Younger Days
I wish I’d have appreciated my 18-year old body and taken care of it when it was close to perfectible.
That’s what I was ABOUT to tweet, until I realized it’s a lie. I *did* appreciate my eighteen year old body. I’d been appreciating my maturing body for years in front of the mirror, naked. Or in this one awesome pair of yellow string bikini panties, very eighties style, with the tiny triangle and the extreme V sitting up high on the hips. I remember the brand was “Eve” and I got them at Lamont’s. I danced around in those and fondled myself . . . admired myself from all angles.
When I finally got my own room at eighteen I took it to a whole other level. With privacy, I could light candles and make a whole elaborate masturbation ritual out of it. I’d put music on the stereo I bought myself, one component at a time from Crutchfield, and stand in front of my white mirrored dresser (an antique handed down to me from my mom) rifling through my panty drawer and meager selection of “sexy” stuff.
I almost always wound up pulling on a hot little ivory Christian Dior thong: lace in the back and satin in front with, again, a sweet dip down in the front punctuated with a tiny circle of faux-pearls. Then I’d have to choose between my two pairs of elbow-length gloves: white satin or white lace. You have no idea how much gloves turn me on. It’s not so much the wearing them (though I do like that, too), but looking at them on someone else.
So I would look at myself in the mirror but from a vast distance. I so wanted my gloved hands to be like other teenaged girls’ gloved hands: hot, with the satin stretched TIGHT and their soft, fleshy girl hands emanating sweaty uncomfortable heat. The other girls didn’t like to wear gloves, but FUCK I *loved* them and I wanted to be able to squeeze their hands and never let them go and stroke up and down their arms with my own satin gloves, or bare-handed, and have them squeeze me ALL OVER. Hot, fat, filled-out shiny satin arms and fingers over rustling dresses.
Anyway, my hands never looked that sexy in gloves — they looked thin and insubstantial like flat playing cards. But my arms looked delicious with the satin pushed down just enough to make wrinkles. In addition to being extremely turned on by gloves, I’m also extremely turned on by tight, wrinkled fabrics on long, slender girl arms or legs. Or fat girl arms or legs. WHATEVER. Point is, I still got very, very excited putting on my gloves and admiring myself in the candlelight.
I often switched back and forth between the two pairs of gloves. The lace ones reminded me of the Billy Idol White Wedding video and THAT brought to mind long-festering taboo fantasies of someone who looked (to me) just like him, but better . . . and worse. Rebel Yell, Eyes Without a Face, Sweet Sixteen, White Wedding, Dancing with Myself . . . yeah. Billy Idol fetish planted when I was way too little and he was way too recognizable for me to think it was silly or to resist it or analyze it.
Not that I thought about him when I masturbated. Not very much anyway. I mean, it would only have taken a few seconds of thought allowed to stray in that direction. What I would do, though, in the buildup, is I would arrange the candles in such a way that my shadow was projected on the wall. I’d inflate my chest to highlight a profile of my breast, then I’d have my hand come at it from an unnatural direction, like my boob belonged to someone else. I’d reach in and trace the silhouette of my breast. I’d pull away and reach back to touch and fondle it, over and over again, spying on this other person’s boob being teased and stroked. It’s always been WATCHING my breasts being touched that really initially arouses me. Without watching the hands on my boobs, the sensation of having my breasts touched is actually pretty boring a lot of the time.
I’d mount the corner of my mattress then, again with the candles arranged so I could spy on my shadow, and hump the edge of my bed until I came, over and over again. Sometimes I could just drag myself against the flat of my mattress and that would work, too. I’d watch the shadow of my boob hovering there, and dip myself down to make my nipple touch the mattress. It wasn’t part of the position that made me come, but the sight of that woman’s body touching and being touched made me very excited.
At that age I did feel lonely and wish I could do some of these things with a guy (which kind of doesn’t even make sense when I think about it). More than that, though, I felt a sense of loss that I was young and the only person who was admiring my body. I did feel very strongly that it should be worshipped and felt like the time to do that, the ripe teenaged time, would be over before anyone did.
Many times I felt like someone was standing outside spying on me. I even felt like I could hear them. But I tried to tell myself I was being paranoid and not to worry about it, because every time I tried to catch them, there was no one there.
As it turned out, of course there WAS someone there. Many different people at different times. Everyone from the guy I lost my virginity to, to the village idiot, to the felon who supplied the highest cop with pot (at least, that’s what we figured when we did eventually catch him outside my window and the cop said it was no big deal — he was just standing on cinder blocks he’d stacked up to peer through my blinds “to get high”). It was horribly embarrassing to think about, so I tried not to because there was nothing I could do about it. They’d already seen everything (even more than the masturbating) and knew all of my secrets. Except for the Billy Idol guy that was only in my head. I mean, they knew him too, but not that I thought about him that way.
*****
If I could go back I would nail up a billion blankets over those crappy fucking blinds. I would find a way to make it fair, to make myself paid and worshiped. For me to be the one in control. I know that because of the other things they saw me do, I was like a weird freak show to them, but they were total fucking freaks too and somehow that means I have a weird bond with them for the rest of my life.
I can still remember one of them, the one I had sex with, laughing at me when I was humping his leg without me knowing why he was laughing except that I guessed I was doing everything wrong, even though that was what was going to make me come. It wasn’t until later that I realized he was one of them and all the things he saw. It makes no sense how humiliated I still feel remembering him mocking me when I know now what a dangerously fucked-up individual he was/is. He had such an unfair advantage over me, but he probably thought the same thing of me just by default since he couldn’t last more than twelve pumps. Which of course I actually enjoyed, or WOULD HAVE enjoyed if he’d have gone again. But he never did. Of course, he DID go down on me, but I totally didn’t get that — it was such a foreign sensation that I’d never planned for even though I’d masturbated so often to images of other women’s pussies being licked. I don’t think I understood that I was more interested in going down on chicks than having anyone go down on me.
When I was young, the only true pleasure I experienced on my own terms was by myself. I guess I wish I would have accepted that, made myself more powerful (both physically and . . . spiritually?), and found the confidence and the people to negotiate those terms for myself. I know it’s shallow, but now that I’m older and I can see my body starting to disintegrate and loosen into loose flesh and little balls of fat and poison, I wish I would have ran as fast as I could for miles and taken dance classes and learned how to stretch and spent many many MORE hours in front of not just one mirror, but a fucking roomful of mirrors.
I wish I’d have known about getting paid to stomp on men. I wish I’d have had sex with women sooner. Like that hot Belgian pharmacist with the leather skirt I worked with.
SO MANY MISSED OPPORTUNITIES.












This hits so close to home for anyone over 18, I can see why commenters are absent. They’re speechless. Life give nobody a mulligan even if they happen to be Tiger.