90
Am I young and beautiful?
I thought I was old and divorced.
I can barely sleep at all this night, so unaccustomed to these odd hours, the dance music
still thrumming in my head, my hair smelling of cigarettes, my stomach protesting the alcohol.
I doze a bit, then wake as the sun comes up, just as I am accustomed to. Only this morning I
am not rested and I am not at peace and I’m in no condition whatsoever for meditation. Why
am I so agitated? I had a nice night, didn’t I? I got to meet some interesting people, got to
dress up and dance around, had flirted with some men...
MEN.
The agitation gets more jagged at the thought of that word, turning into a minor panic as-
sailment. I don’t know how to do this anymore. I used to be the biggest and boldest and most
shameless of flirts when I was in my teens and twenties. I seem to remember that it was once
fun, meeting some guy, spooling him in toward me, spooning out the veiled invitations and the
provocations, casting all caution aside and letting the consequences spill how they will.
But now I am feeling only panic and uncertainty. I start blowing the whole evening up into
something much huger than it was, imagining myself getting involved with this Welsh guy who
hadn’t even given me an e-mail address. I can see all the way into our future already, includ-
ing the arguments over his smoking habit. I wonder if giving myself to a man again will ruin
my journey/writing/life, etc. On the other hand—some romance would be nice. It’s been a
long, dry time. (I remember Richard from Texas advising me at one point, vis-à-vis my love
life, “You need a droughtbreaker, baby. Gotta go find yo’self a rainmaker.”) Then I imagine Ian
zooming over on his motorbike with his handsome bomb-squad torso to make love to me in
my garden, and how nice that would be. This not-entirely-unpleasant thought somehow
screeches me, however, into a horrible skid about how I just don’t want to go through any
heartache again. Then I start to miss David more than I have in months, thinking, Maybe I
should call him and see if he wants to try getting together again... (Then I receive a very ac-