Nothing Gold — an excerpt from Ditching Paradise

(In response to a prompt from Robin Klammer and Sherry McGuinn. Not so much sexual fantasy as perhaps anti-fantasy. After weeks of aimless road tripping during the summer of 1999, Matt naively thinks he’s found “the one”…)

We slid out of our clothes almost as soon as I shut the bedroom door behind us. I wanted it to last forever but somehow couldn’t recoup the magic of that first night. I thought maybe she felt the same way too as we cuddled afterward. She kept shifting her body like she couldn’t get comfortable. Still, I was on the top of the goddamn world. I ruminated about the chance occurrences that had been miraculously stacked upon each other for us to even meet, let alone for me to end up stroking her soft skin in the moonlight after-glow. One half an hour side trip in Utah and our paths would not have crossed.

American kids head out to the frat parties and dance clubs and concerts and tractor pulls meekly or confidently seeking someone who understands them, intellectually, sexually, metaphysically; all sure in the way back of our brains that there are millions of human beings who fit the bill, who are “the one,” when really it takes an authentic act of God to bring two truly compatible people together, and maybe an act of Satan, to push the rest of us into the arms and between the legs of someone who is “good enough,” and maybe…