If tomorrow someone asked me what’s different now, I’d tell them about how, before you came into my life, I was twirling bar soap in my hands. I’d rotate it quickly—once for every year I’d been alive plus one, during my obsessive-compulsive days—and then I’d transfer the suds to my body, wherever my small hands could reach. I’d do this for weeks, months, until the bar was flimsy and soft, entwined with dark-blonde blades of hair; and when I could bear its decay no longer, I’d open a new box, start over.
And then you said try this and held your loofah to my nape, liquid soap sliding down my back in gentle rivulets. We had finally agreed on a temperature, though it was still a little cool for me and a little warm for you.
I have never been to the mikvah, where so many Jewish women before me have bathed and prayed. But standing there with you, steam-touched and silent, suds dripping down my once-wayward spine, I felt I’d come awfully close.
Audre Lorde writes in Sister Outsider that the erotic does not just connote sex. It instead “functions … in providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person.” Of course, the erotic isn't merely about shared experience either. For Lorde, it is “the open and fearless underlining of [our] capacity for joy”—a self-awareness that, once achieved, demands that we pursue it.
“This is one reason why the erotic is so feared,” Lorde goes on, “and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all.” Indeed, men-y do not want us to realize that “our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence.” Men-y are afraid of how powerful we might become, should we discover how different, how joyful our lives can be. Should we learn that the erotic rises like steam whenever we say yes to ourselves. What if.
Right now it’s after midnight and I’m missing you, four hundred miles north of me. Tomorrow I will tell you all about my missing, its nature, its shape. But tonight I plan to turn the water hot, step in, and reach for my loofah. As I squirt liquid soap into one of its folds, I’ll be reminded of a day long ago when a nurse gave me a sponge bath, careful to avoid the bandages lining my back. Doesn’t this smell so good? she smiled, scrubbing my arms.
Like cherries, she said. Save some for me.
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Kyra Lisse is a first-year MFA candidate at Hollins University, where she studies creative nonfiction. She currently serves as Editorial Fellow for Jewish Book Council and as a nonfiction reader for Orison Books. Kyra's fiction and nonfiction have been published in or are forthcoming from Collision Literary Magazine, The Blue Route, plain china: National Anthology of the Best Undergraduate Writing, and Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, among others.