Chronicles of New York

Totally out of our element, we were both unhinged. As our clothes came off, I believed we both said “fuck it.” At that moment I imagined Aiden’s religious convictions would go out the window, and we would live happily ever after. And have a lot of good sex.

But the surprising, infuriating thing about the female body is how in tune it is with the brain. If something is off in the heart, the body will not perform. It’s the mechanism that lets women have the best sex when they are in love, but also explains why we hate getting physical after a big meal that leaves us bloated and self-conscious.

And so, when that moment was finally upon us—the moment I had been conspiratorially envisioning for the past three months—my body shut me down and all I could say was, “We shouldn’t.”
***
He proposed to a Mormon woman named Christy in July and scheduled the wedding for August. He put me at the friend table, so far from him that I had to crane my neck to see his face. I raised my glass of water as his sister began the toast.

“It’s been so wonderful to see Aiden and Christy become close over the last year. I remember last September, he sent her the most clever text messages,” she said.

Last September, huh? I kept my eyes fixed on him. His hair was cut short for the wedding. He looked more Mormon, more clean-cut and dignified than I’d ever seen him.

“Sometimes you see two people, and you just know they are soul mates,” she continued.

His eyes were rigid with a sense of purpose, not love but dedication. I took a gulp of my water wishing it were something a bit stronger.

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This entry was posted by Willow on Tuesday, September 8th, 2009 at 11:27 am. It is filed under Guest Contributors and has these tags: drinking, fiction, frustration, life, Lower East Side, manhattan, Mormon, new york city, NYU, school, sex, tourism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.