Dying to love

The first thing I did when I woke up was wipe off the crusted cum you didn’t find the need to clean off in between my breast and along my shin. I didn’t realize that we left the fan on until the last piece fell to the floor and a strong chill immediately traveled along my lymphatics. The bed remains creaseless on your side, and I have to take a moment to remind myself if last night was simply another one of those “wet dreams” everyone always has.

I don’t need to text an apology, right?

I’m not accustomed to the program just yet.

I’m still waiting for the day that my cum tastes like water and not martyrdom.

american dream or how I wish I could stop seeing tweets about how that “man” and his pedo empire defined girlhood

My mother told me that shaving my legs would make the hair grow back faster and longer. I am a few months away from [ ] and my legs carry the same hairs (metaphorically speaking) from when I was twelve.

The first time I noticed I was growing any body hair was when I was nine years old. Some of my cuts from days of self-harm were recovering and when I glanced over at one of the healing wounds, I saw a black mark stick out. It looked much different from the normal scabbiness I had become accustomed to. I took a closer look and at first, I thought one of my eyelash hairs might’ve just fallen and landed in the rubble of my wounds. I gently touched that mark with my left index finger, expecting the hair to have also lifted with my finger as I pulled away. Instead, the hair became erect, maintaining its position in my skin.

I rummaged through my dad’s shaving set and found one of his tweezers. I rinsed it quickly before bringing the metal to my skin. The tweezer’s edge held the single hair and with a swift pull, released the hair from my arm. I glanced at the hair resting in the tweezer before looking back at my arm to see the tiny hole from where the hair once stood. Only then did I notice the other pores across my skin; the baby hairs that were clearly transitioning to tweenhood.

Then, my female cousins told me it wasn’t womanly to have stomach hair. I had just turned ten a few days prior. I hadn’t yet learned how to shave myself. My mother still shaved my armpits for me—my pubic hair hadn’t grown in much yet, so she hadn’t had a reason to teach me how to shave on my own—with her “good blade.”

It felt as heavy as a one-pound dumbbell, and I could see a sharp reflection of myself in it. I knew enough to understand it was a quality blade, and that I wasn’t ready to use it on my own.

So, before my cousins would let me leave our Wisconsin Dells hotel room in my two-piece swimsuit, I had to undergo the rite of passage of “womanhood”—becoming acquainted with what I now know is the infamous, shitty pink plastic razor.

I had to borrow their iPod, lock myself in the bathroom and YouTube “how to shave”. I had to figure out how to hold the razor, how much slip I needed to give myself between the palm of my hand and the bottom of the handle, so I wouldn’t press down too hard.

I watched the first few hairs fall to the ground and glided my fingers along the smooth patch, and shaved over it again because I still could see a millimeter of hair left and the girl I was watching in the video, for some reason, her razor seemed to pull at the root. I went too deep and the sting settled in, luckily, was only as deep as a paper cut, and it was shallower than that really. I let the blood rest on the surface and shaved around it, anchoring myself to help me figure out where I had shaved and what else needed to be cleaned up. I only had two minutes’ worth of shaving to do. The clean-up took ten, including biting down on my beach towel wiping the peroxide along my stomach to make sure I didn’t get any infection from my cut when I would jump into the water and rest in the lazy river.

A full shave of that area now takes about five minutes, with cleanup taking no more than three—even on a slow day—and no need for peroxide. My legs remain covered in hair.

I do wish I had listened to my mother, standing up to my cousins and strutting my nasty, hairy tummy through the hallway all the way to the pool’s entrance, ignoring the embarrassment my cousins would’ve felt. Maybe my stomach wouldn’t be so hairy, and I wouldn’t need to shave it as much as I do now.

Maybe if I never shaved my stomach, I would have been too “manly” for the man who told me my breasts were too big for my age [32A at age 14], for the frat boy who sexually assaulted me by fingering me [34A at age 18], and potentially save me from the man who will inevitability try to rape me [34B/C at age _] as that is where my life seems to be headed.