Sweet Jesus.
K just shot me a note asking me if I’d be interested in two more TVD articles…
[Dear God, isn't anyone sick of hearing about my virginity yet?]
Of course I agreed. I can’t wait to see the prompts.
Article ten
I suppose that the only logical way to wrap up this series is by ending it with the tale of my downfall. How Aya L’Amour lost her innocence, her naivety, her independence, her aversion to the L word and all that comes with it. I know Khrys Rodriguez well enough to assume that he will focus his own article on his own experience, and I know that his was a very painful experience for him. And so, if K must end this series on a serious note, perhaps I can end it on a light one.
Ah, how the roles have reversed. For once, I want to tell you a story with a happy ending.
[I apologize in advance to my boyfriend, who only last night told me that he did not want me writing about him. But he did also say that he does not read my work, and I suppose that what mon beau doesn’t know won’t hurt him. If he should happen upon it, I hope he knows that every word is genuine. I should also apologize to you, dear reader of whichever venue requested this extension of our little diatribe, because I wrote all of this freeform and really had no idea exactly where each article would take us. I am grateful that so many people decided to come along for the ride.]
I was a rather unusual eighteen year old. For two years, I had been out of high school and had studied psychology with a passion that I had never shown for my prior education. Add to that the stress of struggling on a male-dominated “street team” for a little comic book publishing company while trying to just start my own writing career, and the fact that there was a man- but isn’t there always a man?- who seemed intent on driving me as deep into self-destruction as I could get myself. I drank. A lot. Sometimes my roommate and I would wake up and count the empty bottles of alcohol, wondering how we possibly had woken up at all.
It was time to get my life back on track.
Step one: Get rid of the loser boyfriend. Honestly, I was never fond of him to begin with. I did the horrible, unforgivable thing of lying to him about being in love… He did the horrible, unforgivable thing of cheating on me constantly.
I was never caught, but he was, so mission accomplished. I suddenly had the means to cut him out of my life completely, all I lacked was the motivation. Two years I spent with him, as we emotionally and physically abused each other till it seemed utterly normal, and now that I had finally realized what a leech he really was I could not bring myself to be the one to break his heart.
Solution? Breaking hearts is amateur. I smashed his to pieces.
Yeah, yeah. I’m taking responsibility… are you reading this? You were right when you said I left you for him. The ominous, anonymous pronoun.
He was a cashier at Wal-Mart, I went through his checkout lane, and with just one look from those big brown eyes I was his. I had silly thoughts, completely alien to me; I wondered if his lips were as soft as they looked, I wondered if his skin would taste like the caramel it so strongly resembled, I wondered what his hair would feel like between my fingers.
You get it. I was smitten. It was lust at first sight. Surely, no further elaborations or explanations are needed.
Weeks later, he started sending me text messages that made me understand that cliché about girls “melting.” But, still, everything about him frightened me- the way I actually listened to what he said rather than daydream, the way I started getting ready hours before our dates in hopes that he would find me as beautiful as I found him, and above all, the way he made me feel. I was the girl who went through boyfriends like I had never before heard the word “commitment,” not the girl who jumped every time her cell phone rang, hoping it was that certain special someone.
We went on casual dates to movies or restaurants, and never ran out of things to talk about. In fact, seven months later, we still haven’t.
Things went well… Maybe too well, too quickly. I wish I could say that when we slept together for the first time we loved each other, but we didn’t. Sure, I cared about him more than I had cared about anyone I had dated before, and I knew there was something special about him; but at the time, he was just this gorgeous, clever-tongued boy who was as interested in me as I was in him. However if I said that his appearance was the deciding factor in why he finally was the one to break me, I would be lying to both you, dear reader, and to myself.
It was about the way he made me feel. He didn’t try to own me, didn’t give me the impression that he wanted me on his terms or expected anything from me. He made me feel safe and vulnerable at the same time, like I could share parts of myself with him that no one else would ever understand… but he only listened, and never told me how he felt about it. That mix of acceptance and rejection kept me interested, because I didn’t want him on my terms, either. I don’t want someone who’s perfect because I know that I’m not.
I’ve never really been sure what I mean to him… Words are my choice venue of expression, and not his. And, to the best of my knowledge, no one has ever said that love comes complete with a safety net. Giving that part of me to him was a huge act of faith; I have never been known for my good faith in humanity, or the male gender in particular. But sometimes you just have to take the jump wondering if they care enough to catch you at the bottom.
Edit!
After reading the introduction, a certain comedian named K.T. has expressed that I should say that he was not the one who e-mailed me explicit photos when I was a minor.
It was some poor guy named Komeito.
THANK GOD we’ve cleared up this awful mess!
So…
Because Dwayne is constantly on the look-out for K’s and my career, he got us an offer for another Virgin Diaries article… Sort of a conclusion. And he wants K to write part of the introduction, so it’s going to be even longer than the one I put up.
I think it defeats the purpose to have an insanely long introduction to a series of short columns, but maybe that’s why I work at a cruise line and he runs a publishing company. Hm.
Look for that as well as some of our Ebony collab this week.
Intro to The Virgin Diaries
We have officially finished the Virgin Diaries. It’s been through editing twice and there are still a couple of changes I’d like to make, including turning the entire thing into more of a flowing narrative than seperate little anecdotes, but it’s starting to feel complete. I think it’s turned out really nicely, too; it’s been such fun working with K Rodriguez on this, and we’ve had the opportunity to talk to a ton of really interesting people. The best thing about being a writer- perhaps one of the few really good things about working in this industry at all- is the amazing people you meet and the great stories you hear. The human experience really is a shared one: we all go through virtually the same thing. I think that when you get right down to it, that’s all the Virgin Diaries is… a look at something we all can relate to, in one way or another. My story and K’s story may be unique in some respects, but in others, they’re everybody’s story too. So, without further rambling, the freshly penned introduction.
When I began this project, I was an entirely different person. I was sixteen and in high school, still struggling through adolescence. Khrys Rodriguez was an acquaintence then, hardly more than a total stranger to me, but we quickly discovered that we shared a passion for storytelling. While I liked to disguise my life as fiction, K never hid anything. I respected his lack of concern for what others thought of him; I even envied it.
The first time we were approached about putting something into print was about a year ago. A publishing agent who neither of us had ever met before had happened across an article I had written about why it’s realistically impossible to stay a virgin till marriage. He said he liked it for the very reason that my editor had not: my own opinion came across too clearly. He could tell that I was one of those girls who was waiting even though I understood how improbable, even illogical, it was.
People always ask me why I use a pen name… I suppose it’s because it gives me the freedom to talk about things like my virginity, and the subsequent loss of it, without feeling subconcious. I can talk about intimate, personal things while remaining utterly unaccountable. Sure, there exists a select group who know who Aya L.A. really is but the vast majority of my friends and family will never read a word I’ve written and connect it to me. I was able to honestly portray myself and my experiences, which evolved along with the project, without any embarrassment.
The word ‘evolve’ seems like such an understatement. Every aspect of my life, of who I am, has changed since beginning this project three years ago. I began writing it as a virgin, was approached about publishing shortly after losing my virginity, and ended it when I fell in love.
Anyone who has read my previous work may be wondering if those last few words were a typo. Wasn’t the last piece I had published an extremely cynical short story about a woman smashing her lover’s head in with a hammer? Hasn’t my every biography jokingly included the statement that I don’t believe in love?
An old friend of mine [read: disgruntled ex-boyfriend] wrote a scathing little story about a girl [read: yours truly] who was utterly incapable of even the most basic interpersonal emotion. I wish I could find it somewhere online and copy it here verbatum, but it seems he’s deleted it off his website; he said something like, it would take a very skilled liar or an entirely infallible person to make her fall in love.
Seems I’ve found one of the two. But that’s neither here nor there, kiddos.
Let’s think back to how things were when this project began. I was, as I said, sixteen. AFI’s album Decemberunderground had just come out and I listened to it the entire summer as I bounced around Asia. I was, in all likelihood, the stupidest teenage girl on the planet. We got ourselves into so much trouble that lasted for so very long but at the time, I thought that it was my life’s great adventure: I had just graduated high school, had just left my abusive boyfriend, and was actually seeing the world for the first time. I even thought that I had found my soulmate, until he called me late one night and asked me if I wanted to lose my virginity to him without any emotional attachment.
I suppose that without that phone call, the Virgin Diaries would never have existed. When I heard someone say those words, I realized that, with my generation, sex had turned into purely a physical act.
And so I had a decision to make. He was undoubtedly attractive and his family was very rich; despite what he said he was, as I knew at the time and as he did indeed confirm years later, as “emotionally attached” to me as anyone that young could be. The L-word never was a part of my thought process. I had no high hopes of losing my virginity to someone that I loved, because at the time, I did not believe that love even existed. But I wanted to leave room for the possibility of love to develop.
He was dismissing what we could have before it even began. And so I hung up the phone.
It went like that for years. Men made suggestions, some even respectfully… I think that one of them loved me just a little. He was Vasco and had a name that sounded like poetry to prove it. Girls thought he was gorgeous; I thought he was ordinary. It became a game to me, to see how far I could push them before they grew tired of the chase. I liked to play with them, make them think that I was going to give them what they wanted, then punish them for ever thinking that they could own me.
The nightclubs in our little town rang with stories about my tricks, but it never discouraged anyone. It seemed each was even bolder than the last.
This ended abruptly when I convinced a drunk and very ill-meaning amateur comedian to send me nude pictures, then posted them on the internet. Rather than destroy his slowly blossoming career, it seemed to skyrocket it. The game wasn’t fun anymore, so I just stopped playing.
That guy who called me? He asked me to marry him, and I said yes and mentally prepared myself for a mediocre life of consistently settling for less than what I wanted. Until one day when I got a killer craving for cherry Kool-Aid…
In total, we wrote eighteen articles for the series- nine each. I only touched briefly on losing my virginity in article four, and even then, it was only to talk about the consequences of it. I never talked about what or why it happened… Probably because I am not even sure myself.
Much to the dismay of my former fiance, however, he was not the one to finally break me. That’s all you really need to know about that; I think it says volumes on its own. The things in our lives that seem the most real are often the most untrue. He says that I left him for a stranger, and I probably did. I don’t know why. Maybe it had something to do with the Virgin Diaries project getting picked up again. I had sex on my mind for the first time in years. It brought back memories, it brought back curiosity, and the stress made me impulsive.
My favorite article was the very last one. I wondered sometimes if I would ever get it done. For days, all I could think about was what to write. And then, when it finally came time to put the pen to paper, the words didn’t stop. I was so thrilled with the end result that I drove nearly a hundred miles to share it with K…
…His article was even more amazing.
His stories are light, humorous, fun. Mine are serious, cynical, dark. We balance each other out. That’s what was wonderful about this project: we are such polar opposites in everything, from our life experiences to our opinions to our writing styles. You would not want to read nine articles about K’s sexual exploits and adventures, and you would not want to read nine articles about my lack of them. But when we combined the two, the variety of the series kept it interesting, both to write and to read.
I’m sure that no matter how long I write, no matter what I have published or how much I get paid to publish it, this will be a project that I will always look back on and remember as one of the best successes of my life.
Beep beep. Article four’s here!
I skipped posting article three. Too bad. Here’s number four, freshly finalized:
There exists a group of people who want nothing more than to hear me, an adolescent American girl, gush about such mindless nonsense as how I picture my wedding or what my dream boy is like. They want optimism, puppies, gumdrops- they want to hear a bedtime story, but I don’t have any of those. What I have is reality and eyes open enough to see it. They signed me up for this project under the impression that I was a naive, doe-eyed little virgin and that I would write whatever sentimental bullshit I was prompted to; in this article, I want to take that perception of me and shatter it.
Fact: Every single one of my boyfriends has prohibited me from writing about him.
I write about everything in my life; discretion just is not in my vocabulary. What kind of writer would I be if I left out the good stuff? Everyone around me knows it, and every single person that I have ever dated has very clearly told me that they don’t want me to ever write a single word about them. Luckily, it takes only a little bit of effort to make a real-life event unrecognizable, and I’ve got nothing but time.
But when it came to this week’s prompt- how did you first fall in love?- I realized that I would not need to disguise one of my lovers as fictional… I’ve never been in love.
Years ago when my good friend lost her virginity, she came to me in tears, not because she was ashamed or regretful, but because for the first time in her life, she felt emotionally attached to someone. It was a common experience, her older brother had assured her: the person you first sleep with should mean something to you, after all. But he went on to say that that was the reason he never slept with virgins; they got too “too emotionally involved.” Of course, that didn’t make her feel any better.
But the repeated conversation stuck with me, and I remembered it when I lost my virginity. I resolved beforehand not to get too emotionally involved. If anyone could do it, it was me, I told myself. I was well-known in my social circle as the least sensitive [Read: Unfeeling bitch]; the problem with my friend was that she had been too affectionate. She had a history of falling in love too quickly, even before she lost it. I had never experienced anything more than a fleeting crush…
The Best Laid Plans
Of course, it did not turn out the way that I had planned: I got pregnant. I don’t know if you, dear reader, have ever personally experienced the joys of pregnancy, but it is extremely hard to keep your emotions in check when your hormones are dangerously off-balanced.
I was sicker than I ever had been; I felt like I was dying. My whole body hurt, I could not keep food down, staying awake through the day was a struggle. And he wasn’t returning my phone calls which upset me greatly, although under normal circumstances I probably would not have even noticed.
Yeah… Here comes that bitch part I was telling you about.
When I found out I was pregnant, I was terrified. Admittedly, most of the women in my family have children in their late teens or early twenties, and I always had the suspicion that I would follow, but it was still a shock. How had I gone from chastity to being knocked up? The severity of that change alone was enough to overwhelm me. The reality of having a baby never really hit me until I saw the little speck on the ultrasound…
Part two coming tomorrow.
Le Fucking Sigh.
How many days have I been putting off article #3? I can’t keep doing this or I’m not going to get paid in time for rent. It’s super fucking tricky…
Some thoughts about K’s article. Yeah, yeah, I broke my own threat of dying a virgin. And I found out the answer to my question about whether or not sex is worth a few minutes of fun- y dios mio did I ever find out, but you don’t get to hear the answer. Funny how much I’ve changed in the few short years since that summer. I hate to say it but I’ve grown up. I’ve matured. I’ve blossomed again, K doll. Write something about me now. I’m stronger. I’m not a mopey doe-eyed teenager who draws hearts on her jeans anymore. You’ve got so many more interesting romantic anecdotes to tell about me now. Do share some of those.
I’m listening to Sonny Moore’s electronica stuffz on Myspace. It’s actually really good. He’s matured as well.
From K’s Virgin Diaries Run
This is something that K just e-mailed to me for editting. It’s about an incident that happened while we were in high school; I’ve never read anything written about me, so I thought it was terribly amusing, even though he seems to remember it slightly different. [I don't recall crying.] So, here we go:
”Hey, can I ask you a question?” asked a very drunk Aya L. For as long as I’ve known her, she has always prefaced of her serious questions like this, as though she worries she will be denied an answer unless she first asks permission; she doesn’t have many serious questions, so I knew to listen closely to what was coming up. “Do you believe in love?”
“Sure,” I said without hesitating. “I love you.”
“No, no, no,” she chided softly, taking a long drag off of the clove cigarette she balanced carefully between two manicured fingers. “I mean romantic love. Like, Prince Charming and Cinderella love. Like, there’s one person who’s just absolutely perfect for you, one person you’re meant to be with. That kind of love.” She raised her questioning cloudy eyes to me, and I wondered what the hell she wanted me to say.
Her boyfriend had just broken her heart for the hundredth time. She had caught him- literally- in bed with her best friend: simultaneously betrayed by the two people she trusted most in the world, she came to me now for comfort because she wasn’t sure who else to go to. And I had no idea how to comfort her.
Did she want the truth? No, I don’t believe in love at all. My parents have hated each other their whole lives, and they’re very open about the trysts they have outside their marriage. I only have one brother who’s married, and he and his wife can’t stand each other either. At age twenty-two then, I had never found a girl who had captured my interest for longer than a month; I certainly had never found a girl that I loved. Romantic love is about as real to me as leprachauns.
So did she want a lie? I could tell her that, yes, I believe in love. It has to be real, otherwise life would be pointless. I could smile just a little and tell her in the sweetest voice I could manage that someday she was going to find someone who would treat her like a princess… or at least not screw around with her friends while she was in the next room. Even if I didn’t believe in love, there was a part of me that believed that if anyone could find that one perfect someone, it was Aya. She wanted it more than normal people did. She needed a connection, something real. It was what inspired her to write such amazing pieces- the idea of love, and the perpetual internal debate over whether or not it existed.
“Uhh, ah, well,” I stammered instead. “I think… I don’t know.”
“Don’t know?” repeated Aya, raising her eyebrows slightly.
“I think that you have to suffer for your art,” I said finally. “And I think if you were in a happy, healthy relationship you wouldn’t have anything to write about.”
“So you think that I should be a spinster just so I can write things that probably only my friends and family will ever read?” A smile spread over her crimson painted lips, and she laughed just a little. “You really just don’t know what to say!”
I took a drink straight from a bottle of whiskey and looked at her. She was small for a sixteen year old, but she had the body of a full grown woman… always had, in fact, for as long as I had known her. I met her when she was in the sixth grade, had watched her blossom into the miserable little creature that I saw before me now; she was like a little sister that I sometimes wanted to see naked. I think everyone Aya knows feels that same strange mixture of protectiveness and lust about her. Maybe that’s why she guards her sexuality so closely… or maybe it’s because assholes like her boyfriend keep mind-fucking her into a drunken mess.
I wondered why anyone would break a girl like Aya. Then she gave me the answer:
“We used to go to his little condo on the river,” she said softly, looking down at her cigarette. “I’d stay there for the weekend. He’d call me and say, ‘Do you want to come over and play house for a few days?’ It was always so much fun. We’d listen to little rock bands he’d heard in dingy nightclubs or watch independent movies his friends were in. I’d show him what I’d written and he’d show me what he’d drawn, and sometimes he’d play songs that he wrote on the guitar. They were never about me though, they were always about other girls he knew.
“But I never slept with him,” she continued. “We never did anything more than kiss. Hell, we even slept in seperate bedrooms. It never seemed to be a problem, until-”
“Until he started sleeping with other women,” I finished, seeing the tears welling up behind her pale green eyes.
“Yeah,” she said, nodding her head a little, making her thick brown curls bounce innocently. “We never even had sex, but sex ruined us. Sex ruined everything…. I wonder, is it really worth it?” she asked me imploringly, her voice cracking a little. “Is it worth all of this emotional pain for just a few minutes of physical pleasure?”
“No, it’s really not,” I admitted. “But you’ll figure that out sooner or later, I’m sure. You can’t die a virgin.”
“Yeah? Watch me.”
Aaaaaah my god.
I don’t want to write article three anymore. It’s going to be way too tough. The topic is the first time we’ve ever fallen in love, and the one glaring problem with that is that neither K nor I have ever really been in love… especially not K. I think sometimes that the only emotions he’s capable of are lust and confusion. Lust and confusion… what a terrible pair. So Salena told us, “Just write about the closest you’ve ever come.” And so there’s problem #2: I don’t want to write about the closest I’ve ever come; I don’t want him to know. Sure, someday I’ll tell him, if and when the absolutely perfect opportunity arises.
Maybe if I just go on and write it, he won’t know it’s about him if he ever happens to read it. Am I sneaky enough to pull that off? I vaguely remember a conversation with someone who read one of my pieces and knew right away that it was about them… Maybe I’m not sneaky. I can give subtlety a shot though. I need the cash.
Let’s see where it ends up.
This concludes our broadcast day.
Unfortunently, funding for the Virgin Diaries was officially cut yesterday. This leaves K and I in a rather awkward place. I think we were both in the fucking zone for this one. We might continue it on our own just for fun… We’ve gotten some really great feedback on it. I’ll post the entire first article as soon as the contract is officially terminated. There were a lot of parts that I had to cut out for the post here. And article number two was just posted, so check that one out and let me know what you think. I might post some of K’s stuff here; he’s absolutely hilarious.
You peoples need to start commenting on here. You can still tell me what you think in person or via e-mail or whatever, but I like getting comments. Makes me feel wicked special. 
