Kana

Like I can’t tell you how terrible it feels to be vain and also be a part of a class of human that is experience a global bigotry crusade based on things that are visually identifiable

I wish I could look at my own appearance with actual neutrality and not the neutrality that I am forced to adopt for my own fucking survival

I touch my pussy only to find it is filled with shards of glass. I finger at it. I can’t get them out. One piece, painstakingly pried out before nausea and blood loss stop me. I promised my body that I wouldn’t hurt it any more. I pull my panties back on. I put the shard of glass in my mouth for safekeeping. I leave the single occupancy bathroom in my office and return to my cubicle.

I rest my hand on my face as I slouch at my desk. It comes away bloody. Not much, just enough to remind me to keep my guard up, even when I am alone. More time passes pointedly ignoring the puddle of blood collecting in my chair. One would almost hope instead for a head wound, but no. We decided a long time ago that it is better to live, pussy full of glass and all.

I have a date that night. Trying out my new strap on harness. My partner sucks me off before I fuck them. Their eye contact is searing with lips wrapped around a strawberry pattern dildo. I fuck them like a hound. They say, “like you want to hurt me.” With fingers and silicone, I oblige.

Underneath my panties, my aching clit is rubbed raw by the leather of my harness. I can feel glass crunching as I clench around ghost fingers. When they beg me to stop, I flop on top of them and shiver with the thrill while blood creeps down my thighs. The air in my nostrils is thick with the smell of pennies, but I hardly notice. I’m not breathing after all. Way down inside me, her eyes are squeezed tight against how wrong her body feels. She knows I love her. She knows I have found a way to let my body feel good. She hears me moan in pleasure while my date laps hungrily at my pussy.

When I cum, closed chain arching with the earth, she gives a small half smile. “I am doing all of this for her,” I tell my partner. The girl inside hears me, and believes it. Still she cannot begin to unclench her fists. Still she is cut off at the waist. She looks at me with begging eyes. In obeisance with her need, I bow my head and remove the piece of glass out of my mouth. I slip it back inside my pussy.

Earlier today I bought something sexy to make myself feel better. My inner goddess asks me if I am going to look into the surgery today. She sits inside me with a wound as wide as the ocean, waiting for me to conquer my fear or to make a friend of it.

Dysphoria blossoming and spreading

such beauty it has to show me

grown with love from the very soil of me

hot and wet, rich and black.

I am full of everything.

I am lost in the garden of it,

and though my skin is pricked and bloody,

and though my bare feet are achy and torn,

I sink my toes into the earth,

And I am glad to be here.

Dear body,

I apologize deeply to you for your pain.

or mine. I don't know which is

which of if there is even a line.

I'm sorry for the way my mental health

crisis has become your embodied sense of anguish

Stone in my chest. spiked and barbed.

splattered in my blood like lingerie.

I turned this part of myself over and found

that the hardest, deadest part of me was

teeming with all the life I had rejected.

No longer my own but vibrant and ferocious

for its own sake.

It scattered in the light, and went to ground

again. And now I can't close my eyes

because I can feel it on my skin, hear it in the

echo of my own footsteps.

My voice teems with insects

Still the stone in my chest sits heavy. Dead,

hard thing to remind me that I am still alive.

That my dearest companion has lived

to fight another day.

"i am still alive," you tell me. "but it will not always be so."

"I am still alive," you say with teeth gritted and blood on your lips.

"I am still alive." while anguish courses through you thicker than blood or air.

"I am still alive." you say in the face of my paltry offerings.

"I am still alive, but it will not always be so." meanwhile I hunger with no mouth. I yearn to see without eyes. I dream of touch, but all I can feel is the absence of what should be.

I wish I believed in reincarnation. I wish I believed I could try again in the next life instead. I wish that to simply be was not a test of courage or a feat of strength.