Cartoons

I thought I should share my current messenger screename, which says:


'You remember what used to matter? 7AM cartoon shows. Skirts that swirled nice when you spun.'


I miss that skirt. It had a wide waistband, a floral print and it flared just the right way when I pirouetted very quickly. I hated my mum when she threw it away.


On a different note, I feel dirty.


There's casual sex that truly arises out of nowhere, like a sudden flinch in your routine, and it tends to be great sex. Your body didn't expect it, your car and its yet unsteamed windows didn't expect it, and it's like a birthday gift for daily life. Happy Monday! Happy Wednesday! It's when, inspired, he says, 'Let's head to the beach.Tonight, after work.' Yes, more skin dipping--redundancy, begone. 


Before you can think of reasons not to go, you find the little prodigy of spontaneity inside of you consenting gleefully. To the beach you head, for head and whatnot. It's the first time, and so you can still pretend that sex is not the cynosure...Sex is the 'Oh, look what happened' gasp of surprise, and the surprised gasps that follow closely. Before sex, you play make-believe that you're there for the 3AM waves (he likes how they arise frothily out of nowhere...kind of like proper casual sex), for the interminable sky and its glistening diamante children, for the mammoth of a joint he pulls out of his bag, like a magician of spontaneity ('Oh, look what happened!) and for sitting on the sand on a beach towel that barely bears room for two hips. In fact, half the joy is being unsure whether or not you're actually going to do It.


In retrospect, with a guy like him I should have been sure. He has Angelina Jolie eyes and a way of making you feel like he actually finds your jokes funny.


When I was younger, and found it important and secretly electrifying to talk with my girlfriends about the anticipated First Time--the authentic First Time. Of the Paleo-Virginus Age--I disagreed with how they envisioned it. They wanted hotel rooms, king size beds and accidental yet diligently positioned rose petals cast all over the bedspread.They wanted a date, like March 12th or heaven forbid, February 14th.And what I wanted was a build-up of lust, a furor of passion, ripped buttons and then the slow but worthwhile discovery of a new way to communicate with somebody. Unplanned, above all!


If you plan it, you kill the thrill. That's why there's casual sex and then there's the first time you go to his place because he called and asked you to. Aside from a wedding night and a drive to the brothel, I can hardly think of sex that's more deliberate than this. Deliberate and, this time, terrible.


It was a few things that did it. That popped the party one balloon at a time. First, it was getting to his place before he did, hence making me wait. There's nothing like waiting in the dark interior of a car to make you feel like you need somebody and they don't need you. Second, there was a look his roommate's friend gave me when we walked in the apartment. It was a raise of the eyebrows and a tight-lipped smile, both very brief and they very briefly told me that there would be no introductions--I was just the sex girl for the night. Then there was the pointless conversation before the foreplay. Something about weed, something else about Coelho. Topics everybody has brought up at some point or another, because they float and are always relevant, unimportant to the particular moment and the particular people.


Afterwards, there was his cheap, unadorned invitation to stay. It went like this:


Me: You killed me. I'm sleepy.
Him: So sleep.
Me: No, I should probably go.
Him: Ok.


By then it was daybreak, and he lounged on the bed with a joint in his mouth, and his legs apart. He was content, exhausted. While he tickled me with his foot and stared at me with his intense look that I know now is nothing more than hunger--hunger, the easiest, most unattractive human impulse--we talked about why it was so hard for me to finish. His tone, I assure you, sounded like he blamed me. Pop! That was the final balloon. 


It's stuff like that that makes me not want to be naked in front of a guy, nor have his eyes on any part of my skin. Stuff that makes me feel that if I don't run as fast as possible, the walls of self-loathing will crumble upon me and the dust won't even touch him. Stuff that makes me put on my clothes and walk out, and instead of kiss him at the door, lightly touch his lips. I wasn't touching to take, but to give back. I arrived at my brother's place, and the sight  of the velvet couch in the living room drew me like a magnet. I turned on the TV and the early morning cartoons were on! Happy creatures, clearly defined and contoured by black ink. 


So I sat and watched.