Ten months after Samantha left I was still trying to find her, still trying to regain what I had lost. Although at nineteen, if you’d have asked me exactly what that was, I probably would have bored you with some banal statement about my feelings and my love and the unfairness of it all. I know now that whatever I felt back then was guided by only two things — my dick and my stomach.

My relationship with Samantha was never simple. In fact, it was closer to some grasping, sadistic thing that seemed to satisfy and delight both of us on one the hand and send me into severe bouts of depression and her into raging tantrums on the other. Her leaving was probably the only sane thing that happened over the almost two and a half years we were together.

It was sometime during the eleventh month after she left that I decided to cut my wrists with a shiny new Wilkinson Sword razor blade that was once my father’s. I found a packet of them at the back of the medicine cabinet, took one to my room and then tossed a coin to see if I was going to live or die.

“Heads, oblivion. Tails …”

Needless to say I didn’t die. I tossed the coin and it did fall head-side up, but after sitting on the corner of my bed for a minute or two thinking about oblivion, my stomach called.

“Hey John! John! Hows about some food? Get up off your ass and fill this gaping hole! Come on John! You can commit suicide later, on a full stomach.”

My stomach hasn’t stopped arguing with me to this day, but my dick — that old friend, that strictly male appendage, well these days, it lies quietly resting, warm and snug inside its cotton hammock. Sometimes I even forget it’s there, well, metaphorically speaking I forget and during those increasingly extended periods you might say I become somewhat freer. One elemental hunger, one primal urge has been conquered and finally satiated. Well, almost.

I never saw Samantha again but I always remember her and once a year I celebrate with the flip of a coin and that old Wilkinson Sword razor blade that was once my father’s.