A scab to pick off

by Elizabeth Ponds (Twitter, WordPress, IG: pondsyo95)

Content warnings: compulsory sexuality, sex

Once again 
I wanted….
I wanted my Asexuality to be a scab I could pick off and flick
onto the carpet of my college apartment
where I had never fallen in love,
where I had let men and women, enbys and agenders, fall in love with me.
 
I should be a hetero.
That was a fucking vibe all the way into year 21,
drinking cheap Wal-mart wine and swiping on Tinder
to see which guy looked pretty enough to maybe change me this time.
Wasn’t that a fucking vibe
to know that I would be fucking myself up
by letting him fuck me?
“Vibes” hadn’t entered the lexicon in 2017,
but it was there all the same.
 
I said, hey, I’m capable.
I could respond appropriately.
My body needs no help.
So coffee and conversation and a self-sabotage invitation
Was in order.
He told me I could touch him,
and I don’t think he understood that bodies are just beautifully boring to me,
that I only wanted to be touched, to be loved, as I was told a woman should be.
And he did it right, as friends might say.
And that was a passion that I needed to brave.
 
But it wasn’t mine and it wasn’t love
and I couldn’t sexually attract myself to him 
and I couldn’t want to give a fuck.
But it was a needing to want him to fuck me 
because of what I knew was heteronormativity.
The knowing isn’t enough,
because I also knew that this was right.
This was the only way
a woman can be happy.

My stomach roiled some hours into the darkness 

of my nakedness and a lack of discomfort with him
and the presence of discomfort with myself.
Laying with this thing I have to be 
to be happy 
when in all actuality
I exist as I am 
and am whole as I am 
and happy as I am 
if I could accept how I am
without the fucking vibes.