“In the time it took me to get a slice of pizza you lost your virginity”

I lost a couple important things during the first few months of college: my wallet and my virginity.

Losing your wallet is a pain. I had to spend hours at the bank canceling cards, getting credit monitoring and requesting replacements. It was odd being without any form of ID – stranger in a strange land kind of deal

As for the night I parted ways with my virginity, I remember it in blurry snapshots – congregating in my room doing shots of cheap vodka, riding the bus to the sushi restaurant, singing Strawberry Fields Forever on karaoke, wandering over to the Ballroom Dance club’s stoplight party. It was the night before Yom Kippur but I’d foregone the Kol Nidre service, telling myself I’d go to temple the next day. Seeing KX at the party was enough to set-off my Jewish guilt reflex. I had sat next to him at Shabbat services a couple of weeks before. He was reasonably good-looking (stereotypical Jewish looks – I’m partial to that) and fairly amusing (stereotypical Jewish humor – I’m partial to that, too).

After a few self-deprecating remarks about what bad Jews we were, he started trying to teach me how to swing dance. I was drunk and, I’d wager, a pretty poor study (those Cotillion lessons didn’t come in handy at all). The house was so poorly lit he had to ask me what color I was wearing.

“Green,” I said. “You?”

He was decked out in the same hue, I was happy to learn.

Pretty soon his hand was on my inner thigh and he was telling me, “You know, there are four things you’re not supposed to do on Yom Kippur: eat, drink, wear leather and have sex. Of course, some of those rules are more fun to break than others.”

“Is that so?”

“For instance, I’m wearing a leather belt right now.”

We went outside “to get some fresh air” and then he was leading me through the tunnels of the Med School. After what seemed like an interminable trek, during which we stopped periodically for brief make-out sessions, we somehow ended up on the esplanade on the roof of the student center.

Hidden in a corner, he pressed me up against a wall and started kissing me fervently as his fingers found their way under the lacy thong I’d chosen earlier that night (on the off-chance…). “You like that?” he asked – a leading question if I’d ever heard one.

He suggested that we relocate to a small patch of grass near the adjacent soccer field. It was unlit, a safe distance away from regular foot traffic. I found out the next day, examining KX’s facebook profile, that he’s a big environmentalist, so the back to nature approach makes sense, I guess.

I kicked my shoes off into the un-mowed abyss and hiked up that green skirt. I was giving him head and then he rolled over, slipped on a condom and suddenly he was inside of me. It didn’t hurt – the combination of me being drunk and him having a small dick probably helped with that – and it was over before I fully understood what was happening.

He walked me back to my dorm, holding my hand and telling me he’d see me at services the next day. Back in my room, I stumbled around for a few minutes before my roommate got back. We’d parted ways at the party when she headed out in search of a midnight meal.

I was feeling drunker and drunker as the cup of Jungle Juice I’d downed before leaving the party started kicking in. The whole night seemed unreal. I probably wouldn’t have believed it if not for the blood stains on my thong.

When my roommate got in, I told her what had happened. “In the time it took me to get a slice of pizza you lost your virginity,” she observed incredulously. The last thing I remember is kneeling over our trashcan, upchucking the sushi from earlier (for reference: not a good pre-drinking meal). According to my roommate’s recollection, I got mopey and spent an hour talking about how I should have just fucked AN over the summer (but more on that later).

The next day I couldn’t bring myself to go to Yom Kippur services. I wandered around the city for hours, chain smoking and trying to determine whether or not the previous night was something worth repenting.

And the wallet? I found it a few months later while repositioning furniture in the newspaper office. It had been under a couch the whole time.

“Isn’t the sky so much bigger in the Southwest?”

A few weeks ago I was talking to a professor and I happened to mention that I’m from California. She sighed and said, “Isn’t the sky so much bigger in the Southwest?”

I didn’t think too much of it at the time, too busy scurrying back and forth between brick buildings under the slate gray of the mid-Atlantic sky. It was only when I was flying back home (I’ll still call it that, I guess, grudgingly) that I understood what she meant. We were floating over some mountain range (somewhere in Arizona, I think) as the sun was setting and the sky was this gradient of pastels pierced through by a blinding orange orb. It was then, with my nose up against the double panes, that I felt I was returning to familiar territory.

Down on the ground, taking my first stroll the next afternoon, I was struck by how all-encompassing the blue above was. That professor was right, it isn’t like this on the East Coast. It’s a strictly Southwestern phenomenon, that blue stretching on past tomorrow, making you want to drive away on some abandoned highway, one hand absentmindedly minding the wheel, the other out the driver’s side window, waving at the wind. It’s something you find in the land of mesas and vistas and plateaus, the feeling that you could lie under this sky for days and not see all of it. It’s the kind of sky that makes you think about your life for hours, all the while acknowledging that your little foibles don’t matter all that much. It makes you aware of the infinite number of ways this life could’ve turned out, and how strange it is that it’s gone exactly as it has.

I don’t know why I’m writing this. Maybe because I feel the need to get all of this out of my small brain and into the big sky. Maybe if I take the time to reflect on it, hash it all out, the next time I’ll be better, wiser, calmer. Maybe I’m hoping this will be cathartic. Maybe I want a stand-in for the California sky, something to make me feel small and understood.