continued from last week…
Leigh Bardugo wrote that we can endure all kinds of pain but “it’s shame that eats men whole”.
You have felt like something eaten, hollowed out, felt like the wind of life would send you tumbling down a cliff.
Was there anything left behind when R inadvertently opened that box of shame and, hungry from being locked away for so long, devoured you greedily?
You met R in Abuja at one of her work events. It was a playful but turbulent relationship.
—You don’t really like me, she said to you once, before accusing you of being in love with her flatmate.
—I see the way you look at her, the way she looks at you.
So you set about convincing her that you liked her.
The first time she let you, you kissed her as passionately as you could, the palm of your right hand resting gently on her nape, your fingers stroking her vellus hair. She leaned into you, inhaling deeply as she sucked on your lips, first gently but then hard enough for it to sting a bit. Her fingers dug into your skin and you could feel her stomach hollowing out as she took deep breaths. Your hands slid into her t-shirt from behind and ran along her prominent spine, almost as if you were counting the ridges. You grabbed her ass and pulled her even closer. She would go down on you, but you have never liked blowjobs. She caressed you everywhere and all of your body reacted except the one part which mattered the most. Your penis was a useless mass of flesh. She stroked your balls, until it started to get uncomfortable. She moved away and shook her head.
—See? You may be a good liar but your dick doesn’t lie. You don’t really like me.
A penis that will not get erect is the most natural habitat for shame. Here is where it blossoms, thrives, like bacteria that find warm, liquid culture. Talking about it now would be like trying to wash a chicken that has salmonella with only water. You would only spread it.
He who admits shame shall beget more shame.
You stopped talking about it.
Fortunately for you, she let you try again soon after. And this time, your penis was faster than shame. Before shame could intercept impulses from the brain and local nerves, your penis received them, allowing blood to flow in and fill the open spaces. The blood created pressure and your penis expanded, sufficiently. You slid into her as soon as that happened, before shame could launch a comeback and kill the erection.
And it was beautiful.
But you struggled on the days when depression and an eating disorder would pin her to the ground and blind her, make it impossible for her to see anything but a dark room. She would cry and say she wished she would die. She would stand naked in front of a mirror and say unspeakable things about her own body, grab the skin around her flat tummy and call herself fat. She would call herself ugly.
Ugly.
Her big round dark eyes. Her tender rosy cheeks. Her pink tongue, the softest and pinkest you had kissed until then.
Ugly.
You would tell her you liked her body, liked the breasts she insisted she didn’t have, loved making love to her.
Then one day it dropped — a joke covered in thorns.
—Are you sure you don’t like boys? Because I have the body of a boy.
—Maybe you are gay, she added, laughing, because why else would you like fucking me?
You did not like fucking her. You loved fucking her. There were not many things more flattering for you. She held nothing back and she fit you so perfectly that for the first time in a long time, you felt adequate. You fucked in your flat. In her flat. In the flat of friends. In her office. In bathrooms. And not once did you think, when you were both going at it like crazed fiends: she looks like a boy.
You managed to laugh along but when you went home that night, you thought of B, and of Nneka and of R.
All three of them can’t be wrong, can they?
You wanted to crawl out of your skin and set your body on fire. And all the while, shame gnawed away, munching loudly, burping, sighing.
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