A bad joke about married sex under the conditions of late-stage capitalism. Question: “What did one tired body say to the other tired body?” Answer: “Make it quick.”

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You make it quick for me when you get on all fours and talk dirty. I make it quick for you when I eat you in the shower. When the quickie is properly executed, I can orgasm in under five minutes, whereas you can orgasm in under two. It doesn't take us long–not when the end is the point.

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Another bad joke about married sex under the conditions of late-stage capitalism. Question: “What do you call a commodity that really turns you on?” Answer: "Hopefully, your partner.”

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You: Remember–the end is always the point.

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Our jobs–my teaching at the college, your teaching out of our home, the myriad side hustles we rely on to cover bills–demand almost everything and pay almost nothing. Once that work is finished, there is the work to be done with our children and with our community, which (in the existential sense) we consider the most important work there is. Whatever energy is left at the end of the day is eligible to be given to fucking. The problem is, it is also eligible to be given to falling asleep in front of a television.

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“Just think of me as your vending machine,” you said the other night as we were lying in bed after a long day, both of us so exhausted that even the thought of a quickie seemed arduous. “Come on,” you said. “The faster we do it, the faster we rest.”

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Me: I don't want the end to be the point. I want the middle to be the point.

You: And I bet, if you had it your way, the middle would last forever.

Me: Of course. Who wouldn’t want that?

You: Adults.

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Here is the bad joke snickering behind life itself: the faster you do it, the faster you rest.

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The more we work, the less we want to fuck. The less we work, the more we want to fuck. I'm not a Marxist, but I know a correlation when I see one.

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Our conversation after a quickie is different from our conversation after a proper sexual experience. “Thanks,” we say to each other, as if addressing a waiter who has just refilled the water. “I appreciate that.”

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One night, a little drunk and deeply horny, you woke me up with a blow job. Your mouth was warm, and I grew hard inside of it almost immediately. I loved how it felt, until I checked the time and saw it was 2 a.m. I had classes at 8, not to mention an ungodly queue of unanswered emails and uncompleted tasks. Which is why, just as you spit into your hand and attempted to transition into a hand job, I stopped you and said, “I appreciate what you’re doing, but I have work in the morning.”

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Do you know what good sex feels like after a day of hard work? Hard work. Do you know what deep sleep feels like after a day of hard work? Good sex. Fix this, we fix everything.

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“All day long I've wanted to ride you, but now–” you said, cut short by a yawn that overtook your entire body. “But now, maybe in the morning.”

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Most days I'm too tired for sex, but I'm not too tired for television. Most days I'm not too tired to write fragmentary essays, but I'm too tired to read anything except for tiny contemporary poems. “Life's too short for long books,” a poet friend of mine once said. “It's almost too short for short poems.”

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This is to say, we remember there was a beginning, and we know there is an end, but it's the middle we can't quite find. And not because we haven't tried. Because time's a quickie.

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I once went to a writing conference where a participant asked a faculty member if they believed in the present tense. “Only as a performance,” they replied. “And even then, not really.”

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The problem with saying that life's too short for one thing is that life's too short for everything. I used to want to write a book that moved people. Now I'll settle for a sentence that doesn't put you to sleep.

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I once read an article that claims the average length of an orgasm ranges between thirty and sixty seconds. I shared this fact with you, and you had the same response as me: “That's way too long.”

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When you're busy, everything is way too long. When you're tired, everything puts you to sleep. You can imagine it being different, but only in the way you can imagine life after death.

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Once, when we were in bed and just starting to mess around, you grabbed me by the hair and pushed my face towards your pussy. You said, “Eat me out,” and I said, “Okay,” but as soon as you released your grip, I slid all the way down to your feet and started planting a series of slow, wet kisses on the bones of your ankles. I had read somewhere that anticipation was the ultimate aphrodisiac, and my plan was to make you wait as I kissed my way up the smooth terrain of your legs. I got as far as the pocket of flesh behind your knee before you grabbed me by the hair again and, this time, held my face in place by locking your legs behind my neck. “Sorry,” you said. “But that was taking forever.”

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I told the writer who taught me how to write fragmentary essays about this book. He asked about its length, and I threw out the number one-hundred and fifty pages. He told me anything over one-hundred and ten pages would be death. “Hit us quick,” he said. “Right in the head-box. Then–poomph!–you disappear.”

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There is coming a day, if that day hasn't already arrived, when smart people with curious hearts will quit reading books. They will quit not because books got worse. They will quit because they have work to do and because they are tired.

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Sometimes fucking is way too fucking long. Such as the nights when we drink heavily, and it takes me forty-five minutes to come (if I come at all), and it takes you an hour to come (if you come at all), and more often than not we end up stopping in the middle and falling asleep. Whoever said, “Quitters never win,” never put away a handle of Tanqueray after a day like ours.

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Sometimes the goal is to fuck. Sometimes the goal is to disappear. Both feel like a giving up on the middle, which is to say a reaching for the end.

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“A good editor cuts away the non-essential parts of a book until what's left is the cleanest expression of the author's vision. But a great editor cuts away both non-essential and essential parts of a book until what's left is something new and strange, something the author could never have envisioned.” Who said that? Based on its didactic tone and questionable assumptions, I think I did.

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We have edited our lives around work, and this includes our sex. Because what is quick sex if not long sex heavily edited. Cut the kissing at the start. Cut the touching. Cut the licking. Cut the part where you bite my stomach and run your nails across my scalp. Cut the part where I bend you over the bed and tease your thighs with my tongue. Cut the toys. Cut the talk. Cut all the oral shit. Cut everything until the only thing that’s left is the shortest path to orgasm–my genitals, your genitals, and the requisite friction to make desire disappear.

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Some cuts are more abrupt than others. One night, while I was eating you out, I thought I heard you say something. So I stopped and said, “What?” Then I saw that you had fallen asleep, and what I had heard was a snore.

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Time is what you would edit in a world that lasts forever. I once heard a preacher say, “You sleep one-third of your life, you work one-third of your life, and you live one-third of your life.” It was a poor man's speech. It was a rich man's math.

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No matter how quick you are, time won't let you fuck it. Which is why you turn to memory and feel thrilled when you realize no one cares enough to double-check your edits.

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You: I never fell asleep with you eating me out.

Me: You must've forgotten it. It happened quickly.

You: Not that quickly.

Me: But I remember it.

You: I know you do. But it never happened.

Me: The memory of it did, though.

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Memory is what remains after time takes its cut, and a book is just memory dressed up in voice. The problem is, all voice is fiction. It's a problem we don't want to acknowledge for fear entire genres (not to mention personalities) would implode. But what if implosion is the point? What if the ruins are the place where we finally find our truest selves?

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You: Not to kick you when you're down, but that line about the quickie? What was it? “Just think of me as your vending machine”? If you're gonna make up lines, at least make up good ones.

Me: I'm ninety-five percent sure that you actually said that.

You: I'm one-hundred percent sure that one came from Manuscript Hannah.

Me: Manuscript Hannah?

You: Shit. Now that’s going in, isn’t it?

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The only true fact about our married life is “I don't remember.” But that would be too quick. Which is why this book exists.

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Manuscript Hannah: All sex is quick sex. Just like life. Just like us.