Description

SHE WAS A VIRGIN

CATEGORY
Human Stories / Sexuality / Loneliness / Isolation

PRIMARY EMOTION
Loneliness

ALSO FITS
Insecurity / Regret / Intimacy / Missed Opportunities / Aging / Imagination / Dark Humour / Emotional Isolation

WHAT THIS SONG IS ABOUT

“She Was a Virgin” follows an imaginary woman through an entire lifetime without sexual intimacy, but the longer the story goes, the clearer it becomes that sex is only part of what she missed.
She never became comfortable enough with herself to let somebody get close.
She couldn’t look people eye to eye. She was shy. She didn’t feel secure in her own body. Even when an opportunity for something as simple as a kiss appeared, she declined it. Then she lived with the regret.
That’s where this song became interesting to me.
I could have written a bunch of sexual jokes about somebody being a virgin. There is definitely some of that in here. I wasn’t exactly trying to behave myself when I came up with an empty parking lot that nobody ever parked in.
But underneath those lines is somebody getting older.
The parking lot stays empty.
The space stays vacant.
The doors stay locked.
And eventually there isn’t any more time.
She dies the same way she lived.
Untouched.

THE STORY BEHIND THE SONG

This one started in jail.
I was lying on a steel bed with a mattress that was probably about an inch thick. My back was killing me. Every bone in my body felt it.
Then this thought came into my head:
She was a virgin.
That was basically it.
There wasn’t some woman I knew whose story I decided to tell. Nobody came to me and told me about spending her whole life as a virgin. I didn’t read it somewhere.
My imagination just grabbed those words and started running.
I started thinking about what it would actually mean if somebody remained a virgin for her entire life.
What would stop her?
Was she shy?
Was she uncomfortable with her body?
Did opportunities come along that she couldn’t bring herself to accept?
Would she regret them afterward?
Would loneliness become normal?
And then my mind started playing with the sexual side of it.
That’s where some of the stranger lines came from.
A dry spell.
A wet spot.
An empty parking lot.
A vacant space nobody ever faced or embraced.
I knew exactly what I was suggesting. I’m not going to pretend those lines accidentally became sexual.
They were supposed to be.
But once my imagination started moving, something else happened. The woman became more than the joke.
She started getting older.
That changed the song.

WHY I WROTE THIS SONG

I wrote it because once that first idea entered my head, I wanted to see where it went.
That’s one of the things I enjoy most about writing. I don’t always need to know the destination before I start.
Sometimes I get a sentence.
Sometimes I get a title.
Sometimes I get an image in my head.
Then I start asking questions.
With this one, the question became pretty simple:
What if she really did remain a virgin for her entire life?
Once I asked that, I already knew where the story eventually had to go.
It didn’t take me very long to write because the imagination was doing most of the work. One idea led naturally into another. The sexual wordplay gave me images to work with, while the character herself gave me somewhere deeper to take them.
By the end, I wasn’t writing only about whether somebody had sex.
I was writing about somebody who never managed to cross that distance between herself and another person.

WHY THIS MATTERS TO ME

This isn’t autobiographical, and the woman isn’t based on somebody from my life.
What matters to me is the creativity behind it.
I was sitting in jail with very little around me. A steel bed. A thin mattress. Pain. Walls.
But nobody could lock up my imagination.
That’s something I discovered again and again while I was incarcerated.
Your physical world can become incredibly small while your mind can still travel anywhere it wants.
This time it invented a woman.
It gave her a personality.
It gave her insecurities.
It gave her missed opportunities.
It gave her some pretty crude metaphors.
And then it followed her all the way to the end of her life.
That’s why I don’t dismiss songs like this just because they begin with a strange or sexual idea. Sometimes you follow an idea far enough and discover something underneath it that wasn’t obvious when you started.

WHY THIS SONG FITS MOITA

Because MOITA isn’t supposed to contain only one kind of story.
Some songs come directly from my life.
Some come from history.
Some come from anger.
Some come from love.
Some come from things I’ve witnessed.
And some begin because my imagination throws something ridiculous into my head while I’m lying on a steel bed.
“She Was a Virgin” belongs here because it shows that side of my writing.
I’m willing to take an idea somewhere uncomfortable.
I’m willing to laugh at parts of it.
I’m willing to be crude when the song calls for it.
But I’m also willing to follow that same idea until the humour disappears and something human is left behind.
That’s what happened here.

READ THIS FIRST

Don’t read the title and assume you already know the song.
Yes, it’s sexual.
Yes, some of the metaphors are deliberately suggestive.
Yes, there’s dark humour in it.
But listen to what happens to the woman while all of that is going on.
She can’t connect.
She can’t become comfortable with herself.
She turns away from opportunities.
She regrets them.
Time keeps moving whether she’s ready or not.
Eventually those sexual metaphors aren’t very funny anymore.
The empty parking lot becomes an empty life.
And the last line doesn’t need a metaphor at all.

FULL LYRICS
SHE WAS A VIRGIN

She lived for a long time, never looked at anyone eye to eye
She was the shy one till the day she said goodbye
Nervous feelings underneath her breath
She never felt secure in her body. Her heat was cold.
She feels alone in the world. She has no control.
She was as dry as she was old
She was a virgin from the very start
She was a virgin. She couldn’t find her heart.
She was a virgin never laid in anyone’s bed
She was a virgin never ever got wet
She was a virgin. She never fell in love.
She was a virgin she couldn’t find who she was
She was a virgin She never flirted within her soul.
She was a virgin. She was an empty hole.
Cries from your positive days
Combatting her negative ways
She went on a limb, and no one got close to being in
Dry spell she’s burning in hell
Sometimes a wet spot, but always an empty parking lot
A vacant space that no one ever faced or embraced
She felt in and out of place she tries she couldn’t meet face-to-face
The closest she got was a kiss that she declined
And her regrets are always on her mind
Her days are long, lonely feelings, deep inside
Draining all her emotions, but her legs held tight
She never felt secure in her own body. Her heat was cold.
She feels alone in the world. She has no control.
She was as dry as she was old
She was a virgin from the very start
She was a virgin. She couldn’t find her heart.
She was a virgin never laid in anyone’s bed
She was a virgin never ever got wet
She was a virgin. She never fell in love.
She was a virgin she couldn’t find who she was
She was a virgin She never flirted within her soul.
She was a virgin. She was an empty hole.
Cries from your positive days
Combatting her negative ways
She went on a limb, and no one got close to being in
Dry spell she’s burning in hell
Sometimes a wet spot, but always an empty parking lot
A vacant space that no one ever faced or embraced
Still untouched by hands, but scarred by time, she learned that emptiness can make the loudest sound.
Years kept passing like locked doors in a hall,
She learned how to breathe, never learned how to fall,
Still searching for warmth in a world gone cold,
Still waiting to feel what she’s never been told
She went on a limb, and no one got close to being in
Dry spell she’s burning in hell
Sometimes a wet spot, but always an empty parking lot
A vacant space that no one ever faced or embraced
She died a virgin

SECTION ONE
LYRIC JOURNEY
PART 1

“She lived for a long time, never looked at anyone eye to eye”
This is where we meet her.
Not in a bedroom. Not through sex. Not through the word virgin.
We meet her through the way she looks at other people—or more accurately, the way she doesn’t.
She has lived for a long time without being comfortable looking somebody eye to eye. Right away, that tells us there is something going on underneath the surface. She’s withdrawn. She’s uncomfortable. Maybe she’s afraid of what another person might see if she lets them look too closely.
Eye contact seems like such a small thing until you’re somebody who struggles with it.
For this woman, distance begins before anybody ever touches her.
“She was the shy one till the day she said goodbye”
Now the opening line becomes heavier.
This isn’t describing a shy period she eventually grows out of.
“Till the day she said goodbye” tells us this stays with her.
We’re only at the beginning of the song, but I’ve already quietly told you where her story ends.
She lives this way for the rest of her life.
That matters because shyness by itself isn’t a tragedy. Plenty of shy people live happy lives, fall in love, have relationships, raise families or simply enjoy being who they are.
Her problem is different.
Her shyness becomes part of a larger barrier she never learns how to cross.
“Nervous feelings underneath her breath”
I wanted the nervousness close to her.
Not announced.
Not screamed.
Underneath her breath.
That’s how I see this woman moving through life. Much of what she’s experiencing happens internally.
Other people might not even understand what she’s fighting.
That’s one of the difficult things about insecurity. Somebody can appear perfectly normal from across the room while having an entirely different conversation going on inside themselves.
Should I say something?
Should I look at him?
What if I embarrass myself?
What if he doesn’t like me?
What if he does?
That last question can be frightening too.
Because if somebody actually likes you, eventually you may have to let them closer.
“She never felt secure in her body. Her heat was cold.”
Now we move from social discomfort into the body.
That is an important step in this song.
She doesn’t simply struggle with other people. She struggles with herself.
If you’re uncomfortable inside your own body, intimacy can become much more complicated. Being close to somebody means allowing yourself to be seen.
Clothes come off.
Defences come down.
Somebody gets close enough to notice the things you may have spent years criticizing about yourself.
For the woman I imagined, that security never develops.
Then comes the contradiction:
“Her heat was cold.”
There’s still heat.
She’s alive.
She has a body.
She has feelings.
Later in the song, I make it pretty obvious that physical response isn’t completely absent.
But whatever heat exists inside her never becomes the warmth she’s looking for.
Something keeps turning cold.
“She feels alone in the world. She has no control.”
This is where I don’t want the listener blaming her too easily.
From the outside, somebody might say:
Then go meet somebody.
Say yes to the kiss.
Go on a date.
Open the door.
Life isn’t always that simple when you’re the person trapped inside the problem.
She feels as though she has no control.
That doesn’t necessarily mean she literally has none. It means that’s how life feels from inside her.
And feelings can become powerful enough to dictate behaviour.
That’s part of the private hell I was creating for her.
Nobody has chained her to anything.
Yet she can’t seem to move.
“She was as dry as she was old”
Now I deliberately break some of that seriousness.
Here comes the Joe side of the writing.
She’s getting old.
She’s still a virgin.
She’s dry.
I knew exactly what I was doing with that line.
There’s a sexual joke sitting right on the surface, and I’m perfectly happy leaving it there.
But notice what has happened before I make the joke.
I’ve already introduced her loneliness.
Her insecurity.
Her nervousness.
Her inability to connect.
That’s important.
If I’d opened the song with nothing but jokes about an old virgin, we’d have a completely different character.
Instead, by the time I call her dry, we already know there’s a human being underneath the joke.
And now we enter the chorus.
“She was a virgin from the very start”
Of course she was.
Everybody is.
That’s part of what makes the line almost funny in its simplicity.
But the important word isn’t necessarily “start.”
It’s what happens when the chorus keeps going.
Because her starting point becomes her finishing point.
Most people hearing this for the first time still don’t know that.
I do.
I’m already writing toward it.
“She was a virgin. She couldn’t find her heart.”
Here the song immediately refuses to stay purely physical.
I could have followed “virgin” with another sexual line.
Instead, I go to her heart.
She can’t find it.
That tells you what kind of virginity I’m actually interested in exploring.
The untouched body is visible.
The untouched emotional life is underneath it.
She hasn’t found the part of herself capable of reaching outward and saying:
I want you close to me.
“She was a virgin never laid in anyone’s bed”
Now we’re physical again.
Nobody’s bed.
No sexual relationship.
No night where that boundary finally disappears.
The repetition of “She was a virgin” starts becoming almost like a label attached to her.
Virgin.
Virgin.
Virgin.
But each line adds another piece to what that label means in her particular life.
“She was a virgin never ever got wet”
There’s no point pretending that line is anything other than sexual.
It is.
I was having fun.
But later I complicate it myself when I write:
“Sometimes a wet spot.”
That contradiction actually tells us something.
I’m not writing a medical description of this woman’s body. I’m using exaggerated sexual language to describe the emptiness of her sexual life.
That’s different.
The song isn’t a clinical report.
It’s imagination.
And imagination is allowed to exaggerate, contradict, joke and then suddenly turn serious.
That’s exactly what this song does.
“She was a virgin. She never fell in love.”
This is the line that changes everything around it.
Never having sex is one thing.
Never falling in love is something else.
Now we’re talking about an entire category of human experience she never reaches.
And again, I’m not saying everybody must fall in love to have a meaningful life.
I’m talking about this woman.
We’ve already been told she’s lonely.
That’s why this matters.
She’s not standing proudly outside romantic love saying, I don’t need that.
She’s on the outside wondering why she can’t get in.
“She was a virgin she couldn’t find who she was”
That may be an even bigger problem.
Before you can comfortably share yourself with somebody, it helps to have some relationship with yourself.
She doesn’t.
She’s insecure in her body.
She struggles face-to-face.
She’s nervous.
She’s lonely.
Now she doesn’t even know who she is.
The song is slowly taking virginity away from being the cause of her problems.
It’s becoming one of the results of everything else happening inside her.
That’s an important difference.
“She was a virgin She never flirted within her soul.”
I wasn’t interested only in whether she walked into a bar and flirted with somebody.
I’m taking it inward.
She doesn’t flirt with possibility.
She doesn’t allow herself to play with the idea of intimacy comfortably enough to follow it somewhere.
There’s no emotional dance.
No surrender.
No opening.
Even her soul keeps its distance.
“She was a virgin. She was an empty hole.”
And then I come crashing straight back down from the soul to the hole.
That’s me.
I can go from something emotional to something crude without asking permission.
Sexually, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
But we’ve travelled far enough into her character now that “empty” carries more than one meaning.
Her sexual space is empty.
Her bed is empty.
Her romantic life is empty.
Something inside her is empty.
One line can carry all of those things without me having to choose only one.
“Cries from your positive days / Combatting her negative ways”
Now we’re moving deeper into the fight inside her.
There are positive possibilities around her.
Maybe there were good days.
Maybe opportunities.
Maybe moments when she could imagine something different.
But her negative patterns keep fighting back.
That’s the battle.
Not virgin against sex.
Not woman against man.
It’s possibility against the part of herself that keeps closing the door.
“She went on a limb, and no one got close to being in”
She tries.
That’s important.
I didn’t make her completely passive.
At some point she goes out on a limb.
But even when she moves beyond her comfort zone, nobody gets close enough to cross that final boundary.
The wording is deliberately suggestive again.
“Being in.”
I don’t need to draw anybody a diagram.
But emotionally, nobody gets in either.
That’s why the sexual and emotional meanings keep travelling together.
“Dry spell she’s burning in hell”
This is her hell.
I’m not talking about God punishing a virgin.
I’m not making a religious judgment about sex.
She’s burning inside the life she can’t seem to change.
A dry spell normally sounds temporary.
A month.
A year.
Maybe several years.
For her, the dry spell becomes the story of her life.
That’s why it becomes hell.
Not because sex is something she’s obligated to have.
Because the song has already told us she’s unhappy with the absence.
“Sometimes a wet spot, but always an empty parking lot”
Here’s the line where my imagination really started having fun.
A wet spot.
An empty parking lot.
I was lying on that steel bed and once this kind of imagery started coming, I knew where I could take it.
The sexual meaning is intentional.
Her body may occasionally respond.
The parking lot still stays empty.
Nobody parks there.
That’s the crude version.
But there’s also something almost visual about an empty parking lot.
Think about one late at night.
Nothing moving.
No headlights.
No people.
Just empty spaces waiting for somebody who never arrives.
Suddenly the joke can look lonely.
That’s what I like about the image.
“A vacant space that no one ever faced or embraced”
And I keep pushing it.
Nobody faced it.
Yes, there’s a sexual meaning there too.
I knew what I meant.
Nobody ever got face first with her.
Nobody embraced that part of her physically.
But “embraced” gives me the doorway back into the emotional story.
Because ultimately nobody embraces the woman either.
The body remains untouched.
The person remains unreachable.
And that’s where the first major movement of the song leaves us.
We’ve gone from a woman who won’t look somebody in the eye to a vacant space nobody has ever entered, faced or embraced.
The distance has been there from the beginning.
Now we understand how deep it goes.

SECTION ONE
LYRIC JOURNEY
PART 2

“She felt in and out of place she tries she couldn’t meet face-to-face”
Now we come back to the woman herself.
The first part of the song established the pattern. She was shy, uncomfortable in her body, lonely, sexually untouched and emotionally closed off.
But this line tells us something important:
She tries.
I don’t want to lose those two words.
This isn’t a woman who simply decided she wanted nothing to do with anybody and happily lived that decision.
She attempts to move toward people.
Then something stops her.
She feels in place one moment and out of place the next. Maybe she gets enough courage to move forward, then loses it when another person is actually standing in front of her.
That’s where “face-to-face” matters.
At the beginning she couldn’t look anyone eye to eye.
Now she still can’t comfortably meet somebody face-to-face.
The problem hasn’t moved very far.
“The closest she got was a kiss that she declined”
Finally, somebody gets close.
Not metaphorically.
Not an imaginary possibility.
A kiss.
That’s significant because until now we could wonder whether nobody had ever shown any interest in her.
Now we know there was at least one moment when physical intimacy came close enough for her to make a decision.
And she declined it.
She had every right to.
Nobody owes another person a kiss.
But the next line is what changes how we understand her decision.
“And her regrets are always on her mind”
She regrets it.
That’s the difference.
I’m not standing outside the song telling her she should have accepted that kiss.
She’s telling us through her regret that she wishes something had been different.
Maybe she wishes she’d taken the chance.
Maybe she wishes she’d been less afraid.
Maybe she doesn’t even know whether accepting that kiss would have led anywhere.
That’s one of the cruel things about regret.
You can replay a moment thousands of times, but you can’t go back and test the other decision.
That kiss might have changed her life.
It might have changed nothing.
She’ll never know.
And because she never knows, the possibility can stay alive in her mind much longer than the actual kiss ever would have lasted.
“Her days are long, lonely feelings, deep inside”
Now time starts becoming noticeable.
Long days.
Lonely feelings.
Everything still happens deep inside.
That has followed her from the beginning.
The nervous feelings were underneath her breath.
Her insecurity was inside her body.
Now the loneliness is deep inside her.
She’s carrying an enormous private world that nobody else seems able to enter.
And when you’re lonely, a day can feel very long.
When you’re waiting for something that never comes, time doesn’t always move quickly.
“Draining all her emotions, but her legs held tight”
There’s the sexual language again.
Her legs stay closed.
The physical boundary remains.
But by now those closed legs almost become a picture of the rest of her.
Everything is held tight.
Her body.
Her emotions.
Her fear.
Her regret.
Her identity.
She doesn’t release much of anything.
The loneliness is draining her emotionally, yet the defence remains stronger than the desire to change.
That’s a terrible position to live in.
Wanting something and resisting it at the same time.
“She never felt secure in her own body. Her heat was cold.”
We’ve heard this before.
But now we know more.
That’s why repeated lyrics don’t always need a completely new explanation, but they can carry a different weight when the story around them has changed.
The first time we heard this, her insecurity was part of our introduction to her.
Now we’ve seen the consequence.
Somebody came close enough for a kiss.
She declined.
She regretted it.
The insecurity isn’t theoretical anymore.
It has affected something that happened in her life.
And still:
“Her heat was cold.”
The contradiction survives.
Whatever desire exists cannot overcome whatever keeps freezing it.
“She feels alone in the world. She has no control.”
The first time this sounded like a description.
Now it sounds closer to a pattern.
She has tried.
She has had at least one opportunity.
She has made a decision she regrets.
Yet she still feels unable to change direction.
That’s why “no control” belongs here.
From outside her life, somebody might see choices everywhere.
From inside her life, she may see walls.
Those two perspectives can exist at the same time.
“She was as dry as she was old”
And she’s older now.
That matters more the second time.
The first time the line gives us a crude little connection between age and her sexual life.
Now the song has begun showing us time passing.
The dry spell isn’t just continuing.
Her life is continuing with it.
Every repetition adds another stretch of time.
“She was a virgin from the very start”
The chorus returns.
Same words.
Different place in her life.
That’s why I don’t need to reinvent the meaning of every repeated line.
The important thing is what has happened between the choruses.
We now know she had a kiss she could have accepted.
We know she regrets declining it.
So when the song again says:
“She was a virgin,”
there’s now a specific missed moment sitting behind those words.
“She was a virgin. She couldn’t find her heart.”
Her heart is still missing.
Nothing in the second verse solved that.
She hasn’t suddenly discovered love.
She hasn’t become comfortable with herself.
The chorus returns almost like proof that she’s still standing in the same place while time keeps moving around her.
“She was a virgin never laid in anyone’s bed”
Still no bed.
Still no lover.
Still nobody beside her.
A bed is interesting because it can represent more than sex.
You sleep there.
You wake up there.
You can talk there.
Laugh there.
Fight there.
Hold somebody there.
Comfort somebody there.
For her, none of that shared intimacy enters the story.
The sexual meaning is obvious, but the loneliness beside it is getting louder.
“She was a virgin never ever got wet”
Again, I don’t need to pretend the line isn’t crude.
It is.
But because we’ve already encountered the contradiction of “sometimes a wet spot,” the song is clearly speaking in exaggeration rather than trying to give us some literal biological record of this fictional woman.
That’s part of the personality of the writing.
Serious.
Crude.
Sad.
Funny.
Then serious again.
I don’t want to remove one of those sides just to make the song easier to categorize.
“She was a virgin. She never fell in love.”
This line hurts more now.
Because we’ve seen the kiss.
There was at least a doorway.
She never walked through it.
Would that kiss have become love?
Nobody knows.
But now when we hear “She never fell in love,” we’re aware that opportunities may have existed somewhere along the way.
That’s very different from saying love simply never came near her.
“She was a virgin she couldn’t find who she was”
And this remains the deeper problem.
Even if somebody wonderful had appeared, would she have been ready?
That’s one of the questions the song leaves open.
You can meet the right person at the wrong time.
You can also meet somebody while you’re still fighting so much inside yourself that you can’t recognize what is standing in front of you.
She still hasn’t found herself.
So how easily can she give herself to somebody else?
“She was a virgin She never flirted within her soul.”
Again, the closed body and closed emotional life travel together.
There isn’t enough playfulness inside her to explore possibility.
She doesn’t seem capable of saying:
Maybe.
Let’s see.
What happens if I trust this?
What happens if I let somebody closer?
For somebody like her, those questions may feel dangerous rather than exciting.
“She was a virgin. She was an empty hole.”
The emptiness is older now too.
That’s what repetition can do when a song is moving through time.
Same hole.
Same emptiness.
More years behind it.
And at this point the word “empty” is becoming more important than the sexual joke.
Because we’ve now spent enough time with her to understand that she is emotionally empty as well.
“Cries from your positive days / Combatting her negative ways”
The struggle continues.
There are still positive possibilities somewhere in this woman’s life, but her negative patterns keep fighting them.
That’s why I don’t see her simply as somebody unlucky.
Some of the conflict is inside her.
That doesn’t mean we blame her.
It means we understand that sometimes the thing standing between us and what we want isn’t another person.
Sometimes it’s something we’ve carried for years.
“She went on a limb, and no one got close to being in”
Again she reaches outward.
Again nobody gets in.
The sexual meaning stays right where I put it.
But after the declined kiss, this line becomes more complicated.
Maybe nobody gets in because nobody tries hard enough.
Maybe because she doesn’t allow them.
Maybe both.
The song doesn’t give you every answer.
I don’t think it needs to.
“Dry spell she’s burning in hell”
Now the hell has lasted longer.
That’s what changes.
The words repeat, but the duration doesn’t.
Each time the chorus comes around, we have travelled farther into her life.
What might once have been temporary has become habitual.
What was habitual is beginning to look permanent.
“Sometimes a wet spot, but always an empty parking lot”
The parking lot is still empty.
That’s almost becoming the visual symbol of her entire life.
Occasional evidence that desire exists.
No arrival.
No headlights pulling in.
Nobody staying.
The space remains available in one sense and inaccessible in another.
That’s the contradiction she’s been living from the opening verse.
“A vacant space that no one ever faced or embraced”
Still vacant.
Still untouched.
Still unembraced.
And now the song is ready to make its biggest movement.
Because up until this point we’ve watched her live this way.
Next, we’re going to watch time itself start closing in on her.
“Still untouched by hands, but scarred by time, she learned that emptiness can make the loudest sound.”
This is where the sexual joke begins losing its grip on the song.
She’s still physically untouched.
But she is not unscarred.
That’s an important difference.
Nobody has put their hands on her sexually, yet life has certainly left marks.
Time touched her.
Regret touched her.
Loneliness touched her.
Missed opportunities touched her.
Years touched her.
And then comes the sound of emptiness.
There’s something strange about describing emptiness as loud.
But emotionally, it makes sense.
An empty house can feel loud.
An empty chair can feel loud.
A phone that never rings can feel loud.
A side of the bed nobody has ever occupied can feel loud.
Silence can become almost unbearable when it represents something you desperately wish were there.
For this woman, the absence has been around so long that it has developed a voice of its own.
And now we’re approaching the final hallway of her life.

SECTION ONE
LYRIC JOURNEY
PART 3

“Years kept passing like locked doors in a hall,”
Now we’re walking down the hallway with her.
This is where time becomes something we can almost see.
Imagine a long hall with doors running along both sides.
One door could be a year.
Another could be a person.
Another could be the kiss she declined.
Another could be a conversation she never started.
Another could be somebody she wanted to approach but couldn’t.
Another could simply be a moment when she thought, Maybe this time.
Then the door locks.
Keep walking.
Another one locks.
Keep walking.
That’s what time does.
It doesn’t necessarily announce that something has ended forever. There isn’t always some giant warning saying:
THIS WAS YOUR LAST CHANCE.
Most of the time, life simply moves forward.
That’s what makes the image important to me.
She isn’t standing still anymore, even if emotionally it feels as though she is.
Time is moving her.
“She learned how to breathe, never learned how to fall,”
She knows how to survive.
That’s different from knowing how to surrender yourself to life.
She’s breathing.
She’s functioning.
She’s getting through another day and then another.
But she never learns how to fall.
And I mean more than falling into bed with somebody.
I mean falling in love.
Falling into trust.
Taking the chance that another human being might hurt you.
Allowing yourself to be embarrassed.
Allowing somebody to see your body when you’ve spent years feeling insecure about it.
Allowing somebody to see your emotions when you’ve spent years keeping them underneath your breath.
Falling means giving up some control.
That’s the thing she has never learned.
And there’s an irony there because earlier I wrote:
“She has no control.”
She feels out of control, yet she also spends her entire life trying to control the thing she fears most: vulnerability.
Maybe she holds on so tightly that she never gets the opportunity to discover what would happen if she let go.
“Still searching for warmth in a world gone cold,”
That word “still” matters.
She’s still searching.
After everything.
After the nervousness.
After the insecurity.
After the declined kiss.
After the regret.
After the empty parking lot.
After the locked doors.
Something inside her hasn’t completely given up.
She wants warmth.
Remember where we began:
“Her heat was cold.”
Now, near the end of her life, she’s still searching for warmth.
That gives those two parts of the song a connection.
She has carried this coldness with her for years.
Maybe decades.
But she hasn’t stopped recognizing that something is missing.
That’s what makes her situation sad rather than simply unusual.
If she were perfectly content, there would be no tragedy.
But she isn’t.
She’s still looking.
“Still waiting to feel what she’s never been told”
There are experiences nobody can completely explain to you.
Somebody can describe love.
Somebody can describe intimacy.
Somebody can tell you what it feels like to trust another person completely.
Somebody can describe waking up beside somebody they love.
Somebody can describe sexual pleasure.
Somebody can describe being held when they’re frightened.
Words can take you only so far.
Eventually there are things you understand differently because you’ve lived them.
She never does.
She’s waiting to feel something that has always existed outside her experience.
And time is almost finished.
That’s what changes this line.
If she were twenty years old, “still waiting” could contain enormous possibility.
Near the end of her life, the same words become frightening.
The window is closing.
“She went on a limb, and no one got close to being in”
One last time, the song returns to the familiar words.
But we aren’t where we were the first time we heard them.
That’s why repeated lyrics can become different without changing a single word.
Earlier, this could still sound like another failed attempt.
Now we know how much time has passed.
We know she’s scarred by it.
We know she’s walking past locked doors.
We know she’s still searching for warmth.
So “no one got close to being in” begins sounding permanent.
The sexual meaning is still there.
Nobody got inside her.
But by now the emotional meaning is almost impossible to separate from it.
Nobody got inside the walls either.
“Dry spell she’s burning in hell”
The hell has reached its final stage.
Again, I’m not talking about religious punishment.
I’m talking about the hell she has been carrying while alive.
Imagine wanting something for years and feeling incapable of reaching it.
Imagine watching opportunities disappear.
Imagine knowing you’re getting older.
Imagine remembering one particular kiss you declined and wondering whether that moment might have opened another door.
That’s enough hell for this character.
I don’t need to invent another one.
“Sometimes a wet spot, but always an empty parking lot”
And here’s the parking lot for the final time.
When I first came up with it, I was having fun.
It’s a dirty metaphor.
Nobody ever parked his dick inside her.
That’s what I meant.
I’m not going to turn around now and pretend I didn’t.
But look at what has happened to that parking lot since we first saw it.
At the beginning, it was funny.
Then it became lonely.
Now it’s almost abandoned.
Years have gone by.
The woman is old.
The doors behind her are locked.
She’s still searching for warmth.
And that parking lot remains exactly as it always was.
Empty.
That’s where a metaphor can surprise even the person writing it.
Sometimes you invent something because it makes you laugh, then the story keeps moving and eventually the same image doesn’t feel quite as funny anymore.
“A vacant space that no one ever faced or embraced”
This is the last time we see that vacant space.
Nobody faced it sexually.
Nobody embraced it physically.
Nobody ever crossed that final boundary.
But I think “embraced” has become the more important word by now.
Because what did this woman really spend her life missing?
Was it only intercourse?
I don’t think so.
She missed being embraced.
Maybe physically.
Maybe emotionally.
Maybe both.
She missed allowing somebody close enough to know the parts of herself she kept hidden.
The vacant space has become larger than her body.
It has become the space beside her.
The space inside her.
The space where another human being might have existed.
And now there are no more verses.
No more doors.
No more opportunities.
No more waiting.
There is only one line left.
“She died a virgin”
That’s the whole ending.
Four words.
I didn’t need anything else.
If I’d written another paragraph of lyrics explaining how lonely she was when she died, I would have weakened it.
If I’d suddenly introduced somebody who arrived just in time, I would have betrayed the woman I’d spent the entire song creating.
If I’d turned it into a joke, I would have thrown away everything the song had become.
So I let the title come back as a death sentence.
She died a virgin.
When the song began, those words described her sexual status.
Now they contain her entire life.
That’s the journey.
She began shy.
She couldn’t look people eye to eye.
She felt insecure in her body.
She felt alone.
She couldn’t find her heart.
She couldn’t find herself.
She never fell in love.
She tried.
She got close enough to a kiss and declined it.
She regretted it.
She held herself tight.
Years passed.
Doors locked.
She survived.
She kept breathing.
She continued searching for warmth.
But she never learned how to fall.
Then time made the final decision for her.
And I think that’s where the real meaning of the song finally separates from the title.
Because there’s nothing inherently tragic about dying a virgin.
If that’s the life somebody freely chooses and they’re happy with it, there doesn’t have to be anything sad about it at all.
Her tragedy is that she wasn’t happy.
She wanted warmth.
She experienced loneliness.
She carried regret.
She searched.
She waited.
And she ran out of time.
That’s why the final line is so short.
There is nothing left for her to reconsider.
Nothing left to decline.
Nothing left to regret tomorrow.
Tomorrow isn’t coming.
The parking lot will remain empty.
The doors are finally all locked.
And the woman who first appeared in my imagination while I was lying on a steel jail bed has reached the end of the hallway.
She died a virgin.

SECTION TWO
THE STORY
IT STARTED ON A STEEL BED

There wasn’t a woman standing in front of me when I wrote “She Was a Virgin.”
There wasn’t somebody from my past I was secretly writing about.
There wasn’t a newspaper story or a conversation that inspired it.
I was in jail, lying on a steel bed with a mattress about an inch thick. Anybody who thinks the word “mattress” automatically means comfort hasn’t slept on one of those things. My back was killing me. Every bone in my body seemed to know exactly how thin that mattress was.
And somewhere in the middle of that, a sentence came into my head:
She was a virgin.
That was the beginning.
Sometimes songwriting really is that simple.
I didn’t sit there thinking I was about to write some deep song about intimacy, aging and loneliness. I had an idea. Then my imagination started asking what I could do with it.
What does it mean to be a virgin?
What if somebody remained one for her entire life?
What kind of person might she be?
Why had nobody ever gotten close?
Was it because nobody wanted her?
Or was she the one who couldn’t let anybody in?
Once I started asking those questions, she began becoming a character.
I HAD TO INVENT HER
Because she wasn’t a real person, I had freedom.
I could make her shy.
I could make her uncomfortable looking somebody eye to eye.
I could make her insecure about her own body.
I could put an opportunity right in front of her and have her turn away from it.
That’s where the kiss became important.
The closest she ever gets is a kiss, and even that she declines.
Then I gave her something much harder to escape than virginity.
Regret.
That’s human.
How many times do we turn away from something because we’re frightened, uncomfortable or uncertain, only to wonder later what would have happened if we’d made a different choice?
For her, that question doesn’t disappear.
It follows her.
THEN MY MIND WENT SOMEWHERE ELSE
I’m not going to clean this story up now and pretend I was thinking only about emotional isolation.
I wasn’t.
I started having fun with it.
If this woman had gone her whole life without sex, what images could I use?
That’s how I got into the dry spell.
The wet spot.
The empty parking lot.
The vacant space.
Nobody getting in.
Nobody facing or embracing it.
I knew exactly what I meant.
The empty parking lot was pretty straightforward in my imagination: nobody had ever parked his dick there.
“Faced or embraced” wasn’t innocent either. I was playing with the idea that nobody had ever gotten sexually close to her in any way, including face first.
That’s where my mind went.
Sometimes songwriting does that.
You get an idea and instead of standing over it trying to make it respectable, you let the damn thing run.
That’s what I did.
THE JOKE STARTED CHANGING
The interesting part is that somewhere along the way, the song stopped being only funny.
I had created this woman who wouldn’t let anybody near her.
Then I had to let her age.
That’s when the empty parking lot started meaning something different.
At first, it’s a sexual joke.
After enough years pass, it becomes loneliness.
The vacant space isn’t only between her legs anymore. There’s a vacant space in her life.
Nobody ever filled it.
Nobody got close enough.
Nobody became the person she could trust.
Nobody became the person she could love.
Maybe opportunities existed and she couldn’t accept them. Maybe fear kept winning. Maybe insecurity did. Maybe she spent so much time protecting herself that eventually protection became imprisonment.
That’s when I started seeing that I had something more than the original idea.
“HER HEAT WAS COLD”
I like contradictions when they make sense.
“Her heat was cold” is one of those.
Physically, she is alive. She’s human. She has feelings and desires. There are moments when something inside her wants warmth.
But emotionally, everything remains cold.
That’s also why the song can say she’s dry and later mention a wet spot.
Human beings aren’t machines.
Her body can react.
That doesn’t mean she’s capable of crossing the emotional distance required to let another person into her life.
That contradiction actually makes her more believable to me.
She isn’t somebody without feelings.
She’s somebody who doesn’t know what to do with them.
THE HELL IS HER OWN
When I wrote:
“Dry spell she’s burning in hell”
I’m not trying to send this woman to some religious hell because she never had sex.
The hell is what she’s living through.
Loneliness can become its own place.
Regret can become one too.
You can build walls because they make you feel safe and eventually discover you’re the person trapped behind them.
That’s closer to what is happening here.
Nobody has to lock the door anymore.
She has been doing it herself for so long that she doesn’t know how to open it.
LOCKED DOORS IN A HALL
Later in the song, the years become “locked doors in a hall.”
That’s probably one of the places where the character moves furthest away from the original sexual joke.
Imagine walking down a hallway where every door represents another year, another possibility, another person, another opportunity.
One closes.
Then another.
Then another.
Eventually you look behind you and realize how many doors are already gone.
That’s time.
It doesn’t care whether you’re ready.
The line:
“She learned how to breathe, never learned how to fall”
gets to another part of her problem.
She knows how to exist.
She doesn’t know how to surrender herself to another person.
Falling in love requires vulnerability.
Even intimacy requires vulnerability.
You have to allow somebody close enough to see parts of you that you normally protect.
She never gets there.
I ALREADY KNEW WHERE SHE WAS GOING
This wasn’t one of those songs that took forever to figure out.
Once my imagination took off, I pretty well knew where the story was heading.
If I was going to follow this woman through her entire life, there was only one completely honest way to finish it.
I couldn’t suddenly introduce somebody in the final verse and give her a happy ending.
That would destroy the whole idea.
I couldn’t have her wake up one morning at eighty years old and become a completely different person just because I wanted the listener to feel better.
She had spent a lifetime being this woman.
So the years kept passing.
She remained untouched.
She remained lonely.
She remained uncertain.
She kept waiting for warmth.
And eventually time ran out.
THREE WORDS FINISH HER LIFE
After all the metaphors, sexual jokes, loneliness, locked doors, regret and years passing, I didn’t want some complicated ending.
I ended it with:
“She died a virgin.”
That’s it.
The title comes back one final time, except now it means something different.
At the beginning, “virgin” is the idea that started the song.
In the middle, it becomes material for sexual wordplay.
At the end, it becomes the record of an entire life.
And that’s where the humour disappears for me.
Because by then the tragedy isn’t that she never had intercourse.
It’s that she spent her life wanting some kind of warmth while never figuring out how to let herself reach it.
WHAT JAIL HAD TO DO WITH IT
The strange thing is that this story has almost nothing to do with jail, yet jail had everything to do with its existence.
That’s where I was.
That’s where my mind was working.
A lot of my songs were written while I was incarcerated. When your physical surroundings don’t change very much, imagination becomes incredibly important.
I could be lying on a steel bed in pain and still create another human being in my head.
I could give her seventy or eighty years of life while I hadn’t moved a foot.
That’s something incarceration taught me about creativity.
Walls can control where your body goes.
They’re not nearly as good at controlling where your imagination goes.
That night mine went into the life of a woman who never existed.
I followed her from shyness to insecurity, from sexual jokes to loneliness, from missed opportunities to old age.
Then I followed her right to the grave.
That’s how “She Was a Virgin” became another chapter of MOITA.

SECTION THREE
LYRIC EXPLORATION
THE TITLE TELLS YOU THE FACT, NOT THE STORY

“She Was a Virgin” sounds simple enough when you first hear the title.
You could hear those four words and think you already know what the song is going to be about.
You don’t.
Virginity is the condition I gave this imaginary woman. It isn’t really the whole problem.
Her deeper problem is that she can’t connect.
Right from the beginning, I make that clear. She has lived a long time without being able to look somebody eye to eye. Before the song says much about sex, it tells you something about the way she moves through the world.
She’s shy.
She’s nervous.
She’s uncomfortable with herself.
She’s emotionally alone.
That’s important because I didn’t want her virginity to exist without a reason. I wanted to imagine the person underneath it.
“HER HEAT WAS COLD”
This is one of the contradictions at the centre of the song.
A person can want warmth and still push it away.
They can have sexual feelings and still never act on them.
They can want companionship and still become frightened when somebody gets close.
That’s why I wrote:
“Her heat was cold.”
The two things shouldn’t belong together, but inside her they do.
There’s something alive underneath.
Something wants connection.
But the part of her that should allow that connection has gone cold.
Then comes:
“She feels alone in the world. She has no control.”
That takes us beyond sex again.
She isn’t celebrating the life she’s living.
She’s trapped inside it.
“SHE WAS AS DRY AS SHE WAS OLD”
That’s where I deliberately start pushing the sexual language.
I’m talking about aging and sexual inactivity at the same time.
It’s crude.
I know it is.
But it also connects two things that become increasingly important as the song continues: time and intimacy.
Every year that passes makes both harder for her.
The older she becomes, the longer the dry spell becomes.
And the longer she lives this way, the more normal the isolation probably begins to feel.
“SHE COULDN’T FIND HER HEART”
When the chorus begins, I keep repeating:
“She was a virgin.”
That repetition matters because it becomes almost like the identity she can’t escape.
But listen to what comes after it.
She couldn’t find her heart.
She never fell in love.
She couldn’t find who she was.
She never flirted within her soul.
Those aren’t descriptions of intercourse.
They’re descriptions of somebody disconnected from herself.
That’s where the chorus starts telling you that the physical virginity is sitting on top of something much larger.
She hasn’t only kept another person’s body away.
She’s kept another person’s emotions away.
Maybe she’s even kept parts of herself away from herself.
“SHE WAS AN EMPTY HOLE”
That line is deliberately rough because it works in two directions.
Sexually, the meaning isn’t difficult to figure out.
But emotionally, she’s empty too.
That’s something that happens throughout this song. I use language that can make you laugh or raise an eyebrow, then I let the same image carry something sad underneath it.
You can hear “empty hole” sexually.
You can also hear it as the emptiness she has spent years living with.
Both belong.
THE EMPTY PARKING LOT
This is probably the most obvious example of my imagination taking over.
“Sometimes a wet spot, but always an empty parking lot.”
I’m not going to pretend I was sitting there writing some sophisticated metaphor without knowing exactly what I was suggesting.
The parking lot is her sexual space.
Nobody parked there.
That’s the joke.
But there’s another little detail in the line that matters.
“Sometimes a wet spot.”
Her body isn’t necessarily dead to sexual feeling.
That’s an important distinction.
The physical possibility exists.
The parking lot can be ready.
It just remains empty.
That makes her problem more interesting because the song isn’t saying she was physically incapable of intimacy. It’s showing somebody who never crossed the distance required to experience it.
“A VACANT SPACE THAT NO ONE EVER FACED OR EMBRACED”
I was playing with words here too.
“Faced” carries the sexual suggestion I intended.
“Embraced” opens it wider.
Nobody physically embraced that part of her, but nobody truly embraced her either.
That’s what makes the line useful beyond the sexual joke.
The same vacant space can represent her body and her emotional life.
Nobody gets in.
Nobody gets close.
Nothing stays.
THEN THE SONG GIVES HER A CHANCE
The second verse is important because now we learn she wasn’t necessarily somebody who never had an opportunity.
“The closest she got was a kiss that she declined.”
That’s a small moment with enormous consequences.
Somebody got close enough for a kiss.
She said no.
There is nothing wrong with declining a kiss. Nobody owes anybody physical affection, and I don’t want the lyric misunderstood that way.
What changes its meaning in this story is what comes immediately afterward:
“And her regrets are always on her mind.”
She’s the one regretting it.
That’s what tells us the refusal wasn’t necessarily because she didn’t want connection. It may have been because she couldn’t get past whatever was stopping her.
That difference matters.
HER LEGS HELD TIGHT
The sexual meaning is obvious.
She never allowed intercourse.
But by this point in the story, I think the listener can also hear the defensive posture behind it.
Everything is held tight.
Her body.
Her emotions.
Her opportunities.
Her life.
She has become very good at keeping things out.
The problem with building a wall is that it works in both directions.
It can stop somebody from getting in.
It can also stop you from getting out.
WHY THE CHORUS RETURNS
When the chorus comes back, the words haven’t changed, but we have.
Now we know about the declined kiss.
We know about the regret.
So when we hear again that she couldn’t find her heart and couldn’t find who she was, there’s more evidence behind those words.
The empty parking lot isn’t simply empty because nobody drove past.
At least once, somebody appears to have approached the entrance.
She couldn’t let them through.
That makes the loneliness more complicated.
“STILL UNTOUCHED BY HANDS, BUT SCARRED BY TIME”
This is where I wanted the song to grow old.
She may remain physically untouched, but that doesn’t mean life hasn’t touched her.
Time has.
That’s the scar.
A virgin body isn’t necessarily an untouched life.
She has experienced loneliness.
She has experienced regret.
She has watched years disappear.
She has probably wondered what might have happened.
Time leaves marks without ever putting a hand on you.
EMPTINESS MAKES NOISE
“She learned that emptiness can make the loudest sound.”
There’s no actual sound required.
Anybody who has experienced a genuinely empty room after somebody leaves, or noticed the absence of a person who used to be there, understands that silence can feel enormous.
For this woman, there isn’t even necessarily somebody who left.
It’s the person who never arrived.
That’s a different kind of absence.
She’s living beside something that never happened.
THE LOCKED DOORS
“Years kept passing like locked doors in a hall.”
I see time in that image.
One door.
Another door.
Another year.
Another possibility.
Another chance.
Locked.
Keep walking.
The hallway doesn’t reverse.
That’s the frightening thing about time. We can change what we do next, but we can’t reopen every opportunity we’ve already passed.
For this character, the hallway keeps getting longer behind her and shorter in front of her.
SHE LEARNED HOW TO BREATHE
“She learned how to breathe, never learned how to fall.”
She knows how to survive.
She doesn’t know how to surrender.
“Fall” can mean falling in love, but it can also mean allowing yourself to become vulnerable.
Love doesn’t come with a guarantee.
Neither does intimacy.
You can get hurt.
You can get rejected.
You can embarrass yourself.
You can trust somebody and discover you shouldn’t have.
She avoids all of those possibilities.
But avoiding the possibility of pain also means she avoids the possibility of everything that might have come with taking the chance.
STILL WAITING FOR WARMTH
Near the end, she’s still searching.
That’s what makes her sad to me.
If she had simply decided that she never wanted sex or romantic love and lived happily that way, this would be a completely different song.
But that’s not the woman I imagined.
She’s still searching for warmth.
She’s still waiting to feel something she has never experienced.
The desire hasn’t completely disappeared.
Time is what disappears.
THE PARKING LOT ONE LAST TIME
Then the sexual imagery returns.
The dry spell.
The hell.
The wet spot.
The empty parking lot.
The vacant space.
We’ve heard those images before, but after watching this woman grow old, they don’t land quite the same way.
That’s intentional.
Something that sounded crude earlier now carries the weight of an entire lifetime.
The parking lot remained empty.
Not for a night.
Not for a year.
For all of it.
“SHE DIED A VIRGIN”
Then I stop.
No explanation.
No rescue.
No last-minute romance.
No beautiful speech.
“She died a virgin.”
The same idea that started the song finishes it.
But those words have travelled a long way.
At the beginning, virginity gave me something to play with.
By the end, it represents all the things this imaginary woman never experienced.
Sex is one of them.
Love may be another.
Trust.
Vulnerability.
Physical closeness.
Maybe even the simple experience of allowing somebody to know her completely.
That’s why I wanted the ending that short.
After spending the whole song finding different ways to describe her emptiness, I didn’t need another metaphor.
Her life was over.
So was the song.

SECTION FOUR
REFLECTION
WHEN THE JOKE ISN’T THE WHOLE STORY

“She Was a Virgin” started with my imagination having some fun.
I was lying on that steel bed in jail, hurting, and four words came into my head.
She was a virgin.
From there I started playing.
Dry spells.
Wet spots.
Empty parking lots.
Vacant spaces.
Nobody getting in.
Some of it is crude because I meant it to be crude. I’m not going to dress it up afterward and pretend every line came from some deep philosophical place.
But something happened while I was writing it.
I gave this imaginary woman a lifetime.
Once I did that, I had to give her time.
And time changed the joke.
THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH BEING A VIRGIN
This matters.
The song isn’t saying there is something wrong with somebody because they’re a virgin.
It isn’t saying everybody needs sex to have a meaningful life.
It isn’t saying somebody who chooses not to have sex must secretly be miserable.
People live differently.
Some people choose celibacy.
Some aren’t interested in sex.
Some wait for personal, cultural, religious or emotional reasons.
Some simply haven’t met the person they want to share that part of themselves with.
That’s their life and their choice.
The woman in this song is different for one important reason.
She regrets what she couldn’t allow herself to experience.
That’s the tragedy I created for her.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CHOICE AND FEAR
If you’re happy with a decision, that’s one thing.
If fear keeps making the decision for you, that’s something else.
This woman wants warmth.
She experiences loneliness.
She remembers the kiss she declined.
She feels regret.
She doesn’t seem at peace with herself.
That’s why I don’t think the real question at the end of this song is:
Did she ever have sex?
The better question is:
Did she ever live the life she actually wanted?
Those are two completely different questions.
HOW MANY THINGS DO WE NEVER DO?
That’s where I think this strange little story can reach beyond virginity.
Everybody has their own locked doors.
Maybe yours has nothing to do with sex.
Maybe you never told somebody you loved them.
Maybe you were afraid to change careers.
Maybe you wanted to travel somewhere and kept saying next year.
Maybe pride stopped you from apologizing.
Maybe you wanted to create something but were afraid people would laugh.
Maybe somebody offered you friendship and you kept your distance.
Sometimes we have good reasons for saying no.
Sometimes saying no protects us.
But sometimes fear becomes such a habit that we stop asking whether it is protecting us or controlling us.
That’s worth thinking about.
AN EMPTY PARKING LOT CAN BE MORE THAN A SEXUAL JOKE
I still laugh at that image.
I’m not going to ruin it by pretending I don’t.
But by the end of the song, I see something different in it.
An empty space is an empty space.
It could be beside you in bed.
It could be the passenger seat of your car.
It could be the chair across from you at supper.
It could be somebody you never called.
It could be a relationship you never allowed to begin.
It could simply be a part of yourself that you never shared with another human being.
That’s why imagination is interesting.
You can start with a dirty joke and somehow end up thinking about life.
TIME DOESN’T WAIT FOR COURAGE
The locked doors are probably what stay with me most.
We all like to believe there will be another chance.
Sometimes there is.
Sometimes there isn’t.
You don’t know which one you’re looking at while it’s happening.
That’s why regret can be so difficult. We judge yesterday with information and courage we may not have had yesterday.
I don’t think the answer is to throw yourself blindly into everything.
That’s not courage either.
But there are times when we probably need to ask ourselves whether we’re making a decision because it’s truly what we want or because we’re frightened of what might happen if we take the chance.
The woman I created never solves that problem.
The doors keep closing.
NOBODY OWES ANYBODY INTIMACY
There is another side that shouldn’t get lost.
Nobody owes another person a kiss.
Nobody owes another person sex.
Nobody owes somebody access to their body because an opportunity exists.
Her declining that kiss isn’t wrong.
What makes it sad in this particular fictional story is her own regret afterward.
That distinction matters to me.
Her tragedy isn’t that she failed to give somebody else something.
It’s that she apparently wanted something for herself and never found the confidence, security or trust to reach for it.
MAYBE THAT’S THE REAL EMPTY SPACE
By the final part of the song, I don’t think her virginity is the biggest empty space anymore.
The bigger emptiness is everything she wanted but never experienced.
Warmth.
Trust.
Love.
Touch.
Vulnerability.
Maybe even knowing what it feels like to completely relax beside another person and not be afraid of being seen.
That’s a much larger loss than sex.
And that’s why the final line has to remain exactly what it is.
She died a virgin.
It’s factual inside the story.
But after everything we’ve travelled through with her, we understand that those words are carrying much more than a sexual status.
They’re carrying all the years that came before them.
WHAT I TAKE FROM HER
I invented this woman.
She never existed.
But the question behind her certainly does.
How much of life can disappear while we’re waiting to become ready to live it?
I don’t have one answer for everybody.
Nobody does.
Sometimes waiting is wise.
Sometimes walking away saves you.
Sometimes protecting yourself is absolutely necessary.
And sometimes the wall that once protected you becomes the wall preventing you from living.
Knowing the difference isn’t always easy.
Maybe that’s something each of us has to figure out for ourselves.
THANK YOU FOR WALKING THROUGH THIS ONE WITH ME
I appreciate anybody who came into this page expecting a song about virginity and stayed long enough to discover the person I imagined underneath it.
That’s exactly why these pages exist.
A title can give you four words.
A song can give you a few minutes.
But when we sit with the story a little longer, sometimes those few minutes open into something much larger.
This one started in one of the least comfortable places I’ve ever written from: lying on a steel bed in jail with almost nothing between my bones and the metal.
My body wasn’t going anywhere.
My imagination did.
It created a woman, gave her an entire lifetime, made a few dirty jokes at her expense, watched her struggle with herself, and eventually followed her to the final sentence.
That’s another reason MOITA exists.
Not every song arrives through the same door.
Not every story teaches the same lesson.
Sometimes the strangest idea is the one worth following.

MOITA

WHERE EVERY SONG TELLS A STORY

EVERY STORY TEACHES SOMETHING

SECTION FIVE
MOITA DOCUMENTARY & LEARNING CENTRE
WHEN VIRGINITY IS ONLY THE BEGINNING OF THE CONVERSATION

“She Was a Virgin” gives us an unusual doorway into a much larger subject.
The title points toward sex.
The story eventually points toward something broader: intimacy, loneliness, self-image, vulnerability, regret, aging, human connection and the difference between choosing a life and feeling trapped inside one.
That distinction matters.
There is no single correct amount of sexual experience a person is supposed to have. Someone can remain a virgin by choice and live a satisfying, connected and meaningful life. Another person can have many sexual relationships and still feel terribly alone.
Sexual activity and human connection are not the same thing.
The woman I imagined for this song isn’t suffering simply because she hasn’t had intercourse.
She’s suffering because the life she’s living doesn’t appear to be the life she wants.
That opens the documentary much wider.
VIRGINITY IS NOT A MEDICAL CONDITION
The word “virginity” carries enormous cultural weight, but it isn’t a medical diagnosis or a disease.
There also isn’t one universal definition that perfectly describes what “losing virginity” means for everybody. Different people and cultures may define sexual activity differently.
That is worth understanding because society can attach ideas about purity, masculinity, femininity, maturity, desirability and personal worth to whether somebody has had sex.
Those ideas can create unnecessary pressure.
A person’s value isn’t determined by whether they’ve had sex.
It isn’t determined by how many partners they’ve had either.
Human worth is much bigger than sexual history.
That gives us an important boundary when looking at this song.
The character can regret her own choices without turning her story into a judgment of everybody else’s.
CHOICE CHANGES THE ENTIRE STORY
Imagine two people who have both remained virgins throughout much of their lives.
One is completely comfortable with that decision.
The other desperately wants closeness but feels unable to pursue it.
On paper, they share the same sexual status.
Emotionally, they may be living completely different lives.
That is why choice matters.
People may abstain from sex for religious beliefs, personal values, lack of interest, waiting for a particular relationship, concerns about pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections, past experiences, or simply because they don’t want to have sex.
None of those automatically means something is wrong.
The important questions are much more personal:
Am I living according to my own wishes?
Do I feel pressured?
Am I afraid?
Am I comfortable with the choices I’m making?
Am I able to communicate what I want and don’t want?
Those questions tell us much more about somebody’s wellbeing than the label “virgin.”
CONSENT IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE OPPORTUNITY
The declined kiss in the song gives us an important place to talk about consent.
A person always has the right to decline physical or sexual contact.
It doesn’t matter whether the other person is disappointed.
It doesn’t matter whether they’ve been dating.
It doesn’t matter whether they’ve kissed before.
It doesn’t matter whether somebody thinks the opportunity may never come again.
Consent should be voluntary.
And consent to one thing isn’t automatic consent to something else.
The fictional woman later regrets declining the kiss, but that doesn’t make her original decision wrong.
People are allowed to change their minds afterward.
Regret does not erase the right they had to say no at the time.
That distinction becomes especially important when talking with younger people about relationships. Nobody should be frightened into saying yes because somebody tells them they’ll regret saying no.
BODY IMAGE CAN FOLLOW SOMEONE INTO INTIMACY
The song repeatedly tells us:
“She never felt secure in her own body.”
That opens another door.
How somebody feels about their body can influence confidence, dating, relationships and comfort with intimacy.
People compare themselves with images around them.
Bodies in advertising.
Bodies in movies.
Bodies on social media.
Bodies altered by lighting, posing, makeup, filters or editing.
It can become easy to believe everybody else meets some standard that you somehow failed to reach.
But intimacy involves allowing another person to see you without all of those protections.
For somebody deeply uncomfortable with their body, that vulnerability can feel enormous.
The answer isn’t simply telling somebody, “Just be confident.”
Confidence isn’t a switch.
It can develop through healthier self-perception, supportive relationships, experience, communication and, when distress becomes serious or persistent, appropriate professional support.
LONELINESS IS NOT THE SAME AS BEING ALONE
This distinction is important too.
Some people love solitude.
They can spend considerable time alone without feeling lonely.
Other people can be surrounded by coworkers, relatives, friends or strangers and still experience profound loneliness.
Loneliness is about the connection someone feels they are missing.
That makes the woman in this song more interesting.
Her empty parking lot is physical.
Her deeper emptiness is relational.
She wants warmth.
She wants something she hasn’t experienced.
She feels alone in the world.
That’s very different from somebody happily choosing a solitary life.
HUMAN CONNECTION TAKES MANY FORMS
Romantic love is only one form of connection.
Friendship matters.
Family relationships matter.
Community matters.
Shared interests matter.
Creative communities matter.
Sometimes even brief interactions can remind somebody that they belong to a world larger than themselves.
That’s another reason we shouldn’t reduce loneliness to “find a boyfriend” or “find a girlfriend.”
Human connection is much more complicated than that.
A romantic relationship also isn’t a guaranteed cure for loneliness.
Some of the loneliest moments people experience can happen while they’re sitting beside somebody who no longer understands them.
Connection requires more than physical proximity.
THE PROBLEM WITH THE LOCKED DOOR
One of the strongest images near the end of the song is:
“Years kept passing like locked doors in a hall.”
Psychologically, avoidance can be complicated.
Avoiding something frightening can provide immediate relief.
You don’t have to risk rejection if you never ask.
You don’t have to risk embarrassment if you never try.
You don’t have to become vulnerable if you never allow somebody close.
For that moment, avoidance can feel successful.
The difficult part is what happens afterward.
If avoiding uncomfortable situations becomes the only response, opportunities for confidence, learning and connection may shrink.
The wall feels safer.
Then one day somebody may realize the wall has become very difficult to leave.
That doesn’t mean people should force themselves into relationships or sexual situations.
It means fear deserves to be recognized when fear is making decisions that someone wishes they could make differently.
REGRET AND THE LIFE WE IMAGINE
Regret is an interesting human emotion because it involves two lives.
The life that happened.
And the life we imagine might have happened.
The second one can become incredibly powerful because it can’t be tested.
What if she’d accepted the kiss?
Maybe she would have fallen in love.
Maybe nothing would have happened.
Maybe it would have been awkward.
Maybe she would have regretted accepting it instead.
She can never know.
Neither can we.
That’s what makes regret dangerous when we romanticize the road not taken. We can imagine the alternative without having to experience any of its difficulties.
The lesson isn’t that every missed opportunity would have produced happiness.
It couldn’t.
The better lesson may be to understand why we make important decisions so that fear, pressure or insecurity aren’t silently making all of them for us.
AGING CHANGES THE MEANING OF TIME
When we’re young, another year can seem enormous.
Later, years can feel frighteningly fast.
The woman in the song keeps waiting.
That gives the locked-door image its power.
There isn’t necessarily one giant moment when her life changes.
A year passes.
Then another.
Then another.
That’s often how life actually moves.
Big consequences can grow from thousands of ordinary days.
This doesn’t mean people should panic because they’re getting older or race into relationships because time is passing.
That would completely miss the point.
It means there is value in occasionally asking:
Am I postponing something because the time isn’t right, or have I simply become accustomed to postponing it?
Only the individual can answer that.
INTIMACY IS MORE THAN SEX
Sex and intimacy can overlap, but they aren’t interchangeable.
Intimacy can mean trusting somebody with fear.
Admitting embarrassment.
Sharing something private.
Allowing yourself to be comforted.
Being emotionally honest.
Listening without pretending.
Being seen as you actually are.
Physical intimacy without emotional closeness is possible.
Emotional intimacy without sex is possible too.
The woman I created seems to struggle with both.
That’s why her story becomes larger than virginity.
Her body remains untouched, but the greater tragedy may be that she never allows herself to become fully known.
“SHE LEARNED HOW TO BREATHE, NEVER LEARNED HOW TO FALL”
Survival is not always the same thing as living fully.
People can become extremely good at routines that keep life manageable.
Get up.
Work.
Eat.
Sleep.
Repeat.
Keep people at a safe distance.
Don’t take unnecessary chances.
Don’t expose too much.
Don’t get hurt.
That can create stability.
But a meaningful life also involves uncertainty.
Friendship requires it.
Love requires it.
Creativity requires it.
Trust requires it.
Even writing a song and putting it in front of strangers requires some of it.
There are no guarantees.
Learning how to “fall” doesn’t mean becoming reckless.
It means accepting that some meaningful experiences require us to give up complete control.
THE BODY CAN WANT WHAT THE MIND FEARS
The song deliberately contains a contradiction:
“Sometimes a wet spot, but always an empty parking lot.”
Behind the sexual joke is something worth understanding.
Physical arousal and emotional readiness aren’t identical.
A body’s physical response does not automatically mean somebody wants sexual activity, and it does not replace consent.
Likewise, somebody can emotionally desire intimacy while experiencing difficulty becoming physically comfortable.
Human sexuality involves the body, emotions, relationships, personal history, circumstances and individual choice.
That’s one reason simplistic assumptions can cause so much misunderstanding.
Listening matters.
Communication matters.
Consent matters.
Respect matters.
WHY SEXUAL HUMOUR CAN CARRY A SERIOUS IDEA
Humour has always been one way human beings approach uncomfortable subjects.
Sex certainly qualifies.
We joke about things that embarrass us.
We exaggerate.
We invent metaphors.
We use double meanings.
That’s exactly what I did with the parking lot.
The interesting part is that humour can sometimes make the doorway easier to enter.
You laugh first.
Then something underneath the joke catches you.
That’s what I like about this song.
I’m not asking anybody to stop laughing at the dirty parts.
They’re supposed to be there.
I’m asking you to notice that the parking lot gets sadder as the woman gets older.
The metaphor doesn’t change.
The listener does.
WHAT THIS FICTIONAL WOMAN CAN TEACH US
I wouldn’t tell somebody to listen to “She Was a Virgin” and immediately go find somebody to have sex with.
That’s not the lesson.
I wouldn’t tell somebody to accept a kiss because they might regret refusing it.
That’s not the lesson either.
What I would ask is something broader.
Are you living according to your own decisions?
Are you comfortable with the boundaries you’ve chosen?
Are those boundaries protecting something important?
Or are fear and insecurity quietly choosing your life for you?
Is there somebody you want to talk to?
Something you want to create?
Somewhere you want to go?
Something you’ve wanted to learn?
An apology you’ve postponed?
A relationship you want to repair?
A chance worth considering?
Those are questions the song can leave behind even for somebody whose life has absolutely nothing in common with the woman I invented.
That’s when a song becomes useful beyond its original subject.
CONTINUE EXPLORING
For readers interested in going beyond the song, useful subjects to explore include loneliness and social connection, healthy relationships, consent, body image, aging, regret, avoidance, vulnerability and the psychology of human connection.
The World Health Organization provides educational information about social connection and the effects that loneliness and social isolation can have on wellbeing.
The Public Health Agency of Canada and other Canadian public-health resources provide information about healthy relationships, sexual health and personal wellbeing.
For sexual-health education, look for reputable medical and public-health organizations that discuss consent, communication and sexuality without shame or pressure.
You can also continue the journey through books, university lectures, psychology resources and documentaries dealing with loneliness, relationships, aging and the human need for connection.
And while you’re exploring, keep one distinction from this song in mind:
There is nothing tragic about somebody choosing a life that makes them happy.
The tragedy I imagined in “She Was a Virgin” is that this woman apparently wanted something different and never found her way toward it.
That’s why those final four words matter.
Not because virginity made her life worthless.
Because time finally removed every possibility of changing the life she regretted.

MOITA