UNBODY PART 2: (Un)wanting my eros in exile, my sex in war, my pleasure in pus(sy?)

Sex doesn’t liberate me. Sometimes it just bloats me. I’ve had orgasms followed by gas pains and self-loathing. I’ve stared at the ceiling wondering if this was healing or just pelvic cardio. My body finishes, but my brain stays behind cleaning up after the mess. I don’t know how to want. Not really. Not without asking first. Not without scanning the room for permission. Not without rehearsing how that wanting might look on someone else’s face. Because somewhere along the way, my “want” stopped belonging to me. It became a safety hazard. A negotiation. A side dish to someone else’s hunger. They tell me I’m allowed now. They whisper, “You’re safe with me.” And my body? It glitches. It doesn’t know how to process kindness without bracing for cost. It wants to trust, but somewhere deep in the code, the algorithm screams: Obedience is safety. Obedience is love. Obedience is the rent you pay to exist. I want to want. But I don’t know where to put that want. I don’t know if it’s mine or just another auto-filled form handed down from culture, family, gods and groomers all dressed in the same well-meaning smile. Desire doesn’t come to me as hunger. It comes as a checklist. A calibration. My thighs chafe when I try to straddle. My skin collects stories in patches: razor bumps, dry elbow maps, a mole that grew like a rebellion. Nothing is smooth. Nothing is silent. Even my ankles are opinionated. No aphrodisiacs. Just flatulence and unshaven thighs and existential interruptions. My stomach folds in ways that feel like betrayal. Sometimes I suck it in out of reflex, then forget to breathe. My belly isn’t bashful, it softens like protest. It folds like grief. It gurgles in rooms meant for whispers. My nipples don’t perk up on cue: they’re indifferent, moody, sometimes numb. “Sometimes one reacts and the other just... clocks out. Like a mismatched pair of employees. My left boob is always ahead of the curve. The right one's passive-aggressive about attention. Sometimes I wonder if my vulva’s lips are uneven. One labia’s a philosopher, the other’s given up. My body isn’t symmetrical. It’s a democracy in chaos. My knees crack when I shift positions. There’s hair where I was told there shouldn’t be. It grows like vengeance. Like inheritance. I don’t wax it away. I’ve stopped apologizing for follicles. My toes curl not from pleasure, but from trying to hold it together. Nothing fluid. Just joints and folds and tension. It comes as a pelvic-floor calculation. Will it hurt? Do I smell okay? Is my breathing too animal? Do I look alive or just available? Is the bra cute enough to leave on, or will it ruin the performance? Sometimes I rehearse moans in my head, not because I feel them but because I’ve been taught to. I think about how my face looks from the side. Whether my breasts fall in the right direction. If my stomach is flattening enough while I’m on top. My clit isn’t some wild, pulsing portal. Some days it hides. Some days it sulks. Some days it screams so quietly I can’t tell if it’s hunger or mourning. Sometimes it’s just... missing. Like it checked out mid-scene. The body is not a movie. Mine forgets its lines all the time. Sometimes I cough mid-kiss and snot gets involved. Sometimes I queef so loud I have to pretend it was the bed. I’ve had to stop mid-sex to pee. I’ve yawned during oral. I’ve giggled at the wet sounds. I’ve panicked at the dryness. I’ve whispered ‘I think I’m bleeding’ and not in the sexy vampire way. My body is not a climax machine. My arousal is not aesthetic. It stains. It sticks. It smells like me and I’m learning not to flinch. It’s a meat puppet with stage fright and IBS. Is this safe? Is this acceptable? Is this too loud, too wet, too much? Is this going to make me lovable? Am I earning intimacy or inviting punishment? (Here. Touch it. Not to fix it, but to feel how sharp it really is.) Do I angle my body like porn stills or wedding photos? Do I arch or curl? Do I fake the sigh because silence feels too real? And, love? Love after trauma is like teaching a bomb how to cuddle. They hold you and you flinch, not because they hurt you, but because you’ve never been held without it costing something. And you feel ridiculous explaining this. You know they aren’t your father, your uncle, your society. But your body doesn’t care about genealogy. It only knows that soft hands have come before with sharp shadows. It only knows that “you’re safe now” is the most dangerous sentence of all because that’s what they said before they taught you how to break beautifully. And then there’s freedom. God. That hideous, glittery masquerade ball. They sell it to you wrapped in hashtags and lingerie. Freedom, they say, is dancing half-naked on a rooftop, moaning louder, arching bolder, “owning it.” But I don’t want to own it. I want to disown it. I want to unlearn the blueprint that told me sex is a performance and wanting is a product. I don’t want to perform my healing through erotica. I want to be turned off, unmade, unplugged. I don’t want to smell like vanilla lotion and regret. I don’t want my orgasm to be a staged event: neat, clean, almost spiritual. I want to not care if I drool or fart or lay there like a malfunctioning wire. Sometimes I fake trembles because the real ones feel too strange. Sometimes I itch mid-thrust and don’t scratch. My thighs cramp. My jaw locks. My skin breaks into stress hives that don’t look seductive in candlelight. I’ve had discharge that looked like glue. I've left sweat stains on his chest. One time I sneezed mid-orgasm and pulled a muscle in my lower back. The smell of latex and lube doesn’t turn me on, it reminds me of hospitals and cheap motels. I can’t always breathe through my nose when I’m on top. Sometimes I burp. And it’s not cute. And when it’s over, I wipe with toilet paper that sticks to me, rolls into sad little confetti at my thighs. Is this what they call post-coital glow? What does freedom actually look like? Not fireworks. Not fishnets. Maybe it looks like boredom. Maybe it looks like saying no and not being punished. Maybe it’s sitting still without shrinking. Maybe it’s not having to exfoliate before being seen. Maybe it’s not needing a playlist to kiss someone. Maybe it’s unsexy lighting. Maybe it’s cotton underwear and mismatched socks and no script. Maybe it’s silence that isn’t suspicious. Maybe it’s desire that isn’t urgent, isn’t curated, isn’t for sale. The culture that “liberates” me through aesthetics still demands obedience: just repackaged as empowerment. Same pot. Different stew. They say: Be free. But look hot doing it. Be sexual, but not needy. Be empowered, but not angry. Be soft, but not stupid. Be healing, but always presentable. And I’m standing here, naked in every way, asking: What if I just don’t want to be edible anymore? What if I want my desire to be ugly? What if I want to want like a malfunctioning script? What if freedom means never being understood? So, I am not ashamed of my malfunction anymore. I am investigating it. What does it mean to “want” when your want was always filtered through someone else’s comfort? I was  taught to anticipate others, not access yourself. My body isn’t aroused by pleasure. It’s triggered by compliance. The desire I was handed? It wasn’t mine. It was manufactured in their shame factory. I was taught to want like a good girl: quietly, neatly, in the dark. I crossed my legs so tightly in childhood I forgot how to uncross them as an adult. My inner thighs feel like locked gates. I hold tension in my hips like old family secrets. Even my vaginal walls brace like they’re about to be told to behave. There’s no ease in entry. There’s only apology. Even when I was alone, the dark had eyes. I adjusted my panties like I was on camera. I touched myself as if someone might still be grading me. Desire, for me, is not a spark. It’s an algorithm. This household is the microstate of that system. "Nice" bodies  who “never hit me” but trained me to flinch with tone. Well-meaning bodies who passed on silence like recipes. Institutions that applauded my silence as virtue. Healing spaces that still demand me be palatable while “liberated.” I was broken by trauma. I was formatted by tradition. Then, there is love with its teeth bared. The guilt of not feeling “safe” even when they’re kind. Wanting to love but my nervous system is still in alert mode. Being loved without being expected to shrink: it confuses me. I try to love back, but sometimes it feels like self-betrayal. I confuse tension for passion, withdrawal for seduction, discomfort for destiny. Love shouldn’t feel like waiting for the other shoe to drop, but my shoes were always weapons. Even his kindness feels like a trapdoor. Even his softness is suspect. I scan his voice for volume, his hand for pressure, his breath for pause. My body watches him watching me, never present, only analyzing. And, it pushes me into rejecting both oppression and its neon makeover. Hypersexuality as their redemption arc of trauma, acting like the "saviourship" is their holy career. Even rebellion gets packaged: fishnets, red lips, moaning as manifesto. But what if freedom isn’t sexy at all? What if it’s quiet, dry, still, a little boring and that’s beautiful? They shamed my body because it wasn’t theirs to script. They told me my body was too much and not enough in the same breath. Too loud in its textures, too quiet in its curves. Too present. Too resistant to polish. Too resistant, period. I learned early that softness isn’t granted, it’s manufactured. And I was born unfinished by their standards. Untamed in the places they preferred glossy. I carry the kind of skin that history has punished. I grow the kind of hair they pretend doesn’t exist. I inhabit a frame that refuses their choreography. This body wasn’t built for your spotlight. It was built for survival under surveillance. And the most radical act? To want it anyway. To worship it not because it defies them but because it betrays their fantasies. My skin doesn’t glow, it absorbs. It remembers. It bites back. They trained me to think of myself in parts: too thick here, too flat there, too dark to be delicate. I wasn’t born for softness. I was born bearing the myths of ‘fixable.’ They never wanted to touch me. They wanted to edit me. I don’t want to be delicious. I want to be undigestible. I want to want the unsexy in me. To press my mouth against my own mess. To not just accept the folds and the funk and the failure, but to lust for it. To see the sweat patch and feel holy. To feel the ache in my knees and say yes, this is mine. Wanting the unsexy in me, wanting the unsexy on me, is the most radical thing I do. Because it means I am not here to be consumed. I am here to be claimed: by myself. I want to want myself when I’m bloated. When I’m bleeding. When I’m blank. When I’m unwashed, unwaxed, undone. I want to run my hands over the parts of me that never made the catalog. And still feel heat rise. Still feel home. And still... God, I wanted to be wanted. Not fixed. Not prettied up for display. Not lit with soft lighting and asked to pose. I wanted their want in the raw. When I was unruly, unplucked, unslicked. When I hadn’t prepared a face. When I hadn’t starved for it. I wanted them to reach for me when I wasn’t marketable. When I was bloated with rage, streaked with acne, or still sticky from crying. I wanted their hands not to cleanse me, but to tremble at me. I wanted their gaze to flinch not because I was grotesque, but because I was realer than what they were trained to desire. Because I had dared to want while unbeautiful. That wanting became a wound. That wanting became my leash. Because they didn’t want me. They wanted the obedient version of me. The edited version. The after-photo. And I still don’t know what aches more: being used, or being ignored. And, what if freedom is ugly? Slow? Undecorated? What if healing doesn’t taste good? It is freedom in the absence of performance, absence of prettiness. And, I feel like a fleshless ghost leaving the machine. I don't want to be a better performer. I want to stop performing. I want silence without being suspicious. I  want space that doesn’t demand an apology. I want to be able to stand in an empty room. Unwatched. Unexpected. And still not knowing what to do with my hands. I no longer want to ask to be understood and demand to be left unfixed. I’m not here to be healed. I’m here to misfire, malfunction, and make it impossible for your machine to run smoothly again. My desire is no longer yours to narrate. My body is not your audience. My moan is not your metric. Let me be unsexy. Let me pull underwear from between cheeks and still feel worthy. Let me itch my scalp mid-foreplay. Let me have dandruff. Let me be sacred in lint and leg hair and laundry-day bras. Let me smell like stress sweat. Let me fall asleep mid-touch. Let me laugh when I’m supposed to moan. Let my thighs jiggle with no apology. Let my armpits stink. Let my back sweat in patches. Let me have toilet paper stuck to my ass mid-kiss. Let me queef and not apologize. Let my mascara smudge and crust. Let me laugh with food in my teeth. Let me smell like last night’s fear. Let me be repulsive and still real. Let me fumble, twitch, freeze. Let me forget the choreography. Let me not want to be touched at all. Let me be whole in my stillness. Let me be loud in the wrong moments. Let me want nothing. Let me want everything. I want to kiss the crease in my body where shame used to live. I want to want the pimpled, the patchy, the peeling. The part of me that smells like real life, not rosewater. The part of me that jiggles wrong and aches right. I want to want the body that capitalism told me to Photoshop. I want to worship the sag, the scrape, the scab. I want the softness that doesn't sell. I want the hunger that isn't hungry for validation. Wanting the unsexy in me is not passive resistance. It’s an erotic uprising. Let me glitch. Let me wake up with a puffy face, a pimple in my cleavage, and morning breath that smells like existential dread. Let me wear granny panties on my period and still call it lingerie. Let my sex smell like copper and sweat and disappointment. Let my arousal not be cute: it’s swollen, confused, and full of air bubbles. Let it be holy in its awkwardness. Let it be divine like thunder, not delicate like lace. Let it be prayer and pus and pulse. Let it be mine.

- Oizys.

[Goddess on all her fours: gaping, growling, surviving. On her knees, in labor, bleeding through silk, scrubbing the temple floors of blood, bile, and bile-bathed scripts they once called seduction. She cleans with her own spit and grief, with ragged nails and ruined prayers, clotting her divinity. Not for absolution. Not for redemption. Just so no one slips again.]