I consider myself a proud virgin. I have my reasons for being one. I do not look down on those who are not, unless they give me reason to. I think about the fact that I am a virgin relatively often, but it has not been a source of stress or anxiety in my life.
I didn’t think so.
I had a dream last night.
I was in a bedroom with my ex-girlfriend, Blythe, a black stranger, and a vocalist in the music department, Chelsea. Chelsea told me that after a girl has sex for the first time all she wants to do is get fucked as hard as possible. Blythe starts coming on to the stranger. Hard. She starts to remove her clothes slowly. I do not remember it being stated concretely, but the feeling of the dream informs me that she is doing so because in the two years we dated, we never had sex. To make me feel jealous and inadequate, she will fuck a stranger in front of me. She continues to tease him and my blood boils. I walk to Blythe and whisper, “I would have had sex with you.” She moves her body away from the stranger and when she is turned toward me, I hit her across the face as hard as I can. The stranger jumps at me to beat me up and I reach my fingers into his mouth and pull up on his hard palate. I run out of the bedroom and onto the streets of Central City New Orleans where I continue to run, suddenly shirtless.
I like that you included a dream. While revealing your innermost, unconscious thoughts, dreams also suggest an element of the bizarre, and can be interpreted in multiple ways. I think the dream, here, tells us what the speaker would tell us if the speaker could reconcile with the elements of the dream, but we are left with some ambiguity that suits the subject matter nicely.
ReplyDeleteThis is great! The piece advances naturally in a completely unnatural direction. Such are dreams. I also like the idea of a creative non-fiction dream. Dreams are the greatest expression of creative non-fiction. It "happened", right?
ReplyDeleteWe feel compelled to tell a horrific dream in a way we don't feel compelled to tell a horrific thought. Because dreams come at us like the world, without our help.
Really nice representation of the dream, it's disjointed, funny, random, everything actual dreams are (right down to your emotional reaction to it... being angry in dreams is like being regularly angry times 10. Well done.)
ReplyDeleteI would, however, like to see how this dream affected you. We get your "proud virgin" angle in the beginning, but this idea is tested by your subconscious in this dream you had... what do you make of that?
I feel like the two parts complement each other nicely, and perhaps I'm reading too much into it, but the interplay between the first part of the text and the second one is similar to the classic Freudian superego vs. subconscious dialectic. Or the tough exterior that tried very hard to veil a struggle that is all too present. I like the ambiguity.
ReplyDeleteThis is a good start, two distinct sections: a confession and a dream, a beginning and a middle. But what for the end? Where does this take us? The two single sentence paragraphs that conclude the opening are powerful for their brevity and the way they stand alone on the page/screen. The dream might need to be wrestled with. When you awoke, had anything changed as a result? Still proud (tell us more about that)? At the least apparently not stress or anxiety free. The unexpected details are the most interesting ones: pride, the hard palate, Central City. Keep writing and see where this goes.
ReplyDeleteI like how you describe how your reality mixes in with your dreams. In one of your previous pieces, I know you mentioned Blythe in Halloween and how you all dated and broke up. I like how you include her in the dream and how you described her cheating on you and your reaction. Overall, you show how your dream-like fears are inherent to you being a virgin and not having sex with girls.
ReplyDelete