futoncam journals - Lindsey
Casual - 2/17/2003 3:24 AM
The circumference of a circle is 360 degrees. I don't know the measurement of a degree, I don't know why there are 360 of them in a circle and 180 in a triangle. I know triangles are severe because they're sudden and dangerous and circles are casual because they take you back to where you were before. Beyond that, I don't care, I just live on this planet, I'm not responsible for making it go around.
It goes around on an axis and goes around the sun in an elipse. And the entire solar system moves through the galaxy at an exorbinate amount of speed, and so we move through time, never getting back to what we were before, just flying forward into empty space.
And I'm flying forward into empty space. And I'm suited up in a red rain coat and running through DC, soaked to the bone, and I'm wishing I hadn't come to college and I hadn't flunked my final and I can feel myself falling, but I don't know what's going to come of it. That was December. That was Friday the 13th, and that's before I gave in to something I used to think was wrong.
Sex can be casual. I don't know that in December. A woman leans out her Jeep and offers me an umbrella and I don't take because I like rain beading off my hair and I like drops hitting my face like clean tears. I don't feel like crying anymore- so I let the atmosphere do it for me. At the time I think maybe it's God, but I know better now. God doesn't cry on the side of highways and God doesn't cry for virgins.
I start falling that night. I start falling at the offer of a flower because I want to know what that's like- to be the beautiful girl in the short black skirt, to be seen as feminine. It goes from there. It goes to a hundred emotions in the matter of one week. Mostly joy. Mostly a sense of being and life and liberation from fear. And then it stops on a street corner in the rain. I feel stupid in my nudity because the rain never left- even the clouds that are just moisture in the atmosphere are bigger than a week in my life. A week is just empty space, hell, a life is just empty space and I'm not the first woman to stand on a corner and wonder what the fuck just happened. The rain comes down, and I cry enough for the entire ecosystem because that's what virgins do when they realize they don't want it anymore- when we're sick of being sterile and I just want to be alive. I stand there and I hope I never have to come back.
And a month passes. With another hundred feelings of rejection and whoredom and worthlessness. And it leads for good writing and it leads for putting myself out there and being praised for my word-choice. And that's another fifty moments of contemplating what in the hell I was thinking.
There's weeks of wanting it to be over. There's a whole fucking half semester of wanting it to be over, of feeling guilt and pain and a total lack of concentration. There's the traditional loss of faith which crescendos into loss of purpose which eventually becomes an emotional handicap. And that's a hundred moments of thinking of death. Not because my heartache is that severe, but because I figure out that the world feels like this all the time. My stability is gone because when sex is casual power is fleeting and love is a four letter word that means "hook-up." Friendship loses intrest. After casual sex, nothing has intrinsic value.
There were a hundred degrees in the night I lay on a baseball field and stare up at the sky. The snow flitters down onto a quiet city and that's another circle beginning- a smaller one, the empty space in a crescent moon. That will lead to the snow that comes down now. That piles up, foot after foot and makes everything wet again, like a night when I jumped over rain puddles and never wanted to go back. I don't want to go back now. There are no raindrops to fall on my cheeks because sex is, was, and can always be casual. Look into somebody's eyes and give them a moment to say, "You're beautiful" and then walk away without ever thinking of them again. That's casual sex. My face turns ten different shades of red and my immaturity stares at me for pages- my life is three months shorter. Three months, 360 degrees. Snow is just rain frozen over.
My heart didn't break, it just lacked recovery- and not from rejection, from humiliation. Even that is too strong of a word because it's all casual now. Look into someone's eyes and say, "You're beautiful." Snow is just rain frozen over.