First, as a teenager, touch yourself late at night, wondering if there is something wrong
with the small, furry feeling inside you.
In high school, at your friend Adam’s suggestion, try showerheads, vibrating pens,
cucumbers, and finally climax with a curling iron, large.
Feel that someone has turned you inside out when Adam tells classmates about your
conversations and your curling iron. Refuse to explain to friends why you receive
the award “hottest masturbator” at a hazing event junior year.
Kiss no one until you travel around the world.
Then break out of yourself, as if your skin has been an eggshell, and you finally have the
strength to peck a hole, to crack the shell in two.
In a matter of months, kiss on the Puerta del Sol, the sun barely rimming the horizon; be
pulled close, pressed to a pelvis, on Roman ruins. Give your first blowjob in
Budapest to Barry, and make out the next night, under a Bulgarian bridge with
Gary (and yes, be horrified that they rhyme – like bad poetry). Be naked in front
of a man for the first time in a treehouse in Turkey; trace the tattoo of his
homeland across his chest.
Fly back to France to kiss the man who spoke like his tongue could lick your skin gaping,
but go down on his friend instead. Make sure this is the last night of your trip, so
the bittersweet cranberry taste stays with you long after the saltwater you swim
through to get home.
Fall in love. Fall so your skin is ripped from your body, and you are left achingly bare.
And then, as you spill out of yourself, be entered for the first time – and make
love, clinging to his uncalloused skin, as if it could make you whole. Never lose
your sense of gratitude for this gentle touch.
When he leaves you raw, desperately patching skin, devour others.
Let men fall in love with you, and use them, and feel used, because can’t they see you are
no whole person? And how can they love a woman whose skin is still so
translucent that they can see the blood pulsing through veins beneath? Never
forgive them for wanting you this thin.
Sleep with women. Have threesomes. Fuck one man and then another in the same night.
Feel your skin like armor that no one can breach.
Not even the man who steers you – too drunk to understand why you are leaving the
party – out behind the dorm, pushes you up against a building (wasn’t that your
fantasy?), and doesn’t stop thrusting when you say “no,” doesn’t mind dropping
you on the dirt once in the middle of fucking, who doesn’t speak one word
afterward, steering you back into the crowd. Even this man can’t touch you.
Leave the country again, but this time, walk solitary through the world. Feel loneliness
like a companion in those single hotel rooms with no windows; let it lie like a
blanket, soft against your scarred skin.
Now weave yourself tighter and tighter, until you become a tapestry in deep fall tones,
solid like the earth, but permeable – no concrete, or metal. And wait, like the
fallow ground does for a change in the course of a river – that slow erosion
and sudden penetrating flood.
***
Ariana Nash is currently a working writer and teacher of creative writing, living in Wilmington, North Carolina.
