Voice

The first time someone wanted me and couldn’t see me, something inside me cracked open.

Covid closed the world and opened a door I didn’t know existed. Everyone was online. Everyone was bored, isolated, performing normality through screens. I found a virtual world. Avatars. Voice chat. People from everywhere. And something about the anonymity of it unlocked a version of me I hadn’t met yet.

Desire had always been external. Something done to me. Projected onto me. Extracted from me. Men looking. Men commenting. Men deciding what my body was worth and me adjusting the price accordingly. I’d had eating disorders since I was a teenager, on and off, because my body was never mine. It was a thing that existed in other people’s opinions.

But here. Behind a screen. Through a headset. There was no body to judge. Just a voice. Just words. Just the electric, terrifying intimacy of someone wanting you for the sound of you. The mind of you. The version of you that exists when you can’t be seen.

I had partners. Multiple. Different time zones. Different accents. Different lives pressing up against mine through fibre optic cables and shared silence. Some of it was playful. Some of it was filthy. All of it was mine.

That’s the part that mattered. Mine.

Not performed for a boyfriend who’d cheat anyway. Not offered to a husband who’d reject it. Not shaped around what someone else needed me to be.

I explored. I said yes to things. I said no to things and the no was respected, which was novel enough to make me cry the first time it happened.

People will read this and think it’s sad. A woman finding intimacy through a screen. And maybe it is, from the outside. From the inside it was the first time desire felt like something I was doing rather than something being done to me.

I haven’t reclaimed my body yet. That’s the honest bit. The mirror is still a negotiation. The eating disorder still circles. The voice in my head still sounds like every man who ever had an opinion about my waist or my thighs or my worth.

But my voice. My actual voice, in the dark, through a headset, reaching someone thousands of miles away. That I own.

That, nobody gets to take.