Song of Myself

14 March, 2006

My sexuality developed in such a way as to be characterized by radical polarizations. I imagined sex as being romantic, passionate, an act of love. Still, for most of my life, I was plagued by insatiable deviancy.

Jos is so unhappy. I know that I am the cause of it. I am the one who wanted to have a baby. I don't work. I don't cook, clean, shop for groceries, or pay bills. I leave most responsibility for the baby on him. And I never have sex with him.

I'm finally to a point where I have to admit that I married Jos out of need, and an inability to initiate change. I've never broken up with someone. Once I'm in, I'm in. I wanted a man to love me. It was my greatest, and really my only, want. Who was I to refuse the one who finally stayed? The first night we were together, I slept with him. I couldn't let it go as nothing. I had given him the final meagre piece. All I had left, I thought, of myself: the hymen. I'd have had nothing more to give to the next person. And we were two months from our wedding when I found out that he was an agnostic.

Was I never in love with Jos? Was it even romantic? Is he a missing patriarch figure? God? I was always lonely, and needy. For friends, my mom, God...but, I thought, the only thing I really needed was romantic love. I could create it in my mind so perfectly. I could write beautiful, passionate scenes of love-making. That was my whole world. Yet it was a world that for me did not ever really exist.

All of what I had imagined that made sex so magnanimous had been concentrated into one experience--the first. Losing your virginity. Losing. Giving. Being left with nothing. Not being a person anymore, but having given yourself to someone else.

They always said we were supposed to give ourselves to God. Mind, body and soul. Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Wholy. Holy.