On Romance, Flesh, and Broken Birds

I have never read a Harlequin romance in my life.
They weren't in my childhood home, although there was a copy of Madame Bovary, which I devoured at 10.
Still, I was exposed to them. I had a cousin, she had an all pink bedroom, a veritable Pink cave of stuffed toys, harlequins and barbies, and she had all these neon pastel colored chiffony type night gowns.
She wandered around in them constantly, as did her mother, and her father had a stack of not so hidden playboy magazines that spilled from their closet.
Their entire family was massively overweight, and I suppose when visiting the imprint of spilling candy colored flesh and a sort of emo excess when it came to things sentimental became indelibly printed as a template of mild horror in my mind.

My family was very anglo christian and proper. Flesh was not in the visual equation. Nor for that matter, sentiment.
Sexuality was never spoken of.

I had sex the first time while a very young university student, at 17, the last year I lived at home before I escaped the blighted barren barracks that was my suburban upbringing.

My girlfriend and I decided it was time. And made a pact with one another (not our prospective boyfriends)..to lose it.

I chose a math senior on campus, she being a touch more creative, entered the summer reserves to wrangle herself into a free trip across the country, just so she could de virginize herself with a boy that her family had met there vacationing a few years earlier.

I was grounded the night I enacted my half of my gf's and mine pact..
I crawled out my suburban bedroom window so I could meet my man( he seemed like a man to me at the time, he was 21)..wearing a white lace eyelet blouse and levis.

Later, much later in the night, leaving his residence, I chanced upon the sight of a robin, with a broken wing, bloodied and dying up against the old residence brick wall.
I put my hand to my mouth. It was the only sentiment I allowed myself,
it felt like a signifier, far more the so than the young man left in my wake.

Some weeks passed and my mother decided it was incumbent to have a talk with me. I confessed that yes, I had indeed, done it.
For some odd reason I felt the need to pander to her, and so I told her it hurt..to which she replied, of course, dear.

I recall feeling smug. And aware of my lie.
To keep to some family truth.

I'm still not a creature of sentiment exactly. And I still find romance the more so in subtle symbols such as that fallen winged feathered heartbeat.

I still have my small moments, interior, when I place my hand to my mouth
in stuffed emotion.

But I will never be found wearing a pink chiffon negligee.