Virgin

My whole life, I'd been... sort of, an "emotional virgin." I'd never had to deal with these sorts of tragedies that other people had, never really had the chance to. I was just shuffling through my own girlhood, fenced in with an enormous tight-knit family. Dad worked days, mom worked nights. Always being traded off to my aunts, or my grandparents, or my endless amounts of cousins. None of them allowed me to be exposed to hardship, hence my "emotional virginity." Carted away from it all. 

Depression and anxiety runs on both sides of my family. Hell, it was unavoidable. I was wandering through my girly, bubbly little life; all baby fat, braces, and massive gray eyes. I had straight A's, for god's sake. I was brighter than a gunshot, I was damn near brilliant. In all actuality, I don't remember when all of that stagnation went away. 

I hadn't the slightest clue as to why I was poles apart from feeling normal. I was stumbling around like an agoraphobic baby deer, my grades were dropping to basement level, my mattress didn't even have sheets on it. Everything was exhausting, like some homemade Ghostbusters vacuum was just nonchalantly draining the life out of me. Social situations turned my hands into useless trembling balls of tangled yarn, my ears into kettle drums that my heartbeat pounded against, and my eyes into all-seeing all-knowing alert towers with whooping sirens.

As I got a little further into high school, I was trying everything. Weed, sleep, fictional satire, suicide attempts, nacho flavored Doritos. Anything to keep my stomach from having an all-out brawl with my lungs. It wasn't an emotional thing, it was more of not being able to squeeze a single thing out of myself. God, I would've killed just to cry at least once, and let those cheek trails air dry. Make some watered-down lemonade out of my own emotions, or lack thereof. I was numb but buzzing and dazed but alert and I didn't know why. 

My parents had noticed, but they had never really noticed. One day, my body just started screaming. Four years worth of whitewashing was melting off of me, like the new baby-faced janitor guy at a wax museum that left the heat too high. Emancipation Proclamation Lincoln was sweating, Roosevelt's nose was sagging, Gandhi's loincloth was escaping. I cried for the first time in years. If a girl explodes in an empty living room, does she make a sound? 

Apparently she does, because my mom took me to the psychiatric clinic. She cried a lot. Over those next few months, I was being shaped, like one of Pavlov's dogs being conditioned to speak and walk on two legs instead of four. Learning hacks to grit my teeth through situations that should be a cakewalk, but just weren't. It's been about three years since then, give or take. I can order a double pounder with cheese without hyperventilating. Someone give me a damn medal. 

That's the story of how I lost my virginity.