A Meditation of Virginity

This is a poem a wrote about a dream I had recently after being assaulted. No mentions of assault but content alludes to it so TW for that.

I had a dream that I was a girl. She smelled like flowers. Probably because she liked to pass her days in a field full of them. Every morning when she woke up, she would take a brush and run it through her hair. It was pointless because her hair never got tangled, but she liked the feeling that she was responsible for her own beauty. She owned one dress. It was a white sundress that draped itself over her body, careful not to show off her figure. It always looked as though she had just bought it new from the store: ironed (even though I doubt she knew what an iron was) and unstained. Her feet were bare but never got dirty. She was a virgin - in the biblical sense of course.

In my dream I was also a boy. The boy was pale like the girl's dress was white. The only interesting thing about him was the way his dark hair contrasted with his light skin to make his green eyes look a little less dull. The boy was too proud to look in the mirror for it meant he doubted his own memory, and most importantly the boy loved God. The boy didn’t know who God was or what God was all he knew was that God loved him and that was enough. 

The girl and the boy were best friends. They spent their days sitting under a willow talking about nothing because they shared one mind. The girl loved the boy because being next to someone who God loved made her think that maybe one day God would love her too. The boy loved the girl for her beauty because he knew her beauty made her indebted to God. 

In my dream the boy had found a book. Or rather, God had given him and only him a vessel of his thoughts and words. A detailed list of instructions the boy must follow, or so that’s what the boy thought. At night he was to read the book and the girl was to listen. Together, God had wanted them to perform in front of fire, or so the boy said. The girl was too scared to be skeptical and began to splinter twigs off the willow tree they once considered a friend. 

On queue the sun set and the boy took the arrival of the moon as a signal of approval. The twigs anxiously awaited their fate as the boy lit a match and set them ablaze. 

“Hit me.” The boy turned to the girl. His eyes glazed over the words while the book laid intimately between his thighs. The girl had no words but it wasn’t surprising because she never did.

“Hit me!” The boy was angrier this time. His words came out coarse not yet catching up with the certainty he assumed he had for them. His fingers pressed firmly down on the instruction manual bending almost unnaturally with the pressure he bestowed on them. 

He urged louder this time: “if God didn’t want this he wouldn’t have given me the book. He wouldn’t have let the fire live. He wouldn’t coat the scene in an orange hue. If God didn’t want this, he wouldn’t have shown me to you.”

Can you imagine? Feeling this passionately about something but relying on someone else’s faith to pursue your fate.

The girl had hidden her face in her knees unwilling to look at her friend who had sacrificed his mind for his heart. The girl's hands who never once performed a task approached the situation with uneasiness. Her hand hesitantly slung itself at the boy's thigh bouncing lightly off his skin.  

The boy showed her what to do. He hit his skin as if it were a mound of dirt. Pain wasn’t pain but pain was everything good. Pain was purpose - something the girl could never begin to understand. Over and over his hands moved in a repetitive motion. The girl forgot he was flesh and joined his hands in the raid. The boy's skin absorbed the orange from the fire until it lost its signature pale glow, until it wasn’t an illusion anymore.The girl had lost herself in the movement and didn’t resist when the boy began to hit her the way the book instructed. They forgot they were hitting flesh and didn’t realize they weren’t hitting flesh until it was too late.

It hurts when someone takes your virginity. When they tangle your hair. When they stain your dress. When they teach you no one's feet stay clean when they spend all day walking on dirt. She wasn’t a virgin anymore. She couldn’t be. I was told that not everyone tried to avoid stepping on the flowers.

As the boy took her virginity he lost his humanity. The process obsessed with pain lacked the foresight to avoid violence. 

The girl's hair was tangled, her dress was stained, her beauty wasn’t patient enough to wait and ran the second it could escape. The boy's flesh wasn’t flesh but had transformed into clay. The dense type of clay which can be made up of dirt and water. The type of clay which you use to make pots and figurines. The type of clay which starts as a mound and is transformed into a shape but never forgets its primary role as clay. 

When the girl realized the boy was no longer the boy, she realized her skin was beginning to lose its purpose. With each hit, she too was in the process of becoming clay. The boy's mouth was clay, his eyes were clay, his heart was clay, and nothing was keeping the girl from running so she ran. The girl didn’t know who God was or what God or if God loved her or what was enough.

Well, she couldn’t run because her legs were half clay so she rolled. She rolled across the grass and she trampled her flowers and she stained her dress and she tangled her hair. The boy stayed put because the boy was no longer the boy but was a clay figurine representative of everything the boy had wanted to become.

The boy was immortalized while the girl's flesh was confused. The boy had gotten everything he had wanted even if it meant destroying himself in the process. What is the purpose of the self if you have faith? He’s gone but immortalized, and she’s here but exists as a nihilist in pain. 

The girl still smells like flowers and spends her days under the willow tree talking to the mound of clay. They talk about nothing but he no longer has a mind to share. The days go by and she takes them as they come. Her dreams are empty but she tells herself she won’t let one night change the way she loves the moon. But it does and it did because the moon is no longer friendly and her beauty never found its way home. The world she created was only suitable for a virgin and when it rejected her she had nowhere to go except to pretend she still fit in.

-

I didn’t lose my virginity the first time I had sex. Because my virginity wasn’t given to me as an object to lose, it was given to me as an object that’s meant to be taken. And sex, real sex, genuine sex involves no taking. Real sex is an experience shared where everything is gained and nothing is lost. My virginity was never mine in the first place, but it belonged to these boys as a book to admire but never actually read. The first time I lost my virginity was the first time someone sacrificed their humanity for the sake of taking mine.