It’s New Year’s Eve, and I’m lying on the couch with my head on my boyfriend’s heart and my left hand fingering his lower lip. It’s firm and thick with scar tissue from when he went tubing on Lake Mohawk at ten years old, bit through it, and had to get 36 stitches. I decide I want to write about it, and about him, and about how he lets me touch him and about how it feels to be allowed to know his body.
I decide this because he lets me handle his lip for what may have been full minutes without concern, question, or ridicule. Maybe it’s the drugs, I think, but he lets me learn him, trace him, explore his figure in a way I’ve only ever explored my own. Running my hands down his back and across his chest, holding his fingertips and stroking his eyebrows. I begin to touch to discover, to taste, to connect and learn with skin on skin and muscle gripping muscle. I touch not as a means to anything except glimpsing him closer to the way he views himself. I borrow his form, and I begin to know him.
I know to avoid his newly pierced right ear when I press his head against my heart. I know the way his tattoos wrap around his wrist and his forearm, where they start and end, could trace them with my eyes closed—the thickness of his hair and the way his tongue tastes and the density of his triceps. I know the back of his hand better than I knew the back of my own. He knows the stretch marks on my ass and the curve of my neck. He has started to understand my body as I understand his. I am starting to understand my body, too.
***
It's my birthday, an early February deep in flurries and the aquarius energy of innovation and discovery, and we are pressed up against each other, movement only in bellies rising and falling. He says something, or I say something—I can’t remember which. We say something about how differently we breathe. How he can take two breaths to only one of mine, and how we try to match each other’s to become one and can’t.
We, I, begin to find my own body by finding his. I discover how long and deep my breaths are from yoga and acting and living, how special it is that I draw such pleasure from life at its most basic form. I notice how fast my metabolism is—we eat edibles and he is just beginning his high as I am already coming down—and how slowly I eat. I learn my height all over again, my hips all over again, everything all over again.
We lie there and he lengthens his breath and I shorten mine for a few rounds, eventually reverting back to our natural rhythms, okay with being our own even when we are each other’s.
***
It’s St. Paddy’s day, and we are hungover and sad about nothing we can fix, so we lie on his bed and embrace one another. He pulls me close and mumbles, “I’m not trying to have sex with you, I just want to feel you.”
His hands move up and down my spine, my waist, my hips. His legs wrap around mine into a twisted knot. He places a hand on my stomach. “I love your belly.” I’m not sure if he says this because he suspects (accurately) that I don’t or if he says it purely because it’s true and he’s thinking about it. Either way I don’t care. Either way he is learning me.
Our wandering hands eventually still; our bodies find a resting place together. We’re always surprised by the way our bodies persistently unearth a way to fit. Like molds into one another. Like liquid, not bone. Intertwined like my leg is his and his head is mine.
This time we are on our sides, facing one another. His thigh is resting in the crevice below my ribs, his arm my pillow, his ribcage welcoming my every exhale. We lie here together for an hour. We use each other’s bodies to steady our own, to remind ourselves of the physical when we are so stuck in the mental.
***
It’s late March, right when spring is promising things winter won’t yet let it give, and I am writing about my boyfriend and his body and mine. I am making a list of all the things about his chest and his legs that I know just as well as he does.
But, of course, there is nothing rightly on that list. I understand it; he experiences it. It is his home—usual and mundane and tending towards the comfortable.
Placing my hands on his skin is special to me. His figure is new every time I hold it. I haven’t had enough time to learn every inch yet, and even if I someday do, I will appreciate it very differently than the way he can. I do not see his frame only in mirrors or from atop his shoulders. I see it head on, real. I find it under a fingerprint that doesn’t anticipate what bump or scrape might come next.
He knows his body in a way I never will. I will never experience a lip swollen from a 36 stitch scar, or hair on my back, or eyes that can see up close without aid.
I know his body in a way he never will. What it tastes like to kiss him. These things I so intimately appreciate about his shape—the sensation of his lip is fixed in my fingers and in my mouth and on my cheek. I recognize the temperature of his skin at three in the morning. I know him in a way no one else ever will because no one else will fit his shape the same way I do. No one will be fascinated by the same things I am. Maybe someone else will one day lie on him and rub his lower lip between their fingers and explore his frame through their own. Those fingers will encounter different bumps.
But he knows my body in a way I never will, too. Acrylics digging into unsuspecting thighs or the way my lower back fits in his palm or my cold feet rubbing up and down against his calves as I cricket my way to sleep. Maybe someone else will lie with me and tell me they want to feel me, and they will find my spine, my waist, my hips. It will develop differently under a new set of hands.
***
Before we met, I had opinions, notions, about my reflection. I was not thin enough, too broad, not strong enough, not enough for myself: a judgement on my body that transitioned into a judgment about my whole self. I did not feel at home in my own body, or my mind. I did not feel it was mine. I did not feel I was mine.
By stroking someone else’s skin, breathing in my own time, learning myself over again, I am building a home. I am discovering every day that, right now, I do not belong anywhere more than I belong in these thighs and this ribcage and those arms. This is where I am; that is why I belong.
I want to breathe under his skin and wail into his bones. I have never wanted another’s body like this, never dreamed a body could turn me inside out. He undoes me, and I am free to put it all back together, stitching myself up with love and tenderness and the knowledge of a body that can only be learned under someone else’s touch.
Knowing someone else’s body in this way is healing. Knowing a body like this reminds me that corporeal form is a vessel for something more, a tool for navigating the world. A body is not a site of destruction; it is not a machine that can be broken or repaired; it is not a weapon. Knowing the shape of someone else is intimate, and it is rare, and it is extraordinary. It reminds me what it means to give myself, my whole self, scars and all; it teaches me how to tend someone else’s wounds as if they were my own, how to cradle my own as if they were someone else’s. Knowing the body is the crux of loving myself.
***
My body moves across itself; I rub my freshly shaved legs together like crickets, trace my fingers along my waist and down my hips, finger my nails and pick at my skin. I smell like coconut oil and sickly-sweet strawberry lip balm. When I breathe into my belly, I am reminded that home is body, my shape, heavenly ipseity. There is no love anyone could give me that would match the love I have for myself.
Amelia Clare Wright is a recent graduate of Columbia's MFA program in nonfiction creative writing. Her work as appeared in Oyster River Pages, Variant, and The Hunger Journal, among others. Amelia grew up in Baltimore City and now lives in Los Angeles. She is currently working on a memoir about pain and trying to decide if she wants to be a coral reef or a tree when she dies.
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