sunt lacrimae rerum...

There seem to be times in life when the past feels closer and more vivid than in other times. I've been walking in a fog of quasi-nostalgia (know what's a fucked up concept? Ostalgie. Hey, remember the time when the secret police killed your uncle? And there was no toilet paper for 20 years?) There's no longing for times past, but the moments of years ago carry this intoxicating salience...

I can't stop thinking about times past. A thinned out mo-town themed muzak cd at work made me think of a potent time of other people's romantic intrigue. Two of the people involved will be married by the end of the year. The third, I am convinced, will beat me out for the romantic ambivalance award. Yes, it was a love triangle. And yes, I was only an observer.

My own exes aren't far from my mind, though. I just don't like to write about them as much. I had this extraordinarily vivid memory of a moment, in my old roommate's bed, when a certain person pulled up my shirt- it was the first time I had ever been alone, in private, with a person who wanted to take my clothes off. I cannot convey how absolutely terrifying and wonderful it was to realize that. Anything could have happened. For the first time, ending that moment was up to me, not a park ranger or police officer or girl scout or rattlesnake.

I'm thinking that there's something special about that moment, something not culturally recognised. We're so obsessed with virginity and teen oral sex and herpes and pregnancy, physical milestones obscure all others. Dick breaches pussy, dick breaches lips, anus, armpit. These are our markers of innocence lost, experience gained. Carnal knowledge, penetration, the consumption of one body by another.

But what about the moments, few or hundreds, where anything could happen? The sudden, absurd plenipotentiality of body heat, contained by walls and soft surfaces and a locking door and no supervision- does it matter? I don't think it's possible to forget that moment, the first time with the lights on, the first time with someone who would have done anything you let them do; no matter what the outcome, there is a line crossed.

It's for this reason I've become, for the first time in my life, sympathetic to the arguments of abstinence before marriage. I continue, however, thinking that waiting for marriage is for most people ill-advised, prohibitively difficult, and out-dated. I was eighteen, that day in the hideous dorm room with the indoor mud puddle, on my roommate's sheetless bed. I was with the man in the bed because I wanted to see what would happen; not because I liked or loved him. It was exciting. It was wrong (I had another boyfriend at the time). He would like me, love me, in the end. I would hide from him. I was cruel to him. I wish I could apologise, actually, for the way I treated him.

I wonder what it would be like to be alone for the first time with someone significant, at the precise moment of beginning something new together. To suddenly be able to take vulgar liberties, completely sanctioned, with someone else's body, for the first time- when love is a factor- would be pretty nice. I can imagine a wedding night, a hotel room, a honeymoon- a wonderful first time to be alone with a beloved willing body.

But that moment, that first closed door, doesn't belong at 28. You're too old. Men are already losing testosterone. Women's breasts are already making that long knee-ward journey. Unless anyone is willing to propose propagating a formal system of time-limited starter marriages, the wedding night and honeymoon are things of the past. I won't spend time telling teenagers that they'll regret at my old age what they are dying to do right now. They'd never listen and it's not my business to say. And that's the problem of adulthood. You're presented with an outline of post-post-post-hoc regrets, and the sudden impulse to prevent those regrets (delicious as they were at the time) in other people.

I don't know if I'd give up the years I've spent in bedrooms and livingrooms and snug in arms to recapture an unplanned moment in a dank room, in a reeking dorm, in a muddy spring, in vermont.