If I didn’t have a Spinal Cord Injury today, I’d be 6ft, a lean 160lbs, broad shoulders, soft musical hands, and long agile legs. My body would fit the standard attractive body like a glove. I would bike, run, hike, play ultimate frisbee, climb trees, swim, go streaking through the wilderness. I would play piano, and pick up other instruments with ease. I would go dancing, and move my hips better than any white boy in the club (the ocean that stole my body away at least told me some secrets about the hips).
And I would fuck. I would make love day and night.
It would be dirty.
It would be sloppy.
It would be hot and sweaty.
It would be weird.
It would make us laugh.
It would stink of love.
It would be soft like the breeze cools the sun.
It would be
our drool on each other’s skin
creating rivers that flood our body's creases and folds
wetlands manifested by our mouths
feeding each other the flowers we pick from our chests
drawing maps with our tongues so their seeds know where to grow
we would go low
we’d flood each other with moaning storms
i’d never wanna be dry again
only a sponge soaking you in
But here I sit, sedentary, and in many ways bound to my wheelchair. Stuck writing love poems for my body, and for yours. Dreaming of our sensation engines to ignite again.
This injury comes with countless corporeal puzzles, and none harder to piece together than that of sexuality and intimacy. How do I experience physical intimacy when I can’t move or feel 90% of my body? Especially when before my injury my body was a well for my expression.
Even though I never had sex before my injury, the physical side of intimacy had already made itself known. I felt it in the way I played outside. Always barefoot, dirt under my fingernails, usually in a tree somewhere. There was an electricity that coursed through my body, a curiosity, a laughter that lived inside of me. It lived in my fingers when I played piano, it was in my muscles when I pushed my body to its limits, it was in the way I found intimacy with myself.
Although I’ve had sex and been physically intimate with lovers post injury, I’ve found it difficult to experience romantic intimacy with them. The lovers I’ve been with have been very good friends of mine. We’ve shared a vital closeness that I’ve never had with anyone else, a closeness that a lot of folks with disabilities have never experienced. But as time has gone on I’ve begun to realize that I long for passionate intimacy. The kind of love they tell us only exists in movies, poems, and music. The kind of love that’s hard to find even with a body that fits the societal standardness of attractiveness. And over the years I’ve sought this love from people who haven’t reciprocated the same feelings. People who I’ve wondered if they would reciprocate those feelings if I never had a Spinal Cord Injury, if I was “hotter” and “stronger”. Or was it because I’ve been stuck inside my own internalized ableism for so long, feeling like I could never have the kind of intimacy I long for because “no one I love will ever love me as long as I live in this broken body”. Maybe my body is not seen as sexy and erotic, because I don’t let myself or I don’t know how to experience my body in those ways.
So as I get older and more settled into this strange body, the more it becomes clear that the puzzle of sex and intimacy is about finding intimacy within myself. The fire that lives within me. Lovers are waiting, nature is always present, but it’s up to me to open myself up to the poetry and magic of life. Once I give myself over to poetry and magic, curiosity and playfulness will take over.
I can breath orgasms.
I can climb trees with my mind.
I can hold you deeply with my eyes.
I can hear every part of my body you touch.
I can feel the patterns of life with every beat of my heart.
Don’t get me wrong, I will forever starve for touch, full body hugs, a full blown erection followed by an electric ejaculation, feeling so tangled up in someone else’s body that you can’t tell whether or not they’re trying to steal your soul. It is an evolutionary crime that my spinal cord will not heal on its own, and I will forever grieve my old body.
But there are deeper kinds of intimacy out there. So what kind of intimacy can be conjured with poetry, magic, curiosity, and play? I believe it to be a magnetic love so deep that God and Nature itself could never have imagined a place so warm and so full of home.