I’m organizing my CD collection alphabetically by artist, like every Saturday. The Cranberries, Janet Jackson, La Bouche, No Doubt, Selena, the Spice Girls, and TLC are among them. I have a stack of cassettes by Michael Jackson, New Kids, UB40, and various Disney movies. A cheerful knock at my open door catches my attention. Dad stands in the doorway, holding a semi-ripe banana.

For my Lutheran confirmation, my sister gave me a copy of Our Bodies, Our Selves. Inside the book’s front cover, she wrote, “I hope you find this book useful as a woman and a growing person.”

The pundits on NPR have been abuzz the last day or so about a new report indicating that one in five kids under the age of fifteen has had sex. So-who’s surprised? As soon as adults become parents, they get amnesia when it comes to sex. And they become hypocrites. Kids can smell hypocrisy a mile away. I did. I was a kid during the last great age of hypocrisy, the 1950’s. There was lots of teenage sex around then too, but you’d never know it based on the memories of those who were there.

“The violence I had orchestrated left my insides lacking…”

The violence I had orchestrated.

I had orchestrated violence.

Had I orchestrated violence?

I was prepping for a podcast, scanning through my essay collection, Putting Out: Essays on Otherness, when I passed by this sentence. I used to love it. When I read it, I could envision myself as a conductor keeping in time the crumbling of my early womanhood. I’d visualize the rotation of shot glasses, kegs, faceless men, loose pills, and strobe lights blinking in the basement bangers all circling around me like a halo. By putting myself on the conductor’s podium I could pick and choose what parts of my experiences I illuminated to others.

Hi. I’m Mabs, and I am a demisexual woman trying to date after a particularly nasty divorce. I don’t know what I am doing.

Learning to live as a solitary person after twelve plus years is not fun. I go to work alone. I run errands alone. I cook dinner alone. I go to bed alone. There is no one to decompress the day with, no one to share all of the little pieces of life beside. I am learning to adjust to my independence and finding parts I enjoy in it, but I know myself. Left to my own devices, I will hunker down. I will crave companionship, but I will not actively seek it. My friends worry.

At the end of the summer of 1986, I stepped into the elevator and traveled alone from the forty-sixth floor of Chicago’s Mid-Continental Plaza to the ground for the last time. For four years, I had worked in that gray rectangular office building that spans a full city block. Its exterior resembles graph paper—gray metal and concrete run up the building vertically and around it horizontally, forming squares. In between that metal and concrete, set back ever so slightly, are windows.