In This Body: Lolita, Five Years Later
“leave it up to fate, my body will do what it will”
Our monthly column "In This Body" is comprised of true stories about sex, gender, the body, and love, written by Fiona George, for NAILED.
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Hi. I’m the one who loved more, in case you were wondering—in case you were hoping for a quick fix of validation—I’ll deal out security if you’ll promise I won’t be alone at night. And at the end, you said, you always loved me more: you let me believe you never did, you wanted me to work for your love. Remind me again, I was always too young for you to admit it.
No one wants Lolita five years later—you sure didn’t—no one wants to be the man who ages her—especially after you’re not the only one. But more than that no one wants to be the man who has her after. That weight. The responsibility, her tiny body, broken mind.
You never wanted to watch her desire die; you were never prepared for her to grow up, outgrow you and your worldly knowledge and all of those walls you made. To keep her safe. No one wants her after, to see her move to the next silhouette figure, she’ll fill with more love than a shadow holds for her. And she doesn’t want to see them step into the light, learn to be the one who loves the most, she wants to hold onto the idea behind the cold dark figure, she wants to imagine what it will be when they, finally; love her more than she loves.
By then, she’s gone.
Inside.
Under skin. It’s there: hot and red will swell and pulse, the wet sticky mess is tender and rough to the touch. And under the muscle you’ll find the parts that make me work, the heart and the liver and the kidneys—all the soft, slowly-killed mush. When you get to the bone, if you look close: something grows. In the deeper parts of the physical form; it forms—an idea, another shadow—it worms it’s way out of the marrow into the bone, the cartilage, the tendons, the organs—the swell of the uterus, the relentless noise of the brain—through the muscle and skin, until.
I took the morning after pill once, but I thought about not. In the middle of sex, I remembered that my birth control had run out, I thought about telling him to pull out. I didn’t. I thought about telling him: I had to take the fifty-dollar single-tablet to keep someone else from becoming—a new love, another love—inside me. But I didn’t. I thought I felt something happen when I thought I might not take the pill—something in my gut, my blood—leave it up to fate, my body will do what it will.
But it won’t.
I hold the thought in my marrow. It forms invisible. It worms its way into the conscious. To wait until the next time, I think I should ask him to pull out, till the next time, alone with one pill and that decision, that weight, on my soft stomach.
Alone is no place for a girl in the dark, inside that loss of arms, and the tug from the gut to be sufficient—take care of yourself—and the tug, from the chest, towards the warmth of other flesh. She thinks: she could be okay alone, but why would she. We are in love, she thinks: but what a pathetic place to be. She wants to be alone like she wants to walk barefoot through the snow: just to prove she can. Just down the driveway and back, not enough for her toes to go blue, to go to the hospital and hear words like hypothermia. Frost/Bite.
She wants the fire—inside, toes on the hearth and the tiny prints of ash—like she wants the man who managed to love Lolita, five years later—like she wants more than a silhouette—finally—she knows she needs the warmth and flesh—like she knows she’s in love—like she knows there’s nothing wrong with that, or snow boots.
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Read the previous In This Body: here.
Header image courtesy of Angela Buron. To view her photography feature on NAILED, go here.