april 16 2024

I sit in the dark room of my home office and admire my fresh pedicure. Chrome toenails in fuzzy pink slippers play peek-a-boo and tell me I’m kind of a pervert. I grew up evangelical so I don’t argue and I don’t even think about it anymore.

What I do think about is absence as a way of appearing and how I like wearing a specific pair of low-rise leggings because my g-string peeks out of them when I bend over.

I don’t know when I decided I liked being salacious and lusty. It’s not really a histrionic thing, which I find irritating and gauche. I think sexuality should be playful and coquettish, an undeniable plausible deniability. Simone Weil says that “if we go down into ourselves, we find that we possess exactly what we desire” but I’m re-reading Paglia and she says that “woman is literally the occult.”

I shake my head and let my hair down. Braids swing and cover my neck and clavicle, I feel the wispy ends at the small of my back. My thumb finds my mouth and I let it graze the sticky lipgloss on my lips. I hear my boyfriend walk in through the front door. A kind of heat rises.