64/365 More Than Waiting

They pointed fingers

Called me Virgin

As though I'd done something filthy

As though I'd done anything at all

By not    

doing

As though at thirteen

I should have had a girlfriend

And known how to talk about her body

Like she was a baseball diamond

And I had any athletic aptitude whatsoever.

As though at fourteen 

I should have been mature enough

to identify my true soul mate

in the time it took Stairway to Heaven to play at the Elks Club dance

As though I should have been as ready and willing

as I was impulsive and naive.

To tempt fate, live for the moment,

For just a moment

Taunt procreation from the inside of a latex condom

I didn’t.

It wasn't that I didn't look forward 

to finally having sex for the first time

I just needed it to be perfect

To have the certainty of no regrets

Intimacy is too precious a love note

To be published as a rough draft.

So, I waited.

At thirty, 

My abstinence was a conversation reserved

For those few friends I most trusted

And those few girls who I knew would stay.

There was a day

When purity was honored.

I never meant to be noble.

Just to love someone, someday

In a way that meant something new and more

And not just the samedifferent

For “one and only” to mean ONE,

And ONLY.

When a thirty-one year old virgin has sex for the first time

On the perfect day

In the perfect place

Floor littered with rose petals, a bow tie, and something borrowed and blue

It is amazing

How it is still first-time awkward

But also the best they have ever had.

Let me tell you about commitment,

The comfort of certainty,

The assurance of looking only forward

With no past to look back upon

Of waking up in the morning to say

“I waited my whole life, for you.”

And we will laugh about the rose petals
For as long as we
Both shall live

And we will know love,

Without waiting.