The Dark Edge of Wonder

Wonder lives in a sky bursting with stars and in the difficult places too…

The words, dark edge of wonder, came to me while writing into a difficult story.

A few weeks prior, I’d interrupted a family tabletop game of Wingspan to tell my adult daughter, her boyfriend, and my niece and her husband about Torin, the sixteen-year-old boy I wrote a letter to when I was thirteen offering him my virginity.

I’m not sure why I interrupted our game to tell the story, but the combination of a couple glasses of Hennessy, a toke of Dream Walker, and a mid-life desire to claim and reveal more of my darker, wilder, sensual, and once shameful parts took over. They listened, laughed, and gasped a few times at my audacity. It felt good to let those parts of myself out into the room — my sexuality, my desire, my early conditioning to give my body to men so I could say I was loved. It felt good to let the tangled confusion be visible.

A couple days later, I typed Torin’s name into Google to see what would come up. It had been almost 35 years since I’d laid eyes on him. I was curious. I wondered what he looked like now. Was he anything like I remembered? Did he, god forbid, still have that Def Leppard rocker hair that drew me in, entangled me with infatuation? A series of stories popped up. Turns…