The Virgin Writes About Sex

COHORT 7

Space: There is essentially only one difference between boys and girls, and I learn it on the first day of high school, where the boys stretch their arms wide in the hallways, making wide gestures, taking big steps, limbs freely moving through space that is, naturally, theirs. They occupy all the space they want, and then some. Boys will grow to fill a space, and girls will shrink to elbow their way through whatever space is leftover. Our best asset in an obstacle course is our smallness, which becomes its own competition: how little space can you take, how easily can you duck under an outstretched male arm, sidestep the sudden sweep of a male leg? My best friend eats an apple for lunch and is proud to say she is still not hungry three hours later. I watch the boys start a game of tag down the hallway, and brag that I am not hungry either. 

Demarcation: My parents are angry that the neighbors have failed to cut their weeping willow, letting its branches grow parabolically over our fence, where it deposits leaves that are sometimes yellow onto the yard. That the tree is beautiful is irrelevant, and doesn’t affect their frenzied search for the clippers.

Privilege: The morning after my cousin’s body is discovered like a discarded husk in an alley, a classmate who drives a Prius to school jokes about trying heroin. She pretends to inject herself with her pen. I don’t think it’s funny, but I’m too sensitive if I don’t laugh at least a little. I didn’t know my cousin very well, but I wonder if, dizzy and newly on the ground after a high, he ever pressed his fingers to the bruises on his wrists and noticed how a body will ripen faster when stung.

Proactive: My mother leaves pills on the kitchen table for me to take before school. 

Inheritance: Our pill boxes start to look the same, and I imagine this is because my blood learns the swift pace of hers, tries to keep up.

Gratitude: My grandmother’s friend brings books, which I must return, and journals, which I must keep and fill, fill, fill. She says I must nurture my words as if they were my children.

Obvious: The first time an older man tries to stare down my shirt, I realize that no amount of clothes—puffer vest over winter coat over sweatshirt over sweatpants over jeans over boots over three layers of socks—will ever hide the fact that I have a body. Not for the first time, I think bones, skin, and all other necessary accessories are on loan to me, confiscated intermittently while I appeal for ownership.

Self-improvement: By the time I have finally plucked my last eyebrow hair, I suddenly see that bushy eyebrows would have made me look edgier. 

Orthodontics: There’s a way to laugh without showing your teeth. I am a master of this for four years. I laugh ha ha ha through the narrow opening between my lips, and I imagine to some people I must look toothless, but toothless is better than sixteen with pink and blue braces (like cotton candy, I thought when I picked them out). After the braces are removed, there is a row of craters in each lip, the skin not, for years, fully healed.

Decibels: The children who live in the house behind ours—a pair of siblings, sister and brother, with red hair—have a screaming contest on a Saturday morning, sometime before the sky resumes light blue. If I weren’t also tired and angry, I might marvel at their performance, at the way little lungs can summon so much air for something as important as winning.

Growth: And then sometimes there are days like this, when there’s more than enough sun to go around, and I stand outside, swaying gently at a wind’s persuasion, and I feel like, for all my lack of chlorophyll, I might photosynthesize, and I remember that my body and I, too, are things that grow, and I feel us moving toward the sun as though reaching for a mother’s touch. 

Art: I write aggressively about sex because it feels literary. So many good metaphors come slithering shamefully from between legs. Call it visceral. Never mind the fact that I am a virgin. When I’m in the shower, I imagine that this is how it will always be, that sex and the thought of sex will always be research, that I will never be able to touch a body without also writing it.

Debt: My grandmother’s friend dies alone in her condo. I realize that I never returned her book. My grandmother attends her funeral, and I mourn by way of reading. I’ve stopped believing in the afterlife by now—my Catholicism drained gradually—so I try to immortalize her by absorbing the words she once absorbed. I hope to have something of her in me. I hope I am doing the job she assigned me.

Discussions: I vow to never yell at a husband I do not yet have in front of children I do not yet have and to never let myself be yelled at, either. I dream of a marriage so tranquil that all of our conversations can be whispered, if we want.

Narrator: I only write poetry in the first person. Even (especially) the poems where I am not I. The goal is to throw so many I’s into the universe that my readers are never able to distinguish between poems where I have messily torn out and pasted other lives, and poems where I have quietly hidden scraps of myself.

Pride: High school is full of small humiliations. Like having your poetry repeated back to you by someone who isn’t particularly fond of you or of poetry and is therefore less delicate than you have always felt your words deserve. This is to say, having your spine, which you did not realize you were missing, grudgingly returned only after it has been broken at each vertebrae.

Chronology: Two weeks before my graduation, my mother digs up all my portraits, one from the first month of each school year, always with the same blue background. My former selves, lined up neatly in their frame, edges touching not enough to overlap, consolidated and chronological, as though that is the way I moved through them. They watch me, and seem to say, See? This is the tidy way a life should look.

Dignity: If I ever die, let me go like this: floating in a river, a copy of Dickinson clutched to my chest so that I might finally absorb the words via osmosis. Lower me into the river gently and then walk away, leaving me to the peace of soaked, bleeding pages.

Writing: Megan Lunny

Music: Riva Rubin