It's been 8 years, eight long years. That's one heck of a long dry spell. Purity has its place and you know me I try to stay clean but some times I think that abstinence is the worst offense, my worst sin, and so with that mindset I decided to slip into the wet and grimy thing and live a little.

Awkward is how it started, then that mounting anticipation one gets when you know no matter what happens that at least there'll be that moment where it just feels soooo good.

Going early was not my plan but anticipation got the best of me, so in the dark morning hours and in a heavy rain I set out to catch the bus. Two transfers later on the final leg of the route the bus' engine groaned as it climbed the steepest hill in town. Knowing what lay at the top caught my breath and that made me giggle some of my anticipation towards the fogged up window. It was like the first time all over again.

Afterwards, at the transfer center, sitting in a radiant glow of pleasure with a girlish grin I couldn't contain I spied the young couple by the bus door. Her back was to me so that I could just see a tiny bit of her olive complexion. He was flush with an internal heat, his smoky eyes locked on hers and slowly ever so slowly he moved in to place the softest kiss on her lips, and I watched as I always do when I see such tender moments, with a deep exuding emotion that billows up inside me and escapes out of me in a whisper the only word to describe it, "Ahhh."

One tender kiss and then another more intimate with lips apart, "I love you," he said to her in a tone that would melt the devil's heart. "I love you too," she replied so demure and genteel.

He turned to leave her and my eyes followed his tiny frame drowning in a hooded jacket ten times too big, it's waistband nearly to his knees, his sneakers scuffing the ground, blue jean bottoms under heel soaked from the wet ground.

And then she did it, shook me from my dreamy state of purity and good, from the school girl delusions that everything is a bed of roses, pretty in pink, gilt with gold, lined with silver, that dreams really do come true, and of all the possibilities that everything might work out just like a fairytale where we can all live happily ever after, and she did it in one action. She spit.

As I'd followed the young man down the terminal she'd looked way, cleared her throat, bent forward and spit hard on the ground. Her head jerked back to see if the bus driver had seen her, then to glance at the back of the now jogging boy, and as the back of her hand wiped across her face leaving the traces of a sneer her eyes found mine through the glass door.

Some thing in me recoiled and set me back in my seat, Oh Shit! shrieked in my brain and my brow creased hard at the echo as I tried to make sense of it all, my eyes staring her down for answers. Just before she passed she glanced up at me with a smile that sat above the most sinister of eyes. It was the kind of smile that revealed that only we shared this secret. A secret I do not know.

I could've mailed my ballot in, most folks did that days ago, but there were some troubles with it; I was inactive and had moved, our county went from polling sites to a by-mail-only system in the last eight years and after all the phone calls they still couldn't seem to get my ballot to me by mail so I eventually had to go down to the Auditor's Office and pick it up myself.

I figured that was my punishment for being such a lazy apathetic citizen and some how the effort made it seem more important, important enough to take my ballot back to the Auditor's Office at the top of the hill yesterday, despite the long bus ride and the lousy weather.

Eight years ago I had been so devastated by the political process that I gave up on it all together. We broke up, me and politics, me and patriotism, me and my country. But you can't fight a thing you belong to, a thing that belongs to you, that is a part of you, that is you – so by the time I made my way back to that ballot box I had forgiven and forgotten all the hurtful feelings, all the potential for pain and I'd fallen into that foggy fantasy land of hopes and dreams and fairytale endings.

She slipped into the seat across from me on the empty bus and slipped her earbuds in. Her long dark hair had fallen across her face shielding her from my gaze. A million times I asked her in my mind, "What does it mean?" until she looked up at me and in an instant I knew. It means you never know. You just never know.

I like to think I stepped up and kissed my country on the lips as pure and sure as that young boy kissed that girl when I slipped my ballot into that box and however it turns out, at least on my end, my heart was true.