When She Spoke In Depravity.

I can count on one hand the number of dates I have been nervous about in my life. The one in eleventh grade when an age-appropriate boy I really liked took me to a movie. The one in Tokyo when I was 18 and a 17-year old boy made me his bitch. Still can't believe that happened. And my first actual date with a woman, two months after I started college. I remember waiting for her at a corner table in a coffee shop and wondering if I shouldn't just get up and leave. Make some excuse and never contact her again. Until then I had been with women before, well girls really, but it had always been fuelled by too much vodka and not enough parental supervision. 

I didn't know if I was gay or straight or somewhere in between or all over the place. I didn't know whether to give credence to drunken sexual encounters with women since I was given to understand that "all girls experiment at that age" and "women are more fluid with their sexuality (when drunk). And while I often (okay, almost always) masturbated to thoughts of women (still do actually), I knew that it wasn't necessarily an indication that I wanted to actively pursue being with women. I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure until I was browsing Craigslist for unsavoury characters who make delicious stories and I found her ad and immediately wanted to respond. There weren't many ads of women looking for women. Of course later I learnt that there was a more niche community website where all the lesbians in town virtually frolicked and connected. Funnily, I never found that girl on that website and that, says a little more than it seems.  

She wasn't the kind of person I would have picked up at a bar or, to be perfectly honest, been attracted to if she had been a man. I contacted her with a detailed message because despite how full of nonsense I usually am, I can be quite sincere. It's almost embarrassing in retrospect. I always say everything with all the emotions, and I did just that (no, I didn't tell her I loved her, just painted a colorful narrative). She responded with a message that I could barely understand that contained a phone number, a name and her interest in being "intimate". If a man had sent me that message I would have never replied but I was more interested in knowing who she was than I would have been with a man. That's either a double standard or a defence mechanism. Or both. It could be both. 

We exchanged several messages over the next few days and we learnt things about each other. Kinda. I'm not sure. I know that she was a masseuse, she was married, she lived in a part of town that I had never heard of and she wanted to fuck me with her "panties with penis on it". And that was the other thing, we didn't speak any of the same languages. She spoke Kannada and a little English. I know maybe five words in Kannada. So she was being able to communicate things to me because she slipped in disjointed words in English that I understood but I couldn't communicate with her because I am not sure which English words she really understood. Yet we managed to get things across. This is one of the things I love about our country though, you hop on a bus five hours away and suddenly no one speaks the language you do. We fight all the time about declaring a unifying language without realizing that for so long we've all found a way to communicate with one other and create spaces where languages just merge. Politics gets in the way of the natural evolution of language and it's a little sad. 

Nevertheless, this woman and I, let's call her V (which incidentally is also what I saved her phone number as because her actual name was the same as the woman who taught me to cook and there was just way too much maternity attached to it), had scheduled to meet at a coffee shop near her place in the morning because he husband would be at work. I knew she intended for us to have sex and I shaved my "legs" even though I maintained that I would "see how it goes". 

She was tinier than she looked in her pictures. She was also five inches shorter than me and I'm not very tall. She was very plainly dressed and I thought I dressed plain. I had worried what we would talk about on this date because talking was just so hard in our situation but it turned out I shouldn't have worried. See until then I viewed her as someone who was so different from me that I would never understand her and I was pretty sure she wasn't really understanding me but then over coffee, she told me a story in a language we created out of the need to *just* put the point across. 

She told me that she hated her husband and physically hated having a man touch her but her family and his family and their community would never ever accept a lesbian in their midst. Me, I've never had to deal with this problem because I was provided with enough means to make the decision to be independent. The idea that I would be *made to marry* someone I don't even know because I stepped out of line and displayed an interest in women is not something I have ever had to worry about. Some people have to worry about that as a real life problem. Her story was sad but she was fiercely sexual as she told it to me. She was holding both my wrists over my knees and telling me all these things about sex with her husband always feeling like rape and her feeling the need to fuck someone like that...

And I realized, in that moment as I clutched my thighs, that we weren't so different after all. 

My problems were different. Hers were different. Our languages. Our homes. Our lives. Our friends. Our habits. Our appearances. Our privileges. Our behaviors. Everything was different. Our lifestyles. Our relationships. The things we valued. It was all different. But we needed the same little sick things to deal with it all. 

When she was pulling my hair and fucking me with unbelievable force for a woman who is so tiny, we didn't feel so different. She was fucking me with perhaps the biggest thing that has ever been inside me and she was doing it like she didn't even want me to like it. Of course that's exactly what I wanted. I was begging her to stop and I knew she wouldn't because she needed not to listen to my pleas as much as I needed her not to listen to them. We didn't feel so different when I was tasting her and she was sticking her fingers inside me and biting my cunt. 

She was the most uninhibited woman I've ever fucked. 

I saw her several more times after that morning. 

And each time she was more aggressive. 

Almost, hateful. 

Each time I was more delighted to let her be cruel to me. 

And each time I came harder. 

I still didn't get most of what she said to me. 

But I understood. 

I understood when she wanted to dress me in garish pink fabrics and have me massage her feet. I understood when she wanted me to spread my legs so she could slap me until I was sore. I understood when she wanted to smother me beneath her tiny little body. I understood when she wanted to spend hours between my legs stuffing everything she could find inside me. I understood that she needed me to hate it, every time she fucked me, and she understood that I needed to come as close to hating it as possible. And I understood that she had to do it, to take the power back. Create a victim that wasn't her. She had such wrong reasons for doing what she loved to do but I know, I understand, you have to do it for the wrong reasons to deal with life sometimes. 

Lord knows I have.

Maybe that's why she stopped feeling so alien, because when she spoke to me in depravity, I understood every word she didn't say.