I skimmed through the other comments. The range of opinions on this piece is fascinating: Beautiful! Depressing! Validating! Doom-harbinging!

Personally, I love it. I always love your stuff, it's so *interesting*, but this one -- just -- gah. I'm in line with femmenerd, I think; it's the ordinary, domestic, peculiar details of any relationship that make it beautiful, beautiful because of and in spite of its frustrations. You make me believe B/A could work, because you don't prettify it. Instead, you take every last anti-shipper argument I could throw at you and say, "Well, yes. Duh," and proceed to turn it to your advantage. I'm kind of in awe.

You write the most poetic banality I've ever seen.

I've grumbled at you before for using absolutely virtuosic language, but too much of it, so tangling your story's thread. This piece, IMO, is beautifully edited. It retains the richness of your thought, your talent for constructing symbols and metaphors, but it's lucid and clean. Brava.

I think the laundry-folding scene is my favourite, because the picture is so crisp and simple, but you can zoom in on any detail and the secondary meanings just snap into focus. White sheets, innocent beds. Panties, sexuality, sniffed at, folded away. Broken vessel. Stains and washing and starting over, no matter many times it takes before the sheets are clean and soft and comfortable.

Oh my good God, your Buffy voice is to die for. Not only her humour, but what she uses her humour *for*.

I thought of a quote:

"...So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance..."

from 'The Weighing', Jane Hirshfield