Candy wrapper

I mean, I wanted to f—-. So why did it get so complicated?

Fringe ArtsPoemGao Ruijia — Published October 27, 2026 0 minutes

Sex is like unwrapping an expensive candy.

The packaging is exquisite. 

You spend so much time imagining how it will taste.

By the time you finally put it in your mouth, you're almost disappointed that it's just candy. 

I don't know if I'm qualified to have an opinion about sex. 

I've only been with one person. 

One person, one situationship, one experience to make me feel less naive about sex. 

Somehow it made me more confused about intimacy. 

But maybe that’s exactly why I have something to say about it. 

We treat sexual experience like a form of education, as though sleeping with someone automatically teaches you what intimacy is. 

Sometimes, it teaches you the opposite.

I wanted the thrill of sex to finally free me from being a virgin.

I wanted to stop feeling naive. 

I wanted to stop pretending I didn't know what masturbation was,

like when I was 16 and embarrassed in front of a friend.

Bitch, I knew. 

I knew pleasure. 

I knew what I wanted. 

I just didn't know what wanting it was supposed to make me.

And then there was him.

Someone wanted my body, so maybe they wanted me. 

Someone touched me with tenderness, so tenderness had to mean something. 

Someone could make me completely exposed. 

For those few hours, I didn't really care what happened afterward

In that moment, it felt f---ing real.

But it wasn't.

Or maybe the physical part was real, and that was what made everything so confusing.

Take the sex away, 

and I kept asking myself what was left.

Not his body. 

Not the tenderness. 

Not the feeling of being wanted.

Just me, trying to figure out what the hell I had mistaken for intimacy.

That is the strange thing 

about situationships. 

They can give you so much of the physical language of a relationship 

without giving you the relationship itself. 

You can know someone's body and still not know what the f--- you mean to them. 

You can lie beside someone, touch them, kiss them, memorize the way they breathe, 

and still have no idea where you stand 

when you are no longer in bed.

Maybe that's why sex becomes so easy to romanticize afterward. 

The physical experience is undeniable.

It happened. 

You can remember it in your body even when you don't know what it meant in someone else's.

I remember the way desire could take over everything.

The kisses, the heat, my hands in his hair.

How it resembles those quiet but unsettling flows 

of streams in early spring. 

Curved, cold, extended…but finally revived.

There were moments when it felt almost cinematic,

like I had finally stepped inside the version of adulthood I had imagined for myself. 

And maybe that was part of the fantasy. 

I had spent so long looking at the wrapper that I'd already decided the candy had to be good.

But when the physical part disappeared, the fantasy had nothing to hold onto.

“Maybe the sex was good, at least.”

Thinking that was easier than asking 

whether I'd wanted the sex to mean more than it ever could.

I don't regret the sex. 

I regret what I thought the sex meant.

I regret how badly I wanted physical intimacy. 

To become emotional evidence. 

When someone has your body, it’s easy to believe they must have some part of you too. 

But they might not. 

Sometimes they just had your body, and you are the one left 

carrying everything you attached to it afterward.

Maybe that doesn't make the experience meaningless. 

Maybe sex doesn't make you less naive. 

Maybe sometimes it simply gives your naivety a body.

Maybe. 

You can know exactly how someone's hands feel and still know almost nothing about them. 

You can be wanted physically and still not be chosen emotionally. 

You can experience something intense enough to remember for years 

And still discover that intensity was never intimacy.

That's the part nobody tells you about losing your virginity.

Everyone talks about the first time as though something will happen afterward. 

As though you cross some invisible line and suddenly become more.

More experienced, more desirable, more adult. 

But nobody tells you that you can cross that line and still be standing exactly where you were before, except now you have memories you can't unhave.

You unwrap something beautiful, taste it, decide you don't want it anymore, yet it lingers,

long after you've thrown the wrapper away.

This article originally appeared in Volume 47, Issue 4, published October 27, 2026.