Bits

Bits taken from Creative Nonfiction:


I never wanted to lose my virginity in a loving, stable relationship with a boyfriend. And no, I didn’t want to lose it after marriage. In fact, I threw away my maidenhead with a boy I barely knew one night over Spring Break in the later semester of my junior year, on the living room floor of a friend’s house between three and six in the morning. I wasn’t completely sober either. When I tell my friends this (or anyone who wishes to know), the expression on their faces is a hybrid of incredulity and pity, as if I had been tricked into that situation and taken advantage of like all good girls who unfortunately find themselves mixed up with the wrong people.

Don’t let this quiet, wholesome girl façade fool you. That night happened exactly the way I had planned it to. The boy was a friend of a friend, a 22 year-old biochemistry major I knew for all of five hours, and the entire encounter—while playful and breathless—had a current of cool detachment running underneath our movements. It didn’t hurt—that surprised me, I’ll admit that much—but we kissed each other with glazed eyes that did not truly meet until the end of the fact. The next day, he gave me a perfunctory hug, and we parted on neutral-friendly terms. My one-night stand replaced the movie ideal of a high school prom night deflowering on scented sheets to a soft rock soundtrack.

I never treated my virginity as a gift. It wasn’t a trophy, a prize to be won, or a pot of gold at the end of the sexy rainbow. It was a thorn in my side for twenty years, a personal nuisance that made me vicariously live through the details of other friends’ tales as they gestured obscenely and giggled behind their hands while I could only cock my head to the side and wonder. I had read all about sex; I was obsessed with the horizontal tango: books, stories, videos, pictures, online erotica—by the age of eighteen, I was a sex aficionado in all but practice. I wanted to be the female Casanova, bedding beautiful people by day and/or night, but my “purity”—and the misogynistic myth surrounding it—stood in the way of my wet dreams.

On the drive home, my hands wouldn’t stop shaking, and I gripped the steering wheel until my knuckles shone white. I was finally free.