The Taste and Shape of Survival

On a trip across state lines I rent a room safer than any home, devoid of any identity. A man has been texting me. He knows what hotel I’ll be staying at. He knows the velvet of my inner thighs. He knows I’m only staying for the night. I’m sure he has a name. 

When he arrives he texts I’m here. 

I wait for his knock, to be greeted by the barrel of him. I stare at the hotel’s fire escape instructions posted beneath the peephole. My lips are sticky and my tongue is dry. I contemplate all the uses for a human mouth. I contemplate the journey between survival and burning. 

In the many years I’ve introduced my body to strange men, I’ve never lost sight of the danger. How, if they wanted to, they could lay me down, slice me open, and bleed me out, before slipping away unscathed and satisfied, as my heart pumps swells of black cherry insides into the bedsheets, soaking through to the mattress pad, imbuing the air with inside-out-human scent.  This fear pummels me in the moments before their arrival, when nervous energy radiates, and I question my reasons for everything. But on rainwater nights, alone with my ache for relevance and escape, it’s easy to believe the intentions of strange men, however brutal, cannot be worse than those of the men I have already known. Such thoughts can be comforting, in the way a gunshot to the head might appeal to anyone suffering a long, slow death. Even with their bodies hovering above mine, faces twisting to cum, sweat dripping brow to lip, an animal exchange of currency, I’ve never stopped picturing it happening long enough to believe that a man might choose not to destroy a woman, if given the opportunity. If given a proper opening. Though I’ve never been proven right, in time I’ve come to reason that to a womanbody, so many times broken, there may be a greater danger in believing he won’t. That the illusion of safety from any man, at any point in time, might ripen more than my body for the inevitability of violence. 

These are the thoughts I run from.

I open the door and he steps inside with his shoulder-length hair tied back half way, like me at twelve, ignored at a middle school dance.            

You look pretty, he says.

Thanks.

He is taller than expected, face thinner and longer. Cigarette-breath stale with habit. 

So you’re just visiting for the night? He asks and I hate his voice. I don’t remember his name. 

Let’s not talk. 

I smile when I say it, so it isn’t rude, but I know it doesn’t matter if it is or isn’t, because he’s on the bed, balancing on bony knees above me. 

Fifteen minutes later and I am not dead yet. 

He is licking my body and my throat is feeling to moan and my muscles are feeling to clench, but I know this won’t happen because my body is numb to his. In all his licking, I wait for the familiar burn to rise from my stomach, to my nipples, to my throat, for the sheets to singe beneath us, the curtains to catch, and the room to glow unbridled, flame charring everything with the sear of want satisfied. 

But when we touch there is nothing.

His fingers are in my hair, nose pressed against my neck, and I am safe floating somewhere above us. I can no longer taste his cigarette. I cannot hear his voice.  

He pushes himself inside of me and I am thinking about his mother. A woman who gave life to a man, this man, and somehow went on living. I consider the risk in giving your body to someone, spreading it open and spewing life from your depths. Letting go and bouncing back. Surrendering without retreating. There is more than one way to use a body. 

I’ve seen men do magic. 

I’ve seen my silhouette in mirrors.

I’ve been frayed and split and spit into oblivion.

I’ve seen legs clamp shut, mouth lockjaw, gaping unguarded. 

I’ve seen women bend back humanity like a whisper in their hands. 

I’ve been war torn and ugly with nowhere to run. 

My back is flat against the ceiling, a mirror of myself below, all plastered and unmoving. Nowhere to run. On the bed I am stillness, lonely in the atrophy of body crumbling beneath shoulder-length hair like a middle-school dance: not belonging anywhere, waiting to be wanted, learning to breathe underwater. I have gone hollow in the eyes and I wonder if he’s noticed that in a different life I could have been anything else but this open sore, undressing my wounds before him, like dying in reverse. 

In the many years I’ve been myself, I’ve contemplated the taste and shape of survival. The many uses of a human mouth. How a whisper and a scream can sound exactly the same given the right temperature. It’s been months since the Last Man and I haven’t craved sex, just filling. There is no escape from this body, with both its magic and tragedy bearing the truth of so much male memory. If I could count my pulse like rings in a tree, I might discover there’s no one left.  

Suddenly he pulls out of me and stands up at the end of the bed. 

I am back in my body. 

Shifting to my knees, my gaze clings to his tiny mouth, all twisted in disgust. I ask what he wants to do next, but he pulls on his jeans. I don’t understand. Then I see it, just below me. 

I have spilled onto the sheets a giant pool of black cherry insides.

He is pulling a sweater over his hairless chest. 

I have bled through to the mattress pad. 

I am apologizing. 

He shrugs.

It happens, he says, like periods happen, like everything has an ending. 

My fingertips graze the sticky warmth of menstrual blood, one-week early, human-sized, whale-sized, galaxy-wide and forever expanding, the blood of my womanbody soaking opaque like a middle school dance: crying in a bathroom, zip-up hoodie tied around my waist, veiling my lineage of so much ripping. 

Sixteen years post-puberty and I am still ashamed and asking forgiveness. He asks when I’ll be back in the city and I lie never again.  

The door clicks shut behind him and I am alone. 

For a while I cry. My throat closes in on itself and I can hardly breathe through the humiliation I feel, the utter, impenetrable aloneness, galaxy-wide and forever expanding. I order room service and eat it with my fingers, right next to the bloodstain I made but didn’t die for. In the background SVU: the violence of too many malebodies and not enough justice, but in the years to come I will know my many survivals better than the sound of my own voice screaming.  I will know myself as more than an object, war-torn with nowhere to run. Years from now, I will know myself. 

I chew my food and I begin to laugh. 

I wonder about the dried stain of my insides left behind on his dick, how it will feel when he stands in the shower and the pinkish lather of soap blossoms in his hand, a reminder of me. 

I wonder about the shape my blood takes in the grooves of his fingertips, and I am certain that before me he has never known the blood of a womanbody pooled neatly beneath him, all Rorschach without apology. 

I wonder if the iron taste of me still lingers in his mouth, if I am a memory he can’t escape, and if I, with my blood, am his version of violence. 

I wonder if this is the last time I will introduce my body to a strange man in a hotel room, but I won’t be certain of that for a few more years, when I learn to love my body for all it can be when it’s no longer an object to be split open by unrelenting men. 

I am certain this isn’t the last time he will introduce his body to a strange woman in a hotel room. 

I am certain that if I hadn’t bled through to the mattress pad, if he hadn’t pulled back in disgust and slipped gently into the night, that I would have stayed there for however long it took until it was over, thinking about his mother, the many uses for a human mouth, and the curious art of surrendering without retreating, without saying a word. 

And I am certain he wouldn’t have noticed.