the habit of being

Today M. brought me home early in the morning, after our one-cookie-each and French press coffee in the Cowboy Cup. Despite myself, I fell into the tub without writing, and then into bed in my towel, and I slept another three or four hours, dreaming dreams I promised myself I’d remember so I could tell him, but then forgot anyway.

I called my mother around noon, and she tells me that they may take an apartment in a renovated hotel in the middle of Frederick, MD. It is too small and too expensive, but we have always dreamed of living in a hotel, and I am happy for her. She talks about the park down the street, and school districts and restaurants and windows. They’ve already found a buyer for the house in Georgia, and there is so much to get rid of to move into an apartment, so much of my childhood I’ll never see again.

Jen and I went to an Indian restaurant for lunch and split the check. She went home to write a paper while I went shopping in the freezing rain. I bought cheap underwear and expensive foundation. Now I’m sitting in a bookstore cafe reading literary smut across from a stranger who is studying economics. I consider buying a dessert, and ponder how in the span of one month, my sex life has changed completely.

I feel very much like a virgin, who has been recently woken up. In so many ways this is ridiculous, because before I met M., I had already done everything. I had done so much that there was very little left to do. But without a new perversion to explore, I found, finally, pleasure instead. I cannot scream loud enough that I was wrong about everything. I knew nothing at all. Sex really is not violence. It does not have to be. It seems that everything before was only profanity, vulgarity, thinly-masked anger disguised as passion. I could never accept that now, knowing otherwise. I have become somebody else. I was a girl who had gone numb to everything but pain, but now I have found far better reasons to cry.