I Discovered I Only Came Inside My Own Head

I’m going to tell it exactly as it happened, without embellishment. It took me half my adult life to understand something that now seems obvious to me: the pleasure that truly belongs to me never came from another person’s hands. It came from my own, and from what happened behind my eyes when I closed them.

With my first boyfriends, I never got past caresses. We touched each other in the back seats of cars, in dark doorways, in my room with the door ajar and the fear that someone might come upstairs. We always postponed the end, as if that end were a border neither of us dared cross all the way.

I would masturbate him with my hand until he came over my chest. Sometimes I would take him in my mouth and let him finish there, swallowing, with that mix of modesty and curiosity I had in my early twenties. He, in return, would slide his fingers into me, work me until I was soaked, and I’d reach a kind of warm, incomplete orgasm that never quite satisfied me.

I wanted to arrive at marriage intact. It was an idea they had planted in my head and that I defended as my own back then. That’s why I avoided the other thing, what I called in a low voice “the end,” as if naming it made it more dangerous.

***

The one who broke that boundary was a man older than me, divorced, with no patience for half-measures. His name was Tobías and he always smelled of cigarettes and a cheap cologne I still remember. He didn’t want endless caresses or promises. He wanted bed, and the first night he took me there without beating around the bush.

When he penetrated me, he frowned.

—You’re not a virgin —he said, almost reproachfully.

I froze. I thought I was, in the only sense that mattered to me then. I explained the bicycle, that brutal fall against the bar when I thought it had split me in two. I told him about a medical checkup years earlier, about someone else’s fingers and a pain I hadn’t understood at the time. I said it out loud for the first time, and saying it awakened an old rage in me.

—It doesn’t matter —he replied, and kept going.

But it did matter to me. That night I understood that my body had kept stories I had not chosen, and that pleasure and pain had been mixed together in me from much earlier than I had believed. Tobías finished, satisfied. I lay there looking at the ceiling, still burning, waiting for something that didn’t come.

***

Then came Renzo, a coworker. What we had was pure desire without a name, an urgency that lit up at six in the evening, when the rest of the office emptied out and only the two of us were left, along with the hum of computers on standby.

We locked the doors, pulled the blinds down. He would shove my underwear aside with one hand while with the other he unbuttoned his pants, and we’d do it on the conference table, or standing against the cold wall, or in his rolling chair that slid with each thrust and made us laugh between gasps.

It was exciting in a way few things ever were. The forbidden nature of the place, the risk that someone might come back for a forgotten charger, the silence we had to maintain when a security guard walked past in the hall. All of that made me tremble.

And yet, once again, he finished and I didn’t. Renzo ended with a groan and collapsed over my shoulder, and I was left with ragged breathing and a fire between my legs that would not go out. I’d pull up my stockings, straighten my blouse, smile as if everything had been perfect. And inside, I burned.

What’s wrong with me that no man ever quite gets me there?

That question haunted me for years.

***

The need didn’t go away with the encounters. On the contrary, the encounters fed it. That brush of skin against skin, those hands searching for me, that carnal contact I wanted so badly left me on the edge and never on the other side. I’d come home overheated, throbbing, with my body screaming for something the other person had not given me.

Then, alone in my apartment, I would begin what it took me so long to recognize as my true sex life. I undressed slowly in front of the bedroom mirror. I looked at myself. I traced my breasts, my stomach, the curve of my hips, and at last I understood that this body so many had touched was still a territory only I truly knew.

I stroked myself hard, without the clumsy delicacy of the others. My fingers knew where, how much, at what pace. And while I touched myself, I let imagination do the rest: I invented scenes, voices, hands that held me down against my feigned resistance, men who demanded things of me and to whom I, in the secret script in my head, ended up yielding.

It was my own game, a one-woman theater where I wrote every line. There, and only there, I came. I came for real, with my whole body, with that rush that runs from the nape of the neck to the soles of the feet and that no lover had ever known how to give me.

***

With time, I stopped feeling ashamed. I bought toys. I learned to use them the way a musician learns her instrument, with patience and an ear for it. I discovered that lingering was part of the pleasure, that delaying the finish made me enjoy it more when I finally let it explode.

I talked out loud when I was alone, stretched out on the bed with my legs open and the light low. I said things I had never told anyone. I gave myself orders and denied them at the same time, played both roles, the one who asks and the one who resists, and in that contradiction I found a vertigo that drove me wild.

—Don’t stop —I’d tell myself, my voice breaking—. Keep going.

And a second later, in a different whisper:

—No, not like that, let me.

It was my fantasy and mine alone. No one got hurt in it, no one was left out of the script. I controlled every word, every gesture, every limit. What in real life would have terrified me, in the safety of my head became pure desire, manageable, mine. That was the difference it took me so long to understand: fantasy was not an escape from pleasure, it was the place where pleasure finally obeyed me.

***

Now I have someone. His name is Damián and he is honest about what he wants, just like I am. We don’t promise each other everlasting love or candlelit dinners. We meet for this, for the body, and that’s enough for us.

He penetrates me, enjoys himself, comes with that surrender men have when they reach the end. But I no longer stay there waiting for something that isn’t going to come. While he catches his breath, I guide his hands. I show him where, I ask for the toys, I tell him to touch while I touch myself, and between the two of us, with my voice directing the scene, I finally reach that point I believed for so many years depended on someone else.

Because that is the lesson it cost me half a life to learn: no one was going to give me an orgasm. I had to take it myself, with my hands, with my imagination, with that strange and perfect intimacy I have with myself in front of the mirror.

I touch myself when I want. I think what I want. And in that private encounter, where there is no one to please but me, I discover each time the same simple, luminous truth: the body that knows me best, the only one that never leaves me halfway, is my own.

That’s how my days go by. And never in my life have I felt so much like the owner of my own pleasure.