Fucking

Magic

Fucking Magic

by Clementine Morrigan

Published by Clementine Morrigan

Montréal, Québec

clementinemorrigan.com

Copyright © Clementine Morrigan 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without permission from the author, with the exception of brief excerpts used for the purposes of promotion or review.

ISBN 978-1-988178-00-4

ISBN 978-1-988178-03-5 (e-book)

Layout and design by Elen Kolev

Cover illustration by Alyssa XVX

Cover design by Jay Marquis-Manicom

Also by Clementine Morrigan

Rupture (2012)

You Can’t Own the Fucking Stars (2018)

Trauma Magic (2021)

Sexting (2021)

For everyone I’ve been.

Contents

Introduction

Swing Set

What It’s Like to Have a Body

Fucking Magic

Medicine

Sucking Dick is Part of the Process

Making It

Daddy Issues

Opening

Raining in Montreal

Raining in Toronto

Principled

Fuck Me Up

Resolve

The Tower

Kiss the Ground

The Beast at the Bottom of the Lake

Cuimhne,Misneach

Desire

I Remember You Then

Je suis prête

Lifeless Worlds

So So Safe

To Be Loved

Surrender

The Chromatic Scale

I Push Him Off Me

Eye Contact

We Are So Brave

Perfect Again

Tell the Truth

Young Girls

This is Where I Want to Be

You Are Good

Trauma Magic

Neurons That Fire Together Wire

Sickening

My Body Tells Me That It’s True

Hungry for Love

Fucking with Integrity

Cock Sucking Bisexual

Je t’avais dit non

Real Love

Sex Maniac

This World

Indigo and Violet

Alchemy

Home

An Archive of Hollows

Transformation

Taste the Silence

Return to the Water

Devotion

Carnelian4Rose Quartz

Like the Moon

My Voice Disappears

The Magic Comes

Queer Futures

Exhale

Melting

I Want to Hold Your Hand

See Through Blue

Freedom

Six Years Sober

Safe

Kill the Misogynist Bro in Your Head

Becoming a Forest

Remember

Write

Listen for Desire

The River

What I Need

Sluts Can Say No

Baby’s First Play Party

Finding My Way Back

Sober House

AnarchaMagic

First Love

We Carried This Message

The Wholesome Collective

Careful and Daring

Last Year

The Distance Between Us

Letting the World Love Me

Time Travel to the Present

Hurt

The New World Now

How I Learned to Relax and Love Eating Pussy

You Are Enough

Coven

Living Universe

Capable

I Want Him Dead

Calling

Joy

Two Rivers

Remember

The Only Way to Love

The Same Lesson

Gay Slut Life 2019

So Fucking Pretty

The Fire and the Swan

Still Alive

The Forest

Femme4Femme D/s

Still Crazy

Something I Can Trust

Love in the Apocalypse

For Mary

Swamp Milkweed

The Beginning of Spring

My Beautiful Fucking Life

Split Personality

Love Water Always

Incest Survivor Magic

Fingers

Power and Desire

Listening to Black Metal in My Therapist’s Office

Straight Girl Trauma

I Choose to Live

Nervous System Love

Be Gay Do Crime

You Are Sucking My Cock and I Can Feel It

River Slut

Queer Sober Dance Party

Do You Want to Kiss Me?

Violet

Punk in My 30s

Feel It All

Waking from a Dream

Cutting Fences

Grief

La fin de leur monde

I Still Think of You

Naked

Hitchhiking

If I’m Going to Be a Musician I Need to Practice Freedom

Family

Lipstick

Fucking by the Train Tracks

I Need to Write

Turn Back Into Stars

This is the Change

Cancel Me

The Fucking Pleasure of Being an Adult

Yours

We Went to the Ocean

Coming Back to My Body

My Wild Precious Life

We Don’t Crawl Before Anyone

Transformation Again

Wild Living Mourning

Safe Enough to be Curious

Ferris Wheel

We Did What We Were Capable Of

It Starts with the Water

Animal

This Love

Tell Me About Your First Time

The Abandoned One

The Tracks

Desire is Holy

Pandemic

Careful and Unafraid

Acknowledgments

About the Writer

Introduction

I started writing zines when I was twelve years old. They were a place for all my secrets, a place where I could put all my fear and pain and desire. I would go down to the end of my driveway and put the little red piece of metal on the mailbox in the upright position, indicating to the mail carrier that there was something there to be sent into the world. I’ve been writing zines ever since, and I have written many of them. I wrote them in active alcoholism. I photocopied them at the drop-in centre for street involved youth. I painstakingly wrote them by hand when I didn’t have a computer. I printed them at the public library. I traded them with strangers I found online or in the pages of Broken Pencil. I left them on buses and in public bathrooms. Zines are how I saved my life and how I became a writer. Zines are the place where I can say what’s true, what hurts, what I’m grappling with and moving through. Zines are the place where I can pour my anguish and grief and rage and persistent hope and stubborn desire. Zines welcome me exactly as I am, however I am. Zines don’t wait for me to be better, smarter, wiser, more healed, less problematic, less broke, or a ‘real’ writer. Zines welcome me now, as I am. And they always have. To this day I still make my zines like I’m in the 90’s: with scissors and glue. I still have a folder with all the hardcopies that I use to make my photocopies. I still fold my zines and staple them and put them in envelopes and send them to strangers.

I started writing Fucking Magic when I was 30 years old. I was five years sober and had just left a three-year long partnership. I was breaking open. I felt like I was dying and I was coming alive in ways I hadn’t been for years. Fucking Magic follows me as I heal from trauma at deeper and deeper levels, as I fall in love, as I claim polyamory and discover my sexuality, as I move cities, and go after my dreams. Fucking Magic bears witness to transformation after transformation as I step into my power and become the adult I always needed. I often joke that Fucking Magic is a mix of hot x-rated queer sex and super intense heavy trauma shit. It’s all that and so much more. It’s a prayer and a process and a struggle and a dream. It’s me falling on my knees in ecstasy, and grief, and exaltation, and surrender. It is the work of learning to really love, and feel, and live. Hard work for trauma survivors.

And Fucking Magic ends at a precipice, at the end of one chapter and the beginning of the next. It drops off into the abyss of the next adventure.

Here is Fucking Magic as a book, and a prayer, and a spell.

Swing Set

Can I write my way back into my body? Can these words work like a softening, an opening? Can I trace them like a string, like a cord, connecting me back to the beginning?

Years ago we sat on my back porch, my best friend and I. I was new to having friends, new to being sober, new to trusting anyone at all. I was preparing for my criminal injuries compensation hearing and the lawyer had given me a huge file to review. Read it, she had said. Get familiar with it. As if I wasn’t already familiar with everything he did to me. But I had to be prepared. So, I asked my best friend to come and sit with me. I read it out loud so that I didn’t have to be alone with it.

You know what he did to me. You know all the gritty details. You know about my childhood. You know. And you were supposed to be trust worthy. You were supposed to be my friend.

I read the words and my best friend listened. They listened while I read about the rapes and the physical violence and the names he called me. They listened while the details were laid bare: the ejaculation and the crying, the you look so sexy when you’re all sad and submissive. The mattress off the balcony. The hole in the wall the size of my body.

So I fell in love with my best friend. The feelings were reciprocated. It was supposed to be the first healthy relationship of my life. It was the right choice. The safe choice. I chose someone who already loved me. I went to their house and I laid in their bed and they held me.

It feels like all I do is swallow down pain and listen to you tell me it isn’t what I think it is. I’m caught in a cycle of loss but I don’t know that I am losing. I’m hoping you will remember that you love me.

I started to hate femmes. I started to hate myself. I was paranoid all the time. I tried to play it cool. I read about compersion and asked myself why I was so jealous. This wasn’t my first time being polyamorous and yet I felt like my insides were being shredded. I blamed myself. I sought a spiritual solution. I surrendered at the altar of my pain. I needed someone to blame so I blamed myself. I took the weight onto my shoulders and I worked hard at being better.

I did all the work. Read all the books. Initiated all the conversations. I dove deep. I started to hate my body. I started to hate my clothes and my hair. I started to doubt my sanity. My sexuality started to shut down but I continued to offer myself up. My sparkle was starting to dull. The lights were going out in my eyes.

Queer power couple. Date night. Selfies on instagram. Make it look good. Make is so believable that even I believe it. Find a place inside to hold the pain. Find a way to bury the truth. Dig a well for all the water. Keep down what can’t be true. It can’t be real.

Promising things will change but nothing ever changes. You never touch me anymore and when you do it is like I am not there. You say you love me. You say you want to be with me. You say you’ll work on it, we’ll work on it. But I’m left alone doing all the work. I’m tired of feeling so alone.

Nothing changes if nothing changes. My best friend taught me that. My best friend taught me so many things. My best friend cracked the world open and made things possible. My best friend showed me how to be sober. My best friend loved me. My best friend showed me how to love. But nothing changes if nothing changes. I finally tell the truth to another human being. The words break like a dam and come flooding out of me. My friend listens to me tell what is happening in my relationship, what has been happening for so long.

Years ago I sent my best friend a text. I said I hate how it’s awkward when we hug. I said I wish it wasn’t. I said you’re my best friend and I’m crazy about you. The text was not meant to confess my crush. It was just meant to be an attempt at vulnerability within this very important friendship. I knew my best friend was biking home so it would be awhile before they got the text. Anxiety ridden, I went into a park and went on the swings. I surrendered the outcome. I trusted the universe and I let my heart go.

When I got off the swings I checked my phone. My best friend said they felt the same way about me, that they had felt this way for awhile and didn’t know what to do about it. They had taken the I’m crazy about you to mean, well, I’m crazy about you. And they were saying they felt the same.

Years later our relationship is crashing and burning. I have refused to go back into denial and everything is painful all the time. My partner promises to get therapy but doesn’t. Months pass. My partner promises to go to meetings but doesn’t. Months pass. My partner acts like nothing has changed. Everything has changed. I can no longer hide the pain. We make small talk and I occasionally push this issue. I can’t do this anymore. More promises. More excuses. I can’t do this anymore.

I am riding my bike and I see the park in which I waited for their text message all those years ago. I stop and I enter the park. I am gutted. I know what is happening and I am sobbing. I make my way to the swings and I swing and I pump my legs. I sob these gut wrenching sobs and I know it has come full circle. I pray. I surrender. I give up all my love and all my hope and all my pain. Shaking, I take my phone from my pocket. Sobbing, sitting on the swing, I write a text message. I tell my partner that I am moving out. I am looking for a new place to live. I can’t do this anymore.

What It’s Like to Have a Body

Lavender and nettle tea. Green tea in my reusable mug. Attic bedroom overlooking Kensington Avenue. People walking on the street, checking out the shops, laughing. House plants and framed photographs of people I love. Candles on my altar. Incense burning by the window. Tarot cards. Back on social media. My world is slowly starting to get bigger. I am stretching my wings.

WhatsApp conversations with my best friend: LMAO OMG nail painting emoji. You deserve better. / Fuck this date is awful trying to figure out how to leave. / HANGED MAN. / Stay in the town!! / Thank you for witnessing. / Of course, anytime. Conversations over breakfast with my roommate. Talking about the ghost cat and the fairies, about art projects and essay writing, about trauma and spirituality, about sex and dating, on the floor laughing because there is no cat in the bathroom but we definitely heard a cat.

I can feel my heart opening to the world. I can feel the cool spring air moving through my ribcage. Venus is in retrograde. I have lived here for four months.

Music in my earphones, buying vegetables and walking through the market. Sparrows gather on the pavement. Snow comes and goes. I feel the tension start to melt. I feel the familiar throb of pain. What I tried so hard to stop from happening has happened. Again. I surrender but I don’t submit. I let life in again.

Procrastinating on paper writing. Meditating on the Virgin Mary. Reaching deep. Letting go of rigidity. Letting go of what other people think of me. Letting go of trying so hard to be in control. Letting go of trying to redeem myself. Letting go of shame.

Flirting, feeling, working out at the gym, going to my weekly boxing class, feeling the impact of fist against bag. Learning to trust, first, myself. Listening and learning the lessons of a responsive living universe. Practicing magic as embodiment. Remembering what it’s like to have a body. Following the diet my naturopath prescribed. Cooking my food. Making dinner at 2am sometimes and my roommate comes home laughing, asking me what I’m doing.

Letting my hair grow out. My natural colour for the first time since I was thirteen. I am thirty and I’m going gray. Your hair is different at your temples. / Yeah I’m going gray. / It looks intentional. / Nope, natural.

Remembering what it’s like to feel desirable, to feel seen. Remembering what it’s like to feel desire. Remembering desire like a fire at the centre of my being. Remembering what it’s like to love my body, to feel and move and breathe, unrestricted, not anticipating critical comments. Remembering what it’s like to feel like I’m enough. Remembering what it’s like not to try constantly to be something other than what I am. Remembering what it’s like to be a human being. Remembering what it’s like to feel safe. Remembering what it’s like to feel loved.

Breaking rules, not following suggestions. Going to therapy and telling my therapist that I’m not just a slut, I’m a feelings slut. Making the choice to date. Making the choice to start connecting with my sexuality again. Going on dates. Starting things. Ending things. Trusting my gut. Telling people when I don’t want to see them anymore, with kindness, and without excuses. Asking for what I want. Saying with clarity what turns me on and embracing the fact that it’s pretty vanilla tbh. Practicing ethical nonmonogamy, with the emphasis on the ethical. Catching feelings. Doing the ‘no strings attached’ thing. But either way staying grounded in my humanity and the humanity of those I am engaging with. Remembering that sexuality can be healthy and good.

Coming back into my body. These muscles. These curves. These arms. These hips. These breasts. This skin. Starting to feel like myself again. Catching my reflection in the mirror and liking what I see. No longer feeling like my body has betrayed me by not being able to be several different attractive models at the same time.

One of my best friends tells me they never knew me before, that I seem like an entirely new person now that I am free. My other best friend tells me that my light has come back on, that she saw me lose myself in that relationship, that I became a shell of myself, unrecognizable. Who is this new person? This old person? This sociable, confident, kinda even extroverted person? This brave person? This loved person?

Reading fiction for fun, wondering how far I can push my procrastination before it’s seriously a problem. Cutting myself a lot of slack. Letting joy be a priority. Letting pleasure be a priority. Spending a lot of time laughing. Using my library card again. Trying not to get late fees but not totally succeeding. Looking out the streetcar window, feeling the wind in my hair, against my skin. Smiling at strangers, feeling a stir of something.

I am starting to recognize myself. Structural dissociation integration work. I am not either exactly, I am both. Processing my feelings. Letting myself make mistakes. Letting myself breathe. Letting myself cry. Holding space for the pain which is breathtaking. Trusting that I’m where I need to be. I am exactly where I need to be.

I open my heart and I find that the world opens to me.

Fucking Magic

When I was a little girl I watched my grandfather want me. I watched his eyes on my body. I felt the strength of his arms when he grabbed me. The greasy stubble on his face. I lived in a constant state of normalized terror. Always waiting, watching, wondering. Always heart in chest and head spinning. The oldest girl, I felt responsible not only for myself, but for my sister and my cousins. I grew up in an environment of sexual violence, incest. His constant sexual comments and stares. The game they all called ‘slippery slobberies’. Him standing over our beds while we pretended to be asleep. He was after us, and the other adults did not care.

Do I have to start here? Does it always come back to this? How much therapy do I have to do until this is no longer my origin story? But it will always be my origin story. I can’t change what happened. I can keep digging and I can keep finding new layers of fucked up. Some things I can’t even write despite how I open I am. I can keep coming back to it and I can find new ways to relate to it. I can grow. I can change. I can heal.

At the same time, my body was changing. I remember the pleasure, wonder, and terror of it. I remember the tufts of hair under my arms and my tiny new breasts. I remember the bursts of pleasure, sickening and addictive. I remember promising myself not to touch myself and then doing it anyway. Feeling sick and awful afterwards. I remember shame. Deep, permeating, all-encompassing shame. And that shame stays with me today. Gut level. Bone level. Sex is terror and violence. Sex is wrong, dangerous, invasive. Sex is all around and never named. Sex is the root of my trauma and yet I am still a sexual being.

I’m in her bed and we have both come, wrapped in each other’s arms, bodies pressed into each other. It feels good and I love the little breath she lets out as she runs her fingers over my shivering body. She changes positions, moves between my legs. Suddenly, she shoves fingers inside of me. Too big, too much, too fast. I want her to stop but I don’t have language for stop. I say my secret prayer that she will read my body language, my sudden silence. But she goes on fucking me and I leave my body. I can feel it happening but I also don’t feel anything at all. I have moved backwards, out through the back of my head, into the mattress and down into the bed. I can feel the words but they are more like sounds and they are unspeakable.

I was a queer kid sexually attracted to girls instead of boys. I discovered porn on the internet and was horrified by how gay I was. I was deeply in love with my best friend and she was girl. Sex was bad and dangerous already. Incest was the context in which I first became aware of sexuality. Homophobia put the nail in the coffin. I was disgusting. Sexual. Wrong. A boy in my class said let me see your hand and he smelled it. Is this the hand you write with? I gave him my left hand. See! It smells like fish. You touch yourself. You masturbate. I was mortified. I started putting ziploc bags over my hands when I touched myself, rubbing my skin raw with soap afterwards. The shame was so big and so wide it swallowed up my whole being. I wanted to die. I didn’t want to have a body anymore. I didn’t want to feel those sick sweet feelings that I liked so much.

I was drugged and date raped by a woman when I was seventeen. Another woman told me the reason I needed to use my hand to come was because I was fucking dudes, that what I needed was to be fucked by a woman. She fucked me on the ground there in the park and it was awful. I couldn’t come and she treated me like shit from then on. I can’t even count how many times men have raped me. How much sex I just laid there for and stared at the wall. How many things have been shoved up inside of me as I my eyes glazed over and I chose to be somewhere else. How much sex I was too drunk to consent to. How much sex I don’t remember at all. How much violence and coercion, name calling and terror, love and broken hearts, violation, humiliation, hands around my throat, condoms taken off without permission. I time travel. I rise above my body. I exist and I don’t exist at all.

I learned to love fucking as a drunk, a slut, and a sex worker. I don’t want to glamorize those years because they were depressing as all hell. I romanticized my pain. I acted like I didn’t care at all. I let men use my body and disrespect my humanity, mostly for fun, less so for work. I had a hard line with work because I knew that people kill whores. So I worked sober and I was more choosey. But for pleasure I surrendered myself to the violence of men. I sought love from men who thought of me as trash. I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t know how to find actual love, I didn’t know what it looked like, what it felt like. I didn’t even know that love was what I wanted. I was assaulted often. I was told I don’t kiss sluts by dudes who loved fucking me. I spent days in front of the toilet vomiting, dry heaving, and shaking.

But during those trauma years I learned to love fucking. I learned to come like crazy pressed against a perfect stranger. I made money sometimes and sometimes I just got off. But I learned to love fucking. I didn’t get rid of the shame but I put it out of sight somewhere. I became someone who could be sexual. Someone who could feel desire and act on it. I learned what I refer to as my slut skills. I navigated danger with ease. I was brave and brazen. I carried condoms in my purse or tucked into my knee high socks. I played music in the other room to make the dude think someone else was home or left some other shoes by the door. I got the money first and put it out of sight. I found my way back from the strange places I ended up in. I discovered this sparkle, this vast expanse of pleasure. I found a way to feel my body, to pull myself close to the person I was fucking and crack open the pain.

I’m at the doctor’s office getting treated for an STI. The nurse is really cool. We are talking about fucking and risk and how I should go about disclosing to my partners that I caught something. She says No one ever talks about the risks associated with not having sex. And I love her for saying that. Getting an STI has flared up my shame, reminding me that sex is dirty and dangerous, inherently bad. That I am fucked up and dangerous for having caught something. But yeah, what about the risk associated with not having sex? For some people not having sex is healthy and good, not risky at all. For me sometimes what I need is to not have sex. But abstaining from sex is always painted as risk free (even as it is also framed as abnormal) and having sex, especially certain kinds of sex, is loaded with risk. Sexless years spent shut down and cut off from my body, years spent choking on shame, unable to touch myself, riddled with self-hatred and disgust, like yeah, there’s risk there. There’s risk for me in re-inscribing the narrative that sex is bad and dangerous. As an incest survivor, as a rape survivor, I cannot afford to buy into the narrative that sex is bad, dirty, disgusting, dangerous. I tell the nurse I’ve been reading safer sex literature since I was a teenager and honestly no one says anything about scissoring. Like really how risky is it? She laughs, That mythic lesbian sex act, either it’s all queer women do or it doesn’t happen at all. I laugh, give her a look, It’s definitely a thing though. She smiles, But really, there aren’t studies on this. No one invests money into researching the sexual health of queer women. So the answer is, we really don’t know.

My first love was bisexual and slutty too. He was a survivor of child sexual abuse too. He had done sex work too. I held him in my arms and I didn’t judge him when his trauma stuff came up. We had queer sex and we held space for each other. I told him about my sexual history. Laughing and playfully I told him about all the sex I’d had. It seemed safe to do so because he was open about his. It seemed safe to do so because it was obvious I was a slut and he was into me anyway. He taught me how to ride a bike. We spent the summer riding around the island. I had never been loved before and neither had he. We had sex sober. We held hands and smoked weed in the park. I loved him fiercely, deeply, truly. And then, slowly, suddenly, it started. His rage, his violence, his hatred. Flipping the furniture. Grabbing the bong out of my hands and throwing it off the balcony. It came on sudden like a flashflood, apparently unprovoked, but always for the same reason. You’re a fucking slut. It’s fucking disgusting. Running your pussy all over town. Do you think any man could love you after what you did? My first chance at true love, my soul mate, the love of my life. This beautiful, broken human being. This person who knew deep down like I know the terror of violence, the unspeakable horror of violation. This person who I loved so much and he was slipping away. He couldn’t love me because I was a slut, he hated that he loved me because I was a slut. That’s what he told me. I adamantly disavowed my past. I swore up and down that I would take it all back, trade it all in for his love, if I could, and I meant it. I meant it deep in my bones. Our love was the only thing in the world that mattered, it was the only thing that was true. Fucking slut, do you know who you’re fucking with? On the ground with him on top of me, knee to my chest, cutting off my breath. I loved him so much.

She kisses me on the beach in the freezing cold. We walk along the shore talking about how much dudes suck and looking at the winter sculptures. On our third date I invite her over to my place and we drink tea. I am terrible at expressing desire for other femmes. She is beautiful and smart and cool. Sober dating and lack of gender roles makes this difficult. But more than that, and deeper than that, my all pervasive sexual shame is more pronounced with women. Men seem to absolve me of responsibility for my desire by being so obvious about their own. And homophobia, queerphobia, biphobia, heterosexism, misogyny, and trauma have left their mark. We talk about the awkwardness and the difficulty of hitting on other women. She kisses me goodbye at the door. I text her to say maybe next time we’ll make out. She says she’d like that. It takes us seven dates before clothes start coming off and I enjoy every minute of it. I enjoy the slow process of feeling each other out, of feeling safe enough to go for it. I find a kind of desire I haven’t known before. It is slow, unrushed, multidimensional. I look into her eyes.

I got sober when I was 25. 12 step meetings every day for more than seven months. No more alcohol and no more drugs. Lots of therapy. Lots of work. My sponsor told me to change my number, to get rid of the numbers of all the guys I was fucking. It was a painful and difficult choice but I wanted to stay sober more than anything. I wanted to change my life. So I did what she asked. I stopped having sex for the first time in my adult life. At five months sober I went through my rape trial. A five day jury trial in which I had to say all the awful details while he was in the room. I didn’t look at him. I looked at the defense lawyer or my little cup of water. I didn’t exist. In some ways I had never existed. He was found not guilty and he rose up his arm in celebration. I went home and I laid in my bed, the same bed he raped me in. I didn’t drink. At seven months sober, against the advice of a lot of people, I started dating. I loved it. I had some fucked up experiences. I let a random dude pick me up at a library and went to a cheap motel and fucked him. The sex wasn’t good. The sponsor I had at the time said If you want to be promiscuous in sobriety, you can do that. My advice is to find people with good sobriety who are promiscuous and ask them about it. I love her for that response. I didn’t know if I wanted to be promiscuous. I didn’t know what I wanted. Sexual shame was still crushing me and now I didn’t have the booze to dissipate it.

I can’t write my proposal for my final research project for my masters degree until I have figured out what to feel about sex. Maybe it doesn’t seem related but it’s related. Sex is sequestered off, partitioned from the rest of my life. I have survived by keeping sex separate. All this integration work, plus leaving an unhealthy relationship, plus close to five years of sobriety, has unleashed sex from its trappings. I am undone. I am fucking people again. I am feeling things. And it’s driving me crazy. It’s making me feel crazy. Can I be a sexual person and still write this research project? Can I be a sexual person and still read fiction for fun? Can I be a sexual person and still be a good person? I talk to my therapist about it and I tell her I might be a slut after all. I am surprised to find that I am down for hookups. But it feels different from my drunk days. It feels different because I am present, because I am being honest with myself and the other person, because I am not pretending to be okay with being treated with disrespect. It feels different because it is coming from a place of love and care, for myself and the other person. Even though I don’t know the person well, we are sharing intimacy, we are communicating in a language I remember deep in my bones. I don’t ghost. I am careful. I do my best to be careful. To handle both of our bodies and hearts with respect and care. My therapist is mostly supportive but she worries about my safety. I almost want to roll my eyes at this. I tell her about my slut skills. I tell her about the knowledges I’ve developed from sex work and sluttiness. I tell her I know how to do this.

I started dating my best friend. They were six years sober and I was not yet two. I put them on a pedestal. I didn’t yet know who I was, who I could be in sobriety. I still thought of myself as the girl in a blackout, glazed over eyes, screaming incoherently. I still considered myself to be trash. I believed I was lucky to have them. I was used to being the disposable drunk slut. I was used to being screamed at, hurt. I was used to 3am texts, You up? I was not used to being cared about. My best friend cared about me. They told me they loved me long before we were a couple and I didn’t know what to say. What was love without sex? What was care? But once we started dating things started to change. They were emotionally unavailable, avoidant, cold. Preoccupied with other people, dismissive of me. I started to float away from my body. I started to desperately try to figure out how to be lovable again. I put up with so much shit but I thought I had so much more than I deserved. Years passed and my body shut down. I disappeared again. I developed a hatred for my body and sexuality that I didn’t even have during my drunk days.

We matched on bumble and have been messaging on and off for a few hours. Now I’m at the gym on the stationary bike and I’m still messaging and laughing to myself and smiling at my phone. After getting to know each other a bit and flirting we get to the whole What are you looking for? thing and I tell him I’m nonmonogamous and open to a number of different things. I can do casual but only if it’s respectful. He says We should get together some time. When are you free? I say I’m at the gym right now, in your area actually. I could come by tonight. He is into this idea. So I shower and throw on my clothes and start walking to his place. I stop at a convenience store to buy condoms just in case. I remember this. I feel like a slut and it feels good. At his place we talk awkwardly, both of us shy. I laugh a lot. I ask him how he’s feeling and if he’s feeling good about this. He says he is. So we start making out. He pulls me on top of him and we kiss and it feels amazing. We have absurdly hot sex, stopping periodically because it’s too intense and sometimes I dissociate when it’s too intense, so I need breaks. He is cool with this. After a bunch of orgasms he gives me some pajamas and I sleep in his bed.

What if sex is a practice like magic? What if there is no shame in desire? What if sex no longer needs to be separate from the rest of my life like a dirty secret? What if it’s possible to be sober, spiritual, ethical, happy, healing, and slutty, all at the same time? Sometimes I like to hook up with people I have only just met. Sometimes I like to go slow and won’t even kiss on the first date. I just like to tune into my body (my body which still exists). I just like to feel the vibe between me and the other person, the energy flowing between us, and to do what feels good for both of us. Practicing sluttiness in