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Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold. —Zelda Fitzgerald
I feel some of her calm, bright energy settling itself, like a bird in a tree, onto my shoulders, melting down my arms, into my limbs, into my blood. This is one of the many things my mom does best. She makes everyone feel better.
It’s funny how the bad things stay with you and the good things sometimes get lost.
Virginity is a bullshit social construct created by the patriarchy.”
Pretty much.
“This whole concept is so antiquated. As if all that matters is penis-plus-vagina sex. Something like twenty percent of Americans identify as something other than completely straight, so why are we still so focused on a woman’s first time with a man? And why is a girl’s virginity such a big deal anyway? People don’t get excited about a straight guy having sex. It’s all high fives and ‘Now you’re a man.’ They don’t sit around wringing their hands and searching the internet for replacement parts.”
I wish I could explain that it’s not about teasing or doing it; it’s about the possibility. It’s the almost. It’s the Maybe this time, the Maybe he’s the one. I want to say, For a few minutes I make you greater than yourself, and I’m greater than myself, and we’re greater than this barn because we are all this possibility and almostness and maybe.
I’m an almanac of virgin trivia, especially in awkward situations when I don’t know what else to say.
All I can think is how one minute the floor was there and now it’s not. How you could go through an entire day, every day, not thinking about the floor or the ground because you just assume it will always be there. Until it isn’t.
“You have to let the tears come,” she always says. “Because if you don’t, they’ll come out eventually—maybe not as tears, but as anger or something worse.”
And, all at once, there is this rush of feeling in my hands, in my heart, in every part of my body that just went hollow and dead, and I nearly double over from the pain of it. I feel as if a bomb has dropped from the sky directly into my room, directly onto my head.
It was one of those tragedies that my mom the writer refers to as a defining moment: that moment when life suddenly changes and you’re left picking up the pieces. She says it’s actually how you pick up the pieces that defines you.
Whatever memories of her mom, and the girl Claudine might have been if that gun had never gone off, went with her.
It makes me wonder, Is this a defining moment for me? And if so, what will I do with all these pieces?
Besides, virginity is so fucking subjective, Hen. It’s like something made up by the old, straight, white men who run this country, or whoever their equivalent was back in ancient times, to make you feel left out and less than and somehow incomplete. It doesn’t actually mean anything, not to me.”
Sometimes things end, even if you don’t want them to.
What sort of world it was now, there was no telling.
I’ve never realized how hard we are on our bodies. I think, Why are we so mean to ourselves? Why aren’t we happy with what we have?
It’s so fucking bizarre to me that one minute you can be naked with someone and the next it’s as if you never met, yet I’m so strangely okay with this that I wonder if I ever really cared about him.
‘Stuff your eyes with wonder….Live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream.’ Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451.”
Because after suffering a loss, you become a ghost in your own body. You observe yourself doing things and saying things that you might not normally do or say. You need something to ground you and prove to you that you’re still here. As a way of feeling something. Anything.
I see them remembering and this is when it hits me. It will not be the three of us anymore. It will never be the three of us anymore.
I imagine myself as free as that horse, and for a minute I’m nowhere and everywhere. Floating. I imagine an entire summer of becoming the person I want to be, whoever that is. Doing the things I want to do, whatever those are. Not thinking about anyone else because no one is thinking of me. I see flashes of myself as the girl I think I used to be—happy, secure, a floor beneath my feet. Fuck everyone, I think. Fuck them all.
I step off the ferry and my eyes meet his. And, for a fraction of a moment, less than a millisecond, I freeze and he seems to freeze too.
‘Don’t lose today.’ As in don’t hide behind yesterday or hold back from tomorrow.
She is beautiful—as bright and vivid as a field of daisies—but she doesn’t know it.
In spite of her mother’s suicide and the fact that she never left this island for long, even after she was grown, Claudine looks fierce and fearless—as if she could take on the world—and I want to be her.
and lie there in the dark, sinking into the bed under the weight of my chest, no longer hollowed out but filled with—something. A feeling of homesickness. Of not being wanted. Of being all alone in the world. On earth. In the universe. And everyone has someone, but I am just me. And at night they all go inside and lock the doors and turn on the lights and pull the curtains, but I can still see the light shining out of the windows. And I am outside, in the dark, alone.
And this, I know, is part of growing up. The part they don’t tell you. That you can find yourself suddenly in another room, one that looks nothing like the one you’re used to, and there’s no getting back—no matter how much you want to—because from now on there is only here, and the only thing to do is settle in and try to make sense of it and tell yourself that this is your life now. This is what it looks like. And you’re going to be okay. You can do this. Because you don’t have a choice.
But the problem with reading is that it’s too easy to get distracted. I read the same words over and over, and it’s like reading air or clouds or something else intangible.
Me all the damn time.
Behind her sadness, there is a brightness in my mom’s voice, a purpose.
And everything, absolutely everything, was there. Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine.
And then his hands are on my waist, on my hips, his fingers widespread and strong, so warm against my shirt that the warmth reaches into my skin. He pulls me to him and says, “I’m going to kiss you right now because I’ve been thinking about kissing you all morning. I’m telling you this because it’s going to be a fucking incredible kiss, so I want you to brace yourself. I know you promised me you wouldn’t fall in love, but I completely understand if that changes after this. I will now await your blessing.”
But, more than that, he’s direct, honest, and completely himself.
There are moments, and this is one of them, when I can actually see her heartache. She carries it not just in her heart but in her arms and on her shoulders and in her face.
“Some people just aren’t built that way. My mom, for one. Or maybe they are but something gets in the way. Like depression or loss.
I don’t see the future as this road that’s all laid out neat and organized: school, work, relationship. I think the future’s kind of like the ocean—more, I don’t know, fluid.”
“I don’t think there’s any such thing as technically. It’s about who you’re with and how you feel. Sex is sex. Love is love. I don’t need some stupid 1950s construct to tell me what it is or isn’t. However it happens, whatever it looks like, I think you know in here”—I tap the space over my heart—“if you’re still a virgin or not.”
I lost my virginity, and yet I tell myself I didn’t lose anything. This is my body. I’m the only one in it; I got to choose what happened. I knew what I was doing. I decided where and when to have sex. Just like I will decide my life. No more waiting for other people to decide things for me. I’m writing it right now.
I think about how amazing it is that you can have someone that close to you, that for the first time you literally aren’t alone in your body anymore. Yet somehow you can still feel lonely.
The little death. Three words that could also refer to losing your virginity. Not in a morbid, tragic way. Not in a sad way. But in a this-is-the-end-of-your-childhood kind of way. Even though I still feel stupidly young.
Trapped behind the wall I’ve built around myself, unable to move or breathe or do anything but keep building it up around me, brick by brick, fast as I can.
There’s something about the routine of it that I need. Seven-thirty p.m.: cocktails. Eight-thirty p.m.: dinner. Ten p.m.: ocean. There’s this comfort in knowing what I’m doing when.
I love how this reminds me of cruises. I love them and their routines.
“So what scares you most? With us?” I give this a little thought. “That you’ll be really into me one day and the next day you won’t be, and I won’t see it coming. Because apparently feelings can change overnight. Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m too much. Or maybe I’m not enough.” All the things I’ve been thinking since my dad told me he was leaving. “You’re enough. Trust me. You’re more than enough.”
“There’s beauty in every story. And there’s a story in everything.”
And right now, in this moment, I feel time stop. Suddenly I can see every shadow, every color. I can hear every sound. I look around me, and for maybe the first time in my life, I’m in the here and now. Not the past or the future, but here.
“My dad says that it’s a rare person you can be silent with. Companionable silence, that’s what he calls it. He says most people talk too much about nothing.” I can feel Miah’s eyes on me. “He says there’s a difference between not talking when you’re there together and not talking when one of you is there and one of you is there but far away.”
“But when I’m with you, everything is quiet; everything just seems right, like my skin fits. And I don’t mean just when I’m with you with you.”
We’re swaying a little to the music, and I’m looking into his eyes and thinking how amazing it is that you can live for eighteen years without knowing someone, and then they can come along and, like that, know you better than anyone. And you can’t imagine what you ever did before they knew you and saw you and heard you and talked to you about all the things they’ve been through and all the things that matter to them.
It’s this feeling of my heart being safe for the first time in a long time. And I know enough to know this isn’t always how it will be, but this is how it feels right now
