For the first hour, I sat alone on a stool with my cheese slices, enclosed in a private corner nook of classroom A046, wearing pool sandals and a trench coat. I could overhear the students introducing themselves. For some, it was their first life drawing class; others were charcoal-cuticled vets. As the instructor’s voice expounded on the basics of sketching the naked human figure, I set the fromage aside. I found a shard of mirror on a shelf and jimmied it onto a spare easel. A plastic, legless skeleton gaped at me from the corner as I parted my trench coat and inspected my body, shard by shard.

Today’s focus, the instructor explained, would be on construction, creating the building blocks of a figure, perceiving the body as a collection of shapes—cones, cylinders, and spheres. To draw the figure as an outline, he warned, would produce a Picasso-esque rendering. “Break the body into as many shapes as you can.” A leg, for example, might be constructed as sphere, cylinder, sphere, cone. Hip, thigh, knee, lower leg.

Returning to my seat and my snack, I couldn’t help but imagine myself as a big heap of body parts; legs and arms tangled up with free-floating breasts, a foot lodged between my head and a butt cheek. Any sexuality that burdened my body de-materialized. Less form, more function. Generally, wholeness is a state of being I strive for, but this image of myself as a sexless pile of parts provided an odd relief, a strange feeling that would sustain me for the four hours to come, and bewilder me for much longer.

The murmur of the classroom faded to silence. The instructor stepped around the massive shelf serving as a makeshift wall and peered over his glasses at me. I sat there, surrounded by anatomical skeleton amputees and bins of fabric scraps, eating cheese. “We’re ready for you.”

My sandals slapped against the concrete floor as I trailed him, trench coat wrapped tight, to the center of the classroom. Two large wooden boxes draped in old white fabric served as a stage, flooded in fluorescent light, circled by easels. I waved like an idiot at the twelve pairs of eyes peeking over their giant pads of newsprint. “I overheard some of you mention in your introductions that this is your first time. It’s my first time, too. So we’re on the same page.” To the tune of a few perfunctory titters, I removed my trench coat, slipped off the sandals, and hoisted myself onstage, wearing exactly nothing. Well, except for a tampon, because of course I was on my period.

The instructor said a simple pose would work best for the first ten minutes, until the class got comfortable with construction. Tilting my chin toward the ventilation system, I tried to stand—to pose—like someone who’d done this before. Simple but not boring, like a Matisse cutout, maybe. Or a Schierbeek sculpture. I felt a little…grand. I was thirty-two and nude on a stage and yes, I felt a little grand. Graphite and charcoal whipped over newsprint on the crescent of easels around me.

I hung off the cart as Mom pushed. We trawled through the bulk section of a grocery store in British Columbia, in my small hometown of Westbank. I had Mom all to myself. I was twelve years old and wanted a giant bag of Chinese crackers, the same ones Grandpa mixed with peanuts. A woman kept staring at us across the bulk bins. She waved, motioning toward herself. “Who’s that?” I asked. Mom shrugged and walked over. I couldn’t hear the conversation, but Mom returned with a business card, brows high on her head. “That woman wants you to model.”

I knew what a model was. My favorite photo of Mom from her modeling days was tucked into a clear plastic sleeve in her old portfolio, stashed at the bottom of a drawer: a close-up of her face, eyes slicing right through the netting of her pillbox hat into the camera. Dad kept a different picture of her on his desk, framed. In it, she lay on her side, head propped in her palm, naked—save for a surreptitiously draped fur coat. In that photo, I saw an enigma. Mom reminded me of the cover models on the stack of Sports Illustrated magazines in the basement, but less beach, more Vogue. She held some intangible allure I didn’t understand, a secret. I couldn’t grasp the intersections between body and sexuality, between obscured and exposed—and I didn’t know how to connect those undefined concepts back to my mom or my dad. I just knew that one photo was public and one was private.

Mom signed me up for modeling classes. Every week, we drove downtown and back, just the two of us. The other modeling students were fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. I was new; they were not. They reminded me of the Sports Illustrated girls too, but skinnier, taller. Tangible. In class, I learned how to walk with my torso tilted back, one foot in front of the other, as though on a balance beam. I learned to do it in heels. My face had to exude power and apathy, I was taught—impossible concerns for a twelve-year-old, but I mastered it. When a dark-haired girl asked me to teach her how to walk, I couldn’t believe it. She called me a natural. “You’re only twelve? You look so mature for your age.” Pride ran up my spine; I felt grateful for my height—five-foot-eleven, and taller still in heels—and my talent for exhibiting contradictory expressions. I stood tall and glowered when I walked.

Glossy editorial layouts plastered the walls of the agency featuring their most successful models in high-end fashion campaigns. Many of them had been discovered at an annual international modeling convention in Vancouver, where scouts from all over the world searched for fresh faces. For us models in Westbank, this was our chance.  My agent wanted me to go, and Mom agreed.

At the end of classes prior to Thanksgiving, a month out from the convention, my agent knelt before me on the plywood runway with a measuring tape. I stretched my arms out as the yellow tape circled my chest, my waist, my butt. My agent smiled and said I could eat all the turkey I wanted. I caught the look on the dark-haired girl’s face. She looked mad. Jealous, my mom would say. I was excelling.

Faces appeared and disappeared behind easels. My skin burned as students analyzed the twist of my torso, the crook of my elbow. I settled my focus on a dent in the wall. Why in the hell was I here?

When a friend told me she worked as a life model, I’d been immediately impressed by her vulnerability. I was prone to tasking myself with challenges that destabilized my comfort. Nudity itself didn’t necessarily present a challenge; I regularly stripped down at Vancouver’s clothing-optional beach, but being the sole bare body at the center of a group’s focus would be a markedly different experience. To start, I had to submit a job application. I e-signed a contract. I was added to an institutional payroll. Langara College was a forty-minute bike ride from my house. On a Friday night, I could have picked up a serving shift at my restaurant job down the street and made more money. But I chose this, to stand naked on a box in a room full of strangers.

Did I hate serving that much? Was it the alt-artsy side hustle anecdote I was after? Was I an exhibitionist? Desperate to be a muse?

I told a colleague what I was doing. They confirmed it sounded quite literally like their worst nightmare.

The hallway circled the main ballroom like a moat. Inside a fancy hotel in downtown Vancouver, on the final day of the modeling convention, Mom and I readied ourselves to storm the castle: agent callbacks. I wore the uniform mandated by my agency: tall black pumps, black miniskirt, baby blue asymmetrical tank top stamped with the agency logo, and my number, 404, pinned to my torso. It had to be visible at all times—using the washroom, running to the hotel room, stepping outside for fresh air. You never knew when you might bump into a big-time agent. When you might have an opportunity to shine solo, apart from all the other teetering, languid models. When you might be seen.

I scoured the flurry of papers taped to the wall, listings of the models that each agency wanted to meet. An agent’s interest could lead to a secondary contract, a gig overseas, the start of an international career. My number appeared on six lists. Inside the ballroom, Mom diligently took notes of the agents’ comments:

Agent 1

• Great, unique look
• Too young for Milan
• Wants to see her in a couple of years

Agent 2

• Good body
• Has editorial look
• Too young for this market

Agent 3

• Perfect measurements—she’ll need to keep on top of it
• A little young

TOO YOUNG. My body was right. My age was wrong.

On the way to my next callback, I ran into 212, a model from my agency, and blushed. Owen, a whole five years older than me, glowed after landing a million callbacks and meeting with a big-deal New York-based agent (who had already signed a twelve-year-old that year) . The hollows of his cheeks punctuated his broad jaw like reverse parentheses. Muscles punched through his T-shirt. I was in love with him, but—as everyone seemed committed to reminding me—I was just a kid. And yet Owen talked to me like an adult. I swear he flirted. He hugged me and signed a headshot. You were the star of group runway and the dancing was awesome, you will be an international guest model next time I see you! See ya cutie. Flashes of us posing together for a Gucci campaign—love and fame—momentarily blinded me.

Mom and I settled into burgundy chairs at my next callback. The agent told me to get my teeth fixed. They were straight and had a natural gap between the two front incisors. “That’s ridiculous,” Mom huffed, as we walked away. “You’re not getting your teeth fixed. Lauren Hutton has a gap.” I clutched my white pleather-bound portfolio—my business card—to my chest. Yeah, I thought. Lauren Hutton.

“Twelve?” The next agent sighed. “That’s a little young.” Mom scribbled on her notepad as the agent flipped through my portfolio. “The pictures—the pictures are good though.” Her smooth nails pressed together as she pushed a card across the table. “Call me when you’re seventeen.”

“But … I can travel. In the summer.”

The agent’s mouth thinned into a smile. “You’re going to go through puberty and your body’s going to change.” Her laugh burned my ears. “Trust me, it will be very difficult to keep the same figure then.” She shut my portfolio. Her nails left little crescent indents in the fake white leather.

When the instructor announced a ten-minute break, I broke my pose and pulled on my street clothes. I had to pee. In the hallway, a student unwrapped his sandwich. “So, what’s it like to model?” he blurted. “Does it bother you?”

It probably wasn’t a trick question; he seemed earnest. Though poorly phrased, a similar question haunted me: what compelled me to stand naked before a group of strangers?

“I’ve been to life drawing classes before, but, like, to draw,” I offered lamely. My hands tucked into the pockets of my cargo pants.

“Oh right.” Bread bits cascaded down his shirt. “You’re in a room full of artists. The context matters, I suppose.” He dusted the crumbs away. “See you in there.”

All the stalls in the bathroom were empty. I tilted and turned in the mirror, lifting and lowering my clothes to inspect different parts of myself without undressing. The single mirror threw my body back at me; my legs were hairy, my weight and body measurements a mystery. Scars from my breast reduction snaked from below one armpit, across my ribcage to my sternum, and to the other armpit. I pulled down my shirt; it was impossible to really see my body like this. I strode back to the drawing room.

Soon after the Vancouver modeling convention, I gawked at photos of Owen splashed across fashion layouts. I saw him on a mega-ad, one hundred feet tall, frozen in place, on the side of a building downtown. The whole world saw him. His face looked different though, “chiseled.” His muscles sinewy. Owen-shaped, but not quite Owen. I thought he was beautiful before. His body perfect before. But perfect wasn’t quite the right shape.

I’d been honest with the tactless student; I’d enrolled in a handful of life drawing classes over the years, as an artist. As a kid, I spent hours drawing faces and animals. In my twenties, I became fascinated with naked bodies.

In the life drawing classes I attended, sessions were timed, but the models otherwise directed themselves on stage, flowing into new shapes of their choosing. I tried to capture it all with graphite, to somehow translate the energy of their gesture—a wave cresting from finger to shoulder to toe—onto paper, make fat and skin and muscle and bone move, push a current of blood through the tip of my pencil.

What did it feel like to be a form, a movement, rather than a body, with all its weight? I had spent so much time in front of a mirror, I’d forgotten I had depth. What was a body without a mirror to flatten it? How did it stand on stage, not as a singular, fixed shape, but as a figure constructed of many shapes, protean and mutable? How did it become parts that made up a whole, an arrangement that moved and gestured?

Eventually I was fourteen—older, finally—and though my parents couldn’t afford to let me attend the modeling convention in the fall, my agency announced a local model search in City Park, just over the bridge from Westbank. The prize was an all-expenses paid trip to the convention in Vancouver.

Mom was by my side whenever I wasn’t in front of the judges, but she never obscured my number. She held my portfolio and told me I was fantastic. I felt annoyed. It didn’t matter what she thought.  It mattered what they thought. I knew I looked older—I wore a bra now—but it was the wrong kind of older. Boobs could really fuck with your measurements, exactly as that agent had warned. At least I was the tallest. Us models, we snagged glances at each other. They clomped around in their heels, but I’d been walking in those shoes since I was twelve.

I pounded the concrete runway in a skirt. In a swimsuit. My number flapped, my face exuded power and apathy. I met the judges, flipping my face into an easygoing smile. I stood taut and tall in my bikini as an agent whipped out a tape measure and cinched it around my bust-waist-hips. I knew the numbers but held my breath. “Thirty-four, twenty-four and a half, thirty-four. Almost perfect!”

I breathed out.

The models scattered off stage as the judges deliberated. While Mom and I waited, the edges of my vision went dark and I crouched at the base of a tree.

“Are you okay?” Mom’s forehead crinkled and I admitted that I needed to eat. It would be another few years before she knew about my eating disorder. Even then, I didn’t know that’s what it was, but I knew enough not to talk about it.

Ten minutes later, the other models and I posed homogeneously side by side. My agent stood to announce the results. A charged silence struck the crowd.

I won.

After a long, hungry summer, I attended the modeling convention in Vancouver for my second and last time, the shape of my body half an inch closer to perfect than it had been at the model search. But I was only fourteen. Still too young.

Mid axe swing. The class was now learning to capture movement of a figure—gesture—and I was posed as though chopping firewood.

“Draw what you see,” the instructor said, circling the room. “Not what you think you see.” The students were supposed to find the single line that flowed through the entire form, a line that mapped the course of energy. “Don’t worry about details right now. Just get the shape. The more shapes you can break the body down into, the more movement you will see.”

This made sense. To consider outer space is to be baffled. But to look up at the night sky and focus on each moving part—the moon, the sun, planets, stars, and celestial bodies, solar systems and galaxies—creates a lens through which to observe the cosmos more holistically.

In my peripheral vision, I sensed the artists breaking my body down into shapes, reconstructing the shapes onto newsprint. Building my body back up with charcoal. The timer rang, and I followed through with my swing, met gravity’s force with my own.

In high school, I dropped to 116 pounds. I was so exhausted, I could not hold my head up, let alone hold open the heavy doors of the school entrance. I slept through all my English blocks in high school, my favorite subject. I skipped most other classes, except drama, but sat in the back row because I couldn’t stay awake there, either. Eventually my teachers stopped reprimanding me and just let me sleep. My hands and feet turned purple, then white, then numb. A thousand layers of clothing couldn’t keep me warm. My lips were stained blue from an endless, bone-deep cold. When the principal’s office called because my record showed over a hundred truancies, I told Mom I always missed roll call because I was chronically late. She believed me; I was always late.

My body stopped menstruating, stalled in time on a biological level. An anxious feedback loop played in my head: when will I be warm again, when will I eat again, when will the day end? I no longer had hobbies. But I had stamina. I had integrity. I had the figure of a twelve-year-old.

Naked. The timer sounded. The scrape of conté on newsprint tapered into quiet, and I readied for a new pose. I shook out my wrists, billowed my trench coat over the stage, and sat down as though at the beach, legs out, leaning forward to admire my sandal tan. Long poses now, hold for fifteen minutes.

The stretch made my hamstrings burn. Stillness was not painless. I closed my eyes, focused on my breath. Tried to relax. But all I could see behind my eyelids was my reflection in the bathroom mirror.

What if the students were disgusted by the scars on my chest? My hairy legs? What if they fixated on my poor circulation, which turned my hands and feet a dappled purple? What if my breast looked like a home-grown zucchini from this angle?

I forced my attention to my breath. In, out. My hands were probably purple.

The year I finally turned seventeen, I didn’t return to the modeling convention in Vancouver to strut the runway, to show that agent I could keep my prepubescent figure, that I had kept it. Instead, I went to the bush. 

A close friend called my parents, unbeknownst to me, and shared her concerns about my increasingly strange eating habits, long bathroom stints, and erratic social conduct. When they confronted me, upset and already devising a plan to fix my problem, I barely protested. In truth, I felt relieved. Secrets are lonely undertakings, and mine had demanded constant attention.

They sent me to a camp for girls with eating disorders, at a lodge nestled in the woods on a lake an hour outside Vancouver. The closest thing to a catwalk was the old dock, where I fell asleep during group yoga every morning. One afternoon, in the communal area of the lodge, we were each paired with another camper. Sunlight angled through the windows, landing on huge sheets of paper taped to the walls. The counselor passed out colored markers as she explained the activity. I stood against the papered wall, facing my partner, who smiled, a purple marker in hand. She traced my body all the way around, from one foot to the top of my head, from my head down to the other foot, tracking all the space in between. When she finished her drawing, I stepped away and turned around. 

The counselor told us the exercise offered a more concrete way to see our bodies, a way to disrupt the thick film of judgment and expectation we were trapped behind. 

I hoped for a stick figure but really expected more of a crime scene situation, a rudimentary outline like the tape around a cadaver on a TV cop drama. But the tracing on the wall looked like neither—it didn’t look like me whatsoever. It was just a line, after all, a two-dimensional contour on the wall. Still, I felt my defenses swing like a metronome. I should be smaller, I thought, wondering if my partner had held the marker at an unfair angle. But what if that rangy outline was really what I looked like? Because my name was attached to it, I felt an urge to take responsibility for that line, to place some kind of value on it. 

I traced my partner, determined to capture her just as she was. We stepped back. And the contour didn’t look like her either. Glancing around the room at all the outlines of bodies on the wall, it became impossible to tell which belonged to whom. They were just shapes. Not people.

Two minutes into the pseudo-beach pose and I could not push away my concerns about the vegetable shape my boob had possibly morphed into, given the way my torso arched, given the pull of gravity. Every time I switched poses, all my body parts took on a slightly different shape, and I felt the urge to step outside my skin and do a 360° scan of myself to ensure everything looked as it should. Aside from presenting a logistical impossibility, I recognized the urge as one with incredible potential to spiral. In such a vortex, thirteen minutes would become a lifetime.

I took a breath. Pricked my ears to the constant erosion of charcoal. If my boob did look like a zucchini, at least the artists were building the zucchini out of spheres and cones, focusing on accuracy. My body was a collection of shapes. It wasn’t worth losing myself over.

At the timer, the students spun their easels to face inward. A dozen interpretations of myself surrounded me. As each artist described their technique, I faced my body, sketch by sketch.

The first easel conveyed a hunched figure, arms clutching the edge of the chair between her legs. The lines were choppy, the form rendered small. In another, exaggerated lines swelled into a wide, muscled arm and the breasts swooped away from the rib cage like birds in flight. One picture portrayed the figure on a stool. The edges of the conté had been dragged to create shadows that revealed her shape through the relief of light.

Seeing my body this way, deconstructed into shapes, arranged on paper into stacks of spheres and cylinders, calmed me. Strange relief. The way others perceived my body, I could see, had very little to do with me, and nothing to do with the anxieties that spiraled in my head. Each drawing revealed my body’s subjectivity, unveiled an alternative way to see. On the page, I wasn’t in good or bad shape, appealing or unappealing.

While the students packed up, the instructor offered a final pointer for their portfolio pieces. “As you draw, notice the contrast of the body and the background. Think about how the contrast of the negative space informs the shape.”

I recalled the conversation with the student in the hallway. The context mattered. I wasn’t twelve but thirty-two. This wasn’t a competition, but a drawing class. Here, I was not expected to scrape myself down to a razor-thin margin of acceptable measurements, draped in sample sizes. My body wasn’t up for debate; my body was the shape in question—positive space informed by the negative. Here, I had autonomy over my body’s expression; the interpretation of it was beside the point.

I dressed, packed my bag, and waved goodbye to the class. “It was nice to see you,” a student called out.

It was nice to be seen.

The post A Perfect Body Wasn’t the Right Shape For Me appeared first on Electric Literature.

Well, well, well. Look at you, @teen-w00lf, back again. You’ve taken this quiz sixteen times. How many times can quiz creator @leavebritneyalone696969 tell you what you are? What are you so afraid of? 

It’s up to you if you want to continue. Remember: These quizzes are just for entertainment. 

Q: Do you ever buy clothes from the men’s section?

I want my body to be something it can’t be. I want it to be slim, rail-thin. I want the spindly body in so much lesbian media. It isn’t. I force myself into men’s clothing that fits me all wrong, that reminds me, you are not meant for this. I can put together femme outfits, in skirts and tank tops, in clothes that show my cleavage, the curve of my ass. This is what I am supposed to look like, a girl-shape. My body feels like it is something outside of me. 

I go to Babeland to buy a strap-on. Next to the dildos is a section of packers, limp and harmless, and I have an immediate urge to buy one, wear tight jeans, make myself into someone between genders, impossible to discern, with all my girl-body and an idea of a penis packed tight in men’s jeans.  

Your body, teen-w00lf, is the way you move through time, through sex, through queerness. What do you think it means that you feel so alienated from it? What body do you expect to have? Why do you blame this body? 

Q: Have you ever had really short hair?

My mom takes me to her hairstylist when I am eleven. This is a big deal, she tells me. She’s a great hairstylist. Up to this point, my mom cut my hair, scissors in the kitchen, straight across, straight bangs. She realizes that I am beginning to care about the way I look. I am an early bloomer, slouching in math class to hide the breasts that grew too soon, yanking at the hems of my skirts to hide a body I didn’t ask for, didn’t particularly want. I tower over everyone else in my class. I come from a tall family. My dad is so happy that I am a Tall Girl, for now, for now, for now, and he thinks I will still have another growth spurt. Instead, I get my period when I am still in elementary school, and no one tells me to expect it. This is the body I will be living in, my teens, my twenties, my thirties, my forties, until my body moves to menopause. I tell the hairstylist I want a bob, short, to my chin. I have what I don’t know yet is cystic acne, painful and rageful, that scars and blemishes my face. I don’t like how much of my face is visible when the hairstylist shows me the final cut. Even as I start hormonal birth control at twenty-two to assuage my cystic acne, even as I get older and my body and face become an adult’s, I am afraid to cut my hair again. I wear it like a mane. I wear it like a shield. For so much of my life, until I start Lexapro and Lamictal, I want to disappear. 

I am twenty-six. I cut my own hair, kneeling in my bathroom in front of the full-length mirror. 

This feels right, doesn’t it? Your body is not a fixed object. It is as mutable as you are. 

Is sexuality mutable or fixed? How can my body show this in-between-ness? I want to be something fixed. I want to hold on to something, whatever that might be. Can my queerness be this, rise up in me as fierce as a religion? 

Gender is part of this question. My body is feminine, soft, curved. 

Sometimes I wish I were a man. No—not quite—something outside of it all. Neither man nor woman, something in-between and bigger and more nebulous and mine. 

This question will take time to unspool, to learn that gender is a question that asks itself again and again. I walk through the world and I am “yes, girl”-ed and “hot girl”-ed and “yes ma’am”-ed and none of these are right and none of these are wrong and none of them are mine. My gender can be more than how I move through the world; a way of relating to the self. Nonbinary-ness allows for that flexibility, that movement. It takes time to get here. 

What are you leaving behind? Who are you leaving behind? 

Q: What have your friendships with other girls looked like?

My first best friend is a hockey player who has a GameCube in her basement. My parents are about to split up and I spend most weekends here, playing Mario Kart and Donkey Kong two-player games. She and I both have younger siblings and talk, with disdain, about being oldest sisters. Her mother picks both of us up from school on Wednesdays, and we share bags of grapes, pluck the fruit into our sweaty palms, burst them between our teeth. The two of us go ice skating for her eighth birthday. I slip, fall, and someone else skates over the side of my pinkie finger. I will always carry this scar. On field trips, the two of us curl together in the summer-sticky fake-leather school bus seats, reading from the same book. I read faster than she does, and when she reaches the end of a page, she says, turn, turn, turn. We go to different middle schools. She is an athlete, makes friends easily, and I am writing bad poems on the inside of my history notebooks, talk only over emails we send each other on family computers. I send her long messages about the boy I’ve decided to have a crush on. She responds, have all your brains fallen out? 

In my first middle school, I develop a tight, desperate friendship with four girls in my English class. We sit together at lunch and talk about what we’re not eating, how many calories are in bananas and apples. I have already learned this language of thinness, but here, I can speak it fluently, hear it repeated back to me. They teach me how to do makeup in the bathroom before class. I blink and smudge black eyeliner all over my face. They give me clothes that no longer fit them and barely fit me, squeezed over new breasts, and I feel like I am showing a body that hasn’t become mine yet. I go over to their houses for sleepovers and spread out my dad’s camping sleeping bag, feeling distinctly out of place. We talk about all the food we’re not eating, do each others’ makeup, play dress up, talk about the boys we like. I’ve decided on a boy to have a crush on and talk about him obsessively. My mother gets remarried; we move from the mountains to the suburbs. My friends grow older, find boyfriends. I am invited to their birthday parties, then I’m not. 

I have a hard time finding footing in high school. My best friend is a Christian girl whose Facebook profile reads proud Jesus Freak <3 and hate-the-sin-love-the-sinner-s me when I come out. Another friend who plays the piccolo in marching band with me says she also thinks girls are pretty sometimes, shrugs, when I come out. One friend is out, queer and nonbinary, and we understand each other without question, playing ping-pong in their basement, volleying the ball back and forth, not talking about all the pain we’re carrying. I have other friends, but they are moments, they are just conversations between lockers, talking during science class, exchanging notes in world history, talking about our AP tests. I make friends easily, but have a hard time letting people in: door open, but kept at an arm’s length. These are years of sloppily undressing and redressing in bathrooms, in bedrooms at 2pm, in the backseats of cars, in church rec rooms, next to riverbeds. I don’t realize you’re supposed to like the people you sleep with until much later, so as a teenager, I offer up my body to anyone who says they think I’m pretty. 

Q: What TV shows or movies have you watched obsessively? 

16 years old, watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer in bed. I fall asleep with the lights on, laptop humming, sweaty from what I haven’t realized yet is desire, what I excuse as only the Virginia heat panting through screened windows. 

Rewatches of But I’m a Cheerleader, in dorm rooms and curled up on twin-sized beds, no shoes, in pajamas our mothers sent in care packages from suburban houses in other corners of Virginia, in Alabama, in Louisiana; trying on the stereotypes of a lesbian life because it’s the only blueprint we have. Smoking Marlboro reds, wearing used Docs, torn flannels. Each of us comes home with tattoos, simple line drawings, ears and noses pierced up and down cartilage. We come back together at the end of weeks of homework. Only one of us has a TV, and all of us, queer eighteen-year-olds, Tinker dorm, first floor, A Hall, congregate, lay our heads on each other. 

I spend afternoons at home alone, my siblings at after school care, my dad at work, my mom at work. I guess the PIN he uses to lock channels (it’s my birth year, the year he became a father), and watch Tila Tequila’s Shot At Love, which is where I learn the word “bisexual,” and, a soda I stole from my dad’s Costco stash in the basement in hand – this is before he stops drinking soda, before he starts running eight miles a day, before he sticks to a diet of chicken caesar salads and yogurt – I realize, holy shit, I’m not the only one who ever feels like this. 

This is when you first came to this quiz, isn’t it? The family computer in the living room, you, the only one home, before you learn what Incognito Mode is? Well, we can tell you that you like girls. That much seems obvious. But, here’s the catch: the difference between lesbian and bisexual? That’s all you to figure out, teen-w00lf. Come on. You’ve always been like this. 

Why does this still feel so wrong? Forbidden? Like I’m stepping into someone else’s clothes? 

Q: Do you feel confused about your sexual orientation?

Am I a lesbian? Am I bisexual? Am I dealing with comphet? Why do I care so much about a box to fit myself in? Doesn’t that completely miss the point of sexual fluidity? What if I don’t want to be fluid? What if I want to be just one thing? How do I have the language for something as hard to define as sexuality? How can this already difficult to define thing also encapsulate gender, which is fluid, too? Why am I so uncomfortable with fluidity? Am I desperate for male attention? Do I want to be looked at and noticed so badly because of some trauma? Do I have daddy issues even though I have a loving, attentive father? Are step-daddy issues the same thing? Have I ever actually enjoyed straight sex? Have I ever even been present in straight sex? Do I remember having sex from the first person or third person? Does it mean anything that I remember having straight sex only in the third person? What does it mean that I’ve gotten through sex many, many times by imagining their body as someone else’s? What am I giving up by calling myself a lesbian? What am I afraid to lose? A life I don’t want anyway?

What would I gain? 

Q: Have you ever kissed a woman? Have you liked it? Is this a gain, the pleasure of a body? Has it been a pleasure? 

Kisses in dive bars, kisses on dares, kisses high in the back of nightclubs, kisses while dancing in lesbian bars, kisses immediately pulled back and said, wait, I’m straight, don’t tell my boyfriend, kisses good, kisses bad, kisses sloppy, kisses longing. First kiss with a girl: I am twelve, the summer between seventh and eighth grade, and I am about to move schools. My braces are off, teeth newly slick, and one of my friends wants to practice kissing and practice queerness all at once. We sit together in her attic, fans humming, watching a VHS of The Nightmare Before Christmas, and she tells me that I am the boy, to kiss her. Pecks on the lips, quick, a toe dipped into queerness. I am sweaty palms and greasy bangs and bras that squeeze and full of desire that aches on my tongue, somewhere in my stomach. Kisses in high school, girls who think they might be queer and know I’m a safe bet, that I can be an on-ramp, easy, eager to please. Kisses behind the gym, at the back of the bus after marching band competitions, in practice rooms, in bathrooms, in the unused showers of the locker rooms. Kisses quick, light pecks; kisses long, slippery; kisses that yearn; kisses that beg. In college, I call myself a kiss-slut, work the kissing booth at the drag king show, fifty cents for a kiss on the cheek, a dollar for a kiss on the lips, and I wear bright red lipstick that stains. At the end of the night, a sweaty room full of queer women who carry my kiss-print. At parties, I throw up my hands, drunk, and shout that I want someone to kiss me. Someone always does, femmes in pink and feathers, butches with undercuts and jean jackets. My straight friends are embarrassed by this at brunch the next morning, say I’m developing a reputation, but if my reputation is kissing happily, freely, I want it. I go to the lesbian bar down the street from my apartment, single for the first time, and kiss everyone I dance with. I’m drunk on strawberry dykeiris and loop my fingers in the pockets of a butch I ask to fuck me in the bathroom. The average person spends two weeks of their life kissing. I want so much more, kisses constant, kisses nonstop. I love when a kiss blossoms into a want. 

You have a reputation, then, for kissing women, don’t you? Okay, fine. Proof of your queerness. What’s the point of trying to prove this? 

I want someone to tell me that I am making the right choice. I want someone to tell me I am labeling myself correctly, that if I do, no one will be able to hurt me again. Does excluding cis men protect me, keep me safe? 

What if you’re still just bisexual at the end of this? What if you get hurt in a lesbian relationship, anyway? What are the stakes here? 

I left a man I loved to pursue a truer life, a lesbian life. Was this the wrong choice? Here I am again, looking for proof. Tell me I was right to do this. Tell me I was right. Tell me. Tell me. 

Q: Do you have fantasies or dreams of having sex with a cis man?

I have been in relationships with a few men, but only fantasized about one. 

It would have been kinder, teen-w00lf, to say no, when men asked you back to their apartments, asked you out on dates to share pizzas and bottles of wine. Why do you struggle so much with saying no? 

Do I want to call myself a lesbian because it is a no without having to say “no,” in all its intents and implications? 

I am twenty and living in Paris. I haven’t had much experience being attracted to men, so because I am, for the first time, I don’t know how to contain myself. He invites me to a threesome. He invites me to do a line off his dick and blow him. I am too scared to say yes and do neither. He comes from money and buys me all the drugs I want, and oh, I want. His French is terrible. We go on a date, kind of, where we both do coke in the bathroom and smoke cigarettes on the patio. He buys an expensive bottle of Bordeaux that we share. We are both so addled with substances, and when we go to the symphony together, I am still trying to be a classical musician, I coke-fast talk about my favorite composers and he tells me about his father, the pressure of growing up rich, while  I think to myself that I grew up in the mountains in a house with bats in the attic and a one-bedroom apartment and a house with my stepfather where I was never never alone and whatever part of me that’s not spiraling into substances thinks something like, jesus, we have lived very different lives, but when we both get into the metro it’s crowded and our bodies are pressed together and god I can smell his cologne his soap and he lives in an apartment in Stalingrad and I live in an apartment way out in Porte de Champerret and oh I want to go home with him and he’s got an eighth of weed to share he says but I say no because I’m coming down and feel fucking awful and go home past midnight and walk up the empty rue Guillaume Tell unlock my door kick off my heels and masturbate unsuccessfully lying down in the shower. I never have sex with him. I follow him on Instagram. He becomes a model, marries another model. When I see his posts, I think, well, lesson learned, take the opportunity to be a slut when it presents itself. 

Proof, then, in heterosexuality. I can’t be a lesbian if I feel like this for a man, just desire, nothing else clouding judgment. 

Right?

Do you think that’s lesbian behavior? 

Q: When have you lied during straight sex? What scares you about lesbian sex? 

I imagine a woman sitting on my face, pressing my tongue into her. I imagine running my hands over breasts, taking a nipple in my mouth, another between my fingers, rolled like a stack of quarters. In all sorts of settings: my sunny studio, a bedroom in a shared house dark from blackout curtains, in the lesbian bar bathroom, in tents in national parks. Want, heavy. In my dreams, I have a penis. 

Can I tell you a secret? Can I trust you? It scares me, the idea of being bad at sex. It’s easy to be a receptacle for straight men; what am I supposed to do, when someone wants all of me? 

Think: what are your kinks telling you? 

I want to be fucked by a group of women, the center of pleasure. Easy: I want attention. This is all I’ve ever wanted. I was a child smiling for the camera in every home video. I talk to strangers, I make friends everywhere I go. I want to be paid attention to. I want to feel real. 

Here’s what scares me: what if these fantasies are only good as fantasies? What if my sexuality is only good in the abstract, and if I admit it, if I know it, if it becomes concrete and real, what if I am wrong? 

You want everyone to like you, so much, you want everyone to like you. This isn’t a lesbian thing. This is a you thing. 

I want to perform my sexuality in front of a group of people, the exhibition, the voyeured. I want to take my clothes off. I want to go to the sex club on Femme Dominion night, stand on stage in tall, heeled boots, sweating off thick winged eyeliner. Tell me that my body is pleasure, even to look at it is something inviting, that it has worth. I want someone to fuck me in front of an audience, or do it myself. Pay attention to me, please. Tell me I’m beautiful and wantable. Tell me I am worth attention. Tell me I am worth being heard. 

No, teen-w00lf. It’s more than being liked. You just, simply, want what every person wants, to be loved, to be seen. 

Q: Imagine a hot femme is flirting with you. What is your reaction? 

I go to the lesbian bar after the DJ starts, dance close to the front, drink strawberry dykeiris, flirt with absolutely everyone. When people dance with me, stand close, make eye contact, tell me their names, I flirt back, smile soft, curve my body toward theirs. I am electric and hungry. 

I know you, teen-w00lf. I know you’re scared of wanting this. How much easier would it be to negate this, erase this? How much easier would it be to push away femme flirtation, to slip into heterosexuality? You could do it. You know you could. It would be so easy. Wanting never goes away, but you are an expert at restriction. 

The artist I’m dating leaves me compliments, buys us lunch, comes with me to art installations and poetry readings, meets me when we both have connections coming back to Seattle through O’Hare, share green smoothies while sitting on the airport tile floor. She stretches out with me on my couch, my cat curled between us, plays Stardew Valley with me. She tells me about queer Appalachian ceramics and I tell her about my opinions on Red Dead Redemption II. She is as beautiful and longed-for as springtime. I can’t tell her this, it’s too honest. The words get all caught up in my throat before I can spit them out. I am only good at flirting and fucking. 

She will leave you, you know this. What will you do when femmes disappoint you, too? What will you do when you can’t blame your loneliness on anything other than your own flaws and faults? 

Q: Have you ever fallen in love? With whom? 

a boy, a saxophonist | a girl, an ice skater | a girl, a fellow tumblr blogger | a woman, the communist next door |a nonbinary person, the poet with a david bowie tattoo across the hall | a woman, the environmental science major in philosophy of art | a woman, the poet I drive home from workshop | the poet, again, when we are in the same city | my longest lover, a man, with rough, tender hands 

Did you really love all these people? Or was the only person you really loved the lover you left? Isn’t it proof that you’re not a lesbian at all, that you loved this man so much, that you still worry you made the wrong choice in leaving? 

Q: Have you had lesbian sex?

bedrooms // bathrooms // under blankets in basements // dorm hall showers // dorm hall tubs // library bathrooms // bedrooms with a lizard in a cage looking on // bedrooms where one of us bleeds on the comforter // strap-ons from the sex toy store down the street // $120 vibrators // pierced nipples // what do you like? let me tell you exactly what I like // I’ll do you, then we can have a water break, and you can do me (repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat) // do you like this? is this good for you? // sex where I come six times in a night, I tell my friends, and they say that can’t be healthy (they are straight-girl jealous, I say to my lover) // can I take this off? can we cuddle for a little bit? I have to pee first. // 

Q: Have you had straight sex?

in bedrooms, unwashed twin sized sheets // backseats of cars // mall family bathrooms // dorm rooms // nightclubs // sex where we simultaneously orgasm // sex where I don’t finish at all // sex where I fake an orgasm just to get him away from me // sweat // come on my toes // come on my tits // come on my ass // please don’t come on my face (comes on my face anyway, I have to wash it out of my hair and eyelashes) // keep your glasses on, keep your skirt on, keep your dress on, keep your heels on //

My het friends talk about their body counts. One goes down the list of names she keeps in her notes app; another friend asks, how many of them did you have real sex with? 

I interject, hey, wait a second, what do you mean by “real sex?”  

You know. P-in-V. 

That’s like, one kind of sex. There are lots of kinds of sex. 

Come on. You know what we mean.   

They’re telling you exactly how they see you, teen-w00lf. This is exactly how they’ve seen you since you dated your first queer college partner, asking how two people with vaginas even have sex, and you were walking back to your dorm room, just barely eighteen, and thinking – if that’s the only sex you can think of, shit, you sure are missing out. 

I have the capacity to love men, love women, people who are both and neither. But, as I undressed for a shower, age 25, sharing an apartment with a man I loved, a realization as clear and bright as lightning: I really thought I’d be living my life with a woman. 

I can imagine full, bright, happy lives without loving men. I cannot imagine a life where I do not love women. 

Result: You are a lesbian. 

The score indicates a high probability that you are homosexual. If needed, you could consult with a relevant sex specialist for further clarification. But you’re not going to do that, are you? No one can clarify this for you but you. How ‘bout that, teen-w00lf, Probably a homosexual. 

You’ll be back in a year and a half or so. It’s okay, you know, to just be. To just be a lesbian. To just be queer. This is the life you’re building for yourself, isn’t it? You know leavebritneyalone696969 isn’t the arbiter of queerness. It’s just you. 

You left your lover because it was the right thing to do. Being a lesbian can be the reason, if that’s easier. It’s more complicated than that, of course it is, of course all of it is, but this is a life you get to build on purpose. Lovers come and go. It comes down to you, all you, just you. 

Just me. Here in front of my computer, I am a lesbian, I am a lesbian. A life building community in book clubs, at the lesbian bar, through lovers and friends. A lesbian life at supper clubs, sharing writing. A lesbian life gardening. A lesbian life with fulfilling, intimate sex. Imagining a life. There is freedom in this imaging. Queer love, too, the love of friends, the love of partners, moves in prisms.

The post I Left A Man I Love To Pursue A Truer Life appeared first on Electric Literature.

Why are memoirs still being published, the man asked. It was beyond him. It fed a nonsense cycle. Why do people keep reading them? Worse of all: Why are they being written at all? He leaned back, smug, as if he had just landed a well-placed punch against Big Memoir. The woman nodded politely, burrowing into her yogurt with a silver spoon. People are publishing them too young, continued the man. They are publishing too many. He paused, throat puffed with conviction: There’s no reason for that, unless you’re an admiral or something. He stabbed a strawberry. Eyes on the city skyline, he shook his head.

At that moment, the open tab on my phone was the Rachel Cusk profile of Nobel-prize winning memoirist Annie Ernaux. “Her art bears no relation to a privileging of personal experience,” writes Cusk. “What Annie Ernaux understood was that as a female child of the regional laboring classes, her self was her only authentic possession in this world, and thus the sole basis for the legitimacy of her art.” I was thinking about how the life we live determines our perceived authority around what we can write about, or rather, what we are allowed to be experts on, which is to say published experts on. 

When I heard his line about the admiral, I stopped looking at my phone. I became very fixated on carving the melon from the rind. I needed a knife in my palm. I needed to separate that which was sweet from that which would lodge in my throat. 

I am not going to tell you who this author was. Not out of any sense of protection, but because I realize I was not meeting him as an individual. I was meeting him as the vessel of a voice that had, until that moment, been only in my head. His was the voice that tripped me when I sat down to type, that hissed at me whenever someone (usually a man) asked “So you’re a journalist?” and I said “Well, not exactly,” then went on to explain, his face pinched into a pitying smile, that my nonfiction reliably included myself, too. When I heard this man at the festival, I became convinced that every ghost who haunted my writing desk would, one day, appear in human form. That they might be friendly in the elevator. That when I dropped my fork, they’d hand me another. 

I stayed silent that morning on the roof. I did not, if you can believe it, ask the man about his favorite memoirs by admirals. And yet I have spent the months since talking to him. Thinking about what I might have said: about how witnessing a memoirist’s vulnerability on the page makes space for interrogating our own, or about the political imperative of a writing that swivels between self and world, not as a means of dwelling on the self, but as a mode of almost diluting it, contextualizing it, tracing its wires back to their environmental, sociopolitical, and cultural roots. I would guess this book festival man saw himself as an objective observer of our world. 

The first-person writing that I love refutes—critically—this myth of neutral narrator.

A few months later, I was traveling for the book in a different corner of the United States when, on a morning jog, I came across a historic waterfront sign about “naval stories.” I immediately thought of admirals. And then I thought of my belly.

To think of the belly-button is to think of navel-gazing, which is to think of the charges brought against those of us who write about ourselves, a kind of writing allegedly so myopically focused on the self that it does not see the world beyond it. Ted Kooser defines a poet as someone who stands before a window, controlling the strength of the sun outside, but the metaphor extends to creative nonfiction as well: Your silhouette can fade when you make the world outside brighter, just as your reflection can sharpen when that world darkens. Every time I sit down to write, I find myself in front of this window, fiddling with the lights. Who, or what, do I want the reader to see most clearly? 

It is true that a first-person author turns their own narrative presence up or down, but I have come to resent the idea that I must choose between seeing my navel or seeing the world. When I say I am omnivorous, I mean I am hungry to read and write about everything. I do not want to pick between writing about another subject—as my training in academia and journalism taught me—and writing about myself. I look at the world to understand my life even as I mine my experiences to learn about the larger world. 

Writing is the act of making one’s thoughts visible to other people. My pencil scrawlings are, very literally, the bridge between my interior and exterior world. Writing is an art form that lends itself, then, to complicating—to detonating—the binaries between self and other; inner thought and outer action.

Let us think literally about the alleged insult of “navel-gazing.” Imagine writing about your belly-button, a puckered lint-specked innie that nobody else, ostensibly, should care about. Then consider how looking at one’s belly button is not only to consider the bridge to one’s mother, but the body’s first interaction with civic infrastructure. 

I look at my navel and see the brown brick hospital whose windows overlooked the soccer fields where I later got kicked in the shin. I see my mother in the operating room, gritting her teeth, while Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is on trial for sexual harassment on the corner TV. I see the silhouette of her doctor, dulled to the choreography of conjuring life, discussing an upcoming fishing trip from behind a sheet as he cuts my mother’s belly open and pulls me out. I look at my navel and I see the hanging question mark of whether I, one day, will try to carry a child into this world, too. 

Can you see that each navel has a different story? That to tell a navel story is to tell a story of labor, not just of your own mother’s, but of a system around you? Can you see how this story might be as important as a story about the life of a naval admiral?

To imagine that writing about oneself is not also writing about these larger systemic inheritances is utterly wrong. The writer’s job is to make visible the structures which might otherwise be unseen. We live in a world of interconnection, but we exist in a society that often tries to silo us into our factions, our nations, our species, our careers. To make us forget, for example, that the money our government spends on war is money they don’t spend on education. It is the writers’ imperative to illuminate the linkages between us, and to the histories we all carry. Not as a mode of teaching the reader facts, but as a way of helping them see their own body in union with the world. 

I write to make interconnection visible. There is a selfishness to my method. It keeps the world oiled with wonder. When I think about grief, now, I think about how scattered human ashes are changing the soil chemistry atop some mountains, and then about how the griefs that I carry have changed my chemistry too. Or take the seedlings of northern oak trees, so quick to grow back, ecologists now think, because they evolved when elephants trampled them. We are not so far from extinct prehistoric creatures as we would think. To imagine these elephants when I now walk through the woods is to restore a glaze of awe to an act that can, on my worst days, feel like dragging a skeleton through a burning planet. 

As a young journalist, I was taught that experts held authority. I would approach stories with a to-do list of ‘expert archetypes’ in my mind. When I was working on my first book, Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear, I would slot interviews in with the environmental conservationist, the rancher, the biologist. What I found, of course, is that ranchers are not just experts on their cows being predated on, they are experts on the habitat they steward, and where wolves like to walk. Just as I could talk to ranchers about cows, I could talk to them about the changing grasslands, or their experiences walking alone in the forest and being afraid. We each wear more hats of knowledge than are immediately visible. Considering my own first-person authority has trained me to think about other people’s authority in more capacious, generous ways too.  

I had a similar revelation when talking to my agent about what sources I could look to as I wrote about how fear shaped a prey animal’s body. You too are an animal, she told me one day over the phone. You have the authority to write about what happened in your own body, you don’t just have to quote biologists. At that point, I was hesitating to put my own experiences with fear—with symbolic wolves—into the text. I felt my own experiences with fear were unexceptional. I did not want to subject the reader to my navel. 

That was when I remembered a scene I had written years earlier, about something that happened on a college dance floor. This might not be necessary to include, a professor had written in the margins. It’s a fairly standard assault. At the time, I blushed. How embarrassing. I had presented something mundane as worthy of space. Only later did the comment lodge inside me, catalyzing the simple truth that writing about a “standard assault” is to write about a world that decides what sorts of assaults are standard. 

To accept the phrase “fairly standard assault” is to normalize both violation and violence. In college, in Sociology 101, I was taught that the job of the sociologist is to “make the familiar strange.” In many ways this is my goal as a writer too. I include mentions of my own life not because I think it is superlative, but because it is familiar. I want to challenge that which I—and which the reader—think they know. 

Today, when I see a new memoir hit the bestseller chart, I think of the man at the book festival. I imagine him rolling his eyes, shaking his head. And then, because he is a passing character and not the narrator in my head, I tell him to hush. I look at the world—I look away.

The post I Don’t Have To Choose Between Writing About Myself And Writing About The World appeared first on Electric Literature.

Not a whit. We defy augury.

We were gone for almost all of August. When we got back, we found a rime of black and white bird shit and feathers encrusted on the top few steps of the stoop. Pigeons had been roosting on the pediments atop our windows. Whatever normally kept them away from our building was no longer keeping them away. Who’s to say where they came from; pigeons come from nowhere.

Nadia and I figured the late summer rains would wash the fecal matter away, and the pigeons would eventually leave. Find some other Brooklyn brownstone with protruding eaves. But the rains only got rid of the white shit, leaving behind the more three-dimensional, wormlike black shit, and the pigeons stayed. Fresh feculence of both varieties kept falling. The stoop, where we sometimes sat around and chatted with the neighbors, had become entirely unusable.

Our landlord, Erik, a veteran New York Times reporter based in Mexico City, was oblivious to the issue until he visited one rainy afternoon in October. He was standing by the trash bins sorting junk mail. He always wore a pair of newish black Sambas. No rain jacket or umbrella. High receding widow’s peak. Dark, angular, bushy eyebrows that gave him the semblance of a hawk.

“Sorry about the mess,” he said. “How long has it been like this?”

“Probably since mid-August,” I said. “We were away when it started.”

“That’s a long time, I’m really sorry. It’s frankly disgusting. It’s also a public health hazard.”

“How would you go about getting rid of them?”

The three of us looked up. A row of light and dark gray triangles hung over the lip of the brownstone’s uppermost ledge. The pigeons were sheltering from the rain.

“I’ll probably hire a guy to go up to the roof and hang off the side to clean those ledges. Then they put down this sticky stuff, which keeps the birds away.”

“Is that okay for the birds?” Nadia asked.

“Oh yeah, it’s all-natural. They don’t like the feeling of it on their feet, so they stop landing there.”

This seemed a better solution than nets and metal spikes, which always felt so medieval to me. Erik promised to have the property manager get straight to work. Rain had darkened his shoulders. The junk mail sat in his hands like undevoured prey. We thanked him and left it at that.

A few weeks later, I woke to the sound of voices on the landing. Aurelio, the property manager, and a couple of his guys were heading up to the roof. I lay still and listened to their footsteps creaking across the bedroom ceiling. When I went downstairs, I noticed that the stoop was clean. Aurelio the generalísimo—tall and well-fed, well-liked on the block—was standing by his van, staring up at the eaves. He smiled when he saw me and shook my hand. He said they might need to go inside the apartment tomorrow to work on the window ledges. I said no hay problema.

 “No hay problema?” he repeated, smiling again, and went back to work.

The crew came back the next day with coarse black brushes duct-taped to the ends of wooden poles. They dipped the brushes in a soap solution, lay flat at the edge of the roof, and reached down to scrub, presumably while others gripped their ankles from behind. I stood by the bedroom window at one point to watch. Fine particles of soapy water floated past the glass. The men joked around while they worked, suspended over the edge, supremely indifferent to death. Once the stone was clean, they took a pole with a putty knife taped to the end, smeared the blade with bird-repellent gel, and reached down to scrape the stuff onto the ledges. The job took less than half an hour.

Aurelio knocked at our door. I waved him and his right-hand man, Rodrigo, inside and moved some books and picture-frames away from the bedroom windows. I pointed to the potted sampaguita on the windowsill with its tracery of green leaves and vines wound about a bamboo trellis by the glass. I asked them to be extra careful with that—my cousin Emily had entrusted the plant to my care before leaving the city. Aurelio nodded. I went into the kitchen to wait.

Emily had been on my mind all morning. She had messaged the family WhatsApp the day before: “Hi fam! I am being admitted to labor and delivery. Baby will most likely be born tomorrow.” Hearts and prayer hands flooded the chat. I sensed something grave and unspoken: the baby wasn’t due for another month. “Eat noodles for us pls,” Emily added. A Filipino custom, eating noodles on birthdays for long life. Whose long life? I wondered. For us, Em had said. The custom covers both, of course, the same life force. Every birthday belongs equally to the mother—

“All done!” Aurelio said, emerging from the bedroom. On their way out, Rodrigo waved his caulking gun, fitted with the tube of bird-repellent gel, and flashed his perfect set of silver teeth. I went in to examine their work. On the ledge outside the window near my desk, they had put down some thick squiggles of whitish, transparent gel. They had done the same on the other window ledge, by the bed. I found the sight of it vaguely unsettling—the gel had a semen-like quality, maybe that’s what it was. But it also had to do with the lines Rodrigo had drawn. There was something runelike and indecipherable about them. A wide, looping, archaic script, just dense enough to ensure that nothing could land there without touching it. The pattern was not haphazard; some knowledge was encoded there. Some canny human certainty about the ways of animals that I found disturbing. It didn’t look at all, to me, like a deterrent. It looked like a fucking trap.

Nighttime.

Nadia came in and said, “There’s a pigeon on the stoop. I think it’s stuck.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s stuck.”

“To the stoop?”

“Come see.”

I followed them out. On the third step down, in the shadow of the wrought-iron handrail, a small huddled form sat motionless. I hadn’t seen anything there on my way up, an hour ago. Maybe I had missed it. We went closer, speaking gently: hey little one, are you okay? It didn’t move. Its head hung low, near the step. Its crown and throat were snowy white, with dark gray regions around its eyes. Its eyes were wide and black and blank, like the eyes of someone shocked.

“What should we do?” Nadia said.

I didn’t know. I switched on my phone’s light. The bird’s wings glistened with transparent gunk. Its feet were a mess. Globs of gel clung to the pink skin above its claws, and the feathers nearest its feet were saturated and dark. It did seem to be stuck where it was. I moved closer to see if it would try to strain. It hardly seemed to see me at all. It must have been exhausted. We watched it for a moment. Its whole form lifted faintly, then dropped, lifted, then dropped. It was breathing.

“We have to do something,” Nadia said.

I went upstairs to fetch one of the wooden poles Aurelio had left on the landing. I moved it carefully in front of the bird. No response. I touched the pole very gently to its breast. Nothing.

“Do you think we should try to free its feet?” Nadia asked.

“How?”

“Maybe with water?”

“That stuff is extremely sticky. I had to scrub some of it off the windowsill earlier.”

“We have to do something.”

I agreed. The alternative was what? It would just sit there until it died, or until the rats got to it. We went upstairs and did some research. As I clicked around, I saw an ad for something called “Tanglefoot Bird Repellent”—how obscene, I thought, how cruel. We found that vegetable oil might work. So we pulled on double layers of blue nitrile gloves and brought down a dishcloth, a roll of paper towel, and plastic containers of canola oil and water. Coming down the stairs, I felt a heaviness in my limbs. I wasn’t hopeful about the outcome, but Nadia was right, we had to try.

The pigeon had turned around. Now it was near the edge, facing away from the step. So it wasn’t entirely stuck. Maybe it wanted to fly. We decided to start by removing the gunk on its feathers. I moved to a lower step and held up a light. Nadia took a moment to drape the dishcloth over the pigeon’s head, and held a hand there to calm it. Then they dipped some paper towel in the oil and set about swabbing the wing feathers, pulling the gel outward, speaking to it the whole time.

It seemed to be working. The pigeon hardly appeared to notice. Nadia was able to pull one of the wings out from the body—a sickening sheet of gel stretched between wing and side. It had been literally stuck shut. I propped my phone against the step, dipped my fingers in oil, and did as Nadia was doing. We worked quietly, pulling feathers free, dragging the gel down to the tips, then out completely. It must have flapped its wings after it landed in the glue. It must have tumbled into the glue, then righted itself. It must have fallen three stories from the ledge. The Adhan began at the mosque on the corner. Evening prayers curled like smoke; we listened while we worked.

I thought of Emily and the baby. Josh, her husband, had sent a photo in the afternoon of Em lying with her eyes closed in the hospital bed. She looked unconscious or delirious. Her mother was standing above her, feeling her forehead, looking concerned. One aunt said she was going to the church to offer prayers to St. Gerard, patron saint of expectant mothers. She urged everyone to say the Memorare Prayer ten times. My mother wrote, “Lord, please protect Em and baby during this delivery. We trust in your perfect will and timing. Amen.” Josh had said the baby was likely arriving by the end of the day. I wiped a hand to check my phone for updates—nothing. I felt a sudden fear for Emily’s life, and the baby’s life as well. It was getting late. The pigeon moved very little.

Several stray bits of mangled feather matter had become lodged between its flight feathers. I extended the wings and removed each piece that seemed out of place, trying to simulate a natural preening motion. I had kept parakeets before, so I knew something about birds and their habits. A pair of pet-store budgies—one was green and yellow with a single ultramarine tail feather, the other was pale blue and white, puffy, rotund. It was never exactly my choice to own birds. The first was a rescue from my roommates’ theater production. They toyed for a moment with killing him onstage. I intervened on the grounds that art has nothing to do with killing animals onstage. The other one I adopted to keep the first company, to give his life purpose. Both lived in the bedroom I shared with my partner at the time—another Brooklyn brownstone, another life.

But keeping birds troubled me. I was haunted by the thought of one of them slipping through the cage, flying for the window, striking the glass. Somehow worse was the thought of the window hanging open and one of them flying out, a blaze of tropical wings, suddenly alone in the cold and powerless to the casual killing force of everything in the city. Even worse was the thought of the other one left inside, confused, calling for its mate. All of it was awful, the whole arrangement. In the end I broke up with that partner and left that apartment, but I had nightmares about the birds for years—cradling their little forms between my hands, traveling with them through the chaos and noise of the subway, shielding them from gears and cars and heavy machinery. I sometimes woke up flat on my back with my hands folded softly at my chest, as if we had all died together.

I would tell Nadia about these dreams just after we started dating. We were sitting on the stoop one morning drinking tea when they asked if there was any subtext to the dreams’ recurrence. Previous relationship, I said. That seemed clear. I suppose I equated their absence with grief over the relationship. I suppose I felt I had abandoned the birds, as I had abandoned my partner.

Talking it through made it comprehensible. Even then, Nadia could tell when I was stuck or troubled, bewildered to the point of incapacitation. I saw them off that day with a kiss atop the stoop. I remember it vividly: Nadia closed the gate, waved, turned away. They were carrying a yellow backpack and wearing a yellow leather belt. I watched them recede down the block and sat back for a moment to enjoy the morning, the spring air. Then glancing down, I saw, just inches from my feet, a dead chick, sprawled on the step. No longer than a finger, pink and nearly translucent in the sun. Its head was thrown back, arms not yet wings at its sides. It must have fallen from a nest—the oak tree moved extravagantly in the wind, shuffling its leaves like cards. I sat for a while with these strange pieces of experience in my hands. The continuous line from dreaming to waking to this moment. Ill augury? I waved a fly away, went into the vestibule for an envelope, and lifted the bird with mute ceremony to the trash bin. It weighed next to nothing.

Once the feathers looked relatively free of the gel, we turned our attention to the feet. But as soon as Nadia started swabbing the toes, the pigeon startled. “It’s okay, it’s okay!” Nadia said, and placed a hand atop the dishcloth. They used their fingers to drag the gel away from the legs and claws. They were making steady progress; it was working. But then the pigeon jumped again, and this time it tumbled off the side of the step, falling with a thud onto the trash bins below.

“Oh no!” Nadia was horrified. “It’s okay,” I said, hurrying down the steps with the light. It had fallen all the way to the ground, between two of the bins. I moved them apart carefully. It was standing with its wing against one of the bin’s wheels. It was alive. Nadia was rattled—“That was my fault. Is it alright?” “It’s alright,” I said. “You’re helping it, you’re doing beautifully.” We decided to wait a few minutes so that it could rest. We needed to collect ourselves as well.

It was a cool night, temperate for November. Occasionally someone would walk past, glancing at us in our blue gloves, glancing briefly at the pigeon in the field of the flashlight. No one seemed to think about it much. Our neighbor Linh, who lived on the parlor level, appeared at the gate. Nadia told her what was happening. Her shoulders fell forward. She seemed genuinely sad. “Is there anything I can do?” she asked. We said there’s no need, we would take care of it. I could tell she was relieved. “We have some Dawn,” she said, and offered to bring it out. We accepted.

I squeezed some soap into the water and we went back to work. Nadia laid the cloth over the pigeon and picked it up entirely. They set it down in a clear part of the forecourt and tried to continue wiping at the feet. But now it was sitting flush against the bluish stone, as though brooding over a nest. I checked my phone: still no news about the baby. “It must be really tired,” Nadia said. Maybe if I held it up, they could get to the feet? They shrugged. We agreed to try.

I refolded the dishcloth and wrapped it around the bird’s head and body. Then I placed my hands on either side of the wings and lifted. It felt somehow both substantial and light. Hollow bones, I thought, pneumatized, devoid of marrow. But here was a life. These were its contours. I tried to impart calm through my touch. It did not strain or protest. I saw Nadia’s green eyes distant with concern. I thought about the heat at the edges of bodies, the life contained for a time within. I thought about the living force within my body, as well, and I thought about Emily, laboring to bring life into the world, laboring to keep it there. What large decisions was she in the midst of making? What life-or-death adjustments was she trying? My lola, the mother of Emily’s mother, would say that in giving birth, the mother has her one foot in the grave. One life going out as one comes in. The hold of one body weakening as it releases another. The thought was unbearable. Unbearable, unspeakable—to imagine the family’s prayers becoming prayers for the dead.

I tilted my hands so the pigeon’s feet faced up. Nadia pulled back the cloth and swabbed the claws with their fingers, now using both oil and soap. From time to time it twitched, and its feet grasped, but I held it steady and we spoke to it, and it relaxed. Nadia worked diligently for a few minutes. But holding the bird like this, we saw how deeply the gel had worked its way into the feathers covering the breast and abdomen. The stuff came away from the wing feathers, more or less, but it seemed to be caked about this lower region like tar. It all felt suddenly hopeless.

We looked at each other. I wondered where I should set it down. “Out there?” I said, gesturing to the sidewalk. I don’t know why I suggested that. Maybe I wanted to be free of the responsibility. Maybe I wanted to be like all the other people walking past, going about their swift urban existences. “How about here?” Nadia said, pointing to a corner of our forecourt near the neighboring wall. “It should have some kind of shelter.” I eased it down where Nadia pointed and lifted the cloth. Its right shoulder seemed higher than its left. Its head still drooped. Because I had set it down facing the wall, it gave the appearance of turning away from us, refusing our help.

“You poor thing,” we said. This bird had no chance. What more could we do for it? Calling animal rescue seemed absurd. A single pigeon in New York City; who would move a muscle? I thought about the rats again, big ones on this block. They would descend on it soon, any moment. It would be a bloody mess by the morning. A sad thought occurred to me. “Maybe we should put it out of its misery,” I said. Nadia searched my face. “You don’t think it’ll make it?” I didn’t even think it would last the night. Nadia frowned. I did, too. I felt we had a hand in this—getting rid of the pigeons had seemed like a good idea to us. We were partly responsible for this creature’s suffering. Maybe the least we could do was to end it. Miserable, the frailty of human logic.

“How?” Nadia said. I had no desire to kill it with blunt force. “Maybe we drown it,” I said. But we didn’t even own a bucket. Our other neighbor, Deb, was coming down the street. Nadia explained the situation to her. “That’s so awful,” Deb said. “That’s exactly what I thought would happen with the sticky stuff.” A completely inane solution, we agreed. “We’re considering putting it out of its misery,” Nadia said. I asked Deb if she had a bucket. She shook her head. I think she was lying.

Nadia and I went upstairs and rooted around in the kitchen. I found a bag made of thick green plastic and tried filling it at the sink. It seemed to work. I lifted it into a nylon grocery bag, in case the plastic ripped, and filled it about halfway. I asked Nadia if they thought that was enough water. They did. I held the double bag in my arms like a wineskin and brought it down. “Are we really about to do this?” Nadia said. The pigeon still hadn’t moved. I frowned hard and looked down the street. No one else was out. “It’s the right thing,” I said. “It would just suffer otherwise. I think I would want the same.” Nadia nodded, pensive. I said if they held the bag steady, I would drop it in. “Them,” Nadia suddenly corrected me. “Drop them in.” They were right, of course.

I wrapped the bird with the dishcloth, this time holding the fabric a little more snugly over their head. Their life in my hands. “Sorry, little friend,” I said. “You’re going to fly straight to heaven.” Nadia was solemn, holding the handles of the bag upright. “It’s really brave of you,” they said. I said I was just following their lead, which was true. I brought the pigeon closer to the bag.

“On three?” I said. We counted—

One. Two. Three.

Remember,

O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection, implored thy help, or sought thy intercession was left unaided.

Inspired by this confidence I fly unto thee, O Virgin of virgins, my Mother. To thee do I come, before thee I stand, sinful and sorrowful.

O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not my petitions, but in thy mercy

hear and answer me.

Beside the bag, a little yellow larva was inching along the ground—a newborn caterpillar maybe, fallen from the oak tree. A little bead of pure life, inching, squirming, striving blindly. I stared at it, amused, while Nadia said some words I couldn’t hear. Water was seeping from the outer bag. “Oh no,” that’s what Nadia was saying. I worried suddenly that there wouldn’t be enough—I moved my hands and felt the coolness of the water at my wrists. It was still deep. I looked for the larva again and was pleased to see the water trickling in a stream just past it; it was dry, safe. The pigeon strained—I felt their feathers sharpen against my hands. I adjusted my grasp. I spoke to them. The wings went slack. “I think that’s it,” I said. We waited for a moment to be sure.

I lifted the body in its sopping cloth out of the water. Nadia opened the lid of the trash bin. I set it down inside. “It’s too bad we can’t bury it,” Nadia said. I brought the bags to the street and tipped them out. The water rushed forth. I felt relieved. It was done. I covered the pigeon’s body with the bags and carefully lowered the lid of the bin. We floated upstairs in a daze. I felt a vacancy in my eyes. We sat silent in the kitchen. I lit a stick of palo santo at the stove, and it burned a long time.

An image of St. Francis lay face up on the dining table. I found the sight of it calming. “He looks like the pigeon,” I said to Nadia. Wounded and alone. Wings at his sides. Draped in coarse cloth. We decided to pray the Memorare for Emily and her baby. Nadia lit a candle and turned out the lights. I hadn’t prayed in a very long time. We sat on the floor and did ten recitations, taking turns. My mother’s voice traveled to me across the years; I remembered her intoning this one often, almost every day. At the end I said, “We pray for Emily and her baby. For the soul of the pigeon. For the current of life that connects all of us.” The candlelight flickered through my shut eyelids. I didn’t remember how to end the prayer, so we just sat there for a while in the dark.

The post On Killing A Pigeon in New York City appeared first on Electric Literature.

Standing in line at the H-E-B checkout, I’m mindlessly deleting emails when a photo of a naked, pornographically hot beefcake stretched out on a massage table illuminates my screen. I recoil and quickly pull the front of my jacket around the phone, worried I’ll scandalize a wayward shopper, or worse, traumatize some passing youth. I tap the bookmark button, then quickly swipe to another screen and wait for my turn to clumsily scan my groceries.

Once I’m settled in my car among frozen pizzas, off-season blueberries, and kitty litter, I reopen the email to check the sender, worried some porn site has laid hands on my address. I’m relieved to discover it’s a promotion for an erotic massage workshop, distributed to a mailing list for Austin Naked Yoga. I’d signed up a year ago when I overheard a couple of Daddies talking about the group while I was sunbathing nude in the gay section of Hippie Hollow, Austin’s nudist “beach” (really a limestone cliff on Lake Travis). Now, safely in the cocoon of my Corolla, I grin as I read the copy below the beefcake photo:

Join Bo, experienced leader and gifted giver of bodywork, as you give and receive touch, experience relaxation, eroticism, sensuality, brotherhood, and a very intense release.

Oh, I think. Well then.

I read on.

Every participant will receive massage for one hour and give massage for one hour. Bo will empower attendees by reviewing full body, Swedish, and deep tissue massage techniques, glute and outer anal massage techniques, and genital massage techniques. Erections will occur and are most welcome. Participants may choose to release their erotic energy during the session or take it with them.

My oh my. My cheeks feel warm and I know I’m blushing. Coincidentally, after almost a year of delay, I had attended my first gay naked yoga class about three weeks before. I’d been keen to participate after hearing about it that day at Hippie Hollow, but I’d been too nervous to go alone and only mustered the gumption when a friend asked me to accompany him. Safety in numbers.

But naked yoga is one thing, an erotic massage workshop is something else entirely. Still, I’m curious, and when I get home I decide to ask my boyfriend, Brandon, if he has any interest in going as my massage partner. I’m anticipating a “no,” but I’m not sure where it’ll fall between “abso-fucking-lutely not” and “maybe at some point in the abstract future.”

I get a firm “No, thank you.”

“Fair enough,” I say, a little bummed and a little relieved. We’ve been in an open relationship for a couple years, so I could still go on my own, but his “no” makes it easy not to venture outside my comfort zone. The class, I think, might have been too big for my (absent) breeches.

The next week I go to yoga class again with my friend Evan. It’s my second or third class, and it’s as liberating and exciting as I’d imagined, a yogi exhibitionist fantasia. I still feel shy during the initial strip-down, still find myself giggling during Happy Baby and smiling as I push up my glasses (the only thing I’m wearing) during Downward Dog. After class, I’m standing around chit-chatting and flirting, still naked, when a skinny older guy I’d noticed eyeing me during class comes up to me.

“I’m Bo,” says the man standing stark before me. “I’m doing this massage workshop on Saturday.”

I mutter an introduction, looking over at Evan, struggling to maintain eye contact with Bo. For a moment I think he’s going to ask me to be his partner, and I start rehearsing excuses in my head, simultaneously feeling guilty that an excuse is my knee-jerk response. But then it clicks, and I realize I’m talking to the “gifted giver” himself.

“How open minded are you?” Bo asks.

The question feels like a challenge and an affront. I’m here, aren’t I? I want to say. I’m fun!

But Bo’s question is delivered with a softness and compassion that lower my defenses.

“I’d say moderately,” I answer. “But it depends on what you’re getting at.”

He smiles. “My model for the Erotic Massage Workshop just canceled. So, I need a substitute.” He’s speaking pragmatically, simply, hurriedly. “Would you have any interest in filling in? I’ll just massage you for both sessions, demonstrate the techniques on you, and the rest of the time just give you a massage.” He pauses briefly. “And I’ll pay you a hundred dollars.”

I notice he’s speaking in the future tense, rather than future subjunctive, as though I’ve already agreed, as though this is a foregone conclusion. I feel myself blush and demurely wrap one foot around my calf. Our nudity makes the conversation feel rawer, the nerves of my skin exposed to the warm musky air of the yoga studio. Evan, who’s been standing nearby and has clearly overheard the solicitation, walks away, smirking, to check out some other booties.

“Oh,” I say to Bo. “Interesting.” I pause. “I need to think about it. Can I get back to you?”

Bo and I exchange numbers. I tell him I’ll let him know one way or another the next day. I need to ask my boyfriend about the prospect, sleep on it, jerk off on it.

When I get home, I tell Brandon about the proposition and ask for his opinion. I suppose I’m partially asking if he’s okay with me getting felt up by a massage instructor, but since that’s clearly within the bounds of our open relationship agreement, I’m more interested in his reaction to the element of financial exchange. To me stripping down for money.

“Go for it,” he says, chuckling. “You’re having a whole hippie-dippie nudist woo-woo moment. It seems like you’d have fun.”

“For the record,” I say, “I don’t think it’s a moment. I am a hippie-dippie nudist. A free spirit. A liberated queen!” I toss my imaginary locks.

“Sure,” he says.

Brandon doesn’t say it, but I know he’s thinking about a story I’d shared with him before. A story about another massage, when I was seventeen, at a chain called Massage Envy.

Back then, no one would have described me as a hippie-dippie nudist. I was not a free spirit, did not possess even a scant trace of whimsy. I was a type-A, overworked, under-slept, five-AP-class-taking little shit. All I thought about was college applications, which extracurriculars would help craft the most compelling narrative for my future success, and competitive gymnastics.

I was tragically repressed. No one at my high school was out, and I had only recently begun to even allow myself to consider that I was gay, to allow myself to explore those feelings, in my mind and on the internet. I’d probably known somewhere deep down for years, but it wasn’t until my senior year of high school that I dared voice my personal “persuasion”—a rhetorical dodge because even uttering the word “sexuality” made me uncomfortable.

After a physical therapist recommended a massage for my gymnastics-injured spine, I called the local chain in town, Massage Envy. I was already suspicious of the place, especially the questionably sensual name, which evoked both sin and the puritanical value system in which sin exists. The local paper for our geriatric beachside town had recently run a series about another massage business, Crystal Spa, which had been shut down on multiple charges of prostitution.

On the phone, after I spent too long justifying why I was getting a massage, the receptionist replied: “Wonderful. Now let’s get you scheduled with one of our licensed clinical massage therapists. Would you prefer a male or female therapist?”

My stomach seized up. “What?” I whispered.

She repeated the question.

I looked around to make sure my bedroom door was closed and listened for my father in the hallway. We had been on precarious terms since I’d come out to him a few months earlier, and, after a few outbursts, had settled into a hostile silence. I imagined how my father would feel about the idea of a man kneading his son’s warm nude body. (It wasn’t hard to imagine, because some not-so-small part of me still disapproved, too.) But with a barely healed lumbar injury, my back was killing me. I needed someone strong to knead my knotted muscles. Plus, I was curious.

“Male, please,” I said softly.

On the day of my appointment, I pulled into a parking space at the opposite end of the shopping center from Massage Envy’s gaudy purple sign. Inside, a marble reception desk shimmered with a golden sheen that matched the receptionist’s spray tan. She checked me in and swiped my debit card, “just for incidentals.” I wondered if incidentals were what had gotten Crystal Spa in trouble. Then I heard footsteps, which materialized into a tall, dark-haired man with a thick mustache and thicker Slavic accent. He extended a hand.

“Hello, I’m Alex,” he said gruffly, giving my hand a firm shake. My dad had made me watch the Terminator movies at least five times each, and I imagined Alex as Arnold’s replacement in the next installment. “Please follow me.”

Alex led me to Room 6 and ushered me inside. It was dimly lit, which I knew was supposed to be relaxing, but instead made me worry about the possible hygiene concerns brighter light might reveal. Alex pulled out a clipboard from under his muscular arm and began asking for my medical history: what brought me in, where it hurt. The procedure of it comforted me. Despite the flouncy decor, the appointment had at least the façade of a medical encounter.

When I told him I had a gymnastics injury, his eyes lit up. “Romania has some of the best gymnasts in the world,” he said, beaming with national pride.

I smiled in agreement, relieved to find common ground. Then Alex pressed the center button on a silver iPod mini and the room filled with the sound of rain and a sitar. He pulled back the purple sheet on the massage table.

“Undress,” he said, directing me to leave my clothes and belongings in the chair and get face down under the sheet.

“Undress, as in . . . ?” I asked, eyes averted.

“Completely,” he answered; he’d clearly made the clarification many times before.

As the door clicked closed behind him, my heart fluttered like it was supposed to on the first date I’d never had. Uneasy, I stripped out of my tee and below-the-knee Volcom shorts (I was still performing straightness), then whisked off my plaid boxers and shimmied under the sheets.

I shifted uncomfortably until I heard a knock on the door, followed by Alex’s voice. I lifted my head to grunt an affirmation, then settled into the lavender-scented face hole. I could feel myself trembling and tried to force my body still. Alex folded back the sheet, exposing my back down to my last vertebra.

I heard the spatter of massage oil. I heard him rub his hands together vigorously. As soon as he made contact, I felt my body jerk away.

“Just try to relax,” Alex soothed.

I was fully shaking now, teeth chattering. It took me a few long minutes of Alex’s tentative, preliminary pats on my back before I settled down. I breathed through my panic like I’d practiced in therapy.

I’d never felt a man’s hands against my skin like this. The warmth and pressure as he glided his hands from my neck down to my lumbar spine. Coaches had prodded at me to correct my form, laid on top of me to press me deeper into the splits. Physical therapists had probed my nerves and joints. But this was new. With each measured stroke of Alex’s hands, I felt a muscle relax, an insecurity fade away. I was a touch-starved teen, and this was delicious.

“How’s the pressure?” Alex asked, interrupting my bliss, now ten or so minutes into the massage.

“Good, good,” I muttered, but the disruption allowed an outside reality to creep in. The sound of his voice was quickly succeeded by thoughts of my father. I imagined that he would writhe in disgust if any man tried to lather oil on his back. I felt a stab of shame, a flash of anger, then a momentary pity.

I directed my thoughts back to my body on the massage table, my face smushed into the head cradle. Alex had just ventured a bit south of the sheet. No complaints, it felt lovely, just a little surprise. Glutes are muscles, too, I told myself. Still, the butt-touching made me feel like I was doing something bad, and it pulled me out of the experience of the warm sheets, the warm hands. No, this wasn’t anything bad, I corrected myself. There was nothing even sexual about this—this was a massage to relieve back pain. A medical procedure.

Okay, I asked myself, then why do you have a raging boner?

I felt myself swell under my abdomen, a throb with my heartbeat. Briefly, I panicked that Alex might be about to finish with my back and ask me to flip over, revealing a teepee erect on the table. But fortunately, he moved from my glutes up to my shoulders, where the nerves were less touchy, and then walked to the other end of the table.

He began to massage my calves. Then, gradually, the circular motions inched up my leg, past my knee, and into the uncharted territory of my inner thigh. I felt a little chill as Alex pushed the sheet to one side, and tucked it under my leg so that it covered any embargoed goods. Oh, no. I shimmied to adjust myself, to brace against these new sensations. I felt myself pressing into the massage table to the motion of the massage. No, no. I urged the carnal forces to retreat as he continued to massage my hamstrings. I tried to think about SAT questions, and college applications, and the tumbling pass I was training on floor. Anything else. No, not now. And then Alex’s hand lingered on my inner thigh a femtosecond too long, and I stifled a moan. I felt the gooey warmth beneath me, gluing the sheets to my abdomen.

The wave of shame crashed over me immediately. I felt my skin go hot and knew I must be bright red.

I briefly considered telling Alex I needed to end the massage now, but I clung to the hope that he hadn’t noticed. I wasn’t sure if he’d realized what had happened. But he must have smelled the teen angst, right? He must have felt my body shudder and contract? I hoped not. I didn’t know. I’ll never know.

I wanted to fuse with the table, to become inanimate. When Alex instructed me to slide down and turn while he tented the sheet over me, I rotated onto my back, feeling the wet stick of cum beneath me, the physical manifestation of my shame.

For the rest of our time, I laid there, hardly able to notice the massage. I hated myself. Hated my body for betraying me. Hated how I hadn’t been able to will my body to stop, how I’d lost control.

I felt, too, like something had been taken from me. I’d never even kissed a boy. And now a man had made me cum. That was supposed to be something special. That was supposed to mean something.

After the massage, Alex stepped out and I pulled my clothes on quickly. I was confused. I’d never felt anything so incredible, and never so powerfully hated myself, within the same hour. I wanted to disappear.

Thirteen years and hundreds of hours of therapy later, as I’m considering whether to model for the Erotic Massage Workshop, I’m thinking about Massage Envy. I’m thinking of bildungsromans and rites of passage and even something like kismet.

When I tell Brandon I think I’m going to do it, place myself in a vulnerable position in front of eager eyes, he replies, “You’re not just doing it for the money, right?”

“No, no,” I assure him.

“Or the story?”

“Definitely not just that,” I say. “It sounds fun!” What a liberating and absurd experience! I pause, then ask, worriedly, “But does taking the money mean I’m, like, legally, a sex worker?”

As soon as the words come out, I feel ashamed. Intellectually, I believe sex work is real work, and that the puritanical legal framework in America is unjust and stupid. Yet here I am, concerned that I’m about to cross a legal line I don’t think should exist in the first place. Worrying it’s unseemly for me to dabble in sex work when I have the privilege of not needing the money. Wondering if this even “counts.”

I shake the thoughts from my head, and text Bo to tell him I’m game.

On the day of the workshop, at the designated time, I check into the fitness studio, the same place where naked yoga is held. Bo is at the front.

“How are you feeling?” he asks.

“Pretty nervous,” I say. “Excited, but nervous.”

He leads me over to the table, muttering comforting things I struggle to pay attention to. Most of the men are already there, standing naked around their massage tables. Then Bo leaves the room to continue checking guys in, and I’m left standing beside a massage table at the center of a semicircle of massage tables, dozens of eyes furtively glancing my way. I’m not sure whether I should undress now or right before the workshop begins, so I split the difference, wait a few minutes, and then undress. While I strip out of my clothes, I avoid direct eye contact with anyone, looking around but not looking anywhere, never letting my gaze linger too long. I take a seat on the table, grateful that the wall of the studio is mirrored, so I can peruse the scene without needing to engage real eyes.

In my peripheral vision, I register that an emaciated old man, butt naked, is walking toward me. Before I can react, he puts one hand on my thigh and reaches out to shake my hand with the other. I mutter some dismissive pleasantries and remove his hand, shifting away from him. He walks away, then right back, this time grabbing my inner thigh and rubbing his semi-erect dick on my leg. I push him away and wave him off. “That’s enough of that, thank you,” I say, sliding off the table I’m sitting on, making it a barrier between us. I immediately beat myself up for my too-polite tone. Still, as he walks away for the second time, his deflated ass makes me sad, and I worry I’ve hurt his feelings, done something wrong.

The start of this workshop does not bode well for the remaining two hours. It feels like a comeuppance for my prior thoughts about doing this as a fun new adventure, about flirting with sex work. I want to bail, but I don’t want to ruin things for Bo. I walk to the front corner of the studio where I’ve left my things and futz with my phone, take a few breaths, then excuse myself to splash water on my face in the bathroom. I tell myself I’ve gotten this far, I have to finish.

When the class is set to begin, Bo directs everyone to their tables, and then pulls me aside. “Minor problem,” he says, and my stomach clenches. “We’ve had a no-show, and an odd number doesn’t really work for a massage clinic.” After a moment of looking around and presumably thinking up a plan, Bo guides me over to a sexy-cute bear cub with dark hair bleached on the ends, the right amount of fur, and a big bubble butt. Bo tells me to choose between two options: Either he can massage me for an hour while Hot Cub serves as a “floater” massaging other workshop attendees, and then massage Hot Cub for an hour while I serve as the floater, or both he and Hot Cub can massage me for an hour, and then Hot Cub and I can switch. The “four hands” option.

I almost take the opportunity to dip out completely. The no-show gives me an out, and a big part of me wants to take it—Hot Cub is game to participate as the model, so I wouldn’t be ruining the class.

But I want to see this through. I let Bo choose. We go with the four-hands option.

“Welcome to the Erotic Massage Workshop,” Bo says, then launches into his spiel about how we’re going to learn five techniques for outer anal massage and nineteen for penile stimulation. Bo introduces me and Hot Cub to the class. I wave awkwardly.

I’m the model for the first hour, so I climb onto the table as Bo says that we’ll be starting face down. I’m nervous, but the nerves are keeping me soft, which is probably good for now, while we’re learning the outer anal massage techniques. I’ll need to save up for demo-ing the dick massage later. Hot Cub is absentmindedly massaging my legs, my back, my ass while Bo demonstrates the techniques for the class.

As I settle face down, I’m feeling really good. I love massage, love the feel of the oil. After that time with Alex, massage became an important part of my wellness regimen, after a few years’ delay. This is gonna be good, I think, starting to enjoy myself. I think about how beautifully poetic, how full circle this is, a symbolic bookend to the shame I felt with Alex. A redemption. A reclaiming.

Then Bo’s voice snaps me out of my reverie.

“One way to get access to the area is to pull a knee up like this,” he says, moving my leg into a frog position, his forearm caressing my crack and hole. “Or, if it’s more comfortable, hands and knees. Mark, can you . . . ?” he asks.

“Yep!” I say, too chipper, as I climb into tabletop position. I squeeze my eyes shut and focus on my breathing. This is moving really fast. Now I’m worried I’m supposed to be hard, but I’m not yet, because I’m worried I’m supposed to be. We’ve quickly sailed past my comfort zone. We’re in the zone of what I wish I was comfortable with. What I’m intellectually comfortable with, but still feel myself having a visceral, clenching reaction against. I push through. What is there to be ashamed of, even? I ask myself. But shame refuses to oblige logic.

“You okay?” Bo whispers to me.

“Yep,” I say again.

“You’ll also notice this position gives you full access to the penis,” Bo tells the class. The medical term feels out of place, but I don’t have time to dwell on it. He grabs my dick. “We’ll cover those techniques in more detail when we flip over.”

After reviewing the outer anal massage techniques again, Bo sets the class to practice. This first half hour will be face-down, the second face-up, on our backs, and then we’ll switch giver-receiver positions and repeat. The instructor and Hot Cub set to work on me.

I’m more relaxed now, without all eyes on me. I settle back face down, which is more comfortable, and feel one of them spread my legs to the edges of the table for better access.

Ten minutes go by, and it feels great.

And then it feels . . . too great.

I’m worried I’m getting too close. Four-handed massage, it turns out, is a game-changer. We’re only fifteen or twenty minutes in, and I have to model for the dick techniques after this. I prop myself up on my elbow and lean over my shoulder. “Hold off,” I say, “too much, slow down.”

They do for a few minutes, but after a brief reprieve they’re back, one working on my ass, the other on my dick, which is tucked down in the gap between my legs where it’s getting too much attention.

No, no, I think. Not again.

I call over my shoulder again to slow down.

But they don’t hear me, or don’t want to stop.

I do my best to will myself calm, to diffuse the sexual energy into the rest of my body, and for a few seconds, it’s working. And then it isn’t. The cosmic balance is too perfect. I start to prop myself up again and say, “Hold on, hold on. I’m gonna . . . ” and then I finish into someone’s hand. As I come, someone, I’m not sure who, continues to pump me. I shove my face into the pillow in front of me.

“Oh,” Bo says.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “Oops. I’m so sorry.”

“That’s okay,” he says. “That’s fine. Just a little change of plan.”

Hot Cub leans down and whispers, damp breath in my ear, “That was hot. Really fucking hot.”

I chuckle, and I appreciate him, but I’m still spiraling. Mostly, I’m worried about the logistics. In about ten minutes I’m supposed to flip over, but I don’t think I’ll be able recharge in time. A darker thought creeps in, too: Was it bad they’d made me come, despite my protest? Despite the fact that it felt great, that I was riding a flood of endorphins? Should I have had a safe word? They didn’t hear me, I tell myself, I wasn’t clear. And regardless, I’d known what I was getting into.

I feel a carryover of the Massage Envy shame. Some censorious moralism that I haven’t successfully battered out of myself. I’d just been jerked off by two pairs of capable hands, and still I wasn’t able to remain present. Much of the time, face down, I’d just been comparing the experience to Massage Envy. Why was I stuck spending time in retrospection when, of all times, I should have been most in the moment?

As I towel off, I worry that others in the class noticed. Meanwhile, Bo has worked out the logistics and swoops in to save me. He proposes that Hot Cub demo the next portion, face up, and then I’ll do the face-up session during the second half. Thank god.

For the next hour, I learn nineteen massage techniques and apply them to Hot Cub. As I glide my oiled hands over his body, the coarse hair of his legs, I look around the room, this sanctuary of touch. Sweaty bodies, focused on one another, some contorted in ecstasy, some blissfully still. This workshop is a marvel. Helping men become more comfortable in their bodies, teaching us, repressed and liberated alike, to find pleasure for pleasure’s sake, something so beyond my worldview at seventeen.

In the past thirteen years, I realize I’ve come really fucking far. I’m still fighting a lot of the shame I was fighting at seventeen, but I don’t feel the same self-loathing I did back then. Not once during this workshop had my father’s judgment interrupted my thoughts—and there was only a transient visit from the ghost of shame past. I could see now that much of the hatred I had felt radiating from my father was really my own insecurity, reflecting back at me. Sure, I was still probably a little too sensitive (both physically and emotionally) to serve as an effective model for this type of thing on the regular. But I’d been brave. I’d gotten through this new, nerve-racking experience, and I felt better for it. More open.

“It looks like you’re enjoying yourself,” Bo says as I reach for the massage oil.

And I am. Throughout the rest of Hot Cub’s massage, I smile the whole time (and only tremble slightly).

When the workshop ends, relaxed and invigorated, slicked in sweat, I’ll put my clothes on. Bo will slip me a Benjamin folded into a tiny square, a funny detail I’ll ascribe to either discretion or a lack of pocket space. I’ll head out to my car, still smiling—flushed, alive—and I’ll text Brandon a picture of me holding my hundred-dollar bill.

But for right now, I’m recharged, and it’s my turn for the face-up portion of the demonstration. Maybe I’ll even let myself enjoy it.

The post A Workshop for Shame and Sexual Energy appeared first on Electric Literature.

“Did you hear about Ralph Yarl?” I ask George, my 17-year-old Black son on Tuesday night, five days after a white man in Missouri shot the 16-year-old Black child in the head and chest for knocking on his door; three days after a man in another state shot at a car that’d pulled into his driveway to turn around—20 year olds lost on their way to a party, and no cell service in those woods—killing the woman in the passenger seat; two days after a white student on my husband’s campus called in a shooter threat and my son and I had spent some of Sunday and Monday worrying—not for the life of his dad, whom we knew was unharmed, but for what it might be like to feel safe in this world again; the same day two cheerleaders in Texas were shot for mistakenly opening a car door in the dark, thinking it was their car. What has happened in this country that shooting at strangers has become our answer? What triggers our fears so deeply? Or is it that we’ve always been this scared and now just everyone has a gun?

George nods, keeps his eyes on Football Manager, sighs softly like his father might, sounding older than he is, and at a distance. I think he wishes he believed that if he knocked on the wrong door, sent to collect his younger siblings, this couldn’t happen to him. I think he wishes it were as simple as this world being so sad. He makes that sound, like he’s sighing from far away, and is it my job to bring him closer to this fear, or to let him stay distant?

“I tried to start watching a new show with George tonight, but he just played Football Manager on the couch next to me,” I’d texted my husband Ngoni an hour earlier. My second son and I, living alone most of the time these days, have been bonding over TV shows and Martin Scorsese films. 

“Sometimes just being in the same room is enough for George,” Ngoni reminded me. Sometimes George and I consume content together so it can be discussed and dissected and understood. Sometimes we just sit on the couch together—parallel play, they called it when we were talking about two year olds. I can still do that. I can always do that. 

“Do you remember the night I told you about the shooting at the Sandy Hook school?” I ask next. He’d been just one year older than those children, too. 

“Nope,” he says, looking up from Football Manager with annoyance. I’m taking this too far, his eyes tell me. I stop talking and scroll through my phone and realize my second son doesn’t remember an America where the school children weren’t being killed by guns. I stop talking and scroll through my phone and wonder what Ralph Yarl’s brothers thought about when he never arrived to collect them. 

“I’m kind of heavy from the news this week,” I text Julius, my first son, in New York on Wednesday after we’ve had an exchange about his day at school and he’s asked how I am. 

“Can I call?” he texts. Would the answer ever—ever—be no? 

“I can’t imagine an America without racism,” I tell him when I pick up, “but I can imagine one without guns.” I don’t add that my imagination paints a giant magnet in the sky sucking up all our weapons, finite metal objects to be collected and destroyed. “And even still with racism, that would be better.”

“That would be better,” Julius agrees. “But every time something like this happens, I think we’re stretching and stretching and it just means the breaking point is coming sooner.” He’s talking about his favorite topic: when the nation states fail and news media is revealed to be the façade he’s long known it to be, and we rebuild society from the bottom. He really believes this day is coming. It’s his only hope in this world and who am I to say he’s wrong? Do I want him to be wrong?

“It’s not only race,” I tell George on the couch. “A young white woman was killed when the car she was riding in drove into the wrong driveway and the owner of the house came out shooting.” Why do I feel compelled to tell him this? Do I tell him this so he doesn’t feel like he’s the only target?  

A detail I keep back: as the bird flies, this one happened around the corner. I want these things to only happen far from us. I want to pretend the Trump signs we drive by on our way to my mother’s house, the mall, the train station aren’t indications that this could happen to us. White mama, Black boy, side by side in a little orange car. If it breaks down? If we get lost and turn around in the wrong driveway? If I have an aneurysm and George runs for help? Knocks on the wrong door? 

“I think this is all about covid,” Ngoni will say over FaceTime on Wednesday night. “Two years of lockdown made everyone so much more paranoid.”

“I think this is all about guns,” I will say. My phone will be propped on my bedside table while I fold laundry. He will be ironing his shirt for the next day. In this new life of jobs at different colleges, we talk every night on FaceTime, but we sometimes don’t look at each other’s faces. “Fine to be paranoid, but if everyone didn’t have a gun, would Ralph Yarl just have been threatened with a baseball bat, plenty of time to outrun the old man? Would that girl Julius’s age still be alive?”

As a child I worried my mother had been in a car accident each time she was late to pick me up, that she’d drop a cigarette on the floor in her sleep and the house would burn down, that the airplane she was traveling in would fall out of the sky. The children today, their fears. I can’t begin to catalog them, or how much more likely they are to happen. 

“Sometimes I think I just want to write my book, that that’s the contribution I should make,” Julius tells me through my AirPods. I want him to think exactly that thing and not any other thing. “But other times I think I have different skills. Maybe I could make a difference, ignite the next phase. But do you know three of the original BLM leaders died under mysterious circumstances?” He talks for a time, sources confusing and maybe exclusive to TikTok—which he would shame me for not trusting—asking: what if he became a leader of the movement and was killed by the CIA? 

“It won’t be the CIA,” Ngoni will tell me over FaceTime in a few hours. I won’t ask who it will be. “But I’m glad he’s asking these questions. It means he’s not among the apathetic of his generation.” I can’t hear you I can’t hear you I can’t hear you. Just let my sons live their lives in peace, let them find joy and meaning, and later, so so much later, let them die of old age. This is my only wish. 

“Do you ever feel scared driving around in this town?” I ask George just one more question on the couch. I know he’s tiring of this, of me. But then I feel something else beyond his silent shaking head. A sweaty foot still in its sock pressing against the crook of my elbow. Casually. Like maybe my elbow is in the way but he’s not worried, we can share this space. Sometimes it’s enough to just be in the same room. Now I won’t move for fear of breaking the connection. I sit slightly sideways also, so casual and maybe not on purpose, but my body maintains the pressure against his body, so his body knows that his mother is here on the couch next to him, always. I scroll through my phone like I care what it says. 

Would he tell me if he were afraid?

I am so scared I will lose my sons to this world. 

“Before Sertraline, I used to think about all this stuff so much more,” Julius tells me through AirPods, “and I feel guilty about that. Like the medicine is just the same propaganda as everything else, a happy pill we take to keep us quiet.” 

Ngoni will tell me over FaceTime in a few hours that propaganda isn’t the word he means and I’ll mutter something about our son being 20 and thinking it is the word he means and that isn’t the point, really. The point is that Julius might be considering going off his antidepressants because he thinks that might help him save the world, and these concentric circles frighten me on different levels I don’t have the words to express. They have something to do with me never wanting my sons to carry a gun and how the revolution he’s discussing won’t be peaceful; they have something to do with me worrying that grandiose thinking is a thing my first son has in common with my father, and does that mean it’s a sign of schizophrenia?

“I need to do the dishes,” I say after George’s sweaty foot slides away and he readjusts himself to sit with the laptop on his lap and Football Manager (his team is winning!) running his emotions. But I come right back into the living room because I suddenly very badly need to apologize for scaring him so late at night (it’s 8:20) and bringing him into this broken land in the first place and asking him to try to survive here when the world he experiences is a world I will never experience or understand and who was I to think our children would inherit a better one? But he’s not in the living room anymore, he’s downstairs now, standing outside the basement door, thinking—maybe—that I don’t know what he does out there. Or thinking—more likely—that I do. That I get it. Smoke wafts up my windows. 

“Let’s look at this structurally,” my therapist will say over Zoom on Friday morning, and I’ll wonder what she could mean. “All three of your men are in danger in this country, and your sons are both exhibiting signs of fear. Julius, for lack of a better word, through paranoia—” and I’ll wince. I will know she does not mean paranoia and I will know that she does. And I know that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you, and I know that paranoia is the first word in one of my father’s diagnoses and I know that in addition to being afraid, so very afraid, that I will lose my children to this country, I am also afraid I will lose them to my father’s disease. But I breathe and I listen. “And George by numbing out.” And this I can hear. 

I spend so much time fighting the anxiety, sometimes I forget that its job is to cover the fear. I forget how to tease it apart from the fear and sit with these things separately. “Anxiety is a constant, obnoxious force,” my therapist will say, and I’ll think about a child from grammar school, always buzzing in my ear when I was trying to learn science. “But fear, like grief, will come and go, and the trick is to learn to sit with it, and to breathe.” 

I’ll recognize that it does come and go, the fear, and I’ll think about how I learned to put my fears in a box as a child. (Brick houses don’t burn down, stop worrying. But then the brick house across the street burned down.) And that fear closed away opens the door to anxiety. 

“I am feeling some of the awfulness of the world after this week in the news,” I text my mother when she asks me how I am on Thursday morning. 

“The news this week is awful,” she responds. “I am only happy the stupid old man didn’t manage to kill Ralph Yarl.”

“Me too, that kid is a wonder,” I type across state lines to my mother, not asking if she knows he ran away after being shot twice, that he knocked on three doors before someone helped him. Not asking if she knows what his brothers were thinking when he never came to collect them. “The girl in Hebron, NY, tho. The cheerleaders in TX. When did we become such paranoid people? Ngoni says covid. I say: when they gave every American a gun.”

“Or when we decided it was okay to own other people,” my mom types back faster than is typical for her poor eyesight and arthritic thumbs. “Always knowing deep down it was wrong and indefensible.”

And then she adds in a text bubble all its own: “Hence guns.”

My mother. How many 83-year-old white women in this country would throw down slavery as the cause of it all in one simple text, making her daughter feel so much less alone?

“Up to pee and this thought occurs to me,” I will type to Julius—who I know leaves his phone on silent—at 3:23 am on Thursday, on what will become my first sleepless night in a long time. “You might have thought about all this stuff more pre Sertraline, but you weren’t able to do anything about it bc of being too depressed to act/move/do. What if Sertraline allows you just enough freedom from that to be the very thing that gives you the ability to do something about it all?”

At 9:04, before he’ll even have seen the first text, I’ll be just out of the shower and will text him a Spotify link to Mos Def’s “UMI Says,” and hope he gets the message. It’s a song I sent George some months ago, too, after a similar conversation justifying antidepressants. Who can shine their light on this world without them?

One fall night last year, George and I drove through the backwoods of Massachusetts on our way home from a soccer game, and he spoke about beauty in nature and the end of the world. 

“I know I’ll live to see a world without trees,” he said, looking at the trees all around. I strained not to see them, to imagine not being able to see them. “I need to paint all this before it’s too late, so we can remember.” 

I’d recently hung one of his paintings on the wall, a landscape based on the view of trees and grass and sky from our back stoop, but all purples and reds and dark blues. That it is recognizable as our backyard speaks to his talent. That it represents how he sees this world speaks to his mind. 

“I’ve been thinking about life after society has crumbled,” he said, and I asked if he’s scared to live in that world. I am so scared to live in that world. 

“No,” he said quietly. Confidently. 

“Because you feel equipped for it?” 

“Humans adapt,” he said. “We always have.”

We were quiet for a moment, though I was certain it was my job to say something next. Instead, he continued: “I’ve been thinking about what it’s my responsibility to fix, since I was born into this moment.” 

Overwhelmed with all there is to fix, I sighed and put my hand on the back of his neck, thankful he was born into this moment. That he’ll find what to fix in it.  

Tonight George will have his friends over for homemade pizza—he and Ngoni built a wood-burning oven during the first covid summer, and he dried it out for the season last night; inaugural pizzas for him and his girl. He’ll blend his homemade tomato sauce, mix the dough in my KitchenAid, shred the cheese all over the counter. His friends in this small New England town are all white and they won’t talk much about Ralph Yarl. They’ll giggle and share stories about college visits they made during April break and smoke some weed and eat some pizza. And Ngoni will come home while they’re out there, pulling into the driveway like he does every second Friday night, like it’s home. I’ll pull the casserole out of the oven and wipe my hands on my apron and put on lipstick when I hear his car (just kidding; I’ll be wearing sweatpants and flip flops and dinner will be takeout; he’ll be tired and grouchy from a long day and a long drive and barely kiss me hello) and I’ll watch him walk up the stairs with his suitcase, like he’s checking into a hotel. Tomorrow, George will go to work at the restaurant where he’ll impress the rest of the staff with his maturity and cooking skills as he does every Saturday, and Ngoni and I will take down the corn house he built a few years ago to keep the squirrels out, which collapsed under two feet of March snow. The sun will shine, or it’ll be cloudy. The dog will chase the ball I throw for him. Or he’ll lie in the grass and watch for deer. George will come home from work smelling like bacon. Or—. 

We’ll breathe.

The post I’m Afraid I’m Going To Lose My Boys To This Country appeared first on Electric Literature.

It was the winter that Ryan and I were squatting in the building on North Avenue in the Old Town neighborhood of Chicago. Actually, we weren’t squatting—we were squatting before, then we were evicted, and now we were paying $240 a month to rent an art studio on Francisco Avenue in a basement that didn’t have a kitchen or a shower. Our landlord lived in the house behind us, so this decision to illegally live in the basement was especially fraught.

To us, the risk of facing yet another eviction was better than the alternative, which was to live with my parents in their South Loop apartment while we figured out our next moves. This was something they had offered and we had refused. My mom is a hoarder and my dad is clinically depressed. I love them, but to live with them would have been to live within their chaos. I had already done this for the first 18 years of my life, thank you very much. They live in a two-bedroom apartment where one bedroom is technically the “guest bedroom/office,” but since my dad tends to work horizontally from his bed or the sofa, and my parents rarely host any guests besides me, the spare room has taken on the role of hoarder’s den. To have lived in that room would have meant living amongst impenetrable walls of stuff. To have lived in that room would have meant caving in.

On the first night we intended to illegally sleep in the art studio, Ryan had a shift at the Second City bar. I was alone and kept hearing the landlord’s footsteps as she passed by our “garden” windows. I imagined her trying to peer inside, wondering what we might be working on so late into the night. If she were able to see inside, she’d see that I was cooking rice and beans on a hot plate. At the end of our block, there was a Burger King that had a breakfast special—two croissant sandwiches for $3. We ate a lot of those. 

We hadn’t lived there for very long before I took the pregnancy tests. I felt the need to do so after noticing my breasts were tender; I was hypersensitive to strong smells like cigarette smoke and scrambled eggs; and I had missed my period by several days.

In the daytime, the basement’s bathroom was filled with the most enchanting light. I would often sit on the toilet, watching the prisms dance through the brick glass window, which further obscured the outside world. I was always curious what the source of their movement was. Bare branches bouncing, caught in a breeze? Sometimes I’d record this phenomenon with my cellphone camera. I was sitting in that mesmerizing light as I waited for my pregnancy test results. Like they do in the movies, I took two tests to be sure.

We slept on a futon on the floor. Each morning we would roll up the mattress and hide it in the studio closet. The mattress was still unrolled, and we were sitting in bed, when I called a clinic to schedule my abortion. I was given two choices—take pills at home for a self-induced abortion, which they suggested I have a bathtub for—I didn’t even have a shower—or come in for the procedure. Over the phone, the receptionist asked me if I remembered the date of the last time I had sex. I did. She wanted to make sure the abortion was scheduled with enough time between conception and the surgical procedure. 

Ryan came with me to the clinic on North & LaSalle, which was also in a basement. In the waiting room, there were two middle-aged women sitting across from us. They looked very Midwestern. Milky white, big-boned, and blond. They sat still, their faces hidden behind magazines. Both of them had large duffel bags stowed underneath their chairs. I found myself becoming paranoid that they could be Christian zealots with bombs in their bags. There was no rationale for me to be suspicious of them, which made me feel guilty for imposing my own fear onto bystanders. Or not even bystanders—two women sitting in a clinic, probably wishing, same as me, that they could be anywhere else. A much more likely scenario was that they had duffel bags with them because they had to travel from another state or town to get an abortion—either for themselves or a loved one who might have been in the operation room at the very moment that I sat there judging them.

To prepare for a surgical abortion, one is advised not to eat for six hours prior to the procedure. In the waiting room, a male companion to a female patient arrived with a plastic bag in hand. He sat down beside her, fumbled around in the bag, then pulled out a paper-wrapped submarine sandwich. As he unwrapped the sub, the odor of marinara sauce and meatballs filled the confined, windowless space. A waiting room full of starving patients staring at this man’s meatball sub. I inhaled and felt my stomach gurgle and growl. A receptionist came out into the room and told the man, “No food allowed.” He begrudgingly wrapped up his sandwich. After she departed, he unwrapped it again and took another bite.

I was called into a room for the procedure. Two nurses, who seemed much younger than me, informed me that first they were going to examine my uterus with an ultrasound. They told me I could choose whether to look at the screen. I chose not to look. There was silence as one nurse inserted the probe into my vagina and moved it around, while the other nurse monitored the screen. I looked at the nurses. They both seemed concerned. With hesitancy and downcast eyes, one of the nurses told me, “Based on what we see on the screen, it’s too early for the procedure. You’ll need to reschedule and come back, but you’ll still need to pay for today’s appointment.”

The cost of the appointment was $150. Earlier that week, Ryan and I had to scrounge up the $500 for the abortion—and by scrounge up, I mean we paid off enough of our credit card debt to make room for another charge on the card. This additional $150 would put us over our limit and ruin everything.

I stood in a closet-sized office space with one dim lamplight as a receptionist tried to explain to me why I had to pay for that day’s visit, as I complained to her that the clinic was the one who had scheduled my appointment for this date. I tried to argue that I shouldn’t have to pay for their error, even though the last thing I really wanted to do was make an underfunded clinic pay for anything. She was apologetic but adamant that I pay, and so eventually I did, and we rescheduled.

I sometimes wonder if what the nurses saw on the screen was a deformed fetus. The truth is, prior to my appointment, I had already been trying to kill the embryo. I suppose I was angry at it, and to take revenge I’d been drinking glasses of cheap red wine each night and punching my stomach with my fists until my belly and my hands were sore. Ryan knew that this was going on, but since he was working at the bar, and I was pretty drunk by the time he came home, I’d tell him about it like it was a joke. Like I thought what I was doing was funny. And since I told it like it was some kind of “dead baby joke”—laughing—he laughed too.

In retrospect, I know that it wasn’t very funny. More recently, I grieve.

Between the time I didn’t have the abortion and the upcoming date of my newly scheduled abortion, I started to bleed. A lot. I was frightened as the blood kept flowing and my uterus wouldn’t cease cramping. As I laid on my side in a fetal position, I realized that I must be having a miscarriage and googled the symptoms to be sure. What I could have done at that moment was ask for help, but I didn’t. This was all happening in that aforementioned hoarder’s den within my parents’ apartment, where Ryan and I had succumbed to staying one especially cold winter night. I laid there bleeding uncontrollably, while my mom was in the other room. We were only separated by a wall. In the morning, the cramping and bleeding persisted but had lessened. Freshly bathed and fed, Ryan and I headed back to our studio.

In the following days, I wore diaper-like pads, took ibuprofen, and went about my routine: laying low in the basement studio, trying to stay warm with a space heater in a Chicago winter.

Since our studio didn’t have internet, Ryan and I would often use the wifi at Atomix Cafe—a coffee shop frequented by people who needed a place to linger. We’d buy a bottomless mug of coffee for $4 and stay for hours. While sitting in the cafe during the days of my miscarriage, I experienced some sudden cramping and the onset of a diarrheal emergency. I rushed to the bathroom to release my bowels and vaginal canal. When I looked down into the toilet bowl, I was surprised to see what at first I thought to be a very large piece of onion. It was only as I flushed that I realized what I had actually just seen. It was not a piece of onion. It was my placenta.

I exited the bathroom and approached Ryan. 

“What’s wrong?” He asked. 

“I think I just flushed the baby down the toilet.”

Five years later, Ryan and I get married. We don’t intend to have children. We never discuss the miscarriage directly, but occasionally we make jokes when we’re cooking with onions. Ryan will say, “You thought our baby was a piece of onion!” And then we laugh. He never gets to know how scared I was, because I never tell him. And he never asks, because he never asks.

A few months after our wedding, I’m visiting my friend Marisa at her home in Tucson. She’s cooking us dinner—Marcella Hazan’s cult classic tomato sauce, served over a creamy bowl of polenta. The secret to Marcella’s sauce is an onion. You slice a whole onion in half and let the halves simmer with two cups of canned tomatoes, five tablespoons of butter, and a pinch of salt. After simmering for an hour, you’re supposed to remove the two onion halves from the sauce and discard them, which always seems like a waste as they’ve become so delectably softened in the simmering process. When I make the sauce at home, I usually blend the onion into the sauce until it disappears, or I put it in a container to save for later use. 

When Marisa invites me to the dining table, she’s plated two bowls of polenta with Marcella’s sauce on top, along with a garnish of one translucent piece of onion per bowl.

I sit there staring at my bowl as Marisa giggles. She prods at the piece of onion with her fork.

“It kind of looks like a placenta!” she remarks.

She continues to giggle and prod before exclaiming, “Placenta polenta!”

Looking down at the piece of onion in the shallow pasta bowl, I thought I might vomit. I kept this nausea to myself. I felt alone, trapped in a tunnel that transported me back to the Atomix Cafe. From pasta bowl to toilet bowl. A red mess. In that moment, I felt both deeply rooted in my body and far, far away. Speechless and immobile. What I wish is that I had used Marisa’s joke as an opening into a conversation about my experience rather than keeping it held inside. I’ve often wondered why I didn’t tell Marisa. Why I felt the need to navigate the troubling memory on my own. 

Somehow, I was trained for silence. When I started menstruating, I couldn’t even verbalize it to my mom. I wrote it out on a piece of paper: “I got my period.” Then slid the message to her across the kitchen counter. This moment with Marisa felt similar. Containment and an internalization. A going inwards. 

Imagine if I had told Marisa in the moment of her placenta joke, “You know, it’s funny you say that, because I can tell you from actual experience that the placenta does in fact look like a piece of onion once expelled from the body.” Imagine I’m able to tell her why I know this. And then, imagine she says, “I’m sorry. I had no idea. I wish you could have told me.” And I say, “Me too.”

Imagine if I had told my mom I was having a miscarriage while in her presence, on that winter night when I was sleeping over because it was too cold to stay at the studio. Imagine if I had told my mom and she surprised me with understanding. Surprised me with care. Surprised me with the knowledge I didn’t have on my own. The knowledge she possessed because she herself had a miscarriage (something I would only find out later). Imagine if I had told her and she said that I need to see a doctor. Just to be safe. Imagine that I could feel safe going to a doctor. Imagine that we didn’t need health insurance to receive affordable healthcare. Imagine that barrier is non-existent. And so, I, uninsured, go to the doctor and this gives me assurance.

It feels safe to keep this story to myself, but now more than ever, I want to share it openly—with my mom, with Marisa, with everyone.  It’s a story that feels neither monumental nor minimal—just very much a part of my life. My lived experience of briefly carrying another potential life. My experience of that potential life leaving my body.

The post I Had a Miscarriage And It’s Time To Tell That Story appeared first on Electric Literature.

One day, when I tell my story, I will remember how my body led me to believe it. I will say I slept with you the second time we met, seeking a force strong enough to break the physical magnetism between me and my loving ex. I will not fear being called a slut or worry I’ll be told I got exactly what I deserved. I will describe your eyes, always bloodshot slits, and the long-sleeve collared shirts you wore with the top buttons undone, revealing your chest, and your favorite one that summer: a rich forest green, the sleeves cuffed to the elbows. I will call it what it was when, during the second time in bed, you asked to try something different and I said No but you tried anyway and I said Please stop, and you said Relax and it won’t hurt. I will tell how I shifted on my knees, preparing to spring, but you growled over my shoulder and I froze and you did not stop. I will call it rape.

I will admit I can’t recall whether it happened before or after I learned you were in anger management. I will remember that a half-formed fear about how our social circle might break under the pressure of my No bubbled to the surface of my brain. I will describe how afterward I went into the bathroom and wiped away blood, and how when I returned, it was obvious, no matter how drunk you were, you knew you had done something wrong. I laid myself down, having already left my twenty-three-year-old body, and you lifted me up, all one hundred and thirty-five pounds, and cradled me against your chest. Then you put me back down and fell asleep, and I turned away from you, eyes open in the dark.

I will remember that in the morning you said I hope you had fun last night, as I sat on the edge of the bed, my arms around my knees, my tongue pressing swollen words like marbles to the roof of my mouth. And then you left.

When I tell my friend Sylvie, I preface it by saying, It wasn’t rape. She is uneasy but takes me at my word. I am convincing enough, casting it as a night of bad sex, and later she shakes her finger at you and tells you not to hurt me again. I didn’t know it was her first time, you say, your hands in the air, her finger aimed at your heart. We all laugh it off. You drive me to a park where we have sex in the backseat. We undress ourselves and move mechanically. You try to be gentle but seek, as ever, only to satisfy yourself. My bare skin is pale in the moonlight, and this is what I will remember most. Not your body—mine.

I first meet you in the basement apartment of our mutual friend, Steve. You are sitting on the couch, slumped over, too stoned to raise your head, and Sylvie points you out as the one I’ll like because of your curly hair. Our group heads to the karaoke bar and you stumble your way through “Sex and Candy,” Sylvie shaming you for not knowing the words by heart.

The second time we meet is at a Mexican restaurant. It must be after Cinco de Mayo because I recount my recent disastrous date on that day with a man who arrived at my house wearing a huge sombrero and a black felt mustache stuck to his Caucasian upper lip, whose hands were cold and smaller than mine. At the mention of my long fingers, you set down your wine and reach your hand, palm up, across the table saying, Now I’m curious. We press our hands together longer than necessary. Your hands are not smaller than mine.

The raspberry margarita goes to my head and I grin over your attention. This time when we reach the karaoke bar, you are alert, premeditating. You buy me a Woodchuck and as I drink it, you read all the signs: my flushed face, my loose posture, my growing inhibitions. Are you a lightweight? you tease, and then buy me another.

When you go to the restroom, Steve tells me you’re moving to another state. My spirits fall. I ask if you’re a good guy. Yeah, he says, but then tilts his head from side to side, weighing your bad against your good. Yeah, he bobs finally.

I am already so enamored by our shared love of Suzan-Lori Parks and the fact that you’re an actor like my ex that I don’t think to mind when you put your hand on my ass. We dance close together, your hands everywhere, until you ask, Do you still need that walk home? and I say Yes.

On the walk, under the sobering street lamps and headlights, I ask you not to touch my ass. You take your hand away, but slide it back again to cup my jeans under the shadows of the magnolia and gingko trees. You make a joke and as I turn to you and laugh, your mouth falls hard on mine. I kiss you back. At the door of the house I share with three other people, I turn to you and say, I suppose you want to come in.

If you don’t mind, you say. We climb the stairs to my bedroom tucked above the old garage and make out on my mattress on the floor until you say, Not to sound like a total skeeze, but I have a condom. I consent.

You are quick and pant a lot. Jackrabbit is all I can think. The next thing I know, you pull out and my stomach is wet in the dark and in a panic I say, Did the condom stay on? And you say, Not exactly. You apologize that the sex wasn’t better.

In the morning, you lift the sheet to appraise my body in the filtered sunlight and smile your approval. When you catch me looking back at yours, you kick your startled legs and pin the sheet down, but not before I see you are as hairless as a porn star. On your way out you say you had fun and we should do it again sometime.

By midday at work, I’m anxious about the condom mishap and my friend and co-worker walks with me to CVS to buy Plan B for forty dollars. The old pharmacist is kind, judgment absent from his face. I swallow the first pill and hope it won’t make me sick.

A week passes before I see you again. Sylvie invites me, you, and Steve to her apartment for drinks. You arrive last, wearing that same green shirt. When they leave us alone on the patio you knot up your eyes, press your cigarette between your lips and exhale a smoky, controlled How you been? I want to laugh. Steve has already told me you asked for my number. I tell you about taking Plan B, still thinking it was an accident, that we’re in this together. You say you’re sorry but don’t ask how much it cost or offer to pay. As we all walk downtown, Sylvie jams our hands together and runs away. It’s too soon, you say, extracting your hand and putting it in your pocket, and I want to laugh at this too. But then you tell me about your recent heartbreak, a woman who, in the middle of sex, said I don’t love you anymore.

I savor a single drink and talk to Sylvie and Steve while you play pool. Then you walk me back to my car and kiss me in the shadows against a truck that isn’t yours.

I think maybe the second time will be better.

The house is dark, my roommates asleep when we arrive. You have trouble getting it up and say, This isn’t really doing it for me.

That’s when you ask.

That’s when I say No. But you do not listen.

That’s when I say, Please stop, and you say, Relax and it won’t hurt.

Once, when my ex and I were having sex, I felt a sudden sharp pain. Ow, I said. He didn’t stop. Ow, I said again. He didn’t stop. In a fraction of a nanosecond, I shut my eyes in shock, turned my head and thought, This is what it’s like to be raped. He stopped. What’s wrong? he asked, his eyes full of concern. When I couldn’t speak, he lifted himself off of me and laid down beside me. I told him what was wrong. He said he hadn’t heard me. He kissed me and apologized.

That is my only frame of reference: if words fail, body language—its movement, expression, stillness—will communicate all there is to know.

So, I shift my body under you, ready to spring. Then you growl over my shoulder and I realize I don’t know you at all. I freeze. But you refuse to read my body. I am not a person to you. I am a means to an end.

A month later I sit in a thin smock on an examination table and tell the nurse I may have contracted an STD when she asks the reason for my visit. I’m reminded just how legible my face must be when I hear her say outside the closed door, She’s very nervous, and then my nurse practitioner enters the room and asks softly, What’s up, babe?

I only tell her about the missing condom. The tests come back negative, which seems like dumb luck, especially when I hear third hand that one of the women you slept with before me called you to report symptoms.

Before you move away, I say I have something to give you. Steve and I have been dating for a month by then. We’re at the goodbye party your theatre friends throw for you in the country when I walk you to my car and hand you Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, and Venus by Suzan-Lori Parks. Maybe it’s because we’d talked about them, and now I don’t want their spines on my shelf reminding me of you. Maybe it’s because I want to remind you of this thing we shared outside your violence.

Early in the evening, the party gathers around a fire pit and someone asks us each to share the story of our worst lay. I keep quiet and notice the silence of another woman, whom I know you’ve also slept with. After dark, she and I sprawl out on the trampoline, stare at the stars, and laugh about how bad in bed you are. Later I will wonder if she is also laughing to balance an unacknowledged pain.

A month after you leave, your body far removed from mine, the marbled words I held against my tongue that morning appear in my journal. In your absence, I am ready to own them: date, acquaintance, rape. Until then, I had believed I was in control of my life, that I was able to keep myself safe. Naming what you did meant admitting neither was true. It meant admitting it could happen again.

This admission, even to myself, has a price. I develop quirks that are hard to hide. I’m newly afraid of heights, balconies, flying, bridges, and tunnels; a generalized fear of structural collapse. I sit on the second-story balcony of a bistro and try to have a conversation with a friend while I imagine the supports crumbling and the floor tilting, tables, chairs, plates, silverware clattering to the street below as I dangle from the iron railing. Crossing bridges, I lift my palms to the sky in supplication to be upheld; I suspend my breath inside tunnels.    

From another state you send me a friend request on Facebook, which I delete. When I’m packing to move to a new apartment, I find the missing condom crumpled behind my bed and admit to myself that you must have pulled it off. I discuss my suspicion with a friend who knows other women you’ve slept with, and she confirms this is something you’ve done before.

Four months later, you return for a visit. Steve and I are still together, but he doesn’t know about the rape and I am not ready to tell him. There is a blizzard. Steve, another friend, and you, all drive to my apartment to borrow a snow shovel. The sun has already set as I sit at my desk with all the lights on, the indoor shutters open. You don’t come inside.

In the dark you might have seen me, but I couldn’t see you—as if I were on a stage; you, the uninvited audience.

Later, I join everyone at the bar to face you in the light, to see you see me, my body intact in spite of you. We do not speak. Your ex shows up and I watch your eyes flare and your jaw lock in place. Her betrayal stirs you more than your own. I have proven nothing to you, only to myself. I can survive your presence, your gaze, you—and walk away unshattered.

I tell Steve during the second blizzard that winter. I’m falling for him but won’t say so until I know whether he will believe me or call it a misunderstanding. We lie down on his futon, and with my eyes on the ceiling and my hand gripping his, I ditch my prepared script and tell it simply: It was date rape. It was anal. It was your friend. And I cry. He holds me, angry and dumbfounded, asks if he should confront you, warns me it won’t be quiet, and I say No, that if anyone should, it should be me. I am conscious that my body froze, didn’t fight you off, and I tell Steve I’ll have to explain myself for the rest of my life. You don’t have to explain yourself to anyone, he says.

The culturally inherent shame is so entrenched it takes a while to believe him. When I do, I realize that what we find so uncomfortable, so disturbing, about acquaintance rape is not that the line is blurred, but that the line is so easily crossed. When I start to think that things were blurred, that the night was grey, I remember the clarity of my No. I remember that I bled, though not all assaults draw blood. And I remember your words: Relax and it won’t hurt. These are not words spoken to someone who consents. These are words spoken to someone who resists. Couched in your command was an admission. You knew you were hurting me.

After dark, Steve and I tramp through the snow-plowed streets with friends to the one open bar downtown. It has floor-to-ceiling windows and the light from the street lamps gives everything, even the slanting snow, an orange tinge. After we down a couple vodka citrus highballs, Steve leans in and whispers he can’t wait to get me home and kiss every inch of me. In his room my body is lit with kisses and I want to lift myself but can’t, suddenly a cinderblock. I can’t put myself on display and feel safe. He chokes up and says it’s all his fault. Why? I ask in surprise. Because I introduced you, he says.

In the new year, I begin telling the women closest to me and their responses vary.

One assumes, He held you down?

Another says, My ex used to rape me repeatedly, and when I ask why she didn’t tell me, she says, I didn’t want it to define me.

An older woman says, Something like that happened to me. But she does not name it.

Another says, I was raped. It was the sixties—men just assumed you wanted it.

Still another says, What R-word? when I speak in code and shushes me when I say anal in a public garden as we walk in search of a new art installation, something made of sand.

I tell my mother in the car so that I don’t have to face her as I speak. After I’ve used the fewest words possible and cry, she parks the car, turns to me, and says, Can I kill him? I laugh out a mouthful of air in relief that there is no need to clarify, to recount in detail your assault on this body she made.

Steve and I have been dating for over a year and have just moved in together when we receive an invitation to a wedding we know you will attend. This is the nature of acquaintance rape, even after you’ve moved hundreds of miles away. People say your name around me, not knowing what you did, and my face learns not to grimace at the sound of it. I want to attend the wedding, refuse to alter my decisions because of you. But as the date approaches, when I shut my eyes, I think of sliding a razor across my wrist. It doesn’t feel suicidal. It feels primal, exorcistic. As if bloodletting could drain the demons. It takes me weeks to tell Steve. I stand in the shower, my arms around myself, and tell him I keep seeing the image of the blade on my skin. He stands outside listening, the curtain drawn between us.

I recognize the danger and finally tell my doctor what you did. She recommends a therapist whose office is beside the train tracks, which forces us to suspend conversations mid-sentence over the roar of the engines. I don’t have much money or time, so I get to the point. When I say, I was raped, she hands me a box of tissues and asks if I was a virgin and I am annoyed this woman twice my age seems to subscribe to the myth that only the pure and untouched can be raped.

In the months leading up to the wedding I see her weekly and she gives me permission to hate you, which I do until I don’t need to anymore. I indulge my bloodlust in my mind, punt your ribs, scratch your eyes and break your nose, but it always ends with you cracking my head open on the walnut dresser my great-grandmother brought with her from Zurich. My therapist says you’ve given me a violence that doesn’t belong to me and when I ask her, How do I know where his rage ends and mine begins? she has no answer other than to suggest punching pillows or screaming in the woods. The first and only time I try beating and shouting into a pillow, I become more enraged and might laugh at the absurdity, except the anger inspires such terror in me. 

As the wedding nears, my therapist asks me to write you a letter I might never send. I punch the keys of my laptop and imagine that when I’m finished, my keyboard will look like my mother’s, her strong nails impressing crescent moons above the most common letters in the English alphabet (i, r, a, t, e, s, h, n, o). In the letter, I tell you what you did and how it changed me. I tell you that you engendered in me a hatred unlike any I have ever known, much of it self-directed, some of it not. I hated you for assaulting my humanity, my dignity. I hated your audacity, your sense of entitlement. I hated the mistrust stirred by your violence, which inevitably impacted my relationship with Steve. When I read the letter aloud in my therapist’s office above the grinding gears of the train braking below, she says, I think you should send it. I consider it as I select a shiny dress to wear to the wedding, a disguise intended to present me as unchanged, unaffected.          

Two years and five months after the rape, I see you for what I hope will be the last time. Our first encounter that wedding weekend is mercifully easy, two cars passing in the hotel parking lot, Steve and the groom speaking through open car windows, you and I silent. The day of the wedding, I do yoga to calm my nerves, shower, dress, and catch the shuttle to the ceremony site. A friend takes my arm and walks me down the stone path to the lawn where the men are gathered. As I move toward Steve, I catch sight of your eyes on my body and wonder if you have always looked so lecherous.

At dinner you sit across the table, diagonal from me, and ask about my writing. Steve runs his hand frenetically over the top of my thigh, his fingertips saying, It’s going to be okay babe, it’s going to be okay, as I answer carefully. I do not tell you my latest work is an unsent letter addressed to you.

The next morning, Steve and I arrange things so I won’t have to see you again before we leave. I will check us out of the room, he will say goodbye to you at the elevators. But instead of getting on the elevator, you walk Steve to the door where I stand. You shake his hand and then reach your arms around me. My whole body retracts internally. But then the touch is over, and it doesn’t sear like I thought it would.

Ten days later, I mail you the letter. In it, I remind you of your words, Relax and it won’t hurt, and ask, Who the fuck did you think you were, trying to talk me out of my pain? I tell you I know you pulled the condom off without my consent our first time together and that it, too, was a violation—of trust, sexual health, and my reproductive rights. I tell you about my denial and dissociation from the rape, and how I couldn’t name what you’d done until after you left town.

I don’t tell you I ordered a book called I Never Called It Rape by Robin Warshaw. I don’t tell you that it helped me understand why I pursued you afterward, plied myself with vodka, and kissed you that night under the porch. Warshaw explains this behavior is a way of normalizing violence, shrinking its terror by embedding it within the context of a relationship. It was my unconscious attempt at repair. But when a knife cuts, one doesn’t seek the blade to heal the wound. Eventually, I recognized my denial as a force of self-preservation, a suspension of truth that allowed me to be unafraid and fall in love with Steve.

After I send the letter, you unfriend Steve on Facebook and begin to fade from my story.

Gradually, I allow my body to thicken, to push back against Steve’s beautiful hands. Expansion makes me a smaller target in a culture that reveres thinness. (I read somewhere that the tissue of the traumatized vagina thickens too, and I wonder: Is it the same for other traumatized tissue, the body remembering its trespasses and reinforcing its defenses?) I build a barrier between me and the version of me that could be hurt. Because if I blame the rape on my alignment then with conventional standards of beauty, I regain control, increasing my girth and transcending the size parameters of someone who can be raped. Of course, this is folly. People of all sizes are raped.

Some days, when strange men turn from me, the excess pounds are a comfort. Some days, I am anxious to dig myself out from under this unburned energy, to reclaim an ease of movement and strength.

Three years after the rape, Steve and I visit Sylvie in her hometown, where she has returned to live. Steve’s friend Daniel attends the university there and we agree Steve will stay the weekend at Daniel’s and I will stay with Sylvie.

We all meet up at a bar and then go back to Daniel’s house, where everyone—Sylvie and I, Daniel and Steve, and Daniel’s two male roommates—continue drinking in his basement. The big and tall roommate points to the steel column in the middle of the room and says to me and Sylvie, Stripper pole. I glare at him but it doesn’t seem to register in his alcohol-sopped eyes. His perceptions aren’t so dimmed, however, that he can’t see, an hour later, that Sylvie prefers Daniel. In that moment he lifts up the loveseat she is sitting on and pours her onto the floor. She lands on her knees and spills her beer as she yells, What the hell? He is embarrassed then and says, I might’ve gone too far. Daniel laughs and agrees.

Meanwhile, the other roommate and I are locked in a grammatical argument. I can’t remember what point I am trying to articulate, but my nuanced construction irritates him and he interrupts to say, Well now you’re just trying to fuck an ant in the ass.

My body goes limp.

The scene is too familiar. Testosterone and alcohol. The men outnumbering the women—violence in the language and actions of the two men. My head falls onto Steve’s shoulder and I tell him I want to leave. But Sylvie is hitting it off with Daniel and doesn’t want to go. I tell her I am leaving without her, and swipe her car keys from her purse. Steve walks me out and as we ascend the stairs from the basement, my anger rises, strengthened by my movement, my agency. Steve sobers some as he tries to calm me. We reach the driveway when my rage catches and snakes through my body to my mouth and I scream in the quiet neighborhood, I fucking hate them! and slash the air with Sylvie’s keys. Only I’ve misgauged the distance between us, or Steve has taken a step toward me, and the keys rip through his t-shirt and the skin of his chest, but I don’t realize it as he wraps his arms around me and whispers, It’s okay, it’s okay. I let him hold me and breathe into the warmth of his body. Only when we pull apart does he rub his chest and check for blood; there is none, but apology still runs from my mouth.   

As I drive in the dark alone to Sylvie’s house, I am suddenly seized by fear. I have, essentially, stolen her car and I keep checking the rearview mirror for police lights. When I reach her house in the woods and unlock the door, her large black dog, the only dog I’ve ever feared, barks his alarm. I extend my hand past his massive jaw, the one Sylvie has to muzzle for the first ten minutes of my every arrival, and hook a leash on his collar. He stops barking, surprised, and I walk him out into the night—brazen and unafraid.

Years later, Sylvie and I will laugh about the night I stole her car. But I will also see it for what it was: trauma response. This is how the body remembers.

Five years after the rape, I see a second therapist whose office is across from the graffitied mailbox you pressed me up against once, your clumsy paw between my legs. I tell her my frustrations, desires, and fears about returning to my previous size.

I’ve done it before, I can do it again, I tell her.

When was the last time you did it? she asks.

When I wanted to show him that he hadn’t changed me.

But that was a lie.

Yes, that was a lie.

And because of this, returning to a smaller size feels like regression.

I have grown so much.

Maybe the next time you see me I will be too large for you to wrap your arms around.

Maybe

I

will

be

monstrous.

A word that grew out of danger, rising up from the Latin monstrum, meaning portent, threatening disquiet.

I sit on my therapist’s loveseat and she instructs me to plant my feet on the floor, close my eyes, and remember a time when I felt connected to my body. My brain takes an adolescent second to smirk over sex (consensual, mind-blowing, with Steve), but then my eyes swell and the smirk is replaced by a memory. I am twenty-one again and running along a sandy path before the boardwalk carries me over the marshes of the peninsula. I inhale the scent of pine and feel the strength and warmth of my muscles with each step of the nine-mile run. And suddenly, there it is, the lost thing that I am still mourning: my body. I inhabit it and it is mine and I am free, unburdened by you.

One morning after you assaulted me, I was out for a run when I saw you up ahead. My gut tightened and I slowed my pace. You didn’t see me as you bounded through traffic, probably late for work. I kept moving and by the time I reached the graveyard you were gone. When winter came that first year, I didn’t need much convincing to stop running and stay warm in bed with Steve. My knees lost strength and shifted, my patella pinching my ligaments every few steps.

With my second therapist’s encouragement, I begin physical therapy. On the first day, I can only lift two pounds with the left leg, only press a quarter of my body weight with both. If I were to fall while running, I wouldn’t be able to support my own weight. I do the exercises, sign up for my first race in ten years, and start running again. My breathing is labored, my lungs untrained, but I am slowly stitching back together the threads of connection to my body. My knees don’t hurt while running, but at night my bones wake me—they feel hollow inside me, unequipped to push back against the pain.

That same year, I learn that meditation can help those diagnosed with PTSD and I sign up for a class. On the first day, the teacher asks us to pick a partner and tell them why we’re there. I tell an older woman with bleached hair that I’ve experienced a trauma that has separated me from my body. Then, unexpectedly, the teacher announces we’ll share our reasons with the whole class. Because I cry when it’s my turn, the older woman faces me at the end of class and says, I don’t know what you’ve been through but I can tell you I was raped with a gun to my head, and if I can survive that, you can survive this. Later, when I think of sitting quietly with myself, resistance presses like a metal beam on my sternum. I do not return to class. Instead, I force myself to do yoga, my shoulders shaking in downward-facing dog, all my joints weak—a woman unhinged.

And then, one day, something shifts. The voice in my head no longer says, You should, assuming it will meet resistance, and instead says, I will. I will feel better if I do yoga. In the movement from second person to first I am no longer outside myself looking in. I inhabit my body, take up residence inside myself.

Seven years after the rape, I read Bessel van der Kolk’s book, The Body Keeps the Score, and learn that bilateral stimulation of the body in Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy can help the brain process traumatic experiences. I seek out a trauma specialist who practices EMDR. Her office is in a converted old house on a half-numbered street, squeezed between two whole numbered streets—which seems like a metaphor for something, like the place where trauma lives, in the half-space between a remembered past and a lived present, my body, the time traveler, slipping back and forth between the two.

After the introductory session, the specialist hands me two hard plastic pads the shape of worry stones, connected by electrical cords to a control device. While EMDR is named for bilateral stimulation of the eyes, the reprocessing of memories can also occur through stimulation of the hands with vibration, or of the ears through tonal sounds. As I hold one plastic pad in each hand, she adjusts the control buttons to demonstrate the vibrations I can expect to feel. There are at least three variations of intensity and three settings for speed. On the mildest setting, the gray pads quiver lightly in my palms, alternating from one hand to the other. The electrical current is strung between us, she in her chair and me on the couch. It feels both woo-woo and scientific as we work on “resourcing,” which involves constructing a peaceful place I can go to in my mind to rest between revisiting memories.

We spend several sessions exploring memories that cause light to medium discomfort. It’s awkward initially, as I’m unsure of the “right” answers in these structureless explorations of my own mind and emotional responses. But she reminds me that the only instruction is to react to what comes up as the bilateral stimulation of my body shakes things loose in my brain and we draw nearer to the white-hot pain. We practice visiting childhood memories and work our way up to the memory of meeting you. After six sessions, I tell her I’m ready to get it over with, to confront the rape itself. Seven years is so long and I am so tired, I tell her. Yes, she says, her voice gentle and measured, Let’s get it the fuck over with. I laugh and agree.

I am already holding the vibrating worry stones when she asks me to stand. She explains that as I recall your violence, I should feel free to respond in any way I want, to punch and kick, to scream. I am nervous and shut my eyes as I reenter the scene in my head. I am angry as I punch and kick without moving my arms or legs. Then suddenly I am crying and she asks me, What do you need right now? What do you need to do, what do you need to say? And one word rises up through my throat that has never once occurred to me in seven years. Not that night or any night after.

Help, I croak.

And for the first time, I think of my three roommates asleep in their beds, the British man well over six feet tall who lived across the hall and with whom I shared a bathroom, the woman in the bedroom below with her two protective dogs, and the other man downstairs by the kitchen who worked late and might even have been awake.

The novelty of the word astounds me, its size and shape expanding to fill the hollow space carved out in my brain by years of its absence.

Help, I repeat aloud in my therapist’s office to the roommates who aren’t there. In my head I scream it, and the power of my voice shakes my roommates from their sleep. The British man pounds on my door, the weak hook-and-eye latch wrenching apart. The woman below opens her door, and her dogs climb the stairs, snapping and snarling as they storm into my room.

You shrink from me then, naked, hands in the air, claiming innocence as infantile and inauthentic as your hairless body.

I don’t know what happens next and it doesn’t matter. What matters is the shattering in my brain. No longer catatonic, I have broken free from my freeze response.

My body remembers, and enacts a new ending. This is how the story changes.

The post My Body Remembers the Story You Want to Erase appeared first on Electric Literature.

The club is situated in a warehouse district near downtown St. Louis, a low building with turn-of-the-century brickwork that looks like every other low brick building in the city, surrounded by weedy parking lots and rusty chain link fences. When my friend Steven invited me to soak in the hot tub with him there, I had to Google it to make sure it was what I thought it was. Honestly, I’d thought that bathhouses were a relic of the Time Before, when men ducked into gay saunas to have anonymous sex without the fear of AIDS. I grew up in the eighties and nineties and knew only the Time After, when the crusades to shut them down in cities like San Francisco and New York underscored the fear of the plague and the drive to exterminate queerness rather than caring for the sick. That fear crept into my Midwestern Southern Baptist existence and made every queer person a gay man, wasting away, an ominous cautionary tale, body poison to everyone around him. I could only see the view from the TV at the Days Inn, where I cleaned rooms; from there, queer joy was as removed—as irrelevant—as Broadway, Wall Street, and Hollywood. It sparkled in this forbidden way. 

The Club, a block away from a Mobile station and a Store Space Self Storage, didn’t sparkle. Still, I was curious.

Bathhouses are a quintessential part of gay culture, specifically cis male gay culture. In the last century, these places have served as safe(ish) places for gay men to have intimate time with other men, secluded from the life and career-demolishing eyes of the police. But times had long since changed. Steven is an activist and an irrepressible extrovert who can talk his way into nearly anything; he was determined to break down the barriers for trans and nonbinary people in all places, even decades-old bathhouses. He was in the process of convincing the owners and management of The Club that all people who identify as male should be allowed equal access to the sauna, workout room, lounge and entertainment area, swimming pool, hot tub, and, you know, everything else. While this may not be revolutionary on the coasts, Missouri is different. His success led to an offer of a test mission, and he needed a wingman, which is how I became the first trans man to get naked in this gay bathhouse.

In my mind’s eye, I saw a sort of Queer as Folk situation where hot guys in their twenties walk around in white towels and spontaneously fuck each other, devoid of inhibition. While a lot of this was true, it wasn’t meant for my eyes, the eyes of a man who was assigned female at birth. 

Steven and I were both in our forties, both balding with beards (although he had more hair), both having had top surgery. We were different in other ways. Steven surrounded himself with queerness, and nearly every aspect of his life included people in various versions of gender. He avoided tricky situations like doctors and locker rooms, whereas I was, and am still, nearly always the only trans person in the room. I had undressed quickly and guardedly in the YMCA for years, and it amazed me that not one guy in the very straight YMCA locker room had ever looked past my tattoos and bald head to see the incision marks on my chest or the significantly different anatomy between my legs. It seemed like if I kept moving and directed them where to look, they’d see whatever I wanted them to see. Even so, women have an ingrained sense of danger when it comes to male proximity, and I’d spent the first thirty years of my life in a body that housed a uterus and even a child in that uterus. I knew when to be uncomfortable.

Maintaining the illusion that I was just like every other man took up giant swaths of bandwidth in my head. I packed my underwear with all sorts of soft representations of a penis over the years, and when that grew tiresome, I just wore loose pants, sat in a slouch, and walked like the guys I saw at Lowe’s when I bought lumber for woodworking projects. I diverted attention. It wasn’t about being closeted. I had been a very visible trans man for over a decade. It was about something closer. Something infinitely intimate and unknowable.

Sex was complicated. It was all fantasy, like virtual reality where I was all of the avatars—the person touching, the person being touched, the person looking, the person being looked at—while I stayed locked behind the screen. And nowhere was this collection of avatars more present than when I tried strap-ons. As much as I wished I could have wrestled my mind around wearing one, they made me disconnect completely, like I was fucking by proxy. What I wanted was uncomplicated. I didn’t need acrobatic sex or a million orgasms. I just wanted to be in the room.

 But every second spent locating the equipment in a drawer, adjusting straps, wiping off the inevitable bit of fuzz from the pouch or stray cat hair that stuck itself to the shaft, and then wrestling it into place on my body was a pace away from being in my actual body. By the time I had suited up, I was already thinking about the grocery list and wishing it was over. It wasn’t just about sex, though. I lived from my shoulders up in pretty much every respect. Even alone in the shower or getting dressed in the morning, I mostly didn’t look down, which over the course of a few years translated to not being able to look in the mirror and then not being able to look at anyone else, at least not directly and not for very long. Sex was the least of my worries. I had nearly erased myself completely.

I drove to The Club and sat in the parking lot with both hands on my steering wheel. A scene from National Lampoon’s Vacation repeated unbidden in my head. Chevy Chase’s dorky dad character is about to go skinny dipping with Christy Brinkley’s character and keeps repeating to himself, “This is crazy. This is crazy. This is crazy.”  I texted my sister, not just because I wanted to talk to her about being parked outside a bathhouse, but because she is the only one I know who has memorized the same scenes from movies we watched as kids.  

“This is the gayest thing I’ve ever done,” I texted. I looked in my rearview mirror and made eye contact with a middle-aged man walking behind my truck into the building. 

“I want details,” she texted back.

It was not the gayest thing I’d ever done. My sexuality has careened widely between asexual and pansexual for as long as I can remember, and even though I struggled with it when I was younger, I don’t stress anymore about where I am on that spectrum at any given time. I’d had anonymous sex in strange places, but those experiences were in a female body, not the very male body I inhabit now. It had been a long time since I felt much of anything besides crushing depression while fighting to have the surgery and then bone-deep fatigue from months of recovery from the surgery. For the past year, I had felt more like a list of symptoms than a human being.

That Tuesday morning, I planned on getting naked in the hot tub, knowing that Steven wouldn’t. In a cis gay bathhouse, trans is transgressive, and cock is, if not required, expected. Unlike me, he had no interest in bottom surgery. 

There are a few different kinds of bottom surgeries. Each method gives you different sizes and sensations. Some give you the ability to pee standing up and have penetrative sex. Some are more involved than others. I chose phalloplasty, which is a surgery that constructs a penis out of donated skin, nerve, and arterial tissue from other parts of the patient’s body.

Most trans men don’t have bottom surgery of any kind, and even fewer have phalloplasty. Many don’t feel they need it. Many do feel they need it but can’t afford it or are scared of it. The surgery is a big deal, involving multiple locations on the body—the arm, the thigh, the back, the groin, depending on where the donor site is—and there are almost always complications. People get creeped out by the scar on the donor arm, which looks like a very large burn that extends from your wrist to nearly your elbow, but it’s not just aesthetics. I had physical therapy to get full use of my hand again. I can’t feel anything on the scar. I’ve cut my arm on several occasions and not known it until I noticed blood. But most hesitation is about presentation. Many trans men want a perfectly formed penis with perfect length and girth (a dream of many cis men), and they will settle for no less than flawlessness with zero visible scars (good luck with that). The internet is filled with sites where you can see surgery photos, and those comment sections are filled with people who cringe, or worse, laugh at images of The Results—as if the trans man in question didn’t nail the landing, so points must be deducted.

I can understand the trepidation. I had a lot of it before my surgery. I had convinced myself that bottom surgery was an option that would give me even more to be self-conscious about. I had built up the Frankenstein’s monster version of The Results in my head, and that kept me distracted until a friend came home from having his own phalloplasty and offered to show it to me. I figured I’d look in real life and definitively close the door on any desire to do it. We sat next to each other on his living room couch, and he unzipped his pants. Instead of the monster I had imagined, I saw a living, breathing, normal person with a very much not scary Result.

Fuck. I thought. The next day I started researching surgeons. 

Fifteen years after I started taking testosterone, and ten years after I started pushing my health insurance to cover the surgery, I finally completed and healed from my phalloplasty, which had left me with a penis, scars hidden under scars from other surgeries, scars hidden under hair, scars in plain view, and a skin graft on my arm. 

I didn’t look cis, but in a dark room, I might be okay. The bigger truth, though, was that I didn’t just want to be okay. I wanted to be wanted. I thought about the guy in my rearview mirror. I wondered if we’d recognize each other in the dark. I wondered if I’d want to make out with someone. I wondered if I’d feel anything at all.

I wasn’t sure how Steven and I would be received at The Club. This was our inaugural visit, and I had no idea what was required. I was following his lead – and yet I had come without swim trunks. He pulled in just as I was texting an lol to my sister. He clutched his shorts in his hand. He’s a big guy. He carries his weight like a bear daddy, and I’d always thought he was attractive. I carry my weight like a secret and hide it under layers of clothes when I’m heavy. I’d just lost 34 lbs, though, and was feeling as good as I ever have, but my body and I have a complicated relationship.

“I’m nervous,” I said. “Why am I so nervous?” I knew exactly why I was nervous.

“I am too.” He shifted his shorts from one hand to the other. We smiled and shook our heads at each other. This is crazy. This is crazy. This is crazy.

Once we were in, I felt like I had in the dressing room of the strip club where my sister tended bar in her early twenties, the 40-61 Club. Littered with gym bags, lingerie, and drugs, it was easy to slip in the back and hang out with the other dancers while I waited for her shift to be over. Those friendships and flirtations didn’t count because I was a woman. There were rules for that club too. The bouncer never told me to leave but never asked me to dance. The bathhouse felt like slipping into an old pair of jeans.

Porn played on multiple screens. The manager, Mike, gave us a casual tour of the place while I tried to avoid the impulse to take out my phone and take notes. 

“These are useful,” he said. He put his knee up on one of the benches in the hallway and rocked back and forth. “Fuck benches.” He looked at me, expecting me to cringe. When I nodded for him to continue, he took us past the glory holes and the “slurp deck,” which was a platform that a person could stand on and put their crotch at face level for the person standing in front of them. Then he showed us the private rooms. Each stop on the tour was accompanied by a disgruntled look from Mike. I couldn’t tell if he was trying to shock us into leaving or if it was a sort of adolescent dare. We twisted through the dark hallways and made our way back to the locker room. I put my key into the locker and stripped off my shirt and pants. 

Standing in The Club in my socks and underwear, I felt the familiar reflex to hurry and to hide. I thought about a night two years earlier, before my surgery, when, in a suicidal depression, I went to the psych ward of a hospital and was confronted by two nurses—one man and one woman—who directed me to strip so they could do a “skin search.” I thought about the time years before that in intensive care when the nurse called me “it” and “forgot” to give me a blood transfusion. I thought about every time I had the instinct to hold my breath, to shrink into the shadows, like the air around me didn’t belong to me, and if I only took a little, if I stayed there pleasant and quiet, suffocating for long enough, my stillness would protect me. Here though, in this locker room in this strange place, the sun came out. The air was okay to breathe again.  

 I took off my socks and underwear, stowed my clothes in the locker, and looked back at Steven. He was hurrying to put on his swimming trunks in that familiar YMCA gym way, so I looked away and twisted my towel around my waist.  I looked back; his body was turned away from mine. I watched him pull the elastic key holder around his forearm, and I did the same with mine. Our guide had left. We were quiet and awkward as we walked down an uncertain hall toward what we hoped was the hot tub.

There were men, maybe ten or fifteen, standing with towels slung around their waists in darkened corners. The screens above us were silent, but the raw sex on them seemed to follow the rhythm of the Studio 54 Spotify playlist that sounded from the speakers. I chuckled. We found the hot tub, and I stripped off my towel in the gang shower. I pointed to the sign that said, “Please shower before using the hot tub.” It was a familiar OCD. I felt like I always did when I passed the front desk at my therapist’s office, where the business card holders and laminated calendar begged to be straightened and re-straightened. I had seen the sign, and now I had to do what it said.

I pumped the soap out of the dispenser and stood under the water. A bearded, naked man walked in and descended into the hot tub without so much as glancing at the shower. I didn’t look at Steven as I rubbed the soap onto my torso, but I saw him from the corner of my eye hesitate, watch the guy pass the showers, look at me, then the sign, then reluctantly pump soap onto his palm and rub it under his arms. This, right here, might be my favorite thing about Steven: I think he’d help me straighten the business card holders and calendar at my therapist’s office if I asked him to.

We finally stepped into the water. From where I sat in the tub, I could see a still frame of a young white guy on his back, his legs spread into the receiving end of the missionary position. Steven’s view was two screens side by side showing slippery fornication on each. One featured young, hairless white guys. The other featured hairy, beefier white guys. I noticed a theme. I also noticed that deep inside, buried under a surgically composed scrotum, my original equipment was aroused. That was new.

It’s hard to explain how phalloplasty works because there are multiple possibilities for constructing a penis, but in my case, my original anatomy is rerouted and buried underneath all the reconstruction. It has all the same feelings and sensations it had before, and these are connected by nerve grafts to the new equipment. Sometimes it feels good, like a deep breath in the woods at the edge of an open field in summer. Sometimes it feels like an unpleasant and raw zap referring back to the original nerve ending—sort of like memory, a little like grief.

Steven popped out of the water and sat on the side of the hot tub. 

“I can feel my blood pressure,” he said. 

I watched him lean on his elbows and admired his body. He carried his maleness in every cell. I stayed submerged, and when the fifteen-minute timer turned off the jets, I popped up and hit the switch again.

We sat close to each other, he clothed in his trunks, and me shrouded by convulsing water, and talked in low tones under the music and Jacuzzi jets. Outside of that building, we were public figures: He, the executive director of a transgender nonprofit; I, the co-owner of an independent bookstore. Professional Public Trans . Right then, though, we talked about things that friends talk about when the trash of the outside world is held at bay, and the only thing that matters is the two of us, stripped down to the essentials. 

The men around us were old, young, large, small, muscular, and flabby. Their faces were soft and hopeful. Like they didn’t have to hurry. Like they didn’t have to hide. I almost felt guilty for intruding, and yet I was there in the middle of all of it, as vulnerable as I could have possibly been, and they looked at me like I’d always been there. I suppose they were as vulnerable as they could be, too. After I transitioned, I learned the ways men; straight men, in particular, guard themselves. Physical contact is kept brief – fist bumps and handshakes. Emotional contact is frequently briefer. I once gave condolences to a man for the death of his wife with a nod of the head, to which he responded, “Yeah.” 

Steven left to meet someone at the front door. He was on a mission to populate The Club with trans men, and we were so new in this place it was hard to know if the front desk guy would let any more of us in. I sat alone in the churning bath and stared at the porn. The jets relaxed me, and I didn’t notice an older man approaching. 

“Sorry?” I said.

“Is it okay if I join you?” he asked again. I knew what it meant, though my inner teenage girl kept looking for another reason a naked man would ask to sit next to me. I did the familiar inner negotiation of my boundaries. Sure, I thought, he can sit next to me. Next to me isn’t inside me. I tensed when he sat. But I knew where I was. I had chosen to be here, in some ways, for this.

“Can I touch your leg?” he asked. 

Sure, I thought. He can touch my leg. My leg isn’t my dick. He gently put his hand on my leg and started to touch himself. He didn’t, as I expected from memories of high school and the creepy guy on the church bus when I was ten, grab my hand and guide it to his dick. 

“My name’s Sam,” he said. “I have a room if you’d like to go have some fun.”

“I’m here with my friend,” I said. “He’ll be right back.”

“Oh,” he said. His hand moved to my back. He instinctively found the knotted muscles around my lower spine. On the screen, a blindfolded man was giving a blowjob. My breath got shallow. My mouth went dry. His hand lowered to my ass, and he started massaging his way into it. Sure, I thought. His fingers aren’t his dick. But I was curious about his dick. I reached over and stroked it a couple of times, carefully not looking at him but at the TV screens. His hand left my ass, and I realized he was stroking me. I knew the game was over. My body doesn’t operate the same way cis bodies operate. The loud voice in my head that had been quiet since surgery woke up screaming Fraud!

“I have some trouble with that,” I said. “You’re not going to get anything there.” I waited for him to get up and leave, to laugh, to get angry.

“That’s okay,” he said. “I understand.” He put his hand back on my leg and nudged me with his shoulder. “There are lots of other fun ways to play instead.”

I almost cried.

Steven returned alone, wrapped armpit to thigh in his towel. His swim shorts peeked out from underneath. He dropped into the water beside me, talking about how the person he went to meet didn’t show up. I turned to Sam and said, “This is my friend. I’m sorry.”

Sam smiled and said goodbye.

“You want to go walk around?” Steven asked. 

“Absolutely.”

We walked into the nearly empty hallway and made our way around the twisting corridor into the darkest corners. I followed him into another smaller room with a platform and two screens. One man in the room had strapped himself into a sling with his legs spread and was masturbating tentatively. Steven and I looked at him and then looked at each other.  We stood beside each other in the dark, listening to dance music and watching anal sex on two screens without looking at each other. Steven remained very still, not taking his eyes off the screen. I looked behind us and saw a man watching us and also watching the man in the sling. He had his hand in his towel too. In the dark, I couldn’t tell if it was the guy from the parking lot. I decided to pretend it was. I kept looking at him. 

Before I stopped using women’s restrooms, I was used to people talking and holding the door for each other. It took practice to master the art of men’s rooms. Walk in. Stall. Hurry. Sink. Hurry. Walk out. No looking or talking, especially at Lowe’s or even the YMCA. Maybe I was just like that because I was afraid to stop moving. Maybe they were too busy trying not to be seen to notice me anyway. 

But here was a place built for anonymous sex, where looking and touching was the point. It was a temporary ceasefire with rules for those desperate to be touched without consequence, and even though Steven and I hadn’t come here to hook up, I felt a crushing tenderness toward these awkward, average, strikingly beautiful middle-aged men who came to an anonymous place to stop diverting attention, to stop feeling poisonous. Just like me.

The snap of rubber jolted me out of my reverie. I wondered if it was a condom or a rubber glove. I looked at Steven and saw the look of a person who was holding his breath. Shrinking. I wanted to give him air to breathe. I wanted the sun to shine on his face, too.

Or maybe I didn’t see anything but what I would have felt a few years prior. I wish I had been a good enough friend to ask, but I didn’t. Steven gripped his towel and moved silently out of the room. I knew we were finished with our visit.

If I never know the touch of a man again, the last touch will have been gentle.

As I followed Steven silently back through the shadowy maze toward the locker room, a stranger emerged from around a corner. We passed each other there in the dark hallway in that bathhouse in a manufacturing district in St. Louis, late morning on a Tuesday in February. This anonymous man’s friend, if he was a friend, had turned away. I slowed to let him pass. He reached up and stroked the hair on my chest, a passing glance before we walked away from each other. I wanted to take his hand. I wanted to touch his face. I wanted to be gentle. I wanted not to be gentle. Every second of my life lived in that tender stroke of my chest in the dim light of the most nakedly male place in the world, where I had trespassed and had been wanted. 

I turned and followed Steven to the locker room. I knew that he was comfortable in his body, but I doubted he felt as welcome here in The Club as I had. I wondered if I was only welcomed and wanted because, in a shadowy place, I look enough like a cis man to pass for a while. I wondered if he resented me for it. I wouldn’t blame him if he did.

Behind us, a man put on his pants. I dropped my towel and turned to look at him. I looked at him for a long few seconds and let him look at me before I turned and took my time getting dressed.

The post In a Bathhouse Meant for Cis Gay Men, Trans Is Transgressive appeared first on Electric Literature.

I knew where I was going but not how to get there, so I made several wrong turns on my way to the Castle Apartments. When I finally arrived, I got out of the car and had to shield my eyes from the sun. It was cold in the way that only a winter morning in the desert can be: an emptiness where you expect warmth. My presence on that otherwise empty street felt conspicuous. I was searching for a part of Tucson’s past, but to any observer I was just a loiterer casing the building. The Castle Apartments really do look like a castle, at least in the most reductive sense: battlements, turrets, towers, its name emblazoned in the curly script you might see at a Renaissance Faire. A shadowy form appeared in the window of a second-story unit. I watched them watch me walk across the road for a moment before they abruptly shuttered their blinds.

It was my first time home for Christmas in the two years since the pandemic had upended everything. I’d spent the early months confined to my Seattle home, but with my mind caught up in thinking about the other place I call home. Daily Zoom calls between my mom in Tucson and her eight close-knit siblings made them, in some ways, closer than ever. My aunts and uncles occasionally let me join these calls and I used the chance to record group oral history sessions, with me posing questions about our family’s past and them bickering over whose version of a memory was most correct. I loved listening to their stories, always have, but my historian brain also grew curious about the things that lay just beyond the periphery of their collective memory. How, I wondered, did our Tucson origins map against the city’s settler history? After months of research and writing in isolation, I was eager to find — and to sit with —the places I had spent so long thinking about. The Castle Apartments were first on my list, a landmark representing not only a forgotten moment in time, but also my own ancestral complicity in the too long history of Indigenous dispossession and genocide.

Despite its royal airs, Castle Apartments is a remnant of tuberculosis — an ignoble disease that profoundly shaped the city’s history more than a century ago. This building was called the Whitwell Hospital and Sanitorium when it opened in 1906, and advertised itself as “a delightful home for those desiring rest and quiet.” It promised modern and fireproof living quarters, complete with steam heat and electrical light. Tuberculosis patients, initially, were not allowed. But it was only a matter of time. The building sat on the easternmost edge of a sprawling Tent City — or Tentville — which hordes of indigent tuberculosis patients had come to call home. In 1911, the hospital re-opened as the Tucson-Arizona Sanitarium and became the city’s first private facility dedicated to tuberculosis care and treatment. While convalescents inside the Sanitarium dined on gourmet meals, grown men and women, too sick to work, somnambulated in threadbare bathrobes and stockinged feet in the “canvas slum” just beyond the castle walls. Rustic structures of canvas and wood stretched as far as the eye could see. There was no water or sewage system, and residents relied on charity for everything from food to medical care. At night, the unlit streets fell into darkness and the sound of hacking coughs filled the air. In 1913, the Arizona Daily Star described Tent City as a place “where Armageddon goes on in continuous performance.” As one young resident later recalled: “It was truly a place of lost souls and lingering death. Sometimes life was too much to bear and a victim would end it. He was soon replaced by others who hoped for a cure in the dry air and bright sun of Arizona.”

Tuberculosis was not a new disease, but it was a particular menace and the leading cause of death through much of America’s pubescent nationhood. As the US expanded its imperial reach, nearly imploded in Civil War, abolished slavery, became the world’s “city upon a hill,” welcomed some immigrants and excluded many others, wrote Indigenous displacement into law, christened the era of Jim Crow, and traced skeletal rail lines across vast expanses of stolen land… tuberculosis was, body by body by body, quietly curbing the growth of the nation. 

But while the body count grew, tuberculosis also helped fuel westward expansion. Those charged with guessing how to heal that wasting disease blamed the “impure atmospheres” found in East Coast urban spaces for incubating illness. In the absence of a cure, pseudoscience — and capitalistic enterprise — thrived. Doctors and business moguls joined forces in luring convalescents to plunder Tucson’s “treasures of health.” 

An 1897 publication, Tucson as a Sanitarium: The Healthseeker’s Meca [sic] and the Invalid’s Paradise assured its readers that the Tucson “atmosphere is singularly clear tonic and dry.” Dr. A. W. Olcott, the vice president of the Arizona Medical Association in 1904, bolstered these claims, writing that Tucson winters “render pleasant an out-of-door life the entire year, and permit those suffering from lung and bronchial diseases daily exercise and life in the open air.” Another ad enticed East-coasters with verse: “Children of the Sun Live Here / Brown, sturdy, rosy-cheeked / growing into robust vigorous youths / Tucson’s children flourish like flowers.” None of the ads mentioned that this health-seeker haven was being built atop Tohono O’odham land, atop Yoeme land. That while Tucson signified a chance at survival to some, its original inhabitants were being forced into ever-dwindling reservations bordering its city limits.

Yet some alchemy of hope and desperation drove waves of migrants to seek the sunshine cure. To pack up their lives in Philadelphia, in Boston, in New York and to make new homes in “the land where winter never comes.” At the dawn of the 20th century, the Arizona Medical Association estimated that 70 percent of the state’s residents were infected with tuberculosis. These health-seeking migrants and their kin helped swell the territorial numbers to a size that warranted statehood, which was granted on Valentine’s Day, 1914. 

On the surface, my decision to search for the Castle Apartments that morning was a random one. It was an anchor site, an address I could plug into my phone’s navigation system since nothing remained of the Tent City I was actually looking for. But now the Castle Apartments have become so much more to me — a monument to a part of the city’s past that had otherwise been largely forgotten, and a marker of how my own family’s history came to unfold in that place. 

I too am a descendent of lungers. Tuberculosis did not afflict any of my immediate ancestors, but they followed in the well-worn path of those who were. My uncle Bill, the oldest of my mom’s nine siblings, suffered severe asthma and chronic coughing fits as a child. He caught polio while visiting his grandparents in Yonkers one summer and his respiratory system couldn’t handle the stress. He was rushed to a hospital in August 1950, where  the doctors said he needed to move to the desert. The doctors said this was his one shot at survival. The doctors said the sunshine would cure him. 

Nine-year-old Bill was sent to board with a family in Tucson, a tenuous connection made by way of St. Ambrose Catholic Church. His parents and siblings stayed behind in Park Ridge, Illinois, packing up their lives and preparing for a permanent move Out West. During the long months away from his family, Bill was miserable. In a tear-stained letter to his mother he told her how “very, very lonesome” he was, and implored her to send one of his siblings to keep him company, and also a hat. He ended the note: “I cried while writing this letter. I am probably crying now too.”

When I look at a picture of Bill shortly after he arrived in Tucson, he’s not the bronzed or strapping youth that the city’s climate gurus promised could be raised there. He’s frail and his pants, clearly many sizes too big, are cinched in waves of fabric under his belt. He’s holding a football near a patch of dry grass in front of his foster family’s home. Trying, at least, to emulate the kind of All American Boy he was supposed to be. I also see in that photo the roots of my own settler story in this place.

Even after I arrived at my destination on that cold desert morning, I had to stare at Google Maps for a long time before I could grasp the vastness of the Tent City that once scrawled itself across the landscape around the Castle Apartments. I recited the boundary roads over and over, until it started to sound like a badly written poem: 

Bordered on the north by East Lee Street, 

On the south by East Speedway, 

On the east by North Park Avenue,

On the west by North Stone Avenue.

It was about four square miles in a part of Tucson that was mostly desert scrub back then. Creosote. Cholla. Micah. Dust. More than a mile by foot to downtown. “A long way when one walked with only one lung,” observed a Tent City resident. But this boundary I was having so much trouble imagining wasn’t really a fixed one anyway. Tent City was amoebic in its growth: sprawling, haphazard, uncontained. If you were sick and poor and needed a place to slowly die, you came here and made a home on whatever patch of land you could find. And what’s a boundary anyway? A line drawn in the sand? Even a body that seems so fixed and firm is really just another porous vessel, susceptible to most of the things we wish to keep out: to pain, to parasite. To unspeakably worse. 

My therapist likes to remind me that sometimes we don’t know our boundaries until they’ve been crossed. The same could be said, I suppose, for Tent City. Its ambiguous boundaries became most clear when disease spilled out over them. When an influx of health-seeking vets arrived after WWI, then secretary of Tucson’s Chamber of Commerce, Orville McPherson, noted with disdain: “You couldn’t walk down Stone Avenue in those days without passing someone with a terrible cough… it was dangerous because tuberculosis is contagious, but most of all it was pathetic.” 

Tent City was bounded by time in a way that it wasn’t bounded by physical barriers. It appeared suddenly at the turn of the 19th century as the city’s tuberculosis population swelled. But soon those tents were replaced by roads and structures with less permeable borders. Sanitoriums meant to contain and cure the disease had sprouted up across the growing city and more were on their way: the Hotel Rest Sanatorium, Pima County Wing, Elks Hospital, St. Mary’s Round Hospital, Mercy Hospital, Oshrin, St. Luke’s, Hillcrest, Anson Sisters, San Xavier, South Pacific Hospital, a veterans’ hospital for all those unwell vets, and The House at Pooh Corners, “a boarding and convalescent home for children who spend the winters in Tucson.” Inside those walls, patients were subjected to ghastly sounding procedures: thoracoplasties, lung resections, lobectomies, pneumonectomies, nodulectomies, phrenic nerve crushes. These experiments mostly involved collapsing or removing key parts of the patient’s body, and those who were subjected to them were the lucky ones.

Tucson doctors and commerce enthusiasts continued to actively entice health-seekers through the 1950s and beyond, but hostilities grew hot when the wrong sort arrived. Poor, Black, Mexican, and Indigenous people who suffered from the disease were often blamed for their own illness, their humanity reduced to some insulting epithet: consumptive, indigent, lunger, shut-in, tubercular, case. According to the classist and racist logics of the time, they were innately unclean and prone to poor health, to have somehow orchestrated the unsanitary conditions in whatever underserved part of the city they had been crowded into. They were treated as nothing more than their disease. No longer a person, just a problem to solve. 

Man-Building in the Sunshine Climate, a 1920s promotional booklet published by The Sunshine-Climate Club, devoted more than half its pages to assuring its target audience of worried white mothers that Indians could still be found in Arizona, but only the good ones — the “peaceable,” the “picturesque,” and the “primitive” ones. These fantasy Indians were rendered as two-dimensional cardboard cutouts whose crafts might add some color to a modern ranch style home, but whose “treacherous” ways were a thing of the distant past. 

In reality, Indigenous people in Arizona were bearing the brunt of the health-seekers’ migration. The Phoenix Indian School — the state’s only off-reservation boarding school — just a few hours up Interstate 10, had been partially recrafted into a sanitorium to contend with the growing number of tuberculosis cases among Native youth. And in 1925, Indigenous inhabitants of Arizona were 17 times more likely to die of the disease than the general population. 

Still, few in power gave any thought to how the influx of sick settlers might impact the people that had been there for generations before them. Worse yet, the doctor charged with treating tuberculosis in Southern Arizona in the middle of the 20th century, blamed Indigenous peoples for their inability to heal: “Our main problem with the Indians was not tuberculosis,” said Dr. Harold Kosanke, “because we had drugs in those days — but it was alcoholism and depression and disgust. They had no incentive to accomplish anything [including] getting well because they don’t work.”  

Let’s sit with the irony of these violent words for a moment: while white settlers with tuberculosis were actively recruited to come to Arizona to heal, bringing disease and dispossession with them, members of the state’s 22 federally recognized tribes were blamed for their own illness and any challenge they faced in healing from it. Though it’s impossible to imagine that the eugenicist doctor who started calling tuberculosis “the white plague” in 1861 understood the barbed double entendre he’d created, its meaning lands heavily on me now. 

For their part, Indigenous convalescents in mid-century Tucson were doing all they could to heal. Live-in patients at the Oshrin, a private hospital dedicated primarily to the treatment of Native tuberculosis patients, came from across the state in hopes that a respite in sunny Tucson would do them well. A 1965 roster lists patients from 13 Native Nations from across the state: Navajo, San Carlos Apache, White Mountain Apache, Yavapai Apache, Chemehuevi, Cocopah, Hopi, Mojave, Hualapai, Paiute, Papago and Pima (now Tohono O’odham and Akimel O’odham, respectively), and Yavapai. 

 Their collective desire to heal is visible on the pages of Smoke Signals. This patient-produced monthly newsletter is thick with reports on patients past and present, with descriptions of cultural practices and kinship networks, with class offerings: typing, guitar, beading; with comics, drawings, jokes, word games, and reprints of Reader’s Digest-type syndicated columns. Patients also used those pages to urge each other to follow the healing protocols prescribed by the doctors, to resist the urge to leave and return home before they were fully well: “Don’t go now, keep fighting, and before you realize it, you will be walking out the front door with the good wishes of your doctor,” wrote a Navajo patient named Clinton Tsosie in 1965. And just like the Tucson promoters who lured East Coast consumptives to town, patients wrote out their desires in verse. Like this 1958 poem, “Navajo Goes Home,” by a patient named Emet Hopson: 

Whitemans doctor says I need medicine,

The nurses give me streptomycin, 

To help chase the T.B. germs away,

Maybe short, here, will be my stay. 

I can help, with sleep, food and rest, 

All very good, here, in “Wild West.” 

With this fine Arizona weather, 

Soon I will feel much better; 

Fit and fine as a guitar’s tone, 

When Mr. “Pillman” sends me home. 

A Kodachrome photo album at the Arizona Historical Society features Oshrin patients of all ages carrying out their bathrobed lives as convalescents: Christmas celebrations, craft fairs, costumes, playing in rock and roll bands. A pocket-sized portrait of a young woman with freshly curled black hair is signed on the back with a message to her sweetie, reminding him “by good luck, I’m yours.” Together with Smoke Signals, these images show things that are too often glossed over when non-Native historians write about Indigenous history: signs of mutual aid, of laughter, of play, of melancholy, of deep concern for themselves and their communities, of love. I don’t mean to romanticize any of this. Like boarding schools, the Oshrin signified family separation, a disruption of traditional practices, a removal from homelands and sacred sites. But despite all this, Indigenous joy and Indigenous survival were happening too.  

By the time my family joined Bill in Tucson in 1950, the city’s tuberculosis heyday was beginning to wane but the myth of the climate cure lived on. Bill’s parents, my grandparents, brought five more children with them and had four more after that. My grandparents “man-built” their ten children in that Arizona sunshine: Billy, Betsy, Dean, Nancy, Peter, Kathy, Ellen, Patti, Michael, Barbara. Tent City was by then the Feldman’s Neighborhood where neat rows of single-family houses belied little of the chaos and suffering that was there before. My family made their home about three miles north of what was once Tent City, and they passed over those grounds in their daily commute from home to jobs and classes at the University of Arizona. Decades later, I would walk, drive, bike, and run over that same ground long before I came to know anything of the history that unfolded there. I must have passed the Castle Apartments hundreds of times before it became the locus of memory that it is for me now. 

My family wasn’t wealthy, but they were educated and they had gained some small-town political clout by way of New York’s notorious Tammany Hall. Irish Catholics who, in just a few generations of being in America, had leaned into their invented whiteness, stepped onto the social ladder, and climbed. They were the kinds of white or white-enough immigrants Tucson wanted to attract. They were also generous, affectionate, funny, and social justice-oriented people. My grandparents were lifelong leftists who participated in Tucson’s culture of radical hospitality, often welcoming passing activists and their children’s friends into their crowded home for a warm meal and a place to sleep. Their guests included the famous Catholic anarchist Ammon Hennessey and their saintly friend, Dorothy Day.  When my grandmother Eileen died in 1990, a staff writer for the Tucson Citizen wrote that she was “a pioneer in efforts to feed the hungry and shelter the homeless in Tucson.” 

My heart swells with love and pride when I read this. We were the good whites, or at least that’s what I’ve always wanted to believe. But the binaries of good and bad don’t work so neatly when you’re a settler on occupied lands. When your health, your survival, your very being exists alongside so much suffering. Before, when I thought about disease and colonization, my mind would turn to smallpox blankets, to the sexual violence that spread venereal disease, to the livestock carrying virulent strains of illness that Indigenous peoples had no acquired resistance to. To things that were very distant from me and my closest ancestors. 

I’ve spent the better part of the past decade researching and writing about settler colonialism, but it’s only now that I’ve had the courage to use those same words to grapple with my own family’s legacy. To look squarely at our settler entanglements and the harm they have done. It’s always been too much, too tender, too many feelings to potentially hurt. Too challenging to ask: What kinds of settler violence tether us to this place we call home? And harder yet to ask: What do we do about it? I still have more questions than answers, but what I do know is this: until we all quit trying to contort ourselves out of acknowledging our complicity in the ongoing creation of the settler state, there is no real healing to be had for any of us. 

In grade school, the Five C’s of Arizona state history — Copper, Cattle, Cotton, Citrus, and Climate —were drilled into our impressionable brains. We blithely recited those sturdy pillars of words and came to know them as the foundation of our state history. But it turns out there were other, more important, C’s — like colonialism, capitalism, cancer, class hierarchy, and carceral states — that were never mentioned. And there were so many other letters we never quite got to, like “B” for Border Walls, “I” for Insatiable Growth, “N” for No Water, “V” for Valley Fever… I could go on. Arizona was not the paradise that the titans of wellness wanted us all to believe it to be. In fact, in 1981, the year I was born, Dr. John Erben debunked the sunshine cure altogether, calling it an “absolute myth.” “Arizona is not a climate,” he said, “but a philosophy.” 

Now, late-stage Alzheimer’s has turned Bill’s mind soft and fluid. He sometimes remembers our names, but they’re like sparks untethered from any other reality. His brain is losing its ability to fire messages to his muscles. His throat can’t quite seem to swallow right, and his legs don’t always know how to move his body forward. 

When I interviewed Bill on Zoom early on in the pandemic, he was a barely there shadow of the uncle I once knew. His laugh was thin and tinny, and there was a blankness where intelligent mischief once danced in his eyes. His wife, Kathy, and his eldest sister, Betsy, were on the call to help provide some scaffolding upon which he could pin his jumbled memories. I read him passages of things he wrote to his mother. He hardly remembered the polio, his time alone in Tucson, that tear-stained letter. He said he’d never heard of the Castle Apartments.  He’s close to death now, and the sadness of it chokes me into silence. 

As much as I’ve wanted to capture Bill’s story, I’ve resisted telling my own. Over multiple rounds of revisions, friends and mentors have urged me to write myself into this essay. I’ve refused (Who needs another white woman’s navel gazing anyway?), then complied, then erased myself again in subsequent drafts. As an academic I’ve been trained to hide behind the shield of my supposed objectivity and I’ve grown fond of the safety that such anonymity affords. Or maybe it’s the impulse I have as a white settler to erase my existence because of all the inherent harm that it conveys. I don’t have a death wish and I’m not a proponent of suicide, so I take relative comfort in my own literary erasure instead. I don’t want to be on the page, because part of me doesn’t want to be here at all. But I am here, and pretending otherwise isn’t going to undo the inherent harm of my settler presence. 

There’s no ready-made map to help me get to what I’m looking for next: a way to tabulate the debts we owe, to acknowledge — and atone for — our complicity. But that’s not entirely true either. The pathways are there if you know to look. The Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, a Bay Area urban Indigenous women-led organization, dedicates itself to the practice of rematriation, to the returning of Indigenous lands to Indigenous peoples. They urge lost settlers like me to “consider your place in the lineage of this theft and how you might contribute to its healing, how you might reimagine your relationship to the land you are on.” They offer resources, readings, conversation guides, questions for reflection, land return success stories, an invitation to contact them for more information. But what more could we want, we’ve already taken so much. And I don’t even have to look across our own invented state lines to find answers. In Arizona, too, there are Indigenous-led movements for Land Rematriation, Seed Rematriation, Water Rematriation. These movements emerge from deep wells of lived experience, from Indigenous intellectual brilliance, from practices that predate us settlers by eons. Even just their names serve as valuable sign posts, and they all point to the same core demand: give it back. 

So what’s stopping us? I’ve been timid about pushing these ideas into family conversations because I’m well aware of how self-righteous and sanctimonious I can be, how influenced I am by the zeitgeist of the very online left. It’s trendy, I know, to signal #landback sentiments, to offer up Native land acknowledgements at the start of every gathering, to liberally sprinkle toothless “decolonizations” into all we do. I don’t want to give anyone the impression that I think I have all the answers. I don’t. And when I talk to my family about all the bad things our whiteness has done to Native peoples and to this place we call home, it’s not news to them. They feel terrible about it. “It makes me sick,” says my mom, and I know exactly what she means. It’s a rotting feeling that I carry at the pit of my stomach too, sunk deeper by the sense of helplessness that usually comes with it. We do guilt well, but I’ve come to realize there is a sort of comfort in dwelling in that space too. I want us all to be dislodged from there, to be unsettled. To fight against the collective amnesia that settler memory likes to sow, and to take seriously the responsibility of repair. I worry that my family and other settlers like us will see this as a call out. It is, but it’s an invitation too. 

As I drove away from the Castle Apartments, I passed by squat brick homes and dried out lawns filled with Christmas decorations looking sun-bleached and deflated as they readied for their season of disuse. The quiet normalcy of the neighborhood felt jarring in its casual disregard for all the history that had once happened there, and the urgency of what needs to be done next.  But I could finally see it: the Tent City stretched across the horizon, convalescents lounging in that ceaseless sun, the living desert that was there before all that. I softened my gaze just enough to let the past bleed into the present, ever so briefly, but I’d like to think I saw a little of the future there too — a future where Indigenous peoples’ wellness matters as much to us as our own. 

The post I Want Settlers To Be Dislodged From the Comfort of Guilt appeared first on Electric Literature.