Zen Oral.

‘You have a beautiful mouth’.

Her first words to me: a little surprising, given the age gap between us was more of a chasm complete with small, autonomous community and burgeoning infrastructure. But I wasn’t, and am not, fussy. People go their own way, and she was going for my face.

‘Tell me’ she said, gently probing my lip, ‘do you ever get stressed?’. Better and better.

Do I get stressed? Does my angina leap from abstract to actual with every street vendor, hawking their Art Foundation year out of their mobile premises in a suitcase? And my stomach, when it’s not being burned out with industrial-grade coffee beans and gout sandwich; does it wrench – just that little bit more – when a chugger in a tabard tells me it’s *just* a small monthly donation that’s going to make the difference between little Bobby dying or winning the swimming gala for his freestyle butterfly? Or the sinking feeling I get between my first conscious breath and the long, slow struggle to the mechanical underbelly of a life, long-sacrificed to low-grade swearing throughout every journey of every day. Yes, baby. Yes, I do get stressed. Life is stress. You think maybe you know something about that from the cold sores that render my smile into a fixed clown mask; can you make it better, take it away, make it your own…

‘Why, yes I do.’ Mystique makes for a better response than unbridled rabid raving, after all. And it’s marginally more attractive.

She didn’t meet my eyes once, turning away to get something I couldn’t make out.

‘Well, I’d recommend you do something like meditation, take a walk in the park.’
‘What?’
‘Life, Mr…’
‘Croker’
‘…Mr Croker, everything in life is damaging. You can’t stop what’s gonna come at the end. But what’ll damage you the most is worrying about it.’

She started to drill into the seas of yellow scale glued to my incisors and I began to think, lady’s got a point…