Growing up, I was always told that sex was an extremely intimate and special act between two people.

But I don’t think it’s the physical act of having another person inside you that is so intimate. I think it’s rather in the way you see their secret responses to pleasure. The way he can see your teeth involuntary sink into your bottom lip, or the way your eyes moisten with satisfaction.

And then, after it’s all over, and he wants you no longer, you have to walk by him  with a regained composure. You say a polite hello, smile, and pretend you don’t remember the way he’d draw circles on your arm afterwards, or rub his fingers through your hair, or brush his lips against your throat.

I don’t know. Maybe sex is an intimate thing.

The girl next to me asked why we had to do it.

My professor’s lips curled into a sad smile. ‘Well, why do we do anything?’ he asked. ‘We wake up, we get up, we do what needs to be done, and then it starts all over again. That’s life.’

Yes, it is.

The words most commonly said to me by my high school Literature professor. I had good ideas, but I needed to put more detail into them and extend the argument. A good practice to put to your emotions, too. But the thing is, I just can’t.

I have all these ideas and thoughts intertwined in my head, and I can’t separate them. So they only feed on each other and cancel each other out. There’s no way to extract a linear thing because it’s all just a mess. A splattered, rainbow mess.

Lately I’ve been beginning to notice just how old my father looks. While life moves slowly on, it’s easy for subtle changes like this to slip under the radar. But the other day when I was about to drive somewhere, he signaled the need for a word. And when I wound down the window I noticed a face that looked more similar to my scarcely seen grandfather’s than his own. A face carved with creases; set with tired eyes and a receding hair line.

And it scares me somewhat. Because often I neglect the fact that life is forever moving. I’ve been on this Earth many years already and will hopefully continue to be on it for many more to come. I’m in the transformation of becoming an old woman; just in the early days. Cue quarter-life crisis. 

I need to start living.