It is the most beautiful day in October, the autumn of my sophomore year far too beautiful to be going to class. I field a call from a boy I met the previous week and in another few minutes I am jumping into his sports car and speeding off through the falling leaves and into Vermont. His frat's golden retriever is in the backseat; we head for the fire tower. It's like a music montage from a bad movie: speeding down back roads, then racing each other up the trail; stopping to kiss and then sprinting ahead again, the trees all ablaze.
Another night, that autumn, maybe the next week or maybe weeks later, it doesn't really matter: Phone vibrates. I abandon my pong game, run upstairs and outside, giggling, and jump into the getaway car. We speed off, heading for who knows where, but way too fast.
Sure enough, the blue lights begin to flicker in the rearview. I try to suppress my laughter as he gets slapped with a $250 speeding ticket. When the cop car slides away, my slampiece tells me the contents of his glove compartment could've put us both in jail. More giggling.
This boy was bisexual he was taking home girls, most nights of the week and then me, every now and then. As for my part, I had a boyfriend I was not being particularly faithful to. I was kind of in shackles. This, you see, was why there was always the getaway car.
I dumped the boyfriend. I dumped the boyfriend because I wished to live deliberately; was reading Thoreau; and in those days a beautiful passage in a book was as good a reason as any to rearrange my life.
I remember a few days later, reading the last pages of Walden on the third floor of Berry, while playing footsie with the speed-demon slampiece. We were having so much fun together, those days. Too much fun. I know we were both aware that we could really fall for one another.
As usual, pride and time intervened. After a month, on and off, there was nowhere to go but towards each other, or away. Of course, with all our usual haste, we went away. I stopped answering calls and slampiece stopped calling. We evaporated.
Winter term came, and we ran it back one last time. But it was clear, this time, that the bright or ominous future we either imagined or feared had been erased. He asked me, the next morning, why.
"Why did we fall apart?" I had nothing to say.
"I guess because we were never together." That was and still is, the only answer I can think of.
I can't count the number of times per day I hear someone either glorify or bemoan the hook-up culture at Dartmouth. Everyone seems to think our relationships are meaningless and that this is either exhilarating, or heartbreaking. I used to be among the exhilarated. But recently, I've changed my mind.
It's not that I now find it heartbreaking, it's that I refuse to believe our relationships are meaningless. You can't tell me that guy with the fast car I kissed for three weeks wasn't important to me. Even when I have forgotten his name I'll still remember him.
My friend Daisy recently suggested that maybe the real meaning of "slampiece" is "slam-fragment." I support this wholeheartedly. Instead of objectifying the people we have sex with, this suggests that they are part of some greater whole. Whoa. I like it.
Even if the three-week-wall has made vapor out of all the guys I've ever kissed, I like to think that our experiences are still out there somewhere, floating against one another like currencies: completely immaterial, but also powerful, and in a way I'll never understand, influenced by each other.
I just don't think sexual relationships are meant to span months or years, when you're in your teens or early twenties and still trying to figure out what a relationship might be. And that's not a big deal. You can't blame Dartmouth, or the D-plan, or the basement. If you really want to settle down with someone, settle.
I'm writing this to you from the laundry room on a weekend afternoon, waiting for my clothes to dry so I'll have some clean boxers to wear on a date tonight with my new slam-fragment. The new approach is a slight adjustment: Instead of going into it assuming it'll go nowhere, I'm going into thinking that even nowhere is somewhere.
So no, I don't regret that I am 22 and have never been able to hold down a relationship for more than three weeks. All these years of slam-fragments mean something to me they do. That guy from two years ago and his roadster? He could be anywhere in the world right now I don't know. We don't keep in touch. But I don't regret it, any of it: the promises and speed limits broken, the phone calls unreturned, the getaway cars that always end up taking me home.
