Sex

Everytime I think of sex, all I can picture is ugliness. I think it’s the most ugly thing people can do with one another. All I can think about is rape, and women who do it to feel pretty, and men who do it to feel successful. I think it’s the saddest misuse of a person’s body, especially if you love them. I think about kissing. I think about soft, smiling lips. I like kissing, and touching skin, slowly, meticulously, as if I’m going to be tested, as if I will have to replicate what I am experiencing in perfect detail. I have the feeling my therapist thinks that I think that I am ugly. It’s too intimate for me, it’s too private and alarming. Too invasive. I hear loud sirens everytime someone touches me, even if they brush past me, even if they’re only touching me inside their head.

I had a girlfriend once, we broke up, a lot happened, she said she loved me, and then slept with a boy three times. I think she was repeating a mantra to herself without realising it. I think it was: “I am pretty, I am pretty because someone is fucking me, therefore I am pretty”. But it could have been anything. I sometimes pictured her saying, “I hate myself, I hate myself”.

When I found out about them having sex, through jeering texts, I felt like someone was ripping my tendons out from underneath my skin. I felt like everything in my head, my stomach, and my chest was going to burst out. I cried so much that I didn’t even know I was crying. I screamed so loud that I couldn’t hear myself. I asked my mother to take me to the hospital so I wouldn’t kill myself. But she knew I didn’t want to go back, she knew I’d cry there too. She held me close, and I remembered when I was little, how I would fall asleep with her. I would force her to put her arm around me, and hold me like that until the world went black. I am five foot ten now, lanky but solid. When she held me, I felt the dizziness of being too light. I remember wanting to throw up. But I calmed down. I said I was okay.