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For a long time, I thought that Sober Sex was a myth or, at the very best, as frequent an occurrence as Haley’s Comet. If you’re lucky, you will get to experience it twice in your life time. I lost my virginity sober and, so, I just figured that my last sexual experience would be the next time. You know, to make for a nice and poetic bookend. Considering that I spend a large majority of my waking hours with a drink in hand, it is just always a statistical inevitability that I will get fucked while fucked. Whenever I have heard people talking about Sober Sex, I have had flashing images of fairytales, magical lands and Snow White giving head to Dopey with a glass of Brandy secretly set aside to the corner of the frame. I believe that dwarfs exist before I believe in Sober Sex.

I hate to clean. The universal hatred of cleaning may be the one truth shown in the myth that is Cinderella. My mother bought me books, toys and videos of the fairytale when I was little, indoctrinating me on a world where a girl dusted her way to a pair of glass shoes. I used to think it was because she wanted to romanticize my imagination from the cynical lump it was becoming from watching Absolutely Fabulous with my father. And I tried to get into Cindy’s world, I really did. But I called bullshit on it, like I did with Bigfoot, God and Sober Sex and, instead, indulged the lives of two middle-aged, alcoholic whores. It just seemed more believable. Maybe I knew what I wanted from a young age? But my mother wasn’t trying to make me idealistic, no, that was a myth I had fabricated in my own head. Hindsight has shown me that she was teaching me how to clean.
“Cinderella did it and look where it got her!”
“Yeah, her luck had absolutely nothing to do with magic.”
“Do you know what’s magic? This Swiffer.”

Now that I am an “adult”, I have had to clean up my own messes. I have found the life messes to be relatively easy to organize, dust and wipe away. But I’ll be fucked before I know how to use a vacuum. And so the messes in my house just kind of manifest until the mould creates functioning societies. However, because I want to get drunk and bring a boy back to my house, I decided that the mess had to be organized. I had no idea what I was doing. I emailed my mother to ask her some questions that Cinderella had not covered in her VHS tutorial.
“Do I sweep, mop or vacuum first?”
“Can you use Spray N Wipe on a mirror?”
“Would vodka remove mould?”
She wrote me back a series of “No’s” followed by a long list of instructions that read like the periodic table. I, in turn, decided that there was only one way to make the experience of cleaning a magical one. I made it into a drinking game. One Tequila, Two Tequila, Three Tequila, Clean The Floor.

Four hours later, I laid on my newly vacuumed rug and tried not to throw up on it. I was fucked. My floor glistened at me when I was eye-level to it. I felt proud of my adult self.

Cinderella met Prince Charming after she finished alphabetizing her bar and separating her G-Strings from Nanna Underpants, or whatever it is she actually did. I got Booty Called.
“Yes,” I wrote back to the series of invitations. I have never said ‘No’ to a single thing while intoxicated. Which may be why my Magic List reads like the periodic table.
I lost myself into the fabricated and fictional world of my book in the hours until He arrived, a fairytale narrative where I am in love with a nice, caring and functioning male member of society. By the time my Booty Call arrived, I was sober. Both my mirror and my liver were clean thanks to the magic of vodka.

As I had gotten myself into the mess while drunk, I understood that I had to then clean it up without the aid of alcohol. There wasn’t time to get drunk and, well, I had used the last of the spirits to get out a stain. My floors were clean enough to fuck on and the fumes should have been intoxicating, but, I had to have sex sober. I had no idea what I was doing.
“Do I undress, caress or blow first?” I wanted to ask someone.
“Is it normal to be able to see what I am doing?”
“Where is the vodka when you really need it?”
Four hours later, I had been laid on my newly vacuumed rug. It was like I had just seen Haley’s Comet. Twice.