My Body Is Not My Body.

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My body is a museum. Vials of spit and cum and sweat, now filed away and
cataloged. My tongue, tasting and discerning, like an aged wine, one lover
from another. Nudes posed deliciously, resting their heads on a pillow and
their legs spread wide. Oil canvasses of backs upright, bent, twisted and
knotted. Stone sculptures of limbs obscenely intertwined.

My body is a mausoleum. Sarcophagi of positions that would make the viewer
blush and pretend to look away. Dead nights that witnessed such pleasure.
Dead days spent trying to frantically weld my body to another. A tomb of
past desires, of spent passion, and of exhausted sleep. My ass that was one
woman’s privileged province. My cunt that was given, one night long ago, to
another woman because I wanted *that throbbing* *pain* to be hers. My
breasts that are heavy with the weight of past tongues, past fingers, and
the past. My hands, numbed by missing you and then calloused with all *this
missing*. My toes, once worshiped, now neglected by a new lover. A yellow
body fluid that made one woman moan and another squeal. Butterflies of
orgasm stunned into paralysis and put on display. Flowers of now dried up
feeling pressed against razor thin Plexiglas. Generations of hair preferred
shaved by one, trimmed by another, and shaped by yet another. All these
hairs are now dead, and every day, new cells triumphantly take their place.

My body is a memory. My neck which used your arm as a pillow. My belly that
you would fall asleep cupping. My legs that gave your icy feet so much
warmth when they crept into bed after a long day. My breath which kept me
from kissing your lips in the morning until I had brushed my teeth. My
nipple that in your mouth felt beautiful. A bruise that conjures some act of
rough ecstasy. Sometimes these memories intrude upon me unannounced and
unwanted, tiptoeing across my skin as it is being caressed by another.
Sometimes, I touch the muscles moving the fingers inside me and am surprised
that they are not yours. I smell the skin moving on top of me and remember
another’s scent, and beneath that one, yet another’s scent. My body is thick
with these traces and scars of lovers. But she still dreams the impossible
dream of fucking the past out of her flesh. So she tries, and tries, and
grows ever thicker with desire and failure to forget.

My body is an archive. Through it I bound to others. You cannot take back
that which has been given. I cannot steal my body away from another’s
experience of it. I cannot lay claim to that which was shared, in vulnerable
and awed resilience, with other bodies. I cannot hide it away from the ways
in which it brings me back, again and again, to the women I have had sex
with. This almost fearful gaze that attacks my eyes when I know that soon I
will com bust in a bundle nerves. You have seen it. That angry swelling that
almost hurt with its need. You have felt it. This shyness, of wanting but
afraid to have that which I could never ask for. You have tasted it. This
fever that rose to meet your fingertips wherever they land(ed). This fever
was ours, not mine. We were sick with it, and in trying to break it we made
ourselves sicker with heat.

My body is an archive of desire. She contains within it traces that are
still alive, that are resurrected into moving pictures that make me blush or
pant. An archive is that which is not dead, not over, and can never be
confined to the past. An archive speaks to the future as much as it does to
the past. The future of my body is one of remembering, again and again, each
woman within another woman. The knowledge that my body as an archive speaks
is thus: I am not, cannot be alone. I am those traces that you, and I, have
left behind but that still haunt our conversations. I am that sweat you
swallowed, you are that finger I sucked. I am this sharing with you which I
do not want to, cannot, stop. I am the knowledge, won through years of
nakedness, that we can, and will stop only to start again with new bodies.
But even then, I (and others) will be there. When your fingers thrust
forward and are surprised by how deep they go. When she rides you and in the
shadows of movement my feel appears. When you look down and at her and for a
second wonder *why you were ever with me*. There is a seduction and a
comfort in the knowledge that everyone leaves a trace, no matter what taste
that trace has. My body leaves a mark, and carries with her all the marks
that others have imprinted onto her. You can always replace a lover, but can
never replicate one.  My body is hers now, hers then, and hers soon. My body
is not mine. But it always, sometimes, yours.

– Contributed by M/M

Tags: body, corporeal memory, creative writing, female anatomy, female body, memory, relationships, sex