Over(sex)drive

Has sex lost its meaning for me?

It's been a long time since I've had a physical relationship with someone I genuinely cared about, rather than anonymous strangers in unfamiliar places.

It feels as if I've been on autopilot for so long that I'm afraid I've forgotten what it's like to take the wheel and drive to a destination of my own choosing, to a place I've been yearning to go for so long.

I feel nothing but emptiness inside, only a wave of regret washing over me at every attempt I make to fill that void that only results in failure.

Maybe W. was right.

Hiding my expectations and desires from the world doesn't protect me from disappointment; it only leaves me feeling weaker, emptier.

A fraud.

By not claiming my true wants and needs, I will never receive them.

I'm settling.

I'm accepting things way below the standard of my expectations.

No wonder I'm unhappy.

I'm not getting what I want, and I can only blame myself.

I've set my self up for disappointment by trying to protect myself from it.

It feels as if I've been given something completely opposite of what I wanted all along, and it's too late to take it back, too late for a do-over.

My mistake has cost my happiness, but this time I'm willing to fight for it back.

I know what I want now. I've always known.

Now it's just a matter of being honest with myself for wanting it, and not being afraid of going after it.

It's my turn to take the wheel and point it to the direction I want to go this time around.

Soul-Shredding Wordplay*

It must have come to me a while later when I was still in his arms. It woke me up before I even realized I had dozed off, filling me with a sense of dread and anxiety I couldn't begin to fathom.

I felt queasy, as if I had been sick and needed not just many showers to wash everything off but a bath in mouthwash.

I needed to be far away—from him, from this room, from what we'd done together.

It was as though I were slowly landing from an awful nightmare but wasn't quite touching the ground yet and wasn't sure I wanted to, because what awaited was not going to be much better, though I knew I couldn't go on hanging on to that giant, amorphous blob of a nightmare that felt like the biggest cloud of self-loathing and remorse that had ever wafted into my life.

I would never be the same.

How had I let him do these things to me, and how eagerly had I participated in them, and spurred them on, and then waited for him, begging him, Please don't stop.

Now his goo was matted on my chest as proof that I had crossed a terrible line. …

[I had offended] those who were yet unborn or unmet and whom I'd never be able to love without remembering this mass of shame and revulsion rising between my life and theirs. It would haunt and sully my love for them, and between us, there would be this secret that could tarnish everything good in me.

Sounds just like a first time to me.


* Aciman, Andre. Call Me By Your Name. New York: Picador, 2008. Print.