I don't know if this even counts as a confession, really... It’s more of a quiet bewilderment, I suppose. I'm 62 now, retired from teaching last year, and I thought I had a pretty good handle on what "aging gracefully" meant. Or at least, what it *felt* like. But lately... something feels fundamentally off. My libido, you see. It just... evaporated. Not slowly, like I always assumed it would, a gentle tapering off. No, it was like someone flipped a switch. One day it was there, a low hum, perfectly pleasant, a natural part of my life even after all these years alone. The next, nothing. A flatline. I was divorced in my mid-fifties, you know. A messy business. Most of our mutual friends, well, they chose sides. Or just disappeared. So I had to rebuild everything from scratch. That included learning how to be a woman who still felt desirable, still capable of intimacy, even if it wasn't with a long-term partner. It took years to feel comfortable in my own skin again, to feel that quiet spark of... well, *aliveness*, I guess. And I had it. I truly did. Even into my early sixties, there was a certain warmth there, a potentiality, if you will. I don't mean constant desire, not at all, but a *capacity* for it. A sense of my own sensuality. And now... it's just gone. I’ve looked it up, of course. Read all the articles about hormonal shifts, "normal" age-related decline. But what I'm experiencing... it feels too sudden, too absolute to be just normal. It's almost like a symptom. A clinical presentation, perhaps. I wonder if it’s a sign of something else, something physical that I haven't detected yet. Or maybe it’s psychological, a delayed reaction to something, though I can't imagine what. I just miss it. Not necessarily the act itself, but the feeling of it, the knowledge that it was there, a quiet affirmation. It feels like a piece of myself, a very private, intimate piece, has simply been... excised. And I don't know if it's coming back.