After Dark

I didn’t know what I wanted. Not really. I knew what I’d been told to want. What I’d been allowed to want. What I’d performed wanting for someone else’s benefit. The real wanting was underneath all of that. Waiting.

After the marriage. After the silence. After the years of being told I wasn’t attractive and the years before that of being told I was only attractive in the ways that served someone else. After all of that, there was a question I’d never been allowed to ask.

What do I actually want.

Not what does he want. Not what will keep the peace. Not what performs well. Not what a woman my age is supposed to want according to the magazines and the culture and the voice in my head that still sounds like every man who ever had an opinion.

What do I want.

The answer was complicated. Obviously. Because desire built on damage doesn’t come out clean. It comes out tangled. Beautiful and broken in the same breath. Fierce and frightened. Wanting and ashamed of wanting.

I explored. Online first. Through screens and headsets and the safety of distance. Through conversations that started at midnight and ended at 4am and left me breathless and confused and more alive than I’d felt in years.

I discovered things about myself that surprised me. Things that didn’t fit the version of me I’d been performing. Things that were mine and private and didn’t need to be explained to anyone or justified to anyone or approved by anyone.

That privacy was the revelation. Not the desire itself. The privacy of it. The absolute, non-negotiable ownership of my own wanting. After years of my body being public property and my desire being managed and my sexuality being someone else’s to approve or reject.

This was mine.

Not all of it was healthy. I know that. Some of it was damage wearing desire’s clothes. Some of it was the old pattern. The attention-seeking. The validation-hunting. The confusing of being wanted with being worthy.

But some of it was real. Genuinely, actually, my-body-my-rules real. And learning to tell the difference between the damage and the desire is the work I’m still doing.

The work is slow. The work is private. The work happens at midnight in the dark with a headset and a honesty I’ve never given anyone in person.

But it’s happening.

And for the first time in my life, the wanting is mine.