Sometimes someone elses words are so stuck in my head I have a hard time creating a better way to say it. So in the words of a book I tenderly read time and time again-
“I don’t let anyone touch me,” I finally said.
“Why not?”
Why not? Because I was tired of men. Hanging in doorways, standing too close, their smell of beer or fifteen-year-old whiskey. Men who didn’t come to the emergency room with you, men who left on Christmas Eve. Men who slammed the security gates, who made you love them then changed their minds. Forests of boys, their ragged shrubs full of eyes following you, grabbing your breasts, waving their money, eyes already knocking you down, taking what they felt was theirs. It was a play and I knew how it ended, I didn’t want to audition for any of the roles. It was no game, no casual thrill. It was three-bullet Russian roulette.”
| — | White Oleander by Janet Fitch |
The way a man can look at me as if my body is his for the taking. Like rabid dogs in a bar, their hungry eyes follow my steps, and undress my limbs as if it is their right. Fear walking alone in the dark, leaving. You wonder why I don't want you, as you leap about my heels, tongue out, drool splashing on the pavement, at best like a puppy trying to knock me down and slobber my face. Humping my leg.
God forbid I don't want to be intimate with a man anytime he desires it again, as if by letting him touch me once I became his property to some or to any degree. As if that act was bought and sold in one misleading transaction and I'm left feeling shortchanged. Then it is a job, a chore, a menial task. It becomes expected of me. The expectation kills any desire I may still have had. Just one more position to fill.
Is this how you would treat a woman who you had not been with yet. Is this how you would have treated me when you met me? Why should I not expect through the middle and to the end what you promised in the beginning.
There is the feeling of expectation, the look of righteous ownership, the entitlement. Then when these looks are not accepted by me there is the guilt, for why wouldn't I want to give something that is already theirs.
Please forgive me for being selfish.
My body.
My temple.
My love.
Mine.
