The Summer I Stopped Waiting for the Love of My Life
My name is Brenda. I’m twenty-four years old and I’m in my final year of Psychology. I devoted almost my entire life to studying, and in all that time I only had five or six experiences with a guy named Lucas, whom I truly loved, but who left me because he didn’t feel the same way about me.
I never had any great desire to have sex. And the few times those desires did show up, they always lost out to the prejudices and ideals I grew up with. I always believed it was my duty to wait for the love of my life before giving myself away, to keep myself as “pure” as possible, as if that meant anything. Lucas took that idea away along with my virginity, and ever since then I felt like the plan had lost its point. Still, I kept waiting. But in a few months I’ll turn twenty-five, and I’m beginning to understand that this great love is nowhere to be found.
Lucas and I were together for almost two years. What we had in bed was lukewarm, rushed, almost always in the dark, and always with the feeling that I was saving myself for something bigger. When he left me, that part of me I’d been repressing didn’t disappear: it stayed there, pounding on the door, asking to come out. The thing is, I kept pretending not to hear it, convinced that giving in would turn me into something else, someone my family wouldn’t want to recognize.
I’d just gotten out of the shower. I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror, with my hair still dripping onto my shoulders, and I found myself beautiful. I’m five foot seven, I’m white, slim, with chestnut brown hair that falls in waves to the middle of my back. I have small breasts and pink nipples. I am pretty, yes, but I’m also aware that I won’t be forever.
What if I get to thirty, or thirty-five, without having found anyone?
What if I end up wasting my whole youth waiting for someone who’s never going to come?
Thinking about all that, I sat on the bed wrapped in a towel and started imagining what would happen if I stopped just waiting. If instead of waiting, I started living. Almost without realizing it, I grabbed a pen and a sheet from my notebook of notes, and I started jotting down some of the fantasies I’ve been carrying around for years. I wanted to see them written out, one beneath the other, to decide once and for all whether I can still keep putting them off or whether I need to put them into practice as soon as possible.
***
Fantasy number one: letting myself be seduced by a man much older than me. How much older? Forty, fifty, sixty? I still don’t know. The only thing clear is this: that age gap has always set me on fire. A gentleman who has the calm of someone who has already lived through everything, who doesn’t treat me like a little girl, who knows exactly what he wants and says it to me without beating around the bush. The idea of being someone like that man’s whim makes me wet on my own.
I imagine him in detail even when I’m studying. A man with large hands and a low voice who watches me from across a table, who asks me double-meaning questions and laughs at my nerves. Who takes me slowly, without asking permission but without rushing me, and whispers in my ear everything he plans to do to me before he starts doing it. That mix of respect and shamelessness undoes me. With guys my own age, I always had to take the lead, explain, pretend. With a man like that, I wouldn’t have to explain anything.
The problem is that this fantasy collides head-on with the idea of finding a good, lasting love. It’s clear I can’t get into a relationship with a guy my age and then cheat on him with a man twice his age. I may be bold, but I’m not unfaithful.
In short: fantasy number one, now or never.
***
Fantasy number two: finding out what it feels like to get paid for this. I live in a neighborhood that borders one of the city’s best-known areas when it comes to prostitution. More than once I masturbated imagining myself in a very brazen dress, high heels, red-painted mouth, standing on a corner on a Friday night to try my luck. I’m afraid of diseases, of course, but nothing a good box of condoms wouldn’t solve. What turns me on most is the idea of a group of men choosing me, paying me, and using me all night long as if I belonged to them.
It’s not about the money. It’s about what it would mean: stopping being the good girl, the one who studies and waits, and turning into an anonymous body for one night, one that a stranger approaches, sizes up, and chooses. I imagine the cold of the street against my legs, the engine of a car stopping beside me, the nameless question. And I imagine myself saying yes.
Once. Just to satisfy my curiosity.
***
Fantasy number three: being completely shameless on the apps. I’m used to going in, making a couple of matches, getting bored, and closing the app. Like that, once or twice a month, without ever actually following through on anything. Sometimes I fantasize about playing what I call “the roulette”: liking everyone, without looking, and going out with whoever likes me back and is bold enough to invite me to do things. Sending photos, dirty texting all afternoon, lining up a drink at some bar that both sides know is going to end in a motel room.
***
Fantasy number four: letting myself be had by whoever wants me. Over the years I’ve met quite a few men who dropped hints, some of them pretty direct, making it clear they wanted to take me to bed. One was a professor at the university, a white-haired man who gave me very high grades and held my gaze a second too long. Another was a colleague from a research group, married, who would text me in the middle of the night. And then there’s the whole list of suitors I ignored on the apps. My fantasy would be to adopt a single rule: never turn down any proposition. No innuendo rejected, no matter the person’s age, body, or appearance. Something like a philosophy of yes.
***
Fantasy number five, the most extreme: being desired by many at once. I imagine myself surrounded, overpowered, attended to from every side at the same time, without a single second to think. Bodies I don’t know, overlapping voices, hands that don’t ask my permission for anything. I come when I masturbate thinking that I only agree on one condition: that they leave my face covered, that no one can recognize me afterward. But then, in the middle of that arousal, I’m the one who tears off the mask, because I no longer care what happens tomorrow. I imagine the expression on my face as I look on, lost, surrendered, while unknown hands decide for me.
The curious thing is that in that fantasy there is no guilt. Brenda, the one who thinks about what people will say, doesn’t appear, nor the one who crosses herself before going to sleep. Only the other one is there, the one who enjoys herself without apologizing, the one I had kept locked away for years. And the more I imagine her, the harder it is to understand why I locked her up for so long.
***
I finished writing the list and sat staring at it for a long while, my breathing a little unsteady. The five fantasies there, in blue ink, were no longer a secret that lived only in my head. They existed. They were real. And suddenly it seemed ridiculous to keep them tucked away in a drawer while waiting for a love that showed no signs of life.
Feeling that turned on, I decided to hand my fate over to chance. I opened one of those random-picker apps on my phone, the kind that spits out a number or chooses an option at random, and asked the first question. “Wait to find the love of my life” or “this summer I stop waiting”?
Answer: this summer I stop waiting.
My most prudish side felt a little uneasy. My hottest side felt victorious.
Second question: how many? I entered the options: one to five, six to ten, eleven to fifteen, sixteen to twenty, more than twenty. I pressed the button with my heart pounding in my chest.
Answer: more than twenty.
I opened my eyes wide. I couldn’t believe it. I spun it again, hoping for something more reasonable, and this time it came up one to five. I was disappointed, and that’s when I understood what I really wanted. I drew again, to break the tie. More than twenty came up again.
So be it, then.
***
Lastly, I asked whether I had to do it for free, for money, or a mix of both. “Free” came up. Perfect, I thought. Like any woman who truly enjoys what she does.
Next Monday I sit my last exam of the year. After that comes a long break, almost three months without university, the whole summer ahead of me. Just enough time, the perfect setting to carry out the project. I’ve even named it in my head: summer project.
Right now I’m here, still wearing the towel and with the sheet beside my pillow, saying it in a low voice like someone confessing something they never dared to say. I have a vibrator I bought about a year ago, and I’m using it while I write this. I like to think that in a few weeks I won’t need it anymore, that I’ll trade cold silicone for real hands, for mouths, for bodies I don’t even know yet.
And as I caress myself and feel something finally breaking inside me for good—that prudent, patient Brenda, eternally waiting—I can’t stop smiling. For the first time in a long time, I’m not waiting for anything. For the first time, I’m about to begin.
A little kiss. We’ll read each other again when I finish the exam.
