fluid

july 29, 2023

i learned early that men were violent.

my grandfather would suddenly crack me on the crown,

thwack somehow, and scold me for not listening. i became a better listener by the time i was ten.

when my friends and i were 14, we wanted so badly to be beautiful, desirable to the older boys, the young men, who lived in the rowhouses across the street. 

i chose an outfit i thought showed off my tits. i drank budweiser, pounders, but headed home at curfew. my friends stayed. said they would come later. but later they still weren't back, and i panicked, called their mom. i had said while we walked around the neighborhood, "they only want one thing." i didn't know they would just take it. from my friends. i didn't get to them in time. i didn't find them before these young men had stolen their innocence. shattered it. their introduction to sex. was it punishment? was my desire a sin? it felt like my fault. like i should have known the way of the world. 

at fifteen i had sex with my friend. a girl, like me, but not like me. her body lomg amd thin, her limbs strong but sinewy across my hip, holding me. understanding what feels nice. expert and familiar but not like me. it was the first time i came with someone else.

i am nineteen and there is a young man with dualchromatic eyes, who is inexplicably attracted to me. my best friend is dating his roommate. and he, despite his ability to be a prick, despite his personality not being my type, has my interest. but he has a girlfriend too. i tell him i won't keep sleeping with him after the first time unless he breaks up with his girlfriend. he does. i don't feel good about it, but i start fucking him, at his house, in the car. we take ecstasy and sit in his car in an abandoned grocery store parking lot. it is the first time someone tells me how much they want me and how much they love my body. i am not in love. i fuck other men, and then move away to college and fuck other men, and his eyes fade from recollection. 

my friends who didn't have a say in the first men who fucked them are developing drug habits. my best friend takes me to raves. to parties. to men's houses. i don't get fucked up because i am keeping an eye on my friend. making sure she is consenting. i understand men only want one thing, but most of them do not want it from the fat girl, so i am relatively safe, i think. 

i am in my twenties. my best friends are developing some drug habits. i don't understand addiction. but i can drink with the guys. i lust after my friends. i lust after one friend, tall and sinewy, his light eyes and his dark hair and his intelligence turn me on. but i think i want to date him. and he doesn't feel the same. but we get drunk and fuck eventually. but ome time i don't say no soon enough. and things get far away, and then i feel stupid and i want to be home, just home in my bed. i don't know how to process what happened, so i write a letter and after too long i give it to him, but he never reads it. i tell him eventually to throw it away. it doesn't matter. he was probably blacked out. i was drunk. it wasn't his fault. it was my fault. 

i meet a man who has exquisite taste in music and art. he talks with me while we sip on wine and i sing for him, and he swoons. "yeah, i like you," he says. direct. i don't have to wonder. he kisses me and it's the first time i feel loved. adored. appreciated. seen by a man, my peer. we are happy for many months. he is so patient with me as i mourn the loss of my father. but sometimes it hurts when we fuck and i don't know how to tell him. i don't want to disappoint him. i don't know how to explain i would prefer never to have his penis penetrate me. but i love him. i should be able to be honest. it's my fault.

during intermission at a dance recital, i tell my mother i am bisexual. before she has a chance to say much, the lights go dark for the second half of the concert. i decide to finally tell her because i have a girlfriend, and i want to be able to speak freely about her, or invite her to visit, and not have to lie to my mother. my girlfriend is the first woman to go down on me, and i don't realize my period isn't quite over. she almost makes me cum, and is able to shake off earning her red wings, and i am awed by how comfortable she can be with me. i should feel more comfortable. our bodies are more similar than any other person i've been with, but i know that my insecurity is my fault.

a man finally makes me cum when i am 32? it takes 45 minutes. i have to keep telling my brain to focus. despite the amount of beer and weed we've had my mind is not relaxed. i feel special because of the dedication of time to my pleasure. i think maybe this could be a new experience. he has a hot tub and is renovating a home in a rundown town outside the city where i grew up. he's an engineer. he's not steretypical. but he runs into an old flame, cheats on me, and ends our courtship abruptly. i get drunk at the car my friends work at, and have to lie on the couch in the office above the bar and sober up so that i can get home. 

the longest running sexual relationship i have by my thirties, besides with myself, is a friend with benefits who has always been down to fuck when neither of us is in a relationship. i travel three hours one winter to his family's home, where i enjoy the thick patches of forest laid over hillsides cradling the valley where the house his father built sits. we fuck in the floor of the workshop. surrounded by chainsaws. he's laid out a bed, some padding, sleeping bag, some blankets. he adds wood to the stove that burns near us. it's one of the best experiences i have, and i didn't even know chainsaws were a kink. 

he pursues women that he feels that spark with, and i wonder what type of man will feel the spark next with me. 

the first man who explicitly asked for my consent was a divorced permaculturalist who i ket at a halloween party with my sister and some friends. he didn't know what my face looked like because it was painted like a skeleton, under a head of straight, pink hair inspired my lady gaga's born this way music video. it took almkst 20 years of fucking to meet anyone who fully understood the importance of consent. he would come stay with me over the weekend sometimes, and we would dance and grind to the entire MIA album in my livimg room, the two of us drunk on lust and high on pheromones. i thought it could be a new experience. he cheated on me with a woman he met at a conference for farmers, and reminded me we were never officially together. 

there were a handful of women whose pussies i felt and plenty of penises. i started using the term pansexual because i had always wanted to rid myself of anything reminiscent of the binary imposed on me. 

i was content single. i had finally made peace with my own sex drive, and realized most of the sexual encounters i had outside of actual relationships weren't worth the energy. i became celibate until it was worth it. there were one or two more times i hooked up with someone. one much younger. one with very different political views. then i met the boyfriend i had just before the pandemic began. he told me a few months after we had moved in together that he was who he was, and that he wasn't going to change when we had conversations about who was responsible for maintaining oir shared home, and like with every other person i had ever fucked, my attraction to him ended, and i knew the relationship had too. but it wasn't until one day when i was struggling badly. having an extra hard time. he snapped at me. it wasn't the first time, but it was the last for the romantic part of our intersection. 4 months later, he initiated the actual breakup. i knew it was not my fault. we gave it a shot. 

and that was the end of my wanting to fuck anyone, really. there was a blip. my ego woke up, my hormones werw stirred, but it was a false alarm, and i returned to happily being single. as the pandemic wore down, i started to get a little more libido. i started therapy again with the goal of exploring a new poimt within my sexuality. asexuality. i have no desire to connect with someone that way beyond myself. i don't care about someone else's pleasure. i don't care what turns them on. i don't care to extend the brevity of desire that bubbles up like clockwork around my cycle, as my body makes its last efforts to get me pregnant, to no avail.