24 June: 87° in the shade. So the long, blinking grimace that is summer has crept over the Walla Walla Valley. I have heard of a nice Adventist girl who is getting married this afternoon to her high school sweetheart. I laughed for fifteen minutes yesterday about a gravesite funeral with one of its pallbearers.
Three, four weeks ago the clouds sagged, full of wet. They lazed about the sky like overlarge tabby cats napping in the favorite patch of sun. And then they broke, and it poured so much that the locals began to claim this as the mildest summer in memory.
I caught a cold, and my body began its uprising against my self-control and pride.
I have been on birth control to have sex (without getting pregnant), and am now on my third week-long run of antibiotics for a urinary tract infection because (I'm pretty sure) I had too much sex. The first two sets of antibiotics were useless; before this third prescription I would spontaneously realize that I needed to piss only a few desperate moments before the yellow trickled gracefully around the curves of my ankle and into my clogs. No twenty-one year-old with a shred of dignity would leave the house: "Yes, my parents shell out forty thousand dollars a year to educate a daughter who pees herself." Or did; until the day before yesterday. As a result of this latest antibiotic my twat was dry and painful; and this morning in my magnifying hand mirror I discovered three pinkish sores on the left labia and a cracking vertical laceration that screamed if I touched my right lip. A clotty bruise near my hipbone.
Under the guise of a mature, beautiful, intellectual woman I am an oversexed, overmedicated liberal arts monster.
In this weather my skin is constantly sticky with almost-sweat and my short, greasy hair goes unwashed, save a rinse in the shower. Most of the time, I smell of barely-concealed-by-natural-deodorant ripe body. And a dry scalp flakes off my head.
But I can still get ass.
Scratch that. It's certainly not as exciting as you think. I have been getting pretty regular sex from a pretty regular lay since October. I'll call him Bender here, although it's not what I call him in bed. But I don't particularly want to type "Poppa Bear" every time I reference him.
I lie. Not to myself, but to other people. If I'm not lying, I try to be terse. When people whose business it isn't to ask about us, I tell that the sex is good. It either satiates their desire for information or affronts them to the point where they don't want to ask any more questions.
So - Bender. I call him that as a throwback to the middle school thing that girls do when they create codenames (like "Moon Doggie" - another throwback) for the boys that they like. They protect each other's secrets; here I'm protecting his - or at least telling our secrets and protecting his identity.
In some phases of our relationship we have loved each other, so "regular lay" is a little unfair. He can play my lover. He loves my intense, flooding orgasms. He likes the way I smell. He is the wickedest cross between a hopeless romantic who loves everybody and a cynic who is uncertain of everything. I'm trying hard to stay uncommitted.
He took care of the fever that resulted when I switched antibiotics the day before yesterday. He tries to cradle me, calm me, even when I'm thrashing and moaning in my feverish nausea, and resents me when, in my pain, I treat him like a punching bag. Fair.
But it is too fucking hot in this town to have a fever.
I will never be hungrier than I will be hot. I will never be more overjoyed than I will be hot. I will never be crazier than I will be hot. I will never be more turned on than I will be hot. In all fleeting situations run the undercurrents of overwhelming, thick-tongued hotness. Until my feet and legs start swimming in the heat waves rushing upwards from the concrete, I will wrangle with my duality as an emotional person with edges and as an organic thing being eaten alive by the sun. But then I will struggle no more, and I will be purified again. Like a widow.