La Rentrée - Day 15

Et voilà, my ephemeral love is gone, even sooner than the red roses of passion are gone. No, not him. In that delicate field, he has both directness and refined manners that I never, or very rarely, saw among much more educated, upper class men. How much paradoxical it is to say that it is religion that tears us apart. 
Whatever Polish journals might say about it, France is not a caliphate, and truly the Islamic sexual ethics as I saw during this brief survey oscillate flatly around the zero line. It is so strange that I must come here to say this. After talking intimately to hundreds of men, I did not come across a single fundamentalist. 
It is a strange feeling, as if I were the last woman on earth.

Overall, all these adventures, sweet and bitter, make me understand what actually my longing is, and what an exorbitant price I am disposed to pay for that utter luxury of having a God.
A God? Or perhaps that minoritarian, elitist, yet entirely earthly privilege of having a sexual dignity. Acquired at an exorbitant price of tears and living flesh torn apart.
Yet in a long lineage of women, I am the first one to have a sexual dignity. My mother, and the mother of my mother, and the mother of the mother of my mother had neither sharaf nor effective control over their bodies; they lived lame, dirty and bitter sexual lives. With all those restrictions I've imposed upon myself, I am not only better served, but also infinitely freer to give myself to whoever I chose than any of them. Infinitely more senhora de mim (just to use the expression of the Portuguese feminist poet, Maria Teresa Horta). And all this made possible, since I've decided to leave behind the country and culture in which I was born. Where many of these acquired freedoms are about to be withdrawn just as I write these words. 
I distinctly remember a lesson about sex that my mother gave me when I was a teenager. Myślisz, że seks to coś pięknego, she said, bo jeszcze nikt cię nie zerżnął tak, żeby cię wszystko bolało. It wouldn't be unfundamented to say that it is against the crudeness of this sentence that I converted, years later, to the religion of God. Because I wanted to live and to love differently, far away from my country, culture and spiritual void into which I had been born. Because I wanted to believe, against all evidence if necessary, that sex is beautiful and brings the grace of that God who loves beauty.  
Last woman over the face of the earth as I may be, I stick to my sexual dignity so tightly, because I still believe that a moment might come in which such things matter. 
In conclusion, the exorbitant price I pay is the price of hope. The price of keeping intact the belief in things that one day may matter.