Bathroom Monologue: What You Want

"They're ugly,” I smirk as our car passes the girls. “They're all lesbians."

My aunt gawks at me in her flannel. I’ve never teased her about this subject before.

"Hey. There are beautiful lesbians."

"Ah, they're all hags."

If she wasn’t a pacifist, she would have slugged me.

"Sorry," I said without a trace of sorrow. "But you know what they say: you don't want what you can't have."

"God, and you’re in college. It's 'you want what you can't have.'"

"Why would you want what you can't have? That'd be moronic. You want what you can have. That way you get it and you're happy."

She turned us off the campus road, towards where there are clean restaurants and other places you’d visit with an aunt. "Not being able to have it is what makes it attractive."

"So if I go jogging for an hour,” I say, pointing to the side of the road, “I'll only want a bottle of water if I can't have one? It's a dollar at the college store. I’ve got a dollar."

“But the things you really want are what you can’t have.”

“I’m going to college. This is, what? Thirty thousand a year? If there was something else I really wanted, I could probably swing the loans.”

“You’ll get it when you’re older.”

“And when I do? I’ll have wanted it.”

An hour later, I paid for lunch. Eleven years later I finished paying off my loans. In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have mouthed off to my only rich relative like that.