You lay me down, your eyes are calm and gentle and you've moved the bedspread to the floor. The sheets are pulled up underneath the pillows and there's nowhere for me to hide my body, my shame. I am marked, colonized, peculiar. I am Other with a capital "O." My body bears the signs of use: stretch marks, a c-section scar, hips too wide, cigarette burns, areolas too large, bruises left by another lover. I don't want to show you. I don't want you to know that I'm used up, I blossomed too early and died and all I have left for you here now, at 25, alone with you on these sheets, is my lack. I am a body marred and mangled and hateful of itself. Can you accept me? Will you admit that you were wrong, that all of me is not beautiful, that so much of me is inadequate and unsuccessful in its representation of woman?
You have been waiting for me, naked, and I look at your body and can see the power it represents. Your broad shoulders, the wide base of your knuckles, your strong legs. I wonder what you will think when you see me- when you understand my inability to maintain power over something so personal and important as my own body. You smile at me and kiss me for a long time, your palms on my cheekbones, your fingers brushing my ears and tangling themselves in my hair.
I feel one of your hands slide down my neck, linger over my breast and start to pull up my t-shirt. You stop kissing me as you move my shirt over my head and rub your hands down my back to unhook my bra. I sit up slightly to help you reach the clasp and you're kissing me again. All I'm wearing now are my panties, and I instinctually press my legs together and cross my arms to hide. You are insistent. You pull my arms above my head and hold my wrists in one hand while you kiss me and make me forget this exposure for a second. Your other hand gravitates down to my panties, tugging them off more gently than you've ever treated me.
I am splayed out in front of you now, and I realize that I am letting you create me. As your fingers move over my body, you are tracing my existence, my corporeality. Your hands start to define me, where my flesh begins and ends, with the smooth rushing sound of my skin against yours. Will there be bloody swaths where your hands have been? Do you mark me, too? Will you take something else from me I can never replace, never forget, leave just a sign inscribed on my body forever?
Your fingers stir me. Move quick down my stomach and over my labia, teasing out my clitoris and making my knees tremble and move apart. I feel sticky, like my vagina is trickling a stream of honey or blood or something primordial and close to the origin. I arch my back and feel fecund. As you kiss my breasts, shaping my nipples in your mouth, I wish I was lactating. I want fluids to surge through my whole body, to seep out of every part of me, semen and milk and blood and dirt and vaginal discharge- everything that creates. My skin feels stretched to the breaking to hold all of this in. You are here to create. To help me create. I want to scream that you are making me, forming me, and I don't want you to anymore. I want to do it myself. Let me take my own hands, let me push them down and over my body, let me make it and mold it and leave it just the way it is, full of scars and brands and logos that I won't erase now, if given the chance, because they are my battle wounds, the impressions of the shackles that remind me the restraints are gone. I want to tell you this, right now, right here, that I don't need you to penetrate me because I don't lack anymore, I am whole and there's no room inside of me for anyone else- just me. But I don't speak. I am overwhelmed. And I am glad.
Your cock presses hard on the hood of my clit, and I realize that I had been wrong. I don't need a cock anymore. No. That part is true enough. But for the first time in my life, I desire it. You spread me open slowly, through layers of flesh, and I notice my pelvic floor muscles have tightened. I am physically changing, I have made myself whole and now you have to find a way to be a part of me, rather than me being empty and needing a part of you. I want you to find your way in. This is an expression now, a supreme and sacred profanity, not just a motion like a handshake or a hug. Not just a physical reality, not just a pleasant time between friends, not a way for me to feel accepted- it's become something beyond those things and beyond you and I, and I realize, for all of my life, I've been doing it wrong.
