It was a southern Californian springtime when my sixteen-year old feet daily plodded the expansive hallways of a suburban high school. Finally, a switch somewhere deep inside of me - somewhere beyond reason and recollect, beyond family and culture - was turned on and,
an ancient pulsing began.
My perceived trigger, at the time, was the courtship dance taking place between my innocent, virgin self and a class slut whose body had also arrived into its fullness of ripe potential. The notes passed between us, during social studies, were merely casual games of one-liners and quick pick-me-ups. I was intrigued. However, it was not until math class, when he borrowed a younger boy's flannel shirt and attempted to put it on, that I was irrevocably snagged. The thinning, vibrant cloth clung to his burgeoning biceps and, like a young, green Hulk, he contracted his well-defined musculature and burst that material at its seams! There was no turning back ~ primal desire ensnared me in its trap. It was pure animal. Suppression and denial were futile. Why fight against nature? I couldn't. I didn't have the will and, truth be told, I didn't want to have it. I wanted what ever our dance would offer up. I hungered for it. I was desperately parched and it was the primal fluidity that would, finally, quench whatever thirst this was.
Nonetheless, I had been raised in a society, and among a group of people, who create rules and regulations for monitoring and reigning in this unnamed wildness - that untamed beast within. True to the good girl I was raised to be, I attempted to create a meaningful relation~ship with this other. Unfortunately, without either of us having positive role models of what deep, emotional intimacy looked like, our pithy attempts merely modeled the turbulence we both knew and came from. His philandering ways never escaped my intuitive perception; I simply played dumb. During a fall break later that year, while swimming in a pool with a friend who was experiencing her own anguish-inducing relationship with my boyfriend's best friend, I arose from under the water with my thick, dark hair hanging down, soaking wet, over my face. "What am I?" I taunted her. Two years my younger, she giggled that she did not know. "I'm the boys' wet dream," the words tumbled out of my mouth,
"a hole without a face."
[Ouch.]
I always knew that my leaving for college would be the out between us and that there was nothing beyond my sharing my sweet fruit, for the very first time, with this developing, young man whose family resided in poverty. Evicted from household to household, the bi-monthly paychecks sometimes ended up on the betting line leaving the refrigerator in the home empty but for condiment containers. Hair was washed with bars of soap and old shoes were covered with duct tape. Living was, literally, survival on a day-to-day basis. Our phone conversations were even dialed from a telephone booth at the local arcade. Did the juxtaposition of our everyday lives intoxicate me further?
Perhaps.
On New Year's Eve, at the end of that year, we lavishly lounged inside a tent perched on the bluffs of a local campground overlooking a churning Pacific. How many women get to write about losing their virginity in such a novel environment? After the initial discomfort of penetration wore off, I relished feeding this caged animal. I savored arriving into English class still warm from ditching the first two periods and spending them in bed at my parent's house. With a devilish grin on my face, I wondered if my classmates could smell the sex emanating off of my body. I discovered deep pleasure in these acts and, yet, there was shame, too. There were the voices and signs, the silent signals and the stringent decorum for how it was supposed to be and for who He was supposed to be. Instead, it was just this.
This meeting of needs. A using, perhaps; both of us called to fulfill some carnal echoing, some instinctual reverberation from a long, long time ago.
