While sorting through old things today, I found a diary from my middle school years. Inside was a dried maple leaf. I stared at it for a long time, wondering about the moment it was picked—was it a boy who handed it to you with a sweaty palm, his mind secretly on the small, newly budding breasts beneath your school uniform blouse? Or did you pick it yourself on the way home from school, tucking it into the pages while your legs rubbed together unconsciously, feeling your underwear slowly dampen with a wetness like a first period? We always drape our memories in a sugar-coating of innocence, but dare not admit that beneath every adolescent flutter lies a raw, pungent fantasy of penetration and being entered. What that leaf remembers is never the poetry of autumn, but the pulse of blood beneath the skin where fingers touched it, and the cock in the trousers, hard to the point of pain. Is your earliest memory of 'sex' an 'object'? What does it smell like now?