about a boy,
who was lost,
and thought he was found,
until he meets a girl,
the same girl,
who makes him wonder
if there's more to life
than just getting by.
-
[a Jem-centered novella/sequel to The Girl Who Saw Through Jem]
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Chapter 7
Are You There, God? It's me, Jem
Jem
I decided to make the best of me being back in the states by paying a visit to my mother, her new husband and her stepchildren later in the summer. Caleb decided to come with me because he said he wanted to visit his sister, who was studying at art school in New York.
The thought about Effy caused a funny feeling to settle in my stomach- not because she was the reminder of what went wrong with Ellis but because I suddenly realized that she was actually the last person I had sex with.
Yeah, trust me I'm not shitting you.
You might wonder to yourself, like gee Jem thought you were the womanizer of the century and now you're finding out that I have for no reasons unknown decided to not have sex for like a whole year pretty much. Well, it wasn't like this self-imposed celibacy wasn't a random choice. No, it was a pretty well-thought-out thing. It wasn't like suddenly, I decided to become a nun and sex wasn't fun for me anymore.
Don't get me wrong, I wanted to have sex. Of course, it was a basic human need. There were times I desperately wanted to have some, but I've decided to sit this particular game out for a while. I didn't want to get involved with anybody at the moment. Not even in the pure physical sense of it.
It doesn't mean I wouldn't get lonely. I did. But I was trying to teach myself how to be lonely, make a map out of it, sit with it and welcome the human experience instead of using another person's body or emotions for a scratching post for my own unfulfilled yearnings.
It didn't take a genius to figure out that I got started early in life with the pursuit of sexual and romantic pleasure. I barely had an adolescence before I lost my virginity and I was consistently involved with a girl since I was thirteen years old. And that was like almost seven years ago. That's seven solid years of being entwined in some kind of drama with some kind of girl. Each overlapping the next, with never so much as a week's breather in between.
And when you scanned back on my romantic record, it didn't look too good. It was one catastrophe after another. How many different types of girls could I keep trying to love, only to fail and push them away?
That was why I think, in the journey of finding myself and trying to figure the state of my own mind out, abstinence was the right thing for me at this moment. I was especially sure of it the night Brecht and I could hear our upstairs neighbor having the longest, loudest, fleshsmackingest, bed-thumpingest, back-breakingest session of sex I'd ever heard in the apartment above us. This slam-dance went on for well over an hour, complete with hyperventilating sound effects and wild animal calls. I laid there only one floor below them, alone and tired in my bed, and all I could think was:
That sounds like an awful lot of work . . .
But I was surprised with how good the period of celibacy had been for me. So much so, I was wondering if I could extend it for another year. I could focus on officially moving to Amsterdam, living with Brecht and Flynn and writing my book.
