One of my most toxic traits is that for the longest time, I gave my body to those who asked for it merely as an act of service. Hedonistic approval seemed almost intrinsic to sleeping with someone—sharing a bed, interlacing hands, gingerly yet sporadically touching thighs like a pair of overeager palms singed by an open flame. By the time I started attending college I'd already had a few sexual encounters, something I simultaneously attribute and blame on an ever-rising need for external validation. My turbulent home life had left me both love- and touch-starved and it very much showed in how I visualized myself as a sexual object. Young, precocious and still Black-boy aligned, I figured if I couldn't please anyone with my successes, then perhaps I could find new value through my body.

Personally, I believe virginity is a silly concept. Up until high-school, I'd only heard it referred to as some ceremonious breaking of flesh and blood, shaping my earliest ideas of sex as a self-sacrificial act. Hearing the ways other boys described it didn't help. My older brother and his friends would talk shit while playing ball as I stood by the wayside at Mazzei Park, chain link fence imprinting on my wallflower hands. Their boisterous and graphic claims of "turning her out" conjured dreams of a lamb being brutally shishkabob'ed while nailed to the cross, bayoneted by brief-bound spears so rough that they could make even a veteran blush. The thought chilled my spine. Those afternoons I'd go home, shut myself in the bathroom and peer inside my pants, wondering how I'd ever sharpen my blade enough to tear through someone's insides, feel their flesh part like waves under the unyielding force of a chromed fighter jet. Dogfight seemed an apt term: two pitbulls wrestling for control in open space, faintly obscured, too close-quartered to fully recognize the other yet too intertwined to escape until one—or both—sinks undone into a deep, tranquil nothingness.

Yet as the years blurred by, my own spear began to take its shape. I hesitantly claimed bisexuality with a preference for women at fifteen years old, both because I'd hoped to leave myself open for a (then) mysterious urge for feminine intimacy and to shield myself away from the shrinking iron maiden compulsive heterosexuality caged me in. This strategy mostly worked until it didn't. My first contact, Dee, was a bright heather-haired dramatist a year my senior that I incidentally met as a freshman. Dee and I quickly trauma bonded over our shared hypersexuality and immigrant-child repressions (mine Cameroonian, hers Indian) and became extremely co-dependent. We'd interlope in beige-colored stairways during free morning periods and isolated fences afterschool, Dee evergreen to chew my ear off with spirited retellings of their theatre cast entanglements before painting my collarbone a New Age Van Gogh. Shoved against those chain links, the chilled iron bled its weight onto my skin. Every second or third full moon we'd have some occasion or event that permitted opportunity to sneak into my parent's place, a clay-red brick house sandwiched between five others with crimson awnings lined ash white. It was in that house's basement that we first explored each other's bodies.

I remember laying on the tiger-print cotton throw of the well-arranged guest bed, rising flush of our cheeks radiating as she slowly straddled me. I remember gently cupping her tanned ample breast, softly pressing two dimples into its sides while marveling at how they swelled to my touch, brushing my thumb against her areola before letting a sharp breath escape my lips. Deciding that wasn't very sophisticated nor manly (nor dykely, for that matter), I cobbled together a brave face and gently pressed my lips against her nipple, evoking an exhale of her own. Those first few times were both sexual and inquisitive—we coolly disguised our yearning as advanced prowess. Over time, however, our emotional walls slowly broke down; we began to lay our arms to the side, opting to blend our chests together and exchange hearts underneath.