I hated that bed. It was so soft. A very soft, very expensive mattress with an enormous down pillow topper. I'd just sink into it and feel like I was drowning. Sometimes I'd pretend the dog peed on the pillow topper and then leave it, a mountain, bunched up in the hamper for as long as possible before my partner started complaining about it being missing. It never occurred to me that I could just tell my partner that I wanted a different mattress setup. I had no communication skills.
So late one night after my partner was asleep, when I got up out of that horrendously soft bed and tiptoed to the bathroom. When I slowly, very quietly, squatted down on the black and white tile floor and started to investigate myself for the first time. When I touched myself alone for the very first time ever and experienced my first orgasm. When all that happened, well, I didn't know how to communicate about that either.
We were very young, and we grew up in the south. We didn't believe in sex before marriage. I felt so much shame around it all that I just dried up inside before I ever knew I was a flower.
Blooming was hard. In some ways that first orgasm was the point when I chose to feel loneliness. My fiance had a trust fund, and a loving family, and we all were very happily codependent. I didn't need to have a job if I didn't want to work. His dad was an ER doctor and we had great health insurance. The church told us what to think about all the hard things. It was a very safe and comforting life.
I was having panic attacks. The whole world was beginning to feel like that too-soft mattress. One night while I slept would all those soft down feathers just completely encase me? Would there be anything left of me except what I was surrounded by?
When I left my partner, I said "I don't want to marry you, and I don't believe in God."
That was true. But the third thing I couldn't say was, "I have become a sexual being and I don't know what that means."
Written by Sunny Allen