Vachon Imagined

Her ring finger, plastered by history and ridicule, rested between her legs of prosperity and creativity everlasting.

“Hold it back,” he said. “Save it for me.”

Ah.

But it’s not yours, she thought.

It’s mine, isn’t it?

Isn’t it?

Everything pointed her toward looking away from it, the burning inside her to love another man, another woman, both at the same time.

To hell with labels, she thought.

As though they were irrelevant in a world of politics where you got ahead by wearing the right dress, kneeling beneath the right god.

But this was hers.

Her body.

Her wanting.

Her pleasure.

Her hunger.

Her sexuality.

The part of her that awakened when she desired another body.

The feeling of being alive.

The part of her that wanted to be touched, to touch, to give herself completely to the experience of wanting without asking whether she was allowed to want it.

She did not need a man to authorize her desire.

She did not need a woman to make it legitimate.

She did not need a name for the places her desire wanted to go.

It belonged to her because it came from her.

She took the hem of her dress, threw it over her arm, and began shredding it with whatever freedom she had left in her.

To spite herself.

Then she spit at him.

Now loud.

Less obscure.

“Fuck you.”

And then, louder:

“But I’m not yours.”

Her ring finger was blinded by the chasm between the sun-stained skin and the area left beneath it.

Fully pale.

Open.

Free.

Waiting for another impression to be called his, when she was never really hers.

And as he demanded that she love only him, she pushed all others away, lying secretly to herself that she could ever love only a man, or make love to only one woman.

It was in her blood.

In her bones.

In the bones of deniability that played his game, but not hers.

She had spent too long confusing possession with love.

Permission with desire.

And silence with virtue.

She had been taught to make her sexuality, herself, smaller.

Quieter.

More acceptable.

To turn desire into something that required permission before it could become pleasure.

But her sexuality was not a debt.

Her desire was not a promise she had made to someone else.

Her body was not a territory to be governed.

It was hers.

The intensity wasn’t illegible.

It was tamed.

And she was done taming it.

Done apologizing for the heat of it.

Done pretending desire was something that happened to other women.

She wanted.

She desired.

She loved.

She burned.

And none of it required permission or a full-scale, sanctified autopsy.

And so she took off the mouthpiece of subjugation.

And relentlessly, she loved in the quiet.

In the deep.

In the place where no one could tell her who to be.

What to think.

What to say.

Or whom to desire.