Episode 2
Adventures in Pantyland

Free the Girl

As a young girl I fancied myself pretty. Certainly feminine. A flouncy dress or better yet a long dress (to the floor) brought out an inner girliness that made me feel right. the cotton brushing against my legs had a certain Cinderella thrill to it.

I got a little older and that thrill became uncomfortable. I rejected it, wearing only pants and tee shirts and I scowled more. I fantasized about hurting the boys who paid me any attention. Mostly because they kicked me or called me names, but also because their attention was like a frilly dress. It made me feel girly.

Dark, and I thought plain, I moved through the years of school, assuming I was smart. Classroom smart, not clever in conversation or pretty. My cheeks were round, my teeth had this unnatural gap. I wasn’t comfortable with boys.

There was no growth of my breasts. They just arrived full blown like adolescence. And with it my period, brown and achy, in a dirty school bathroom. Dreary and uncomfortable.

How I survived being a teenager, I barely know. Dreams I think, and some good friends who allowed me to remain a child just a little longer than some of the others. My mother was a pal for a good part of it. She helped. But she was my mother, and well, in those years that only works part of the time.

Then something happened. The angst lifted. A boy took me out. My girlfriends offered me grownup activities and advice and I didn’t shy away. A flirting arose in me. It was fun and dangerous and true.
From there grew a dark eyed, dark haired laughing girl. A young woman who let the girl out again and showed her off. And with her waking life of adventure, sometimes wrong and icky, sometimes right and juicy, came an intense life of dreaming and fantasy.

If I could allow the girl to live certainly the trees had secret interior lives too. What was hiding behind the perhaps, misperceived, natural world. A kind of lusty inner madness grew within me.

I savored it.

“If I could live it more, maybe all the time….oh please, all you secret gods lurking behind our modern occupations…let me,” I whispered in the night. I begged while driving my broken down car. I pleaded as I sat before a computer at my day job. I thought while I conversed with yet another hopeless blind date over a mediocre dinner.

If you’re driven by your dreams, why not?