SEX AND THE C

This is posted on a plaque next to Shepard's portrait. For everyone who will not make it to Paris, I want you to have the full experience and as much of the story as I can give you. And now a dust bunny the size of my head just rolled by, so I am dragging my blogging butt off the couch to clean the house.

xoxo, wee


Sex and the C / June 2006

I don’t know your story. I don’t know if you are sick. There is no way for me to look into the future and see if you will ever have to face a diagnosis. I only have my story, the parts that I remember.

I love the hours on either side of midnight. The world is quiet, people are sleeping, the city is dreaming of being the country. It is the time old movies come on my non-cable television. Often they are B-grade romances from the eighties. There is too much Molly Ringwald, full of first love and innocence.

If you were to ask me if I have ever been in love, I would tell you yes. This is not a lie. If you were to ask me if I want to be in love again, I believe I would look at you and simply shrug. It just seems that when I look back on my past, I am watching an old home movie of another girl. I watch without feeling, very analytical. I have become very British. You know, those people across the pond who only show affection to antiques and small dogs. And as I watch that girl, some part of me feels a deep and desperate sadness, because it is impossible to feel anything else. I no longer understand love. It is a language I lost when I stopped practicing.

I listen to songs on repeat. Not whole CDs, just one song for hours. When it gets really bad, for days. This is important because the summer I was diagnosed, I played the Garden State soundtrack over and over, one song at a time.

I didn’t yet own an iPod so my whole house was subjected to my musical misery. I think by the end of that fall, the wheels had just about fallen off my copy and secretly my mother was praying the engine would seize and all would be quiet. It was not to be, and I still have that bright red CD stuffed into a sleeve in my black book that houses the past.

I rarely play that CD now. I am done with all that, I like to tell myself. It would be super nice if that were true.

Maybe my lack of interest in having a love life has less to do with the remains of a terrifying breakup and more with self-image.

To everyone else, I finally look well. Healthy. Perhaps carting around an amount of baby fat just this side of cute makes you look really young, and we all equate youth with health. I feel like someone told my body it was the ark and it had to make space for all those animals. Then it went and accounted for the unicorn, the dragon, the jackalope and all those other fantastical critters the Almighty had no intention of bringing into the next chapter of evolution. Yep, there are rooms aplenty at this inn.

Perhaps I just feel cheated out of the good half of my twenties. The years before babies and love handles, but after the previously mentioned baby fat has magically melted away and your body can still handle celebrating national cheeseburger day once a week. I guess in a nutshell that sums up the problem. I feel cheated, and I don’t have a clue how to fix it.