trials and tribulations...

The upshot of the trial separation was that I was charged ‘in absentia’ with being the same complete cunt she suspected I was from the very beginning. I was vigorously prosecuted without ever being allowed to take the stand in my defence, found guilty by a judge/jury of one, summarily convicted…and subsequently sentenced to an indeterminate period of singleness. I was not even present when the sentence was carried out, though in all honesty, even had I known about the trial and its inevitable outcome, I doubt whether I’d have been able to mount much of an argument against the complaint anyway. I was a complete cunt; guilty as charged…no question of it.
From my perspective, while the secret trial was going on, I wouldn’t say things were any better or worse as such. We hadn’t had sex, either deliciously passionate with anger or even anaesthetically dull with duty for over a century, so sleeping in separate bedrooms was hardly going to make a difference. Absence and abstinence certainly did not appear to make our distant hearts grow fonder or our respective pink bits itchier. About the only lesson we learned from sleeping apart was that we definitely got a better night’s sleep. It turned out to be a case of he/she who sleeps alone may be alone…but at least they slept.
I was snoozing so well in fact, I’d already decided that at the conclusion of the trial separation, assuming things went smoothly and my wife stopped being insane, I would suggest either continuing to sleep in different bedrooms or at the very least get twin Queen-sized beds. That way we could have perfectly obligatory sex whenever one of us could be bothered going over to the other person’s bed then scuttle back to our own bed for a well-earned rest. I’d even promised myself I would go over to her bed for sex a lot more often than I would ask her to come to my bed for sex too, though of course any decision to visit my wife’s bed for carnal relations was based less on any notion of gentlemanly good-manners by committing to the extensive travel and more on the practical advantages of letting her sleep on the wet spot.
Hey, I said I was a complete cunt; didn’t you believe me?
Just why our sex life had withered on the marital vine so markedly has always been a matter of fierce academic debate. I claim that my wife’s horrendously complex and multi-layered issues of self-loathing, poor body-image and low self-esteem had created a metaphorical lasagne of neuroses through which it was impossible for me to cut. She would probably say I was a lazy asshole with a blunt, rusty knife; both arguments have equal merit.
Now, before I go on I’d just like to say that my wife was utterly gorgeous and I was physically attracted to her from the first moment I laid eyes on her. She was a clone of Sarah Jessica Parker, you know, Carrie from ‘Sex and the City’. And I mean the good Carrie too, the one with the lustrous straight hair and stylish shades, not the tired-looking hippy Carrie with the frizzy hair and windscreen-sized sunglasses. My wife had Carrie’s wonderfully expressive face, she had her fabulous toned legs, her sexily tapered waist and her overly generous breasts…she even had the long, aquiline nose.
When we went out in Tokyo where we lived for a time, schoolgirls would come up to us in the street and ask her excitedly for an autograph. They’d giggle hysterically while my wife signed their ‘Hello Kitty’ diaries, jabbering away in Japanese, oblivious to the fact I could understand what they were saying, most of which centred on how fabulous Carrie looked and how apparently disappointing Matthew Broderick (me) was in real life…