The Girl Who Bullies Me.

The waistband of my underwear is pulled up so high it rests right underneath my breasts. She grips the fabric on the front inside her fist and pulls, forcing the bunched up gusset to cut against my clitoris. 

“Does this make you uncomfortable?” She asks, leaning against me and whispering her words over my shoulder. 

The discomfort is not the problem. I thrive in discomfort. Put a pebble in my shoe and watch how that restores meaning to my life, cut the tip of my thumb and see how much more I type. This makes me sick. Like being out in the sun with an oily forehead and unwashed hair. Somehow, it is easier to play out the trauma of your past than the pleasure of it. Perhaps it has to do with responsibility, I wasn’t responsible for my pain, but I feel responsible for the pleasure I should not have felt. This reminds of my friend Sara. Sara was a magnificent creature, she was built out of perfection, beauty and charm, but beyond her angelic façade resided an unbridled cruelty. We used to play a game together, we would pretend to be at school. She’d be the teacher and I was the student. She’d ask me to recite the twelve-times table and I would say it wrong. She’d admonish me for being unprepared and dumb, before making me write it down in a single-ruled notebook. After I did that, she’d ask me to recite it again, I’d make the same mistakes, it was the only way I knew how to get what I wanted.

If you could identify moments of your own story that foreshadow the future in real-time, I would have put on asterisk on that page of my life as I lived it and flagged it red. At least then I would have known not to struggle all these years, I could have identified my hamartia and let the downfall come to me. I will, without a doubt, make the same mistake twice. After I got the twelve-times table wrong again, Sara would make me stand in the corner and tell me how everyone in the class of non-existent students could see my shame. The imaginative capacity she possessed was so startling, she’d make up characters and tell me what they thought of me. It used to make me feel sick. The punitive display of shame is the most vulnerable part of human experience and it’s where everything happens. Tell Oscar Wilde, everything in the world may be about sex but sex is not just about power, it’s about draining the shame from a person, gathering it in a tin drum and then dousing them with it. I guess that doesn’t pack quite as much of a punch as the original. I’m a poorly-made duplicate of everything I attempt to be. 

But so is she. 

That’s not her fault. No one can ever again make me feel the exact things that Sara did, that’s just the characteristic of the first that matters the most, the second is not less important, nor is the twentieth, they may even matter more, but they can never be the baseline. It’s my fault for trying to recreate memories with real people as props.  I do love her, I love her not because of who she is but how she makes me feel, and how she makes me feel is the twentieth-counterfeit of the awakening of erotic shame that Sara left in my soul. That’s not sad, not as sad as it sounds anyway, it just is. It doesn’t matter so much in most moments, in this one, it makes me think of Sara, but as she pulls at my underwear with one hand and at my hair with the other, I remember she’s someone else. She reminds me, as she runs his fingers over my cunt, pulling on my underwear as if she is trying to shake something stuck to a plastic bag loose. I make pathetic little noises as she throws me around the bathroom, pushing me into the wall, pulling my hair, giggling at how I wobble at her touch. It feels like I am retching my pleasure out of my throat, coughing it up like it’s a poison my body instinctively knows to expel. She pulls me into the stall, using my body to swing the door open. I get on my knees myself, I don’t know exactly what to expect but I know that is the right decision. That’s what I love about her. She smells how I like and she does what I need, I will kneel before a thousand women like her, but it’s not because I am lower than her, it’s worse, I view her as the needs she fulfills for me, and in that I am the lowest one can be. She pushes my face onto the toilet seat, smearing my lipstick all over the rim. 

“Lick,” she says, swinging my head from side-to-side, leaving the evidence of my participation in the theatre of beauty all over the porcelain, “Lick the dirty fucking toilet.” 

She laughs as I do it. It doesn’t hurt, it feels sick, because I love her for this. For this and the ability to make me weak in my knees when she stands naked in front of me, I love her. My heart is such a small place, it only has room for me and my needs and in her apparent cruelty she gives them to me, but I wonder sometimes, who is being more demeaning to whom, and the answer changes every day. As I lick the toilet seat with an embarrassing gusto, she grabs the back of my head and pushes it into the bowl. She flushes the toilet and the sickness I felt in my throat fades away as my sinuses fill with water, my sins can really only be washed away with toilet water. I’ve gotten so dirty, even untreated water meant for sewage is a step up for my being. I feel like I’m drowning, but the panic I feel is emanating from my clit, trapped between the underwear still cutting into me, my heart lies dead and decaying inside my chest. 

She pulls me out of the toilet and the water gets everywhere, it’s a strange property of water, as dirty as it can get, it makes you feel cleaner even when it is comprised of filth. She drags me out of the cubicle and I slip on the wet floor. My knee bangs against the tile and I ignore it, not because it doesn’t hurt, but because it doesn’t matter to me. I don’t care that it hurts, I want to know what else she will do to me, next. For me, next. She pulls me down to my back and starts to piss all over me, right through her clothes, I don’t know why that’s better, but that is better. She must revile me to feel a need so urgent to befoul me. As she finishes, she slips her underwear out from beneath her skirt and lets it fall on my face. She leans over, balls it up and shoves it into my mouth. She kneels beside me, on the floor covered in piss and turns me over onto my belly. She holds my hair in her hand and starts to wipe the floor with it. As she is wiping the floor with my hair, I hear the door open. I panic and shake. 

“Someone’s here,” I say to her, trying to turn around. 

“I know,” she says, holding my face down on the piss, “I invited them.” 

I love her for his, for anticipating my needs and taking care of them without my involvement in the process; there is an efficiency to her I cannot get even from the women I pay, but I feel sorry for her sometimes, because I am her hamartia. I’m the dirtbag villain in this story, she’s the hero. It’s just too bad that I’m writing a tragedy.