He asked me what I thought of myself before I met
all of my past lovers, and I didn’t have an answer.
My entire sexual history flashed before me in that moment,
from the boy I laid with on the hammock when I was
seventeen and the way I gasped when his hands slid
between my thighs, to the Antiguan rock I met by the way
of the Bronx whose coffee I will always be the cream in,
to the only relationship I ever had, even if it was unsustainable,
issued with an expiry date that had been blurred out just
enough to make it unreadable. The men on Calle Ocho, whose
cocks slid into my mouth as easily as I slid out of my
jeans, the men who would sidle up to you like they just
knew. The only man I ever wanted to kiss for days
pressed himself into me on Miami Beach, while I debated
the pros and cons of following through with that whole
marriage thing with a man who didn’t make you feel half
as much as this one right here
and after he made me forget which language
I spoke, he covered me with a Cuban flag and made sure
I’d never get the taste of mojito out of my mouth. I hear
their voices now, Mira, mira esta jeva…que manguito
eres, mami! Te quiero comer el bollo … and my conscience
just shakes its head and asks me what kind of woman I was
that I let men talk to me like that? The only answers I
have are that no man had talked to me in so long that
the words they said made no difference; just the fact they
were talking was enough, until I told them to stop talking
so I could just feel, please let me remember what it is to feel.
The answer to the question reveals itself; what did I think
of myself? I didn’t. Circumstances made me attention-starved,
and I thought that when a man said he loved you he meant
it, but I don’t even know what love means anymore.
I thought that they could scrape me clean of all the emptiness
and rot, and I would stifle myself until I no longer knew who
I was if that meant I could have someone to hold me for a week, maybe
two. When I exited my marriage, a deflated tire where a
woman once stood, I realized I had turned myself into a
blank canvas in the hopes that someone would want me.
But what is desire? Is desire the ache I feel between my
legs when I yearn to be touched? Is desire a man who wants
to get his dick wet and I am that convenient hole? Or is desire
the feeling of touching down after you’ve journeyed
to faraway galaxies in my eyes? I want concrete next time; I
want algorithms and hypotheses, so I can be
really sure he loves me. I know I can’t get that, that I can’t
ask that much. I have to open the trusting muscle, I have to
stop fixing this busted up chain link fence around my
heart. I need to scrape off the white paint on the canvas,
that which obscures the vibrant colors underneath. I need something
to believe in, and if I have to cling to something, I’m going
to cling to the belief that you’ll be there waiting when I do.
