personal essay: susanna vogel
bruises
When my mother asked about my new boyfriend, I told her he opened Uber doors for me, and she liked that very much; I told my dad he always planned ahead, and he liked that very much.
It was true: he took me to dinner- the nice kind at the sort of restaurant featured frequently on Eater, places you needed reservations for- and he always picked up the check.
It was also true that we didn’t have sex: he preferred to fuck me.
He fucked me so hard that I made strange, involuntary noises, even when he demanded over and over again that I be quiet. I must have told him I liked it this way at the beginning, though I can’t remember doing so. I lay there picturing my body like a cartoon- an explicit, obscene thing cut from the Road Runner universe. I could see the noises jumping from my throat in purple tendrils of animated smoke: a reminder that he was fucking someone who could feel, even if I couldn’t quite articulate what it was I was feeling.
“Shut up,” he’d command gruffly, pushing my head further into the pillows.
Some nights the hoarseness of his voice scared me. I found that embarrassing. I'd start crying, then apologize for crying: tell him, this happens sometimes. Afterward, when I cleaned myself up in the bathroom, his hand would snake around my waist, eyes finding mine in the mirror.
“I love you,” he’d apologize, thumb brushing my hip. “That was amazing.”
Later, when he was asleep I’d pull up Facebook on my phone in the dark, squinting at it with one eye closed like I could remove myself from it. I’ve been checking the profile too often, and, if I had to guess, it’s led to more crying. The man who taught me about sex when I was a child has a child now of his own: a son. His profile picture is the baby boy smiling up at the camera. Babies don’t look real under the best of circumstances. I don’t believe this baby, but I can’t shake him. And so I find myself typing in his name, night after night, to find the photo, the saccharinely sweet announcement to the world that he’s a dad. I read the comments even though I have them memorized.
On nights when I go down this rabbit hole, I can’t sleep. Melatonin doesn’t help. I used to like sleeping beside someone - I liked the vulnerability of it. In a world where we self-regulate all the time, it is strange to relinquish control and sleep next to someone, knowing they will see you breathe when you won't be alert to how it sounds and see your face when you can't think about how you are holding it. This person gets a peak at your most private self. Sleeping next to each other is paint thinner for the soul, chipping away at our hard, outside-world shells to leave something tenderer, less made up, less performative.
I hope it’s not too heavy handed to say that I don’t want that right now.
Lately, I feel cold as I lie next to him. I lay awake running my fingers across my hipbones, thinking about how he grabbed them. I wonder if there’s something about me that fails to inspire gentleness, if he fucked his other girlfriends this way, or if he treats me like this because I’ve never learned the language to ask for something different.
A boy threw me down his front stairs once. We had just been to a Kings of Leon concert and- I can’t believe I have to say this- it was uncalled for. He tried to apologize afterward saying he thought I liked rough sex. We were not having sex.
In March, a boy told me that I should probably get hit in the face once a year. “Some people just need it.” He said later that he was kidding. It’s amazing how many times men will apologize to me and in the next breath say, “But you made me do it.”
I am fixated on the idea of fault. I think I should know how to ask to be treated better, but it’s hard to understand what that could possibly look like when even the men who say they love me comment that my body is the perfect size to throw around. There seems to be something about me that says, please, grab me by the throat.
Or, maybe, it’s not me at all. Maybe, this is just sex at 25. Maybe all over the city women are being whisked back home after nice dinners, pushed onto the bed, eyes watering, to cry mascara tears into the nice Brooklinen pillow cases while their nice boyfriends fuck them hard enough to remind them that men can do anything they want to women’s bodies.
about the writer: susanna vogel
You can learn more about Susanna Vogel on Instagram @susannavogel
