I hope that when I'm old and achieving the age of obsolescence, I at least have the good taste to exit this mortal coil before Alzheimer's or senility robs me of my memory. There may be more to being a human than the accumulated catalogue of our memories, but without them, we're not exactly long on personality.
Notwithstanding the importance of memory to our who we are, I wouldn't object if a few ghosts of my past would just leave me alone for a while. As is often the case around the holidays, I'm home visiting the place where I grew up. It's pretty much wall-to-wall souvenirs of my past here, like having the entire library of my childhood memories assembled in one place. Consider it a Museum of My Natural History, which at every turn offers up new exhibits of each awkward and humiliating phase of the slow and agonizing transition to adulthood. I wander about, with memories washing through me like dread.
Then it begins to snow. Snow falls well into the night, all around the Museum.
Soon, the snow is so deep that any attempt to escape from the confines of the Museum is unthinkable. The curators have arranged a tasteful exhibit, entitled Loss is Forever. I stumble across forgotten faces peering uncertainly from old yearbook pictures, and the soft curving words of old folded love letters, still bearing faint and familiar perfumes. Everywhere I go I'm confronted by pieces of the me I once was.
For those of you who don't think I put enough Lust in the Tales, I'll tell you that this house was the site of my first act of penetrative sexual intercourse. Are you happy now, those of you who wanted more Lust?
No? Then allow me to go on to say that the eager and fumbling act took place right here in my old room, with a young woman for whom this was also the first act of penetrative sexual intercourse. We had frequently engaged in pleasant mutual genital stimulation, but on this occasion, without specifically planning it, we placed our bodies in the necessary arrangements and experienced the associated tensions and releases.
I went on to date the young woman an additional year, before I met another young woman who sexually excited me even more, for whom I ended the former relationship. Months later, on a winter night in the wind-chafed plains of Ohio, the young woman who went "all the way" with me on the floor of my old room called me to say that she had begun dating a new young man since our painful breakup. She tentatively explained that she and the young man had placed their bodies in the necessary arrangements and had engaged in sexual intercourse, and as a result, she had experienced an unplanned pregnancy with a young man who had replaced me as her paramour. As she spoke to me on the telephone, the fetus was developing within her uterus, and while she did not wish to bear a child, she could not in good conscience have it removed from her body. Her family was greatly upset, as was she, but the young man whose expelled sperm had fertilized her egg possessed the sense of honor and duty to ask her to be his wife, and she was predisposed to accept the offer. That was the last time we ever talked.
One day, about a year ago, I looked up the phone number of the young woman with whom I had intercourse for the first time in this very house, and called her on the telephone. I was fully aware, as the phone rang at her residence, that I had nothing to say to the young woman, that I had no interest at all in striking up that old romance or even a conversation with the young woman into whose body I tentatively introduced my inexperienced member so many years ago. A voice answered her telephone, and I recognized it as the same voice that had once told me it loved me and would go on loving me forever, no matter what happened. The voice said, "Hello?" and in the background I could hear the screams of small children, a childish war erupting in my former lover's house as she left her kids to answer the phone, not knowing that it was her long-lost love on the other end, silent and stunned and feeling like a small child himself as he hung up on her yet again.
X marks the spot on the floor of the Museum of My Natural History where this important event took place so many years ago. I step over place where the childish bodies still couple there in the past, clinging and separating again and again.