Souresh
Male
21
Kolkata, India

I am not a morning person. Even though I push myself out of the bed quite early, the world that stirs itself to vitality around me seems like another person’s reality. I’m a passive observer. Tea, biscuits and the morning paper are consumed flimsily, without the grandiose of a ritual. As if I were an indifferent guest in a hotel. Considering my lodging, never committing to it.
She always deems it fit to barge into my room every morning. My mother. I could have been jerking off. Or be in the buff. But she never seems to think about these things. Though I never really was walked into. Maybe she knows me too well. Maybe its the other way around. Maybe it’s a bit of both.
Privacy in our house is frowned at disapprovingly. Doors are never shut. Curtains never drawn.The unspoken rules of conduct were probably laid by my mother ages ago. Maybe before I was even born. My father, an unremarkable man with a remarkable jawline probably succumbed without so much as a whimper. He probably thought it was easier that way. To let someone take the reins of his life. Prone to occasional bouts of helpless anxiety, my father lives his life “on the surface”, complains my mother, as she greedily snatches the unfinished work away from him. He always seems only too relieved to surrender. I wonder if they ever have sex…