Sunday night.
Eleven p.m. and it’s quiet. Relaxed. The hangovers are on their last legs, and the suits are hanging on their hooks, freshly pressed and ready for the week ahead. The last signs of the parties have been cleaned and polished, and everybody returns to leading their civilized lives.
When your public life closely mirrors your private life, as mine does, Sunday nights are nothing special. There is no hangover to return from, there are no lazy partygoers to clean up after, there is nothing to return to. You’ve been there the whole time while everybody else was off getting wasted.
It was about this time of year that I first started journaling, I wrote that I was different. Painfully, unmistakably different. I didn’t know how, or why, I just knew that I wasn’t like everybody else.
Well, two years later, of course I still don’t know the answer. But I’m getting closer every day.
I get the feeling that everybody else is pretending to be grown-up. They wear grown-up clothes; from sexy lingerie to fashionable overcoats, and an interesting mix of everything in between. They sit around the bong and have grown-up conversations. Many of these are about their laid-back, almost animalistic attitudes towards sex. “Give it to me now, but don’t you dare attach any feeling to it, or I’ll drop you like hotcakes.”
And while every single person looks at me and thinks, “Aww, how adorable,” it comes to my attention that I’m the only adult in the room.
I have answers now. Why don’t I drink? I don’t like the feeling of being drunk. It makes my head swim and I feel dizzy, but it doesn’t squash my ability to think rationally, as far as my deep thoughts are concerned. I never once am able to forget my place. So what’s the point?
Why don’t I smoke? I don’t need fake happiness. If I give into it, it will make me think that my very real happiness isn’t enough. I know this will happen, that’s why I can’t try it even once. It’s true, I don’t know what I’m missing, and I don’t want to. Once I know, I won’t want to go without it.
Why don’t I have sex? Because it’s a big deal to me. I know it’s not a big deal to everyone, most people it seems, but it is a big deal to me. It’s true, I have a fear of intimacy, even of the non-sexual kind. If I were to have sex without first trusting my partner with every inch of my soul, it would break me. I know, because I’ve been broken before, and I don’t want to go through it again on an even larger scale.
So call me what you like. Naive. Innocent. Childish. Laugh at my awkwardness. Roll your eyes at my questions. Keep hiding your knowing smiles behind your drinks.
You’ll never know independence like I do. You’ll never know what it’s like to be free.
You’ll never recognize true love, even when it’s staring you in the face.
