…from my new writing project…here’s a See’s chocolate sample.
Annabelle was my best girlfriend and by that, I mean the one who’s seen me through a divorce, at least two abortions that I’m willing to admit, and the birth of one of my children with shit coming out of my rear end as the nurses tried to get my feet back in the stirrups. Always the voice of calm in the eye of a storm even when I wasn’t sure I’d qualify for unemployment benefits due to some scum bag boss wanting to stab me in the back, and the only person who would return my calls within one-hour’s time.
I won’t bore you with how we met, but it was when she tapped me on the shoulder since she had no implements to write with and our teacher, Mrs. Woodcock, was about to dismiss her from the room for coming to school once again hopelessly unprepared, a teacher who delighted in locking her charges in the clothing closet for the smallest infraction. Some would pooh-pooh this as an exaggeration of a deranged mind, but I assure you that is not the case. I saved the day with my offering of a pencil, and inconspicuously threaded my fingers into her palm. Annabelle shared her peanut butter and jelly sandwich that oddly tasted of Campbell’s Tomato soup. Since then, we’ve been BFFs, so whenever AB wants to tell me something, I listen, a forty-five or so year-old woman divorced twice, mother of two kids. Those are my stats, and like a rap artist once said: “to right my wrongs, I have to write them down.”
I’d been languishing after yet another failed relationship and found little solace in the thumbnails of online daters, all of whom blended into one generic line-up wearing dark sunglasses. What about eyes being the portals to the soul? After several years of making my way through these pathways of disillusionment, single-handedly keeping one coffee shop in business through a revolving door of prospective lovers, I vowed to retire to my queen-sized bed with Felix the cat purring nearby, a striped grey tabby that I’d rescued from the ASPCA. He had scratched everything in my condo to pieces, but I didn’t care.
“I’m done with it,” I told AB. I’d just finished a texting conversation with an online dater who wanted to know what I did for fun. I coughed up a few bullet points. He wrote back and shared his distraught about how his dates only wanted one thing. And exactly what was that thing?
“Casual sex.”
Bite me! Now that the possibility of pregnancy has disappeared into the hot flashes of menopause, and women don’t require pharmaceutical assistance to enhance their sexual performance, we get censored for casual sex? Give me a break. Or maybe I’d missed the point altogether, and what he really expected, was for me to reassure him that I only wanted that one thing, Lauryn Hill please take note.