CREATIVE NONFICTION 29
ii. the paradox
I was seventeen the summer I fell in love and
(almost) had sex. The boy and I had our first out-
ing over Memorial Day weekend, and by the end
of July, he had sworn his love and said he thought
we should do it. Intercourse seemed inevitable;
we’d been working steadily toward it since our
first date. This was our status the night I nearly
lost my virginity.
It was late, sometime after the national anthem
gave way to the wee-hours TV test pattern. Stars
blazed beyond the matchstick blinds; the breeze
was spiced with horse manure, soil, and tassel-
ing corn from the fields beyond my house. The
boy and I were making out on the couch in my
family room. We read each other’s eyes by the
blue kitchen lights fluorescing beyond the dining
room pass-through.
I was wearing my silky sleeveless dress with
the hemline two inches shorter than my mother
allowed. My buttons were undone, my panties
around my knees, and he was touching me in
places I hadn’t known existed. Whatever sex was,
I felt myself rushing toward it in the form of my
first orgasm, a yearning of love and body heat.
I soared into the starry universe. Corn fields,
crickets, and my boyfriend tumbled to the earth,
far below. From those heights I watched as desire
transformed our two bodies into one. So this was
sex. But I also saw love—that wondrous, eternal
organizing force that connects, makes sense of, and
gives meaning to everything else, including sex.
In another thirty seconds I would have lost my
virginity.
Then my stepfather appeared like an elfin ghost
at the kitchen sink. I snapped back into my body.
The boy and I froze in place. My stepdad politely
clapped his hands, coughed, and said, “Kids? Is
that you? It’s probably time to go home,” mean-
ing the boy, who was nearly on top of me. We
stopped breathing while our nearsighted inter-
loper, silhouetted against blue light, squinted into
the dark family room.
My first boyfriend and I never got that far
again. School reconvened. He left for Iowa. We
drifted apart. But the experience of that July
night has remained with me like a koan.
Sex is a pleasurable means to an end.
Love is that end.
iii. evolution
Charles Darwin posited that biological inheritance,
variation between individuals, and resource com-
petition result in natural selection, which drives
evolution. Of course, our modern understanding
of evolution is far more complex than Darwin
could have imagined; it wasn’t until ninety-four
years after the 1859 publication of On the Origin of
Species that the structure of DNA, the molecule of
inheritance, was introduced in the scientific journal
Nature. Since then, computers and sophisticated
molecular biology tools and techniques have made
Francis Crick and James Watson’s groundbreaking
discovery testable knowledge for middle-schoolers.
Yet Darwin’s basics are the foundation of mod-
ern biology’s unifying scientific theory: evolution.
We now know that genes, made of DNA and
carried on chromosomes, are Darwin’s units of
inheritance. Variation arises when DNA is shuffled
and mutated during the formation of eggs and
sperm, or later if genes mutate or on/off switches
toggle in response to the environment.
However it arises, each egg, sperm, and new
individual is a unique possibility, a variant on the
themes of one or both parents. Other things being
equal, variants carrying beneficial mutations will
thrive to reproduce.
Those carrying deleterious mutations will not.
Natural selection operates on a population
level. That is, individuals do not evolve. They are
who they are. But those who reproduce send their
genetic legacy forward, which alters the next
generation’s gene pool to favor beneficial variants.
And so on. Evolution is defined as a change in a
population’s variant gene (allele) frequency.
Deleterious mutations tend to disappear.
Evolution has no agency. Natural selection is a
process. Yet, to me, they are blind gods interested
only in species fitness. Maybe that’s the proper
order of things—a biosphere bending toward
advantaged gene pools. But how, then, do we
calculate the value of a life that fails to reproduce?
Your children are not your children.iv. conception
I had zero interest in evolution when I conceived
David.
That night, his father and I made love joyfully,
with purpose, as life longed for itself. It happened