Radioactive Erotica
FEATURE | ISSUE ELEVEN | MAHIMAHI / SEX
Written by Wren Probett (she/her) | @wrenneso | Contributing Writer
I noticed I was being devoured, something I’d long desired above anything else. Two beautiful people were kissing along my neck and torso one Friday night, touching me, biting my ear, making me moan; I realised something. My whole life I’ve been composed of two parts, nerve and soft flesh. All action and interaction have been nothing more than a careful balancing act between two selves; one craving towards life, the other towards security.
For as long as I can remember, I have been enamoured with sex. Not the gratification, nor the conquest or anything so small; the raw and vibrant connection caught me in its teeth from the get-go. But I walked through life with two distinct and preoccupied halves for a long time before reuniting them, fearing and loving the same experiences with equal, conflicted measure. I was simultaneously terrified and revivified by intimacy. In some ways I was both the hand and its inhibition at once, tentatively stroking the wire of an electric fence in concert; eventually, I was grasping it. One half wanted to live, the other wanted death; but they too found connection in this way. I was killed by my first sexual experience and brought to life in its violent and unforgiving wake.
The Death card lay before me, drawn by someone deaf to the words “I’m uncomfortable” and “Maybe another time?”, a deterministic sentence I chose to follow. I resigned myself to her interpretation and did what fate supposedly prescribed for us both: utter destruction of the self. An internal fracture crept through my body. Soft flesh shattered into rubble. Thin cuts of a sharp glow trickled through the spaces between. Is a gift you cannot refuse truly a gift? I’d never felt such searing, warm light like that before.
Since then I’ve only truly felt like myself in the presence of those who radiate sunshine through cracked skin in the same way. As if my eyes adjusted and I can only see myself and others when some light is present. As if the true self lies beneath that surface, and only by burning brightly do we see its halo through faults in the stone. As if wounds to the shell leave glinting scars of gold, for only those with kind eyes to appreciate. Radiance, which spreads across the skin like ink, through the carved channels of my hands. Where I once saw smoothness and simplicity, I saw contradiction and confusion, an identity that had been eroded by the path of the river it lay within. Despite it all, I’m profoundly grateful that the world broke me. The outer self was protective, but it was suffocating too; if there was any fire within me, it was on the brink of fading away. I had, in a sense, been living a subdued and inattentive life before it happened; I don’t know if I would have lived to become a woman, the truest reflection of myself, without it. Though it wasn’t the intention, trauma galvanised my soul into finally taking her first breath.
I had tasted death within sex, and it hadn’t left my mouth. I tried sleeping around, sampling the various forms and flavours of kink, but none was particularly exciting in the way, say, taking mushrooms before riding a roller coaster is. These experiences were like whipping cord to a frayed rope; safe expressions of trust and compassion that acted as the foundation to reintegrate intimacy within my life. Yet even now I’m left chasing the memories of such existential flaying. I only really feel like myself when I’m lost in someone's taste, smell, and sound; when I am in a state of complete devotion towards the composite self that exists between us, the identity of the act itself. As if in the intensity, we slip from our concrete silhouettes and each offers a colour to the harmony; truthfully, I’ve never been able to see my own colour beyond the walls of a shared bedroom, to separate it from the context of iridescence. I’ve only known who I was in moments when I gave everything to someone, and let them rebuild me in their arms. I’m reminded of a line from Clarice Lispector’s Agua Vida, “Am I in the court of death, and is that why I am alive?”
To identify with the flickering orange heat of an exposed nerve is to identify with life and death simultaneously. Those born innately sensitive aren’t given the choice to experience softness with such volume; our only choice is to either embrace numbness or suffer the slings and arrows of vibrance. The skin draping my nerves does so to snuff violent sensation; it is the faint longing towards silence, that which clouds fear and joy. But I have tasted the dark, cool reality of solidified fate, the quiet and shallow depth only substances can afford. I cannot help but run headfirst into the sea of plasma that composes all music in this life, the stream we contour around as we each contribute fragments of a collective dance. It is through Death that I have known The Sun; how it lends to the plants that feed the animal, whose bones it will, in time, dry and bleach.
I am grateful for all that has happened to me, though I will seek to understand it until the day I no longer exist.
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