Eldest Son: [voice-over]
When you're young, and the woman in your hands is young, you're provoked by the life in her skin, in the muscles under her skin. You can smell life in the sweet perfume of her sweat and her breath, sweet perfume that can make you dizzy. You can sense life in the jittery convulsions of her reactions to every new touch and sensation. And you feel young and alive and jolted by excitement every time you come near her. But the older you get, the older the woman in your hands gets, you grow lulled by the lazy response of her flesh to your touch. Lulled by the numb response of your own nerves to her flesh. By the sluggish torpor of her muscles. The souring perfume of her sweat, of her tears. The souring smell of her old guts belching out air. And it's a curse. Because getting older doesn't make you like being with an old woman any more than you did when you were young. It's worse really, because it lacks even the thrill of novelty of the forbidden. She's just old and she reminds you that you're old, and that your old shell is still taking up space, but that it's life is almost gone. But nothing is worse than being old and holding youth in your hands, even youth that's thrilled by the novelty of you, because you can still smell youth's sweetness, feel the spring of muscles under taut skin, but you know isn't yours. You're not sharing in it, but are feeding off it like some kind of vampire. And you wonder what the point is - what the point of going on living, the point of loving, the point of touching. And all your instincts, your training, have made you too afraid to pull the trigger and end it yourself. To take responsibility that nature's abdicated into your own trembling weakening hands. You stare at those hands, studying them, wondering what they are, why you can't make them do what you want them to do. You stare down at your hands and you realize that even your own hands aren't really yours any more.
