Poof, Vagina

Death is such a sweet word.

It doesn't mean anything, really. It doesn't mean anything even if you will it to.

When my vagina died, I wasn't that surprised! I mean, I never thought of it as a living thing anyway.

It just dawned on me. I must've seen it coming. But I wasn't expecting it.

This dear, old vagina with the tiny, smelly clit is actually dead! Oh.

I couldn't believe it when it went off. Poof, it went in a puddle of smoke. I looked at the loss pretty shocked yet pretty...expectant.

What did my vagina do, anyway?

I'm forty. My skin is growing restless with the grand preparation for post-menopausal floods. I can feel it tickling underneath my skin; flushes, depression, dryness, hotness and the whole shebang.

Why does my vagina have to stick around during all this mess? In fact, it's better off that she's gone.

Yes, it's a girl!

Also why would I miss my fucking vagina anyway? I am a forty year old virgin. I don't have any sexual life of sorts. I am not married which makes me kind of a taboo subject in my country. I have never been married. I have been in love a couple of times. I thought I'd "do it" with a couple of guys. I chickened of course, not because I was afraid but because of what happened to the ones who did it...

It's not like a cult or anything but the lesson I've always learned is,

"Active vaginas are doomed vaginas," it was all over housewives' talks, "once you give in, you can't take it back."

It's not like I wanted to give in. Or even saw it as giving in. It's not like that anymore as well. Many vaginas give in and are granted wealthy husbands, hefty paychecks and wardrobes reeking of Gucci.

However, I didn't want my vagina to give in. I had dreamed of my vagina taking over. I had imagined my vagina dominant, wild and happy, not deceiving, submissive and expectant. When it comes to conservative penises, nobody should expect anything. They are as good as herring yet worse than pickles.

"Penises are like watermelons, they're either ripe or white."

I certainly didn't want a white, raw watermelon. It didn’t help that I never thought of myself as a hoarder when it came to sex, too.

So I did the inevitable. I kept my vagina safe and sound, plastic-wrapped and firmly under lock and key. I watched as a million other girls lost their vaginal integrity to the men they loved, craved or simply found on their way to work.

I wasn't gonna be one of them, I told myself.

I simply forgot about my vagina. In the beginning it was pretty difficult because that's the first thing you stare at when you are peeing or when you are changing panties.

As days went by things got easier. Imagine accumulating daily chores of forgetting all about your goddamned vagina. You take a shower and lather it with soap, eyes closed or staring into the vicinity of soap and scum. You gently dry it up with a towel without actually "feeling it". You brush it off. You sometimes even ignore the fact that it is not dry enough.

Dry it did. Slowly yet persistently, my vagina dried out. It was almost unnoticeable, like a flicker of the trees on an already rainy autumn day or a soft humming sound of a passing old man who sang to himself too often. Yet my vagina got drier and drier.

Until one morning, it simply died. It stopped functioning. I placed my hand on it one day, and my vagina was so damn cold although it was a 40 something degree Celsius out there.

I didn't freak out, just nodded in understanding when I took off the foil and buried it underneath thick, coarse black hair.

Pubic hair! Oh, what a relief.

Come to think of it as a shield. It covers your vagina from all sorts of dangers; heat, sweat, panty lining. Sometimes it traps menstrual blood, though. The smell isn't very inviting, of that be warned.

The day my vagina passed away, I had to shave my pubic hair off. I sheared the mass of black hair. It went down in a damp, black mass. When I looked at it, all abandoned and crumbling to the ground, my heart was filled with a tinge of longing, probably for something I never even thought existed.

Then it was time for the funeral.

My vagina wrapped in a white cloth. If you're gonna bury something, at least do it straight from the book. I opened the book of Islamic teachings on how to bury the dead. I said my prayers probably for the first time in five years, and then I buried it.

I stuffed the damn thing deep down the hole.

Hole! Pretty scary word, huh? Haunting, as well. Asshole. Vaginal hole. Whatever the fuck these holes are present for, they might be damned if they only stick around as burial grounds.

I've heard of people who had their breasts die on them before. They usually flush the damn thing down the toilet or shove it down some medicinal cabinet. People, who lose their eyes prematurely, simply bury them deep down their psyches, unable to bear the world without those two round lighthouses.

"People rarely experience vaginal death," I read on a medical journal, "vaginas might get depressed, be prone to self-harm, but death is a rare risk. It only happens in a tiny portion of the population."

I wondered which population they were referring to: the queer population, the female population, the sad population! Po-pu-la-tion! The word sounded so detaching, so eerie, especially since as far as I knew, I was the only member of the vaginal death population.

I tried searching for support groups, or online chat platforms, where one would express how heartbreaking it was to lose a vagina in your forties, when the most erotic moment of your life as a spinster -getting a brand, new vibrator and masturbating to a kinky YouTube video- had just started getting stale and sad, even though you held on to it like dear life.

Nobody understood what it's like to lose a vagina. Nobody understood what it's like to lose an unused vagina, one that's been pretty kept under observation for too damn long.

Why would anybody care if a vagina under self-chastity gets shot, poisoned, or maimed? Why should this be the cover story for some anonymous, neo-feminist magazine?

The fifty dollar question, however, is: Why must the poster girl for dead vaginas be...me?