Some advice I would give to the girl I was last week: When your best friend has a potluck, eat anything you want. Pay for it tomorrow when you go for a run. You love running now. Your body is trading its fat in for muscle, and it is showing in your thighs. Remind yourself of the time we use heart break as a 24/7 boot camp and not a diet. Give a shit about yourself like that and eat, girl.
When your best friend introduces you to the boy, resist making a memory of his cologne. His scent will be the last thing you’re able to scrub off of you in the morning, so think, girl. You’ve never been with a body like his. Contemplate how you’re going to explain to him your queerness without using the words bisexual or confused. You’ve never given your body permission to have sex with a body that doesn’t understand the war yours has survived.
Being queer affords you the risk it takes to love other women. It allows you the default of letting people assume that you’re not attracted to men. The truth is, is that no matter what is inside their pants, you will not sleep with anybody if they try to convince you that the war wasn’t real, if they try to convince you that the war is now over. But tonight, you’re not supposed to be at war.
Tonight, you’re at your best friend’s potluck with this boy. When are you supposed to tell him all of this? When you move in to kiss him first, take it slow. When you’re holding the bottom half of him in your mouth, don’t freak out. When his hand is inside the bottom half of you, don’t come. When your bottom half is holding his bottom half inside itself, use your thighs to hug his hips. You’ve got muscles growing there, remember?
This feels so good, but it’s not usually the way you get what you want. Where is your voice? You are not a quiet girl. When you find it, and you use it to ask him to go down on you, and he says no because you don’t shave, burn your body into a desert that nobody is allowed to survive in. Dry every inch of you up until you’re on the verge of brush fire. Imagine what he was taught your body is supposed to look like. Something close to a newly waxed linoleum floor, perfect for getting him to where he needs to be. Let him vomit his apologies all over your tiles—I mean “your skin.”
Then teach him at what expense your body comes at every time it is naked. Use the rejected that this is why you find yourself fucking women instead. That at least her words will feel like a mirror critiquing its own reflection. The kind of hate that makes you feel more at home and less like the floorboards, when you go home the next morning to take a shower, you find yourself shaving between your legs. You cry as loud as you want. Let the water rinse over you until his cologne slips down the drain. You have nothing to be ashamed of.
Don’t forget the war your body was born in and is surviving from, so get dressed, go for a run. You’ve got muscles growing in your thighs, in your arms, in your chest. Your insecurity is not a diet plan, Teresa. It is the fire escape that your body was convinced it needed, but it doesn’t. Your body needs your voice. Your voice is the fire. It doesn’t need an escape. It needs you to pick it up, girl, and keep it there. Fight.
