny and tinier staff rooms, infinities for the ever-shrinking CNA. There shall be no rest at work. Consequently there’s too much rest at home. Pillows are for sleeping.
I’m wide awake, playing at sums with any other gripas I can lay my mind on. The infectious diseases my CNA picks up at the hospital and that make him sleepy, the antibiotics he takes that make him sleepy, going out to the club and coming home late that makes him sleepy, his Buddhist phlegm that makes him sleepy, his feminist consideration for women’s clinically documented slow approach to sex that makes him sleepy, his philosophy of uncertain outcome that makes him sleepy, his damn lack of corporate intent that makes him sleepy. He’s blowing bubbles like a baby.
Could there be a reverse Pinocchio effect for women who admit to the truth? Do all sexually frustrated women have long noses? Mine grows by the numbers on my unbalanced gripa sheet, my body disproportionates into extremities of misanthropic bookkeeping until I start to scream in fright.
Hush, hush! My CNA runs along the quarter mile hallway of his dream, he hears me shouting at the far end and nearly loses his balance. Hush, lady, you there, you’re disturbing the patients. I am a patient, I howl, my nose has grown down into my chin and now I have a handle in my face like an old woman! Oh dear! He checks his records. Name, uh, significant, um, other. Diagnosis, here it is, he brightens up. Raised temperature with hallucinatory symptoms due to supplementation with italienated grappa, an eccentric reaction not uncommon in women with overactive imagination. There, it’s not really serious. We’ll open the blinds and let the moonlight in, it acts beneficial on the after effects of imbibing, uh, un-aged distillates.
Fuck the moonlight and the grappa, I cry, I’m hysterical! I have a gripa between my legs, my thighs are growing hairy, eeew! and it’s all your fault! How come you leave your cock to shrivel in your teensy-weensy staff room and only bring home some left over lips to dribble with in your sleep? I don’t dribble in my sleep! Yes you do! Big fat dribbles that smell of disinfectant and curdle my skin with cellulites and gnarl my toes and turn my elbows out. See what you’ve done? You’ve made me my bones brittle. I need a hip replacement!
Now that makes him mad. You’re right! he cries. I keep forgetting that I have no right to recuperate from work just so I can get back to work and find you on the sixth floor, orthopedics, specialty hip replacements! I have to remember that I can never rest and that my first duty is to your ass! Here’s for waking me up in the middle of the night, or is it early morning?
He slaps some corporeal intent onto my ass at last and makes it bloom all round and rosy, and then he fucks me and untwists my limbs, unfurls my belly, uncrooks my nose until it’s back to its proper short and only slightly pointed hint at sharpness. I’m a younger woman again, ten years, at least, off my middle age, my eyes swim brilliantly in his cum. The moon, bless her, stays extra for all the pornographic content of our window show and then hurries on to catch up with her orbit.
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My CNA has drifted back into refreshing sleep, much needed, and I hang on to a last bit of drowsy gripa. Why can’t he sleep on the job like any drugged daydreaming CEO of fiscal fiction? Or else for better, why can’t he earn a fair share at a restful and satisfying occupation with benefits, among them a standard six weeks paid vacation at seniority?
Then we could travel to Italy together. We would eat dinner al fresco on a terrace at the long tables of a trotteria overlooking the town square. We would drink golden-hued grappa and inhale the aroma of the original must of grape skins and seeds and stems and I whisper scenarios for adventures in the Tuscan olive groves into his ear until he blushes. The balmy night, the silver moon and the mild effect of barrel-aged grappa smoothes lines and wrinkles, lifts jowls and tits until you don’t know how, it’s magic, oh my love! A horny faun ties a sylvan nymph to an ancient olive tree and has his way with her… ! Sweet dreams.
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A yellow sticky note is being shuffled around the debris on my desk and nags me with its two scribbles of unrelated stories. It’s always another day. My phone is full of messages from the US department of education and other financial institutions reminding my daughter of the unpaid installments of her student loans. There’s education. My son’s ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend has been rearrested because he had been released from prison prematurely through an error of the system. My son’s new girlfriend has been rearrested because she violated parole when she was too sick to show up for an appointment. Drug charges, both of them. There’s justice. I can’t change the bank account information on my credit card online account for easy e-bill pay, error, error! sorry we can’t assist you! and my snail mailed payment will be late to the tune of a thirty-nine dollar fee. There’s money. My CNA is tired every night and I can rouse him with a temper tantrum only every so often, and we go to couple counseling. There’s relationship and sex, or the other way round.
There’s always more. There’s Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan, you name it. There’s women’s rights, reproductive and other, non-existent in large parts of the world. There’s aliens from every quadrant and dimension of the universe, hello, are you here to help us, or are you conspiring with our governments? There’s religion, for god’s sakes.
Each of them another story of another gripa with the corporate, judicial, financial, political, national, extra terrestrial, inter-dimensional, sexual and whatever fucking intent. I’m looking at gripas for years to come. And no real grappa to tide me over.
Violetta says, "I was born... and here I am. It's been quite a trip."