1. There is a world where you are born a woman and your body is the most beautiful uncomplicated thing about you. Everyone thinks this, even your cousins, one at six, and one at fifteen. Even your uncle, as good as your father after you’re orphaned. In the place of failed metaphors, does a door think itself a door without its hinges? What is a survivor without her body? 

2. The year I turned twenty-four I fucked white men to forgive myself for having a body my uncle touched. They didn’t know of the fragility of recasting the body, ridding myself of fault in the dark. 

3. It’s true, I used them.

4. It’s fine, they used me back.

5. Someone once asked if I wasn’t afraid that these men were strangers. She was asking about keeping safe. What’s the worst that could happen? Four times men loved me and hadn’t been able to help themselves.

6. The traumatised body relies on narrative. If a man thinks of my body as just a body I am free from betrayal. Once I hurt the man I love so irrevocably he asked to sleep on a blow up mattress. Can’t you touch me without wanting to fuck me, I spit. Once I was just a girl. Then I was a body.

7. One morning I found a bruise. Who or why didn’t matter. It was I who had let him into the bed. I who had let him lay his hands on my body.

8. One night, many years ago, I lost my hands. Counted all ten fingers but they just weren’t mine. When I went looking, I found them coiled around my uncle’s neck, still saving my life.

9. A year to the date of the first evening I fucked a man in the complete absence of myself, I am on a train to the first session of EMDR. I ask Therapist No. 7, will this save my life. I don’t ask, will it bring me back from the dead.

10. Only after too much had happened, I learnt about the correlation between trauma and hypersexuality. I read every article on the first five pages of the google search results. Once I started looking I couldn’t look away. The flashbacks began without the distance of the decade past.

11. Those years I lived inside of shower tiles and discoloured paint patches on the ceilings. If I could disappear myself into the five by five, it would end. I could live.

12. I haven’t slept through a night in months. I keep waking like a ghost at three in the morning, anxiety searing my throat. Friend, the terms survivor and victim are misnomers. I haven’t yet survived this. All definitions of victim are written in the past tense.

13. As kids my brother would use his entire body to shield mine in a game of dodgeball. My brother died. Last month my lover asked me for my body count.

14. I tell myself so many stories. None of them save us from the truth. These days when we are making love he reminds me to come back to him. He says, You don’t have to fuck your way to forgiveness. I know.

15. I do.