GROWING UP JASON ~ On Second Thought (Patreon)

By the time fall of 2022 arrived, my memory had reduced Dr. Matthew’s words to their core meaning:

That’s what she did. It isn’t who she was, and it isn’t necessarily who she is.

Those words fostered an idea that led to a lot of soul-searching and thinking. Who, exactly, was she when I knew her?

I went back to when we first met in ninth grade and tried to find common threads that would help me answer that question. If I could do that, I thought, I’d better understand why no one else had ever lived up to her memory.

I had to face myself honestly as I did it. What did I really think? What did I really like? What was it about Ailana that had appealed to me in a way no one else ever had?

It was a long, challenging process that forced me to see myself—and everything about our relationship—differently.

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I have to admit that I was trying to align Dr. Matthews’s statement with what had happened. If modeling nude wasn’t who she was or is, then what was it? And who was she?

I started by identifying all the traits that appealed to me.

Her simple approach to faith and life was at the top of the list. She claimed and lived out a simple principle: if you believe something, it should change how you live.

She was humble and genuine. She wasn’t complicated. She wasn’t needy. She gave as much as she asked for in the relationship. She let me spoil her and spoiled me in return. She was gracious and steady. I could go on, but in the weeks that followed, it was her claim about faith that kept coming back to me.

If you believe something, it should change how you live.

In light of that, I had to explore what she believed about posing nude that would make that an acceptable choice to her.

That process took me on a long journey of memories in which I considered how she thought about her body.

In ninth grade, there was a pajama day. She came in regular clothes—as a lot of us had—and one of the other kids asked her where her pajamas were.

“What I sleep in is under all my clothes,” she said.

Later that day, she told Grace and me that she’d been sleeping nude since her mother left, and mentioned some health benefits she’d found.

She went on to say, “If you’re not naked at least ten hours a day, you’re doing it wrong.”

“How do you figure that!” Grace shook her head.

“Getting ready for bed, sleeping, waking up, shower, hair, makeup… all that adds up.”

She wasn’t ashamed or embarrassed by her skin.

I remember that in the fall of tenth grade, we were at photography club, and she turned her back to me. “Scratch my back.”

She pulled up her sweatshirt above the beltline. I obliged.

“Higher.”

I realized she didn’t have on a bra and was embarrassed. “Oh… sorry…”

“What?” she asked.

“I… never mind.”

“Why are you sorry? What did you do?”

“Nothing. Never mind.”

She forced me to say that I hadn’t realized she didn’t have on a bra and that I was surprised.

“Oh,” she replied. “Obviously, I don’t need one. I never wear a bra.”

She didn’t flinch one bit. Her nonchalant reaction to my being aware that she was braless—always, apparently—says a lot about her thoughts.

Looking back, by the summer before our junior year, in 2013, we were probably dating. I’d already more or less asked her to go to the homecoming dance.

One Saturday, my dad took us to Indiana Dunes Beach, and we were swimming and sunbathing. At one point, Ailana rolled over onto her stomach and turned her head to me.

“Untie me. I don’t want lines.”

So me, a sixteen-year-old guy, tentatively reached over and untied the back strings of her swimsuit top.

“Neck too.”

I followed her instructions again, and as a result, I was sitting beside a girl who was, for all practical purposes, topless. That reality did not escape my awareness, but if it was even a passing thought to Ailana, I couldn’t tell.

Sometime later, when it was time for her to change positions, she retied the neck while still face down, then held the top in place as she turned away from me and tied the back.

As I look back on the years we were together, I suppose I became comfortable with her relaxed approach—or at least far less uncomfortable…

The events of the surprise rainstorm at Buckley and the moment in the log cabin have been told. They, too, show that she didn’t think anything about taking off her shirt and exposing her bare back.

After we were officially dating, I’d say that she was actually—this will be a hard sell—both more relaxed and more cautious. We agreed on some specific physical boundaries long before we ventured past them, but there was nothing nervous about our cuddling.

In the fall of our freshman year in college, in 2015, we both had a free Saturday and agreed to make a day of it. I arrived to pick her up a little earlier than planned.

She came to the door in just a bathrobe. “I overslept. I had to work late last night. I just got out of bed.”

By then, of course, I knew she always slept nude. So I knew that there was nothing but Ailana under the robe. She let me in and I followed her to the living room. She asked if I wanted some coffee or tea.

Before I answered, Allen, her dad, came in. “Ailana! Go put some clothes on… Really?”

Ailana rolled her eyes. “I’m fine. There’s nothing wrong with this.”

Allen shook his head and said sternly, “Go get ready. I’ll make Jason some coffee.”

There were lots of little moments over the years like these—all of which came to this point: Ailana’s views on nudity were very relaxed. She didn’t think it mattered, or at least wished it didn’t.

When I had worked that out, the next step was to connect it to her conviction that if you believe something, it changes how you live. By extension not believing something…

Ailana didn’t see nudity as any paramount violation of decency. It was socially disallowed and she understood what was acceptable. She conformed to the expectations of culture.

I’d be surprised if she was even fully aware of how casual she was about it. I doubt she ever put her feelings into words.

So, the anatomy book… the breast augmentation ad… even the gallery photos… I’m convinced that, to Ailana, they were no big deal. So what if someone saw me? What difference does it make?

So, after a lot of thinking about it, I came to a conclusion.

Ailana’s beliefs did, indeed, change how she lived. So, had she believed posing nude was wrong, she wouldn’t have done it. She may not have said it, or even put her attitude into words, but she saw nothing inherently wrong with the modeling.

No more so than she thought it wrong to have me untie her bikini, take off her shirt in the cabin, or come to the door in a bathrobe. None of that remotely crossed her mind as being wrong. If it had, she wouldn’t have done it.

Only after others reacted did she stop and think about what she had done. Her decision that she wouldn’t do that anymore is telling. Seeing what she did through the eyes of others—Naomi and me, for two—changed her view.

So, it truly was something she did. And possibly, it was a reflection of some unexamined aspect of who she was—an expression of her lack of concern.

But her attitude changed and so did her behavior.

I’ll speak back into the past from knowledge I’ve gained in the last year. Ailana told me that Naomi spoke strongly against what she had done, for a lot of reasons. Ailana said that, between how I reacted and what Naomi had said, she’d realized the nude work was a mistake.

But in 2022, I didn’t know that. Still, I had come to see what she had done from a different perspective.

I can’t say I was ready to change how I felt about it. And even if I had been, I am sure—I am completely sure—that I wouldn’t have known what to do about it.

So I’ll end this chapter there, with me having a better overall understanding, yet still with no answers.

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