wearing my body

I wear my body naively, as if it belongs to me. I have soft skin like a peach and I weep sweet sticky sap. I cut the hair I was born with and I remind myself that I can have autonomy in this moment and very few others. Soon it will start to grow again, defiantly, because while I feed it it is not mine and the only parts I can keep are stuck in my razor blades.

I dress my body up in a ritual to remind me I can never dress it down. My skin, my lips, my breasts, on loan to me. I can buy them back in the quiet of my room, under nobody’s gaze, and give birth to my own body again. Race up and down the soft blonde hairs on my thighs, massage out the knot in my calves, ready to auction it off to everybody’s eyes again tomorrow.

Treat it kindly, I tell you when you pierce the silence of my bedroom. I am too young to be ruined. You smile at me, and kiss up the sweet peach skin of my legs. And I learn that I was wrong. I was not offering my body as a gift to you, the coldness of the morning tells me, but instead you bought it without me ever noticing.