The rules to Strip Darts are as follows:
Objective: Orgasms
- Strip Darts must only be played on Naked Friday while the kids are away at their grandparents house
- Strip Darts must be played with music. The music selection will alternate between Player 1 and Player 2’s iTunes playlist
- No show tunes as Player 1 has stated that they, “Kill the mood”
- Cocktails can be present, though not required
- Player 2 is in charge of temperature control as she is more sensitive to her climate
- The first player to throw a dart is determined by who wins the staring contest (Staring contest: P1 and P2 look into each others eyes until one of them caves and kisses the other. The one who kisses first, plays darts second)
- First Player throws 3 darts
- If Player misses dart board, they must remove an article of clothing
- If Player hits the inner circle, they remove an article of clothing off the opposing player’s body
- If Player hits a bullseye, they get to name a sexual favor to be performed
If you get nothing else out of my books, blogs, podcasts, or social media ramblings, I need you to get this: When I was married, I was good, and fun, and adventurous at sex. Now, I just lay there face down in a pillow hoping my boyfriend-of-the-week can’t hear me crying about my dead husband.
I was a good wife.
I was a good wife.
I was a good wife.
I kept chanting this to myself last weekend as I stared at the dart board in our former garage. It was time to sell the house. I hadn’t lived in it in years. The kids and I moved to San Diego nine months after his suicide and never looked back. We moved with such haste, that as I wandered the barren house we once lived in, I kept finding things I left behind.
Pool Toys
A Broom
A stereo
A single red dart
A single red dart standing proudly in the center of the makeshift dart board after all this time.
I couldn’t believe that the renters had never touched the dart. That means the last person to touch the dart was him. Or maybe it was me. I miss both of those humans equally, I thought as I pulled the dart from its position on the board.
I wandered the house four times last weekend….or was it five?…trying to figure out something. Something I couldn’t identify. Did I need to cry? Did I need closure? Did I need to light everything on fire? Did I need to lay where our bed once was? I don’t know.
I took the kids to the house twice. My teenage daughter took a picture off the wall of a werewolf she had drawn that her dad kept in the garage. She also took a picture of a Zombie. Three years ago, when I read his suicide note for third time, I remember that I had envisioned him writing it in the garage while glancing up every so often to see these pictures his daughter had made for him. My son, he wanted the intercom system. I had taken only the dart, but still I felt restless. What did I need to say goodbye?
Every particle of that house had its good memories and its bad. The meals, the Happy Birthday songs, the sex, the wall painting, and dishwasher fixing. How many other women had he brought here? He only told me about one, but his computer spoke of others.
How many nail polished hands had touched the counters that I cleaned?
How many high heels had walked on the floors that I had mopped?
Did they like the way my house was decorated?
Did they look at the pictures of my children on our walls?
Seven years I had spent in that house working to make it ours. Working to make the air warm, and light, and sanitary. And then he and his shotgun and his whores took my work and shit on it. They had turned the air….MY AIR…. in to cold, and darkness, and filth.
As I closed the French doors that lead out to our patio and turned the lock for the last time, the blinds fell from the window and came crashing down at my feet. I reached down to retrieve them, to put them back up and make this place look presentable.
Then, I changed my mind.
“I don’t give a shit. I don’t live here anymore” I said aloud. My son laughed.
©Copyright 2017 Michelle Miller
About Michelle Miller
Michelle Miller is a grief blogger, has essays featured on TheRumpus.net and OurSideofSuicide.com, and is the author of, Boys, Booze, and Bathroom Floors: Forty-Six Tales about the Collision of Suicide Grief and Dating. Her memoir chronicles the aftermath of her husband’s infidelities and suicide in 2014 at the age of thirty-one, and how she used dating to run from, and simultaneously into her grief.
Prior to her husband’s death, Michelle worked full time with special needs students in a small town while balancing life with two young children and a volatile marriage. Her approach to grief is one of extreme empathy, humor, blunt honesty, and….okay, a few cocktails along the way.
Michelle is currently living with her best friend, and their five children in San Diego, California. She is working on her second book, Ghetto Grief which is a collection of short stories about the unconventional ways in which she grieved and continues to grieve her husband; set to be released in 2017.For links to follow her on social media, view her blog, purchase her book, or read her published essays, visit: MouthyMichellesMusings.com
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I never get tired of reading your posts.