PAGE 106
VULCANALIA '21
FICTION
A month before Ben and I split up, he nearly broke my laptop slamming it shut, the two of us crowded together on my dorm room bed, the sounds of the half-finished sci-fi flick dying abruptly. “I’m not watching this shit,” he said, and left the room, and I opened my computer up again to check for damage, ignoring the now-static image of a body in a mirror, frozen onscreen. I still think about this movie too, about this captured frame, wondering what filmic techniques were used to splice the image together, Frankensteining the body for the audience to gasp over. I’m wondering, too, if you’ve seen this movie, or if you can picture the frame anyway because there are a dozen others like it. I know you’re thinking of it, if only because I brought it up. I am complicit, in this way, in my own objectification. I never saw Ben’s body, even in the dark. He’d wear a tank top and boxers, even under the footie pajamas, and I would draw down the zip and still kiss my way over fabric, heating it with my breath. He wouldn’t let me touch skin below the neck, and I devoted hours to memorizing the texture of his throat. In high school it was Gabriella, whose parents knew but wouldn’t let her go on HRT. She’d swamp herself with baggy sweatshirts and jeans, and on the weekends I’d paint her nails purple in the safety of my bedroom, kissing each one to test if it was dry. The polish was tacky against my lips, but hers were soft and warm and curious, slightly waxy from her honeyflavored Chapstick. I didn’t know any other trans people yet. I liked seeing her wrists, when the sweatshirt sleeves rode up, exposing little slivers of skin. I could draw a map of the rivers of her veins. I changed in the changing stalls in gym class, but I could peel off my shirt in front of Gabriella without fear. She was safe, and I liked to see her blush, the way she bunched her sweatshirt tighter when she hugged herself, her eyes darting away. Jesse doesn’t blush for me, not like that. Not when I draw my shirt over my head, discarding it over the edge of the bed we share. Voyeuristic, they stare, tongue darting out to wet their bottom lip, conscious hunger as palpable as the first night, locking eyes across a crowded club floor, bodies undulating in time with the flashing lights, figures pulsing together into one mass of writhing, indistinct parts. There is a checklist of risk, even here. The straight bachelorettes. The gold-star lesbians. The tranny-chasers. The people who hate my flesh, or love it wrong, but Jesse’s hunger was magnetic, and I starving for desire, craving the rush of exposure, just as I did with Gabriella. With Ben. With you, not knowing what your gaze means or what I am risking, and desperate for it anyway.