Somewhere Over the Sun

It hadn’t been too terrible or maddening; if she could go that long without it, she could go a little bit longer still. But she didn’t want it to be true: a whole sexless year. Three hundred and sixty-five untouched days. Fifty-two weeks without a lay; many of them by choice, of course, but still. She wasn’t as sexually frustrated as she was numerically frustrated. The problem was that sex’s hunger would never kill you; it just kept you starved.

Annie was trying to convince herself that she was more than just her sexlessness. People are not defined by their absences, their shortcomings. 

What if she made it to a year? How would she explain that to future lovers, how would she refute the evidence it provided that she was undesirable, that she had somehow managed to spend a whole year of her life—a young one, at that—not having sex? Would there even be future lovers? What if she made it to a year and then desire fell apart? Didn’t that happen? You get used to the things life keeps from you, and you start by missing them, but pretty soon you don’t notice that they were ever in your life. You go about the rest of your day, slowly forgetting the absences, slowly letting go of the desire to fill them.  It had happened before. When she was eight, with chocolate turtles. They were her only request at the grocery store, her only craving for dessert. Worried about possible health and finance complications, and concerned over the possibility that it may lead to an addictive personality disorder later in life, her parents implemented a ration, which they lowered every week. By the time she was only allowed only a box a month, the desire went away, and she didn’t eat another chocolate turtle until years later, and with none of the same zeal, just a barely-felt nostalgia for how they had once been part of her life.

Would she forget sex? Would sex forget her?