A Blur of Selfishness and Orgasms

This cannot be it. Don’t get her wrong, she likes some of it. The sound is awesome. Sounds, she thinks, deliriously lost in the world she crafts in her head as she hopes to get just a little wet. His breathing is short; he’s gasping into her ear, her neck, his hand cradling her head. The slight quench is fun, hopeful. There’s that familiar groan. It’s half pleasure, half regret. They never want it to be over, no matter how long it goes. If the ache in her thighs is anything to go by, it has been at least 15 minutes. She feels giddy and delusional and like if she opens her eyes, there will be an incredibly attractive, open, and willing partner above her looking at her like she pulled the stars from the sky to use as freckles and they want to count each one until their eyes cross and their bones decay and the dust of the young person they had been blows away in the gentle breeze of her constantly on ceiling fan.

She opens her eyes and immediately closes them. Delusions are better than the reality of the skinny, sunken cheek, heaving guy above her.

She grins at the sound of him pulling out of her, the snap of the condom he ties off, and the soft sound it makes as it hits her too full trash can. He makes to come back to bed but she is already standing and moving to her vanity. She smooths down her hair and laughs at the confusion on his face, laughs and laughs and laughs because he shouldn’t be surprised. This is how sex works in your twenties. This is all there is to it. She can close her eyes and imagine it differently, but when she opens them, the reality will always be the same.

She spins and it is virtually the same 50 years earlier. She isn’t sure why it’s 50 years earlier, but if it can explain her desires and her impossibility in grabbing them, then she will go with the flow. (A man’s ideal woman: easy.) She is the same: still in her twenties, still laughing at the delusions of people new to this game. Just add a silk, skimpy nightgown, fringe on the lamps, ruffles on the comforter, and the white tank top the man is pulling on. He starts to speak but the words are unimportant so she will not write them here. Here is for the important words, the ones that can open eyes and spin wheels. She smiles at the sound of the door shutting and teases her curls back to perfection.

She spins and she is back and her phone buzzes beside her bed, insistent and as demanding as the person on the other end of the line.

Come over.

She is in the shower and then in her car and then knocking on the door.

It’s cold out, come in.

The house is warm and spacious. The bed is better, soft, and all-encompassing.

Come on.

She slips from the tee and boxer briefs. Falls into bed. Lips on lips.

Come.

Like a story.

It’s always, always better with a woman under her, beside her. It’s better when she can do the work. She likes the ache in her wrist and wonders why men do this for approximately two minutes a half-inch off and then shove their dicks in the unready, closed-off, dry place like it belongs to them. Not that she doesn’t like belonging to someone, feeling wanted and deserved and worthy. It’s not for a lack of sustenance in her life or a father who bailed, or worse, stayed for the precious, slow-burning emotional torture by telling her she looked better without all the makeup and that her skirt was too tight and her chubby-with-youth legs were going to be too much for the middle school boys to handle. There isn’t a hole in her soul that only physical touch can heal. Art can do that, be that. The music she dances to in the mornings tells her she is perfectly womanly. The paint she slashes across her walls when she drinks too much wine. The friend she has with the oils and the passion and the environmental rants they go on and create from, ideas spilling onto pages through pens, translated through different lenses at later dates when they sober up. The desire to be owned, degraded, praised, and worshipped comes from curiosity. That’s okay, right? To be curious? To want to try new things. She thinks it is.

Sex is selfish. Whether it be with a man or woman or nonbinary person or someone who is perfectly fluid. Sex is always selfish. A take but only a give so they are allowed to take more. Put a dollar in the tip jar so you can feel better about yourself. You were MIA for the weekend? Just schedule a brunch date with your mom and friends to make up for it. To make yourself feel better. You came too quick? That’s alright, say you’re sorry and your partner is just too sexy and tell them you will go down on them if they want it. But say it like it’s a hardship. Better yet, say it like you are being generous with your one-dollar tip to a barista who really, truly needs it.

She lays there, panting, coming down from her high. She wonders how they did it fifty years earlier.

She spins and thinks about how easy it is. Not like how they show it in movies. The common, political goals make it easy. No one is wearing a bra. Hands are stained from making signs. Voices are lost in the crowds and the smoke-filled rooms and the blur that is the entire year. People are looser, high all the time on passion. Her curls are fixed and short and she belts “Dancing Queen” and grins at the fixed, glazed eyes on her rising tank top, the sliver of smooth skin that appears. It isn’t any different. Intrigue is always the same. The game never changes. The players never become smarter, smoother, sexier.

She throws back a drink. Another one. Another one.

The room spins and she lets herself fall back in the booth, sticky with what she hopes is just alcohol. The music is thumping through the floor, a type with no words and too much bass. She would describe it more, here, on this page, but she is suddenly in the bathroom on her knees, distracted by the task at hand– in hand, in her mouth, heavy on her tongue, and eager for the tightness of her closed-off throat. The person above her is tugging at her roots, and tears ruin her careful, barely-there makeup (a direct relation to her before-stated father and emotional, long-lasting damage).

She spins and the bar is quieter fifty years earlier, the floors cleaner, the drugs more dangerous. This act is just as common. This person’s fluidity is just as common, sadly disguised well with loud makeup and the mix of coarse leg hair and the short skirt held up to their breasts. She wonders if it will always have to be like this if choosing drag for this one person will mean that they will never be able to be called by the pronouns they identify with. It isn’t fair that they have to choose this and put themselves in harm’s way of the flying fists of ignorant, terrified men because it is the closest they can come to the fluidity of their gender.

She spins and runs her hands up smooth legs now and feels the wetness in her thong, enough that she can smell it as she readjusts herself. She huffs a laugh and the person above her tightens their grip on her hair and she wants to like it. She likes most of it: the sounds; the wet quelching and the gasps and the distinct sniffs from the sinks outside the stall and then the whimper. She likes the taste, too. Most of the time. Most of it. Never all. Never the totality of the act and the emotional weight it comes with because people can’t just leave things at the door and go for some release and absolutely nothing else. It doesn’t matter if one person comes into it bringing nothing but hopes of a fun time and some experimental stuff they have always wanted to try. If the other person brings that weight, that heavy boulder lands between them on the bed or the rug or over the couch, and the fucking isn’t fun anymore but exhausting and fast and rough. She likes rough but not when it doesn’t end in bruises and embarrassed laughs. She cannot stand it when it ends with an apology like it can erase the marks from the space. Say something cruel but then say sorry and all will be forgiven. Tell your daughter she is more beautiful without all the crap on her face like appreciating her natural beauty will cover the harsh shaming of your true intentions.

The bathroom spins and it’s not a bathroom anymore but a basement with a young man folding her over a dryer as it spins too loudly in the space crowded with mismatched furniture and boxes of Christmas lights and that other couple on the couch fucking, impossibly, harder than she and he are.

It’s fast and hard. What does that mean? Is it the bruises on her thighs and hips? She likes the moment: hands then fingers and the pulling and shoving. (The aggression comes from his short 18 years on this earth, she’s sure, turned towards people that will not take him seriously until he can legally drink no matter that he can legally purchase a firearm or go to prison and suffer the death penalty because alcohol is somehow worse than a piece of metal in his hand or metal bars around him. He drinks, anyway. They are drunk. The aggression would not be so obvious without the buzz.) But she winces when she pulls up her jeans the next morning and she wants to scream every time her friends poke the deep purple mark on her throat. She looks out at a boiling city in the deep, burnt orange of summer and wonders if that married couple smoking together by their refrigerator of a car still have mind-blowing, amazing, knees-shaking sex where they both finish. Has it become selfish? Was it ever not selfish? Do they hold eye contact? Where do they go? If they even have to go anywhere just to reach completion. Completion: sex is not about the journey; sex has a finishing point; if one person doesn’t orgasm, it doesn’t count. She could fill this page with her thoughts on what the purpose of sex has become but the page will soak and stain with her tears and she will not be able to stop and breathe or want to live in a different era, hoping it will become something different in fifty years.

The world spins and she stands in her office building in her too high, too tight heels in a world where casual (is there such a thing?) sex hasn’t changed. She thinks about a type of sex where she doesn’t have to imagine another scenario or that video she watched the other day with that man fucking that other man so hard it had just been scream after scream of pleasure coming through her headphones and her eyes dry as she tried not to blink so she wouldn’t miss a single, hard touch. Not that she wants what porn shows her, though she likes the fantasy of it, the acting. It feels more real to her than the act. Sex will never be that way for her. (Simplicity is boring, anyway.) It isn’t who she is. She imagines and dreams and shapes stars into freckles. That’s okay. It doesn’t mean she is empty and needs to be filled. It can mean that she will have fun trying to find the next thing that will make her laugh or bring her to orgasm. She doesn’t need to be fixed, she just needs to live and be loved with kisses and dicks and mouths and wet pussies.

She could be okay with that.

The world spins and fifty years earlier, she thinks she could be okay with that, too, if only someone had been able to warn her about falling into a pit of romanticizing an act that is sweaty and requires escape. She focuses on the good parts of it: the ache in her wrists as she gets a girl off, the building of tension through kisses, the closing of her eyes, and the stories she creates from those moments.

Spin after spin after spin and the world blurs but the passion is the same. Passion for experimentation and touching another naked or half-naked human who looks at her and doesn’t see something broken or fixable, because she is okay. Perfectly, womanly, humanly okay.

 

Photo by Kurt Francois on Unsplash