I come home and open all of my shades. My bedroom becomes a pool of warm, buttered light. I strip naked, leaving my pants slung over my chair, and my shirt on the bed--it comes undone in quick succession, four flicks of my wrist to undo the hooks. On the desk, my favorite white lace bra I carelessly stained with red paint from fucking a boy during my first week of university. My Calvin Kleins along with it. I will make love to myself before, during, and after the sun sets on a green blanket I crocheted two winters ago. I will come so hard, I cry.
It wasn’t until I turned 18 that I began to notice my body. How the freckles on my shoulders are my favorite part of myself. How the light brown splotch an inch and a half below my right breast is actually a birthmark, not a freckle. How the black dot on the innermost part of my left thigh might actually be a mole, just like the one on my face, but not raised. And it will fascinate me that my past lovers have never noticed these features, kissed my shoulders, never recognized these little treasures, these little marvels of my body. That, at 19, it is me who says look at how beautiful I am here, look at how lovely. And, it’s not that it’s all being realized for the first time. It’s that I’m making it mine now.
And, despite all this intimacy with myself, the way I go over all these details of myself, the way I kiss my shoulders and draw patterns on my thighs with my unevenly chewed nails, it does not mean my body forgives me. It does not mean my body no longer keeps the score. It does not mean I forgive myself. There is a vital difference between saying yes because you just wanted to be loved and not getting the chance to be asked at all. There’s a gaping difference between swallowing your disgust at 14 and having to yank a stranger’s fingers off your vocal box at 19. They both kiss like they are trying to swallow you whole. And there is no metaphor to make this pain easier to digest, to sugarcoat this, or make all this ache into a cavity. It does not need to be made into a metaphor to explain all the times I have pushed my tongue against this rot and blamed myself. But this does not mean I have to accept the lie that this is the way things are. Because there have been times when the words yes and please have not been enough (and this will be true again).
Tonight, I will eat a cupcake in the dining hall and wind up not brushing my teeth before bed. An acquaintance will read a poem he wrote for his creative writing class, and while I listen my finger will press between my collarbones--the way it does whenever I’m engrossed, when I’m becoming part of a story. And the pressure will not hurt. My skin will not crawl. Not even a little bit, not even at all.
february 2023