I remember very well that in the days when my then boyfriend and I, who was my boyfriend because he was the ex of the friend who stole my first boyfriend, were getting our panties in a twist, I felt, at sixteen, like married couples feel after thirty years: tired and used to feeling nothing but idle and tiresome company.
I was about to finish high school and I knew that the fateful adjective that women have when they haven't been penetrated was rushing me closer and closer to the date of entering university, a place I didn't want to reach without having shed the blessed cloak.
The little I had heard about sexuality was that it had to happen with someone very special at a very special moment, that it was "given" to someone who deserved it, that it was going to bleed the first time, and that it carried the risk of ending up with AIDS and pregnant.
In any case, when I thought the guy "deserved it," but above all, when I saw the imminent end of the relationship with him, we did it. But I didn't bleed.
I didn't bleed during either the first or second, and it wasn't because I was so excited or euphoric. Because, as I said, what I needed, to be more specific, was to get rid of that burden of "doing it with someone special and giving it to someone who deserved it." I remember feeling anxious about that burden, especially because I suspected I'd never know how to choose that guy who "deserved it," much less that the moment would soon arrive where I felt so loved that I could actually have sex for the first time. I didn't bleed at that moment, and in fact, much later, I learned that one could shed that blessed blanket without realizing it, for example, while riding a bicycle and crashing into a curb because I didn't know how to brake.
Since I already knew, I broke up with the guy a few weeks later. At the time, I thought, as is typical, that life would bring us back together and that he would be the father of my children, because I was supposed to already know those things.
Now I remember it as the most boring and unexciting sex in the world. I remember it as a task I had to complete, so I wouldn't reach the next level without having seen an erect penis in person, without having felt hard flesh inside me, without having—faked—moaned. I remember it for what it was: two kids playing at fucking.
The day I decided to publish the only collection of short stories I've ever written, I was driven in part by the same feeling of shedding my writer's hymen. As if to truly write with a thirst for it, I had to be a writer first. And to be a writer, I had to write a book first. Like when I thought that to fuck, I had to have "fucked" first.
One day, while I was leaving some copies of the book at one of the bookstores that sell it, I heard one of the booksellers refer to another book as “a bad first edition.” A bad first edition is exactly what I achieved with that boyfriend at the time and with this book of mine: getting it done before it was too late.
Self-publishing also carries the same risk that sex in high school seemed to have: AIDS or pregnancy. Because you're scarred for life. She slept with her boyfriend so young, and look at her, she's no longer worthy of a publisher. But I did it, and I no longer carry the mantle. That gives me a kind of confidence in life. At least I'm familiar with penises and how I want to be touched. And I know, at the very least, how to make books.
Now, neither fucking means I'll fuck well, nor does writing a book mean I'll write well. You have to be patient. You have to know how to use the brakes on your bicycle. You have to know how to wait. You have to correct the same story so many times that you know it almost by heart. And forget it so you can see it again. You don't have to make bad first editions. But to fuck well, you have to fuck first, and to write well, you have to make bad first editions.
