Author's Foreword: This series has themes of romance, sex, friendship, humor, safe and consensual BDSM, and above all, intimacy and the concept of memory. Any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental. I want you, reader, to come away with more empathy, appreciation, and joy for yourself and others than you began. As I did when writing this.
Note on Part 13: I decided to play with storytelling methods a bit, and I hope that it's effective without being confusing or boring - pacing is always a tough one to get right.
On another note, it's bittersweet to accept that there's probably not too much further to go in this series before the natural conclusion. I don't want to rush the end, but it can't drag on forever if I want it to be a story worth reading. And if certain parts went past that one summer... the story wouldn't be as true to life as it deserves. Just pray that this overly verbose pile of lust, longing, and duct tape holds together enough to make it to where it needs to be and lands mostly rightside-up.
***
***Early Fall***
"Welcome, everyone! I hope you all had a good summer, even if good summers are always unreasonably hot and shorter than you expect. This is Psychology 330: Human Sexuality. Or, as I'm sure most of you have heard it referred to, 'Dirty Three-Thirty.' I know, I know, I'll wait." The professor smiled and shook his head, waiting for the chuckling to die down in the lecture hall. I sat in the back in a mostly empty row. It was a large room even for the hundred or so students like myself, with at least a few seats between everyone and their neighbor - barring the exception of a few nauseating couples.
"Okay, everyone settled? Good. As I was saying, this is Human Sexuality. You probably signed up for this because everyone's curious at this age and all that and you heard it was an 'Easy A' in the humanities, which is true. It's an Easy A because I don't want a topic this important to your young lives, or the lives of the people you will encounter, to be anything but welcoming. We all have the potential to do a great deal of harm by how we express our sexuality and understand the sexuality of others... and a great deal of good, thankfully."
Though outwardly unassuming, he was an engaging lecturer that seemed to actually care about the topic and teaching. He was tall and rake-thin with a sleek, light-brown ponytail, and gold-rimmed glasses that he took off and put back on frequently. I wish I remembered his name.
"Sexuality is a tricky subject to navigate because of how subjective everyone's experiences and outlooks are. But it's also wonderfully connecting because of the universality of such experiences: they happen! You're all here somehow, after all. What's more, sexuality is often shared, as well as informed and enriched by the sharing. Or at least, that's the goal, right?" More laughter.
He said a few more light, gentle jokes, trying to put everyone at ease about a charged subject. I didn't want to be there. I felt hollow. I needed the credit to stay on track to graduate, and it was the only course that fit in my schedule.
The light coming through the window glinted and scattered off the dust motes. Like shimmering dust on skin. The same light made the hair of an athletic girl glow a particular shade of blonde. When she turned to talk to someone, her profile didn't fit the daydream I'd slipped into, and I tried to shake it off. A petite girl a few rows ahead of me nibbled her pencil in a certain way. Eight or ten chairs to my right, a sorority princess with dark hair and perfect coffee skin glanced over at me momentarily before we both looked away as quickly. I didn't feel good about what she probably saw; I can't eat or sleep much when I'm depressed. At least I was clean and dressed up in comparison to most of the sweats-clad guys in there, even if it was just jeans and a black tee-shirt. Like I'd worn at the party Alex dragged me to. Might have been the same clothes, in fact. I pretended not to notice as she looked over at me again.
The details I could smell were as insidious as the ones I could see. When I'd first walked into the room, someone in the front row had been sipping chai. The warm, complex, sweet scent had made my heart skip a beat, made me want to look for wide, bright, shy brown eyes that weren't there. Even after I trudged up the stadium seating to sit in the back by the high-set windows, there were too many perfumes and other smells drifting up to me. I couldn't pick any one of them out from the other for more than a moment, but I thought I smelled ozone. I tried to focus on that scouring aroma while pretending not to remember when I'd last smelled it. Trying to bleed some of it away, I scribbled in a small notebook I always kept near me.
Spring ends, summer bolts out of the gate.
Rain-on-sidewalk petrichor and new leaf sap,
pollen,
and lilac perfume;
one small request like a rock thrown in a pond,
ripples of choices racing
all the way to shore
at the speed of a
slow
first
kiss.
I wouldn't look at that scribble again for almost two decades.
The lecture hall was too hot. It was getting hard to breathe. But at least it was quiet compared to the campus sidewalks and quad. I heard a songbird outside, and recalled a dawn chorus at the end of a glorious night. I shut my eyes to hear it better. If I left my eyes closed too long, though, everything else boiled up without warning. I tried to come back to the present, to listen to the lecture, but I was drifting in and out. Forgetting would be hard.
"What we'll focus on," the professor continued, becoming more serious, "besides the physical, psychological, and social *basics* of the topic is to teach you that, while sexuality is a universal aspect of human experience, everyone is fundamentally unique and multifaceted. Every single person in this room has a different experience and expression of sexuality. It's important to have the healthiest version of your own that you can, and to seek out and nurture the healthiest version in other people. It's also important to know that everyone else is navigating the same strange and difficult and hopefully rewarding path - with or without the knowledge that you will have."
I liked that. I'd been taking notes as he spoke, quickly scrawling in my notebook on the page after the poem. I think it's most telling that I wrote it there, in the one I kept in my breast pocket, rather than my class notes.
"So. If you leave this course with more empathy and kindness and appreciation for yourself and others than you began... then we'll all have done what we ought to have done here. To help demonstrate that, I'd like to conduct a little icebreaker. Everyone, please take out a blank sheet of paper." At the instruction I felt my guts turn to ice.
"Okay," he said over the audience's nervous rustling as he talked, "First things first: don't write your name! That's very important! Now. I want everyone to take the next ten minutes to write down something about their sexuality that you feel is unique to you, or that you appreciate about yourself or others, or a recent positive sexual or sensual experience. Don't worry, I'm not going to read these to the class or anything. Still, no identifying information or explicit descriptions. You KNOW what I mean, you delinquents! Afterwards, please fold them and drop them in this paper bag up front, and on your way out the door today I would like everyone to take one piece of paper with them at random, read it *when you get home,* and reflect on it before you put it in the trash."
Oh, it was going in the trash, alright.
"When you're writing, remember: this can be anything, not just simple sexual acts. Think a bit harder. Maybe it's a quality you find attractive in a person. Maybe it's something you do to show interest in another person. Maybe it was a good experience over the summer? Maybe it's a story you read that made you think or feel something you hadn't expected. You've all signed the waiver, so let's be honest and kind, here. You're going to be reading someone else's real thoughts, and my hope is that you see something in them that makes you think: 'Wow, this is a *real* person.' Ready? Ten minutes, go!" I heard the scratching of pencils and pens, awkward giggles and the like before people got serious and actually wrote.
When I folded my sheet of paper up into a small square to put it in the offered brown bag, it was blank. It was going to be a very long semester.
