I snap out of my state when my name is called and I can feel everyone go quiet for a millisecond before the children start giggling again, two twin girls with bows in their hair, because they had seen it on television. I look at my wife, trying to decipher the words through her lipstick which stays on even during sex and that’s when my mind goes elsewhere… Where I see feathers and I see confetti on New Year’s Eve. It hadn’t been so long ago. He laughed in my face, as we both smoked cigarettes inside, nobody caring anymore about fire hazards and how he had offered to go down on me, just for me to relax in the bathroom.

I just sat on the toilet seat, lid down and he worked his way better than my wife ever had. It wasn’t the first time, it wasn’t the last time. I had even brought him home once, looking around the house, as if he had never seen a house and he was younger, between my children and myself, a good ten years and that’s when he paused at a photo, which I didn’t want him to see.

She now raised her voice, the two girls going quiet, I was sure that now they were holding hands. They knew mommy and daddy had been fighting a lot. Like on television.

I just excused myself silently, knowing that I could easily get a meal anywhere else. My wife knew where I was going. She couldn’t do anything about it and that’s the way I wanted it. A fucked up ideology of family, where no matter what I would do I would remain the husband of two pretty daughters because that was the way God intended it to be. I was content with that. I wouldn’t get a kick to my teeth as I would watch drag queens perform and as I would search for his face in the crowd just to have sex again. Was it the sex? It didn’t matter that it was a man. It was someone who reminded me-

“Why does your friend look so familiar to me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is that why you’re fucking me?”

“I’d even pay to fuck you, since he’s long dead.”

And he put the photograph down among the sea of other photos which barely contained me, but mostly of my wife and the daughters and I preferred it that way. He sat on the floor, before I pushed him further onto the floor and I fucked him as hard as I could, watching his face all the time until he reached orgasm again, again and again. I couldn’t get enough.

I left out to the streets and spread my hands, as if I were to hug the entire street, but instantly put them down, feeling the cold creep into my unzipped jacket but that didn’t matter, my wife didn’t go after me. I kept walking until I reached the bar with the feathers and the confetti on New Year’s, but he wasn’t there so I went to his apartment. He opened, surprised to see me this early, but all he did was undress and we kissed, fucked and fucked again. Sometimes I wished he was an angel, my friend’s form sent from the Heavens to revive me, but he wasn’t. He had his own thoughts, his own shampoo choices and his own smell, taste and gag reflex. I didn’t want to go back to my girls, let alone my angry wife. I went out to his balcony and we smoked again in the cold wind, where our short hair was blown and I couldn’t bear to kiss him anymore, so I explained.

“He was gay.”

Silence.

“I never answered to his love.” I swallowed. Inhaled and talked through the smoke. “Slit his wrists.”