The Tape Skips & Skips & Skips

by Urvashi Bahuguna

One minute, you are on your back in a black Honda Civic, passenger seat pushed all the way, giddy to be in a sun dress, giddy to desire and be desired in the lacewing dark. The next, you are barrelling into a bedroom four years ago. You say yes. Yes, as in trumpeter, play. Yes, as in you didn’t know a woman could be too closed to comfortably enter. Yes, as in you hadn’t considered you might need mercy. Yes. He cannot get in. He tears an entry—like any number of men, his first instinct, war. He forces in one bony finger, then another. The world an oyster, shucked & shucked in the candlelight. The world, a swirl of milky jazz and pain. Years later, the man you will marry asks if he has permission and you don’t know what to do with the story of your life. You can no longer bear to be touched. When someone draws close, you are a passenger inside your body bracing for impact. Searching for a cure, you learn mothers of small, clawing children know this song—skin crowding with the wings of a hundred crickets when they approach. If you cannot tell this man, then no other, you decide. If not this man, then no other, you despair. You tell him as a test, you tell him as a rinsing. The revelation not in any one pearled detail. What the men did. What the men didn’t do. The revelation is that you love everyone you have been with. That if you believed the pain necessary, it could end there (you didn’t have to know). The revelation is the shower drain spits up every time he comes near you now. You need time. You beat a retreat from the world of men. You remember sitting naked, deep into the coastal night in a balcony no one could see into, with a man smoking a joint because he could not perform. You’ve thought about that a lot, two years, five years, a decade after the fact, about what it is like to be imperfect and naked. To tell someone the story your body is telling in that moment, a secret it will only whisper in song. Shoulders husking over with unease. Throat tightening in interest. Jaw ticking with tension like a clock you must outsprint to stay alive. You love this man. You couldn’t put a bow on this if you tried.

Urvashi Bahuguna is an Indian poet and an essayist whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Adroit, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, Tahoma Literary Review, The Shore, Orion, SOFTBLOW, The Penguin Book of Indian Poets, and elsewhere. She is the author of Terrarium (The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective 2019) and No Straight Thing Was Ever Made (Penguin India 2021).