ONE NIGHT STAND(S)ING IN THE RAIN

The therapy of destruction and distraction.

The diagnosis was heartbreak. The doctors? Bartenders. The prescribed medication? Vodka. And one-night stands? Band-aids. I convinced myself I was healing, but what I didn’t realize was that I wasn’t sure what I was healing into.

In April 2023, I was exposed to the virus. By September, I was bedridden—crying, sleepless, exhausted, mentally unraveling, losing weight, hair, and a sense of self. It was code red, and I was ill-prepared. In the movies, heartbreak is portrayed as poetic—difficult, tragic, and thus, beautiful. The heartbreak becomes art, and art is often romanticized. Unfortunately, I’ve always had a soft spot for art. And it seems I'm not alone in this.

Humans are a paradox. I've known this since childhood, but it’s only recently that I’ve truly grasped the extent of our contradictions. I think its the curse of knowing everything and nothing, at the same time. We’re simultaneously completely different and eerily alike. Predictable and yet predictable in our unpredictability. If I had a dollar for every time a woman swore off a man she would call two days later, or for every man who spoke of his loneliness, only to claim he was done with feelings, I’d be writing this piece in my own self-purchased newspaper.

Instead, I’m here, still puzzled by the eternal cat-and-mouse game between us and pain. Does pain chase us, or do we chase it? Worse still, do we meet it halfway? Can we really become numb to it, as we've all claimed we have at some point, or does it numb us instead?

A friend and I share a painful history with our first sexual experiences. We lost our virginity to men who made us feel uncomfortable in ways that still make our bodies shudder.

“I’m done with sex,” she says, sipping her favorite cocktail. “I’ve had enough. I’m never giving my body to anyone else again.”

As she speaks, I munch on popcorn, silently tallying the number of men I’ve been with since my own bad experience. I start wondering if something’s wrong with me. Our traumatic experiences were similar, but our responses couldn’t have been more different. While she retreated into silence, avoiding the world, I found solace in the chaos of late nights, mainstream music, strangers who pretended to know me, lemon-bitter vodka, cigarette smoke, and the brief distractions of one-night stands. The therapy of destruction and distraction.

I’m standing at my favorite bar, across from the DJ. My second glass of vodka in hand, I’m dancing with my friend. Four groups of men have already flirted with us. I like it here for the first time in my life, I feel like a woman. Wanted. A sexual being. It gives me power. That’s when I see him—Target A.

He’s the most beautiful man in the room. Black curls, dark eyes, a charming smirk, and tall. He has the air of someone who believes he can have any woman, and I want to be the chosen one for the night.

“Sorry,” he says, brushing past me in the crowded bar, trying to make his way to the DJ booth. “I’m going to annoy you a little tonight.”

“You can annoy me all you want,” I reply before my brain can filter it, and he freezes.

I remember thinking, “That’s all it takes?”

“Yes,” my mind says later, as I lie naked in his arms, in a stranger’s bed, a stranger to myself for the first time. The sex wasn’t nearly as good as his looks, but something about it gave me a sense of control—control over my body and my emotions, like I had the power to choose, to leave, to walk away. This, I thought, must be the right way to heal. After all, my friend had isolated herself—missing out on her twenties, retreating into silence—while I ran toward the noise, repeating the same pattern with different men.

Before I had sex for the first time, I thought it was the most romantic thing in the world. How could it not be? The first sex scene I ever saw was Jack and Rose in Titanic. I was also late to the party—most of my friends had already experienced love and sex long before I did. They had boyfriends, girlfriends, and made-out in schoolyards. I had a single bad kiss at 18 and a high school crush that never went anywhere. To me, sex was a distant, unknown concept. Then COVID hit, and by 23, I had read a thousand pages on love and sex but had yet to experience them. Sleeping with strangers seemed like a strange idea, messing with older men was a no-go, and sleeping with multiple men seemed insane. Now, here I was, guilty on all counts, discovering that one-night stands were my favorite form of self-harm.

It’s 4 a.m., and I’m walking home. I’ve just had sex with a stranger I met on Tinder. He treated me well during drinks, and even better in bed. I ask him to drop me off a few blocks from my place because I want to walk.

The night is cold, and my heart begins to race. It starts to rain. Suddenly, I’m crying uncontrollably on the sidewalk, my body shaking. It feels as though someone tore open my stitches and I’m bleeding on the pavement. I had healed, so what the hell is this? I had control. I chose this. I had power.

A year later, I realize I wasn’t healing into myself—I was healing into him. I became him—the man who hurt me, the situation that broke me. Worse still, I knew from the start that I was becoming emotionally unavailable, convinced I had escaped pain, only to discover I had run straight toward it—and it had numbed me.

Does this mean One-night stands are bad? Absolutely no, and they shouldn’t be demonized. Anyone has the right to do what they want with their body and react however they need to their sexual needs. But have you ever watched someone try to smoke for the first time? At first, they don’t even inhale properly, just blowing the smoke in and out, pretending they’re comfortable. And then, when they finally inhale, they choke. That was me after months of pretending I was comfortable. Not to say i’ll never have one again, but its very important to know why you do something and doing it because you want to, not using it a distraction or not fully understanding your own motives and needs.

Perhaps this was part of my healing or a detour on the process. But I’ve learned that highs when you're low only drop you lower when they end. I've learned that the same trauma can affect people in opposite ways—there's no single “right” response. There’s only fight or flight and we all fight differently.