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Politics

Mossy Brackets: Sexting after Syria

It seems obvious that war zones and dating don't mix, right? Well, Miss Brackets still had to learn that the (kinda) hard way.

Image for Mossy Brackets: Sexting after Syria
Photo by Kenny Louie (Flickr CC)

When Adorno prophesied that there’d be no poetry after Auschwitz, he was contradicted* and eventually our space-time continuum also brought us to sexting after Syria.

Roman poet Sextus Propertius (yes) wrote that absence makes the heart grow fonder. What  Sextus didn’t specify was that the growing-fonder-heart belongs to the one left at home while the absent-heart vagues out, forgets to write and may even hook up with underage people accidentally on purpose. Things that happen overseas, and such. What happens in Damascus, stays in Damascus? The absent-heart has exotic adventures while the left-at-home-growing-fonder-heart withers with anxiety and has to recycle the non-Pfandflaschen.

They say that love is a battlefield. Mossy Brackets, now with a sudden fondness for old adages, has her own to pen: Dating and Actual War Zones Do Not Mix.

Basic rules of engagement need to be established. If you’re going to make a career out of saving the world, you should be already married with children and when your work takes you away to a war zone it’s all heroic, sad and stressful but your kids get to brag like hell about you at school. Or you should be a lone-wolf Indiana Jones cad who’s perpetually single, married to your work and always wearing some kind of signature accessory.

You don’t just date like a regular person and go to Syria. Because there aren’t any support networks like “Soli-Party for Those Who’ve Had Sex Four Times with Someone in Syria Right Now”… as far as I know. I may’ve tried to establish one. And damned if I didn’t deserve it. While he was away I spent at least 14 minutes of every day really hoping that he wouldn’t die. I sent him a WhatsApp message which wasn’t received or responded to for days, presumably because ISIS was holding his phone, and that they might let him send me a message only before beheading him. And then of course when I didn’t hear anything for over a week, I desperately checked the Facebook page of his Saving The World organisation for updates. Nothing. I began to fantasise about calling the embassy. By the time I finally heard from him I had enough feels to match the mother and all four girls in Little Women, including the dead one. Feels which were met with this:

i think you would like to have Dirty Sex later… and get your cunt pounded and my juice all over you… so you’re cunt Is ready for a visit? :-P” (sic)

Uncertain capitalisation, incorrect usage of ‘your’, but asking if my cunt was ready for a “visit” as though it’s a bedridden aunty with nothing but soup and National Geographic for company? That’s a little too close for comfort. I conceded defeat – also known to psychologically functioning individuals as ‘forgiveness’. Maybe he had post-traumatic stress disorder and has suddenly forgotten all manners/who I am/that I am not a webcam girl? Maybe going to Syria in its current state of civil unrest could do that to you. I tentatively suggested that my cunt was not entirely opposed to a visit because I’d been holding a fucking candle for three weeks for this guy. What was I supposed to say?

“Seeing as we’re dating adults perhaps we could celebrate your safe return from Syria by maybe going out for dinner, which would of course be followed by sex to your liking because you’re a modern, entirely non-Nazi German hero who I would do anything for?”

Well, perhaps that might have gone a little better. Because after said visiting of cunt, he went totally off the radar, and there would be no getting to blame it on ISIS this time. What obviously didn’t occur to him was that in olden days we’d be married and he’d come back from war and be fucking stuck with me because I waited faithfully in the nest. I could’ve had three years’ worth of Kummerspeck as opposed to only three weeks’ worth. My friend tries to console me, saying that I should at least be grateful that nothing bad happened to him. That’s the most important thing, right. Right?!

“Well I guess you could unlike the Facebook page,” she offers.

“You mean his Saving The World page? That’s like deciding against world peace because you once had murderous thoughts about your neighbour. I can’t unlike Saving The World because a guy didn’t call back.”

“Listen, maybe he’s just laying low or gone underground, changed numbers even. Apparently the government is heavily surveying all Germans going to Syria right now, even the ethnic Germans. Is he a Muslim?”

“No.”

“That was an emphatic ‘No’.”

“No it was not an emphatic ‘No’!” He is just not Muslim. I’m sure he’s not being surveyed by the government, because he’s a clearly a World Saver and not because he’s ethnically German. Besides I discriminate non-discriminately, I’m not interested in men who follow any religious practises. I just don’t seem to date them, the exception being Richard Gere who’s a Buddhist and very rich and clearly sex positive because he fell in love with a prostitute.”

“Sex worker, you mean.”

“Sex worker.”

XOX

Mossy Brackets

REMEMBER: They’ve now proven that sugar is more addictive than cocaine. Need we say more? Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Nigella. Oh wait, you already did.

*Actually, I’ve no intention on contradicting Adorno or arguing whether or not there has been poetry after Auschwitz. That be some kompliziert shit.