Matches

I remember my mother telling me never to play with matches.

This is my first day with a cock, and trundling down the hallway of the Student Union building, it feels like a lit match, edging back and forth between my thighs.  I keep looking at it, shifitng a hand in my pocket to make sure it's still there, quiet urgency pressing at the edges of my consciousness, reminding me to let go, LET IT GO, lest the matchstick crumble and my fingers singe.

That's what this whole experience has been--trial by fire, smoke-choked, lungs burning, an endless boundless cresting sea of flame.  I hurt.  Sometimes I struggle to breathe.  My nerves, bare, throb relentlessly against the inside of my clothing, twitching and flexing and tensing against the heat.  I am red and raw, scraped, bleeding, blackened, searching for that boundary where the pain bursts through a final crescendo and I emerge, impervious, invincible.  If I can do this, I can do anything.

I am so afraid.  I am no Sly Stallone, Bruce Willis, Chuck Norris, or Steven Seagal.  I hate sports, and I hate pool, and I drink fruity pussy drinks with thick sugary mixers and tiny umbrellas, and I don't know how to dance, and I am shy and awkward and uncomfortable and short and my hips are too wide and my shoulders are too narrow, and my hands are small and sometimes I still shave my legs and I will never be able to do this, never be taken seriously, even by myself.

I know all of that.  I repeat it, endlessly, everything I'll never be spooling around inside my head like Shari Lee Lewis, until my mouth is dry and my hands are trembling and sweat beads warm and wet against my temples, and I can't stop.  I just can't stop.

I nudge my dick again, like an addict feeling their hip pocket before getting off the bus, or a mother looking in on a newborn in the night.  Just to make sure you're still there.  The tension is impossible,
one moment strung into another like beads of water sliding down a blade.  Do you know how hard it is to play hide and seek with yourself?

Clarke sent me an e-mail asking where I've been.  I don't know what to tell him, other than that everything is different.  That I've been here, crouching in the dark, bright heat in my chest and my pockets and my head.  That I've been playing with fire.  That my bridges have all caught, are all burning in my wake.  That there's just enough light from the match head to see my own face.  That even if nothing happens--if I can't do it, can't go through with it, change my mind--there is still the inevitable truth that nothing will ever be the same.  I am not as I was.  I don't know yet who I will be, but that person will never be again, and that in itself is transformation.