Despertar

growing up

The whole thing is stupid. Men and women hit phases of emotional maturity at completely different times. An eighteen-year-old boy is behaving well within his biological imperative when he fucks a consenting fourteen-year-old girl. Same thing, I guess, when a thirty-eight-year-old retired naval officer hits on a twenty-three-year-old me. Eighteen-year-old boys and self-absorbed older men are more interested in intercourse than they are in intellectual connection. To suggest that he shoud have waited two years for his fourteen-year-old girlfriend to grow up into an entirely different person, when probably all he wanted was to fuck her in the first place, is just silly. And a sexually active fourteen-year-old girl is a sexually active fourteen-year-old girl. If not an older boy, she'd have been involved with some precocious kid her own age, and fourteen-year-old semen works just as well as the more mature brand.

He deserves, at most, a slap on the wrist so next time he remembers there's an arbitrary law against two teenagers doing the one thing all teenagers are basically guaranteed to want to do.

*

Age is just a number, anyway. Justin is twenty-five. I am twenty-three. While we don't have the age-of-consent problem to contend with, there is that little niggling issue of how he turns into a total bastard every time the commitment topic comes up.

Had this whole thing happened in 2001, he'd be breaking the law. Instead, he's just breaking my heart.

*

Anyway, I have to give due respect to any fourteen-year-old self-aware enough to even be capable of a sexual relationship, albeit an illegal one. When i was fourteen, I couldn't even look at my own reflection in the mirror. I had never had a crush on a boy, and I certainly didn't draw any type of male attention. I was the ugliest duckling in the pond, and my parents probably would have been relieved to have a bunch of older guys to chase from the house with a shotgun.

For the next seven years, various friends and acquaintances lost their virginities. The whole concept was so foreign, it never even occurred to me to be jealous. Until college, I was mutually disinterested in every boy alive.

When I was twenty-one, my mother came to rifle through my sock drawer for a pair of stockings, and surfaced, instead, with a chain of ribbed Trojan condoms. I was sitting on the bed behind her, cringing at the sudden realization that I had forgotten to hide them better. Marcus was coming to visit a few days later, so there was no way I could smoothtalk them out of their obvious context.

As I sat sputtering, grabbing for anything that could have made the situation less awkward, she placed the condoms back in my drawer, laughed softly and said "Thank Gawd."

See, lesbians don't use condoms. Was her thinking.

*

At this time twenty-four hours ago, I was having sex, and pretending it was the best thing ever, when in fact it was too quick and kind of painful. I think it was foreshadowing. My body was trying to protect me against another dip in the status quo.