zodiac29 Dec 2004

The sentence that begins "It's the escape I get..." is not grammatical. You have to take out the "and" to make it right.

"groomed" and "trained" in the second stanza seem weird. At least, it doesn't seem obvious that she trained you to groom yourself.

Also, by the time you get to "it took her years to teach", you've too many adjective clauses.

It was really pretty good up to that point. Then it gets heavy-handed at the "spiritual emptiness" part. People blather on about showing or telling or whatever, but what they're really getting at a lot of the time is that it's just not likely your narrator is so self-aware. So instead he burns the dinner or forgets her name or something, to show how he's like subconsciously spiritually empty (or whatever). It would work a lot better than that whole third stanza.

Actually, I'd like it better ended after the second bit. Or I could think it was really good, changed only very slightly.

Out of curiosity: Do you consider yourself a feminist?