Late again

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Hello, this is an essay about sex. You should know there are some sensitive topics within so feel free to skip if you need the air. xoxo.

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Seventeen, after school, on a futon with the door closed. The tv was on in the other room. Not like how the too-old-for-me magazines promised. Not entirely unpleasant, but mostly what I felt was nothing. This was sex and I was finally having it.

My best friend at the time had lost her virginity. Ever the competitor, I decided it was time for me too. It happened without seams. I wouldn’t change it now. I was participating in the grand human tradition of being seventeen, and now, I’m grateful for how it was a classic rendition of the first time. I don’t remember most of it, only as I drove home, I realized I knew things about my body I hadn’t known before. I was in a hurry and suddenly I had arrived. My body had caught up but I was still a child whether I wanted to be or not.

If I was honest, I would tell you sex was very bad for a long time before I realized it could be very good. I was told it would hurt, and it did, but not in the ways I worried it would.

If I was honest, I would tell you, from ages eighteen to twenty, I bled every time I had sex. I was too afraid to figure out why. Shame has a funny way of outpacing curiosity. I wish I had been brave enough to help myself.

I would tell you that for too long, I let men do what they wanted with my body because it was easier to let it happen and pretend it was happening to someone else.

If I was honest, I would tell you that for too long, I thought penetrative sex mattered more than other kinds of sex. If I was honest, I’d admit to my arbitrary distinctions. There is no single way to pleasure. It constantly surprises, shifts before you can name it.

If I was honest, I would admit, no I never faked it, but I did give up so it could be over sooner. 

I spoke in euphemisms because I was embarrassed for too long about the simple facts of my body.

Sex shouldn’t be any of those things, but for the majority of my sexually active life, they were. There were so many lessons it took me too long to learn. So many obvious truths that felt like I was the first to articulate them once finally uncovered. But I believe that feeling of revelation was an acceptance of those truths. 

If I was honest, no one told me the simple truth that everyone should hear: sex is fun.

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We spend the weekend entirely together. All we’ve done in the past 72 hours is have sex but that’s a half-joke between us. The only thing I want is to be together. Together, which has come to mean, I can’t be without your touch for more than twenty-four hours. Together, which has come to mean, I am sloppy with all this bliss. On the beach, gazing at your sunbaked golden skin, I haven’t ever desired anyone more. 

Each time it’s new. We’ve broken through to something else. There are moments in the afterglow, all we can do is laugh. It’s a shock to be so compatible, a shock to let my imagination run wild. It’s a shock, even still, when I open my eyes and see it’s you.

There’s a moment in Normal People when Connell says to Marianne, “I’m not a religious person, but I do sometimes think God made you for me.” When I fit so well in your arms, when our bodies move in sync with our minds, when I tell you this, I know it. 

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I lay on the gynecologist's table and explained that I wanted to replace my IUD. Technically, I had two more years before I needed to get it replaced. The doctor was confused. Why not wait two more? What’s the rush? She drilled me with a series of questions so accusatory (do you wash with unscented soap? Does your partner?) it brought me back to my first ever exam at campus health where I cried and the doctor asked what I had to cry about. I proceeded to lie back and stare at the exam room ceiling wishing that the painted butterflies that were on the ceiling of my pediatric clinic were there to comfort me.

A few weeks before this appointment, I’d been told by a different gynecologist that eight years was her recommendation for removal and reinsertion. She was loose on the recommendation for the latter. Why not go natural?

I don’t know what natural is. I haven’t had a “natural” (non-birth control affected) period since I was fifteen. I got my period somewhat early—twelve or thirteen, the timeline is fuzzy—but I got on the pill because it was supposed to help with acne. To my disappointment, it didn’t really. I was stuck in that teenaged self I’d try to find countless ways to kill in the name of growing up faster. Depression surged with the new inundation of hormones as my body failed to acclimate. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I had waited to start any medication. I’m not the only one among friends who believes the pill worsened our various depressions. Once again, we were left to face our fears without explanation from professionals.

At twenty-eight, the idea of going natural was appealing. Eight years ago, when I got the IUD, my worst fear was getting pregnant. I didn’t want my life to be derailed in any way even if I could get an abortion. The IUD helped to soothe some of that anxiety. Eight years in the future, I asked myself the same question, what would happen if I got pregnant? The answer didn’t fill me with that old terror, even though I know at this moment I’m not at all ready. But the perspective as I lay on the table waiting for the most excruciating pain was one that came with some peace. This procedure was a placeholder for the years ahead. In eight more years, I’ll probably be a mother. I braced for the removal of one device and its immediate replacement imagining the dimness of someday.

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Everyone seems to be reading Miranda July’s new novel All Fours. I didn’t love it. I wish I had. It’s unapologetically horny, but I couldn’t quite connect to the narrator—a mother going through perimenopause and experiencing the horrific possibility her own desire may soon wane into nothingness thanks to her changing body. After bleeding, she calls it, as I bleed after my procedure for a few days. The timing of my reading couldn’t be more uncanny but the dots never connected. I found her intolerable in her wanting probably because I often find myself intolerable in my own.

The passage from which the novel’s title comes did stop me in my full-speed ahead charge to finish the book. “Everyone thinks doggy-style is so vulnerable,” the narrator’s friend says. But it’s actually the most stable because “it’s hard to be knocked down when you’re on all fours.”

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It’s always a surprise to me which friends will be frank enough with me when talking about sex. To me, there’s no such thing as too much information. I crave the gory details. The animal admissions. I want to know what they like. I want to know what their arbitrary distinctions are. I want to hear the worst and the best. I want to be honest with them too. Why can’t we all just confess our perversities? I think of Maggie Nelson’s old adage: Find someone with whom your perversities are compatible. That was about partners, but I would argue it applies to friends, too.

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Something vague. A year and a half ago, home with someone I hardly knew. The cold air barely registered. Too drunk to go to bed with anyone but myself. Fuzzy with details. We fell asleep midway through hooking up, but when I woke up again, he was having sex with me. I want to write about this plainly because as horrific as I can recognize this experience was, I felt plainly about it in the days following. It wasn’t the first time someone had taken an opportunity they shouldn’t have with me. 

It took a year for me to call it what it was. In every trespass I’ve experienced, it’s about a year until I can recognize in plain language what happened. It was a violation as mundane and common as it was profound and unforgivable. I don’t have to tell you much more, but I will tell you I ended a therapy session last summer, saying with conviction, “He will never touch me again.”

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There are other things I can admit to myself now—more good than bad. How much I love sex. The way I need it in ways I previously denied myself like I was doing penance for something that wasn’t a sin. I love the sweat, the mess, the noises, the quiet. I can now admit how much I would love to be a mom one day. How I am allowed to touch myself, often. How the only thing that matters are the rules you make with each other. Entering my late twenties and realizing this is what I have. I can’t change it without effort I’d rather not go to. This face, this figure, this mind. How beautiful a body can be. And that body is mine.

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Sex is about stealing time. It’s against production until it’s for reproduction, even then, its core is about pleasure and connection, not strictly utility. I like the permissiveness it invites—the gift is it rarely can be done quickly. It disrupts the daily minutiae. Why I love it in the afternoon—when humans were meant to be with each other. Think about it: before electricity, the afternoon was when you could see the other person. It’s probably why I had a knee-jerk reaction whenever someone would turn off the lights. I want to see everything.

One afternoon in the fall, I left the office to come see you. I needed to, urgently. We texted giddily during my commute from downtown to our neighborhood. You opened the front door and for the next few hours, we stole time together.

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I bit your neck three times. To this day, when I kiss the same spot, I remind you that’s where I injected my love spell. We were both helpless, under the other’s enchantment, as soon as we sat down at the table during that first date. I was in love with you the second time we ever touched. I was in love with you when you said you could never get close enough to me, no matter how tightly our bodies entwine together. All those months ago, I wrote how I desired an impossible closeness when what I really hoped for was this very possible closeness. One where we continue to reach for each other across the gulf for these precious tendrils of clarity.

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Have you noticed the secret language couples create every time they touch? It’s just them. Sam and Abigail hold hands across the dinner table. Ju kisses Avery on the back of the neck to say goodbye. The woman brushes a stray eyelash off her man’s cheek then taps his nose. Will and Liv stand looking over the coast arms wrapped around each other. A couple steals glances when the other goes back to their book on the train. Sometimes out in the world, I forget it isn’t just you and me. We kiss like teenagers on the beach, on the sidewalk, in the doorway, in the middle of the restaurant once to your surprise. Alone together, you tap your chest, right over your heart, when we’re lying in bed to show me where I belong.

Badlands, dir. Terrence Malick (1973)