I was far outside of Monrovia when I started walking back to the motel. As I came down to Earth I wondered if I’d misunderstood the fork in the road Mary had been talking about. I’d thought the two paths were:

sex with Davey  vs.  a life of bitterness and regret

But maybe the road split between:

a life spent longing  vs.  a life that was continually surprising

like this night had been. While I didn’t have the narcotic high Davey gave me, there was another kind of elation and it was, among other things, weirder. I felt untethered from my age and femininity and thus swimming in great new swaths of freedom and time. One might shift again and again like this, through intimacies, and not outpace oldness exactly, but match its weirdness, its flagrant specificity, with one’s own.