The past is a foreign country. So is my body. I am fifteen years old, standing naked in front of a mirror. I’m searching for something across this intimate wilderness. Lips curled contemptuously into a lonely oxbow lake. Wonder flares. A lost comet in the nightsky of my open mouth. In time these square, broad jaws would scare away meek seekers. They saw an unflinching fortress, not my shy bastion. Nothing like His.
I grip my face and suggest to unyielding mandibles, consider something narrow and pointed. I was not narrow and pointed. I would never be. The force of His resolute, unbending discipline is the challenge set in these angular barricades.
These eyes catch the shadows of a scowl twisting the landscape of my face. Unlike those flat, corn-growing prairies, sinister in their openness, mine is a place where I lay down a trick of weapons. There is no vulnerability to be exploited here. But if there is courage, why be unsure of strength?
Lying on my back in an open field, arms spread, eyes half open to the sun. I sense the heft of the planet and the lurking threat of it folding into itself. A strange, sticky force in the bowels of the earth demanded it come back home at 6pm, or like Persephone destined to inchoate thrills.
In the future these angry eyes would be the subject of love and dissection. So intense. Are you Bengali? And then came jilted lovers with sharper phrases. Wicked. Kohl-girl. One day in the future a woman would say a beautiful thing about these eyes. They're like dark, irresistible aureolae. At fifteen I could only be angry at why - despite their size and depth - those unlit, roiling seas refused to offer any answers. Even then I wondered if there was an awful secret beneath the surface.
I trace a line from neck to hips gently flaring like the nostrils of a monster in repose. One day in the future a man would skillfully trace that very journey but taking a more meandering path. I had no way of knowing that those hips were capable of turning on themselves to stack a firm, full trunk and baggage of legs and adventures into the air like a weaving, conniving totem to freedom.Or that they could hoist hungry travellers onto cliffs to throw themselves off of into wondrous freefall. I watched in amazement as they expanded with every passing day.
Briefly, palms flat against what I would eventually come to refer to as hara, tan tien, I think about babies, blood and tubes. And seeds. Do they float in the murky mucosa weightless and playful? Are they Saturnine and heavy with the terrible knowledge of what power they hold? Why do they refer to the uterus as a muscle? I would spend many years wondering if I should exercise it or fill it up with political rhetoric, learning very late that both are indeed possible.
Again, Him in the legs. The knees arcing back like bows, taut and thrumming with a desire for release and reach. I could sense their strength but didn't know what it was for. I bemoaned the broad feet, the tree-trunk legs.I never made the connections between those legs and the effortlessness of childhood gymnastics, teenage dancing, and fearless adventuring in life. Of course, I didn't know about the adventuring. I was filthy-impatient to start.
A hands slips into the familiar territory of down there. I cannot not go there. Or can I? Volumes of storytales would come to supplant the fairytales.
Years later I saw something called a Website about something that grew on exotic islands in the ocean – coco de mer. Down there was salt-studded, coco-de-mer. And the sea it came from reflected the stark, precious mystery of lunar landscapes above. Ars erotica is in the unspeaking, the undoing, and I glimpsed that spit reaching out into the sea through sheer curtains shifting in a breeze.
I am still fifteen years old, standing naked in front of a mirror. I’m cutting out little starshapes from silver foil saved from chewing gum wrappers, glueing them to the unknowable sky of my body. I am sitting underneath a damask sky, wishing on silver-stuck stars.
