as a much younger woman, the first “trend” i recall noticing in my emerging sexuality was a weakness for clever men. while all my girlfriends drooled over duran duran and boy george, i was consumed with bone melting lust over shakespeare and neitzsche.
as all the other teenagers’ clung in sticky, slobbery, sweaty clinches at weekend discos, i was locked in my bedroom, reading glasses perched on my 14yo nose, caressing the leather bindings of library books and dreaming of the men that wrote them, of the words they would one day whisper in my eggshell-pink ear.
books were my lovers. they held within them the clandestine and exciting secrets that i ached to know. in them, women swooned under barrages of words so beautiful, so masterful, that nobody blamed them at all for succumbing.
enter the real world. where “sweet nothings” really are just well, nothings. where i never moved a single man to the torrents of passionate prose that i spent my formative years yearning for.
a romantic dinosaur, i suffered crushing blow after crushing blow at the hands of boys who thought shakespeare was a software program. poised trembling on the brink of the tenderest of tremors, time and time again i fell to earth with a thud at the clumsy utterances that followed.
age and cynicism have only worn the edges off this particular desire, as opposed to quashing it completely. like an old friend, it occasionally raises it’s disillusioned head to pay homage to some passing words and sometimes it’s even still dumb enough to hope.