My body never belonged to me. It belonged to birthing pains and bloodstains, entry and exit wounds. It started as something someone didn’t want. Therefore sex always felt like a disconnect, an out-of-body experience, something to be felt but not aligned with. Instead, I used it to escape, vanish. I was someone with an opening, a void between her legs, made for blood and intrusions, but it was a dark place.
The first person to ever love me, the person to give birth to my body didn’t keep it. She saw my flesh and thought it would be too hard to explain. For her Puerto Rican standard I was too African, too promiscuous, too hairy, too dark, too angry, too thick. She vanished, I wouldn’t find her to demand an explanation for two decades. She’d miss all the important parts. Like the first time I ever tried it, it was with a boy from high school on his bright blue bed sheets in the middle of May. He began to claw, scratch, and bite. It hurt and then somehow it didn’t any longer. I could feel something deep within my linings, lying thereafter, waiting for someone to tell me I was finally a woman. Although absent, her sentiments remained at the root. My love for her was like my love for most things, I only feel it when they leave. That was when I started to search for the love that I lost in all the places it could not be found.
Before I ever knew the taste of true love on my lips, my flesh started to extend and reconfigure to rounder shapes and circular angles poking out vulnerable to the streets and untamed hands. This was when the fear began to ignite like heat in my gut.
When I turned fifteen, they asked me why I wasn’t nice anymore. They asked me why I walked with my eyes straight and never looked anyone in the eye for too long.
“You never smile, unless you’re laughing,” said the boy in my poetry class.
I took out my pocket knife and cut out his tongue.
They asked me why I don’t stop to make small talk with the stray wolves standing on the back alley corners, hungry and hunting. Ma, I didn’t know you was so thick, why do you hide it under those long hoodies? you should let the world see.”
I spit and bite like a wild dog breaking the metal on its cage. I stripped them all raw of their human skin, they never saw it coming, the sound of teeth against bone, pulling and pulling. I didn’t care as long as my body lived, as long as I was the last one standing I lost my smooth edges. They called it intimidation. They called it cruelty. They called it violence. I called it preservation. I called it survival.
When I was sixteen, I started to swallow myself in the mirror. I numbly wandered through strangers’ bedsheets. I gave my body to men and women with dark marks, deep scars, and ulcers on their hearts. We’d forget about them for the moments our limbs were intertwined, hips gliding back and forth across one another’s shameful indulgences. They all told me I did it well.
When I was seventeen, I fell in love with a boy with a white mama and I became a vessel for his pleasure. We wounded one another. It was a young fragile love that lasted five years. He was his father’s son, just as am my mama’s daughter, both clawing desperately to fill the holes they left in us. Desperate for rain.
We were two kids too tangled up in our own pain to know how to love ourselves right. I was comfortable with offering my body to him, becoming his vessel out of sacrifice, submission, service, subservience, if it meant he’d stay. I’d suppress desires, unattended to my wounds, and compiled raw resentment. I grew accustomed to the motions, acts, and positions, never eager or daring enough to confront what I liked or really wanted. Too tired to change. Too ashamed to deny the dissatisfaction.
I was afraid of my own body. I never took the time to learn it. Listen to it. Offer it rest. Honor its blues rhythms. Redeem its right to pleasure. I allowed it to be traumatized and dehumanized because I believed no one could ever desire it without expectations or without executing a masterful performance. I grew to loathe my own skin, bones, cells, veins, organs. They unconsciously redefined their operation to service someone else’s desires so I wouldn’t have to experience the rejection of another love. I didn’t even know my own body. I never knew my body as anything but a compartment for someone else’s needs or a place for pain to be stored. I thought that’s all it would ever be.
Now I’m twenty-two. As I am learning how to fall out of love, I am becoming something like water, a noose undoing its greed. I am learning how to cleanse myself, become my own baptism. I’m showing myself the true arch of a woman with a broken heart. I’m showing myself the pleasure a woman can find with her fingers. I’m showing myself how to rest deeply through the night, alone in an empty bed. I’m showing myself how to be a vessel for my own pleasure. I no longer have to primp and prune, shave, wax and pry every hair follicle out from deep within my confines to feel worthy.
There was the morning I first opened my legs wide for myself, and lived in the i love yous, let my thighs get angry at the sound of bongo drums with my mouth dripping of slurs and love songs. There was the time I laid in shadow and starlight, floated up to the surface, indulged in my own essence, entered every crevice of my own body, caressed the deep corners and finally filled all the empty voids with tenderness. There was the evening in the bathtub where I gave birth to myself again and again until I knew I had no more blood to lose, until I knew how to kiss where he had cut. I dove down into the depth of my every opening, pried out the secrets of the little girl I had been. In that place, I learned, there was me, just me, me and all my mess. It has always been me. I let the desire run down my legs in a blood hallelujah. I remembered where I have been, whose bodies I have laid next to, underneath of, whose limbs and extremities I once loved.
In a complete breath, an ominous silence, I wake up every organ, I trust, I howl. This body. This spirit she gave me. An antique pleasure will mark its origin going back centuries to wise women with melanin-dusted skin, moving in their limbs, using their bodies to feed, foster and fight. Sex mothered me into a woman of elegance and danger. Fingers thirsty for her own water without an ounce of shame.
************
Are you a writer? We’re looking for short stories and personal essays to feature on our digital and print platforms. Click HERE to find out how.
