The Tuesday Group.

Like my father, I prefer dreaming. I know he is a mournful, almost romantic man when alone, or with others, and yet when alone with me it feels like we batter each other in a constant assault of reality, and truth. Then we part and return to our dreaminess, a small relief before the next assault. In recent years, to prepare myself for these encounters, I've often had to partake of some lascivious, kinky, or risque behaviour before seeing him. It lends a film of protection against the present moment. And yet also enacts, in perverse miniature, the experience and the feelings that will arise with my father. Having just undergone the experience, I can feel an illusion of control. And yet today I would have no time for any miniature enactment and so felt somewhat low, oppressed, aware of viewing everyone with an air to fraud or potential misdemeanour. And so it was at tea-time I entered the kitchen and, seeing Helen, grabbed her hand and kissed it all the way to her elbow. In response to my theatrics, she placed her hand, for a split second, over my crotch. A twin sense of shame and lust entered the fractional second and, in expanding it infinitely, I was able to drive to my father's with a modicum of sanity.