Alt. Title: Naked

2.14.22

The water burns as it spills down my shoulders, rounds with my spine. It steals anxious thoughts from my head, tosses them aside and strips me of a racing heart, of racing fears, of terrors that might yet linger just outside that shower door. It urges me to breathe, to close my eyes, and to let it wash away what came before. 

Her hands are on my chest. Fingers spread across my ribs, grab and squeeze my waist. Her hair cascades down her back, soaked from the spray reflecting off my frame. Soap bubbles collect at our feet. Her eyes remain closed as I touch her cheek and rest my forehead against hers. 

Cheekbones, strong and defined. A jaw cut from marble, a brow molded by a potter’s hand. Her skin is soft, her shoulders broad, her body beautiful and gentle and kind. I find myself freed by the lack of eye contact. Freed to smile and stare and admire, without the twisting guilt of being caught. I want to stare. I want to stare and find myself swallowed in my affection for her. I want to touch without the taste of sinful condemnation slipping in with words from the church. I want to run my fingertips down her sternum, let them drift along her waist. I want to admire.

And so I do. 

I used to hide in the shower. I used to curl up beneath the stinging rain and run my fingers along my legs, let my nails draw blood to feel something other than the imprisoning self-hatred, the towering depression, the vast emptiness of sorrow that choked my lungs. I would cry, my sobs drowned by the noise of running water, by the music blasting too loud for anyone to hear the small, fragile child breaking beneath. I used to hide in the shower and find it to be the one place I could let my mask fall. To feel the things I avoided. To touch my own body and consider, perhaps for only a sparing moment, that maybe my breasts were not inherently sinful. Perhaps, maybe, they were simply pretty. 

She reaches behind me and turns the heat up. Steam billows around us and I lean back, close my eyes, and let it envelope me. Her hands rest on my lower back and I smile.

Perhaps we are both beautiful things, and there is nothing sinful about that.