What if you spend your life courting a high level of sexuality — experimenting, enjoying, deviating — and then at age 43, the year your daughter turns six, become sickened by sex, men? You find their penises pathetic and their moans when they cum, disgusting. All this weakness is too much to bear. What if you can’t cum anymore, except alone. What if you lose your lover after years of patience; his willingness to understand, wait, hold you the once every two weeks you can stand to be held? What if your body totally shuts down?
But it doesn’t. You still have nightmares and spend long nights twitching. You seek out bumps on your skin and scratch them open to rid yourself of anything infectious/ugly. Your therapist refers to this as the body presenting its bill. You have to pay.
What if you see your mother licking the salt from her margarita glass, tongue snaking like a b-rate porn star and it makes you nauseous — a different kind of throwing up. What if you notice your daughter checking the vodka bottle to see how much you drank?
And what if there’s no one to blame for your polar bear self? No chase, no capture, just the twitching, and everyone who reads this says they get it, but they don’t — they, too, are suspect. People survive lots worse than this. You have all your limbs, a good job, a daughter, your poetry, and look how thin you are — attractive.
What if you never, ever want to have sex again?
Did something happen? Did nothing happen? Are you that entitled?
Sitting with It
This is what my therapist wants me to know: I am not alone. I have done what I needed to survive. I am safe. I can find resources in my body to heal. I can look my six-year-old self in the eye and tell her I will take care of her, protect her. She will believe me. She will help me shake it off. My twelve-year-old-self shows me her scar — a wound on her inside thigh already healed over but deep. Can I invite her back? She turns into flames. In my mind, she turns into flames.
I try to engage. I try with all my heart to comfort these little girls to wipe