The Sparkling-Eyed Boy by Amy Benson

Author:Amy Benson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

An Aside About Sex

Whatever you’re thinking, whatever evidence to the contrary, this book is not about sex.

I remember fighting on the phone when I was maybe nine or ten with the girl who lived across the street from us in Detroit, the girl my sister and I vied for throughout elementary school. I don’t remember what I’d done, but she yelled at me, said I was schizophrenic and I needed help. Though she was probably just throwing out a word she’d heard somewhere, I was shocked at what I thought was her clairvoyance. I was so changeable, I was a danger to myself, to others. She had seen through me. I thought I knew what she meant—that I was a different person to every person. That I tried to carefully control my image, make myself what I thought someone needed me to be in the moment. I have been, all of my life, a private person, secretive even, consulting a baroque manual to see what’s safe to say or do. This one might like me if she knows this snippet but not that one; he will smirk at this gesture but grin at that. Though I have said too much already, I want you to see me as unassailable. So let me get close, because I want to tell you and I want you to believe that this is not about sex, none of it. There are things at stake hère for which sex is a poor substitute, and I am whispering this in your ear.

When do we have sex? When we’re happy, sad? When we can turn our bedrooms into a stage? When our hormones lead us to it almost entirely of their own accord? When we feel that the noises of our bodies, the texture of our arches and thrusts, are too precious to escape the notice of another? When we are bored and can’t think of a good reason to say no? When we are trying to prove to ourselves that we are, in fact, beautiful, powerful, alive; or, conversely, bruised, careless, and expendable? When we find someone with whom, for whatever reason, we are willing to take the greatest risk: the risk of realizing mid-act that he or she is not it. You may love this person so that you daily weep with adoration; still, he or she will never be the real object of sex. The real object is a nonobject. No matter the position we take, we will never possess what we desire. We will never even embody it, because what we desire is something beyond our skins, beyond the skins of our partners. And since we take this risk, we must also be ready to hate them—in fact, we must already hate them just a little bit so that we might someday discard them—saying, You, you have failed to make me happy, failed to make me rise above myself for more than a moment at a time—and then forget our own failures, our inability to make our moans give noise to every feeling for which sex is a substitute.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.