sketch: loss (11/18/11)

She lost her innocence in the instant during which his touch severed her knowledge of authority from her knowledge of her body, the habit of obedience from the persistence of pleasure. Not that she would have identified it afterward as a sexual awakening; she would have recalled how a vague sense of her inherited values – mixed with the taut, impatient racing of her heart – set off a dissonance inside her that shook her faith. She didn’t grant her innocence a mourning period; she let it die in awestruck silence, wondering what lie on the other side of this brokenness, wondering what further novelties life was determined to wring out of her.