Listening

Seventeen

It’s a dim stipple memory, dark maroon in the backseat-upholstery not-quite-un-comfortable positioning of back against bench, a worn denim reminder of the seam of my jeans rubbing just… there… in the aftermath of hurried teenage date-night car sex.

My body saying, Feel this.

And while I didn’t know just what it was that I was feeling, I knew that it was pleasureful.

After that, I learned to listen for my heartbeat inside the pink nub at the crown of my center-thighs. I learned to make it race there and heard the call of heat when it thundered its lightning storm that soaked my slit.

I listened to my body.

And I stopped listening to his li{n}es.

Twenty-Four

We are nearly at an end. Good in bed and bad for one another, the continual-repeat of damning has killed the care but not the passion; we fight and we fuck and our anger with ourselves over it turns to ever more fighting.

I’m exhausted.

My too-soft heart has hardened and scarred; his too-hard head the ramhorns I finally, reluctantly — with great strength of will — refuse to interlock with.

We separate rooms.

Months later, we separate miles. My move west puts thousands of them between us, mimicking the distance our hearts have been feeling for years.

My body is throwing a tantrum. I want him.

But I don’t want him. Not anymore.

I ignore the shrieks of my sex drive, and instead I listen to my inner voice, calmly saying Leave.

And the only emotion I feel is relief.

Twenty-Nine

My reluctance at seeking medical attention rears its mulish head but I know I need to — I know it, there’s nothing else to do; this pain is too intense — and so I let him take me to the last place on earth I ever want to be and I sit, doubled-over in agony, in the waiting room until it is my turn to be seen.

An ultrasound — traumatic in its reminding effect of loss suffered — shows what the labs don’t: there are lesions on my ovaries.

The pain I’ve been overlooking — that I’ve been ignoring, pushing past, breathing through — is placed before me in bare x-ray imagery, its texture alien but its message bluntly clear.

The knot in my belly tightens hot and coiling and I heed its womb-damaged anger.

You cannot fix this hisses in damning echoes through the empty caverns of my new reality, and with stubborn pride I set about exploring my now axis-tilted world.

Forty

The soft-comfort cocoon of familiarity wraps around me like a blanket even as my sensory alarms begin to flash.

He knows me.
He knows what to do.
My body responds to this.
My body normally responds to this… Differently.

“Stop.”

What once brought familiar pleasure now brings unfamiliar discomfort. There is no exact reason, though the OB-GYN has recently warned me of the difficulty (given my age and my medical history) in discerning where one condition ends and the next begins, so I can venture an unhappy guess at What This Is All About.

We discuss it.

I listen to my body. To what and how it feels, to the scratches where once all was smooth, to the tight muscles and nervous hastened breathing, to the sensations accosting my nerve endings, one by one.

Interpreting these incoherent jumbled messages as best I can, I voice my concerns aloud to my husband.

I listen to what my body is trying to communicate.

He listens to me.

Listening

The key to effective communication is listening.

Not listening to respond with an argument or to plan your next turn to talk, but listening with empathy and with the point being to understand.

I had to learn how to listen to my body before I could effectively communicate what my body’s needs were.

I learned to recognize desire, to understand the force of my own arousal, and to enforce its satiation. I learned when that desire was best overridden and why sating its demands was at times tainted with pain. Years of struggling with PCOS taught me to heed the messages my hormones were sending me — on both a sexual and non-sexual level — and to respond in healthy ways to the sometimes painful demands my body made as a result. I learned to not ignore what I was feeling, physically. I learned to discuss what I was feeling, emotionally.

And I am still learning.

Because I am still listening. (Fortunately, so is my husband.)

And listening is the key to successful communication.

There is much made of talk when it comes to sex/ual/ity and the desires and drives that go along with it.

But in my experience, you can’t effectively talk about your body’s needs unless you first listen to your body.

I listen to my body.

And when I talk about what my body needs, he listens to me.

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