What I really want to write about is some long lost lover, some affair that ended in the distant past. I want to find a titillating and affecting moment — me a tender young slut, him a handsome and brash stud — finding something meaningful together for the first time. Of course, there were such moments for me. I can’t seem to conjure them up now, though. I can see the faces, even my own. I have words that tell how we met, what we meant to each other, what we did together. I have no understanding of those memories, though. They seem to have happened to someone else. Why is that?

When I think about sex, now, it’s about my recent months or years. It’s almost like my sexual life began two summers ago. That’s not true, though, so why is my distant past becoming ever further away? It’s like the long years of resentment, and boredom, and stifled anger have rent my life in two… before and after, the sunlit day in the meadow of my youth versus the glittering jewels in tonight’s moonlight. There was the girl, brave and pure, who dove in to every experience, confident in what life owed her. And here is the woman, complete with stretchmarks and battlescars, who again dives in to every experience, but fully aware that life gives nothing, that every moment must be wrenched from the grip of daily drudgery, stolen, hidden, protected.

Perhaps when I make peace with that arrogant girl, to whom everything came easily, as a given, then I can tell the stories. I want to. I know they’re worth telling. But for now, I think that all I can do is show you my present, tell you about this man’s hold on my moment today, and then what the next will mean in another moment tomorrow.  That’s all that memory is offering me right now.