Of course, this couldn't be true
It wasn’t an easy choice. Bicycle or vagina?
She gave her 3 speed, have-to-get-off-and-push-up-hills luminous green bike, to her neighbour, young Alice. Alice carried my friend’s youth away, in the luminous green wire basket on the front. With her silver blonde hair streaming behind her, she looked a treat, a true Alice in Wonderland. My friend lives on the Sunshine Coast, a wonderland. Alice fits in well there.
The tax man bought my friend that bicycle, when he re-gifted her pennies one year. She was living in New Farm, Brisbane. A top place for wonky old cyclists such as her. She rode the magnificent circuit, over the river boardwalk, past the city skyline and across ‘Their Story’ Bridge.
She and her new husband met crossing its clunking iron. He remembers howling at the moon, joyous and drunk with Greek friends when he first came to Australia from Holland. Her memories are sweet and sour, with people found and loved and people lost and loved, all in just a few short years. Blue and yellow City Cat ferries cruise under it, tropical lightning cuts through it and crazy flag waving tourists climb up and over it. The luminous green bicycle had traced Their Story, for many magical hours.
Brisbane bike-ways are flat as a maple syrup pancake. Sunshine Coast roads are not. They have sneaky inclines that break knees.
Five hundred dollars on an arthroscope, with a second looming, and the luminous green bike was tossed over the fence to Alice in Wonderland.
My friend tried a yellow tricycle. Her tiny granddaughter screamed,
’Three wheels are for KIDS!’
Such a decision, a new vagina or a super six speed, retro, pink, easy leg-over bicycle? Both spoke of romance.
My friend was introduced to Mona Lisa. Italian and silent but graceless and ugly. At two thousand dollars a pop, the laser machine promised a baby face vagina, pink and luscious.
You will never catch a woman chatting merrily over a chardy about her V… A…
Mum and Aunty will never whisper the words to little girls when the men are elsewhere. Love, marriages, babies, hot flushes, leaky bladders…they’ll laugh, caution and advise over gallons of tea and coffee, ad nauseum.
‘Atrophied vaginas…..oh is that the time dear......?’
My friend had her entire womb dragged from her protesting body by a horse doctor, fifteen years ago.
‘Tally Ho!” the equine gyno cried. “Pretty useless at your age, better out than in…ha…ha.”
She tossed my friend a box of HRT, dismissing the meek questions on side-effects.“Better a short, fabulous life than a miserable, long one girl. Giddy up!” My friend plumped for longevity.
Her husband’s penis however, 15 years later, was attended to as a King. He recovered from the prostate cancer. She was as green as her bicycle, envious of the love, care and strategic attention given to his penis. Pert and alert was the aim. Pert and very alert was the result. The medico’s commanded her vagina to attend his regal structure; it was her wifely duty.
They didn’t bother to ask about her fragile, angry, sore muffin.
When Viagra first pole vaulted its way out of a doctor’s door, atrophied vaginas crept in.
‘Stop throwing this stuff around willy-nilly.’ They begged for mercy or sleeping pills.
So...for two thousand dollars, donated by this year’s tax man, my friend could get the super-bike and throw on an engine that would have her giddy-upping a storm. Or she could mount the stirrups with Ms Lisa and hopefully ride off into another precious kind of sunset.
Well, my friend signed the waiver...’blindness from laser burns’ being sighted as a possible side effect…bloody what?…paid her pennies and is waiting to discover the real secret of the old girl’s smile.
Praise the lord that this ‘in the closet’ atrophy thing is not happening to me…..I could never tell anyone, and certainly never write about it publicly.
