Shapeless And Formless

In the dark my body is stripped bare. Clothing is pulled away but so too is flesh. All of me is pulled off and it isn't painful, it’s a gentle rub of a firm hand that takes me in its grasp and pulls and stretches me like I'm a piece of taffy.

It's like I'm clay, warm and unmolded and full of potential. I'd been built into a form but I hadn't been fired in the kiln yet and the person who sculpted me was having second thoughts now.

They plucked me up from the place they'd set me and they turned me over and over under their gaze. They looked at every inch of me, every bit of my body that I knew and they saw me just as I saw myself.

It's hard to look in the mirror and only see deficiencies. It's hard to look at your reflection and never recognize yourself.

With a sigh they set to work. The sigh isn't sadness, it's not resignation. It's a sigh of concentration, an exhale of air so their hands grow steadier as they run their fingers over my body and strip the clay away from my armature.

I'm built around a rigid structure that is agnostic. The wire frame beneath the surface of me is more than bones it is convictions and understandings. It is my personality and though it can shift and change it is what makes me who I am.

Everything glommed onto it is just window dressing.

So it's easy to strip away. Pluck the hand and move it up, straightening the arm and bending it away from the body. Grasp at the shoulder, wrapping tight around the whole limb, and draw your hand down to the tip of the fingers and as you do you gather up the clay and you pull it off. You lay bare the wire beneath the surface. You reduce the person to the core of what makes them what they are.

Take it all away before starting all over again.

First one arm and then the other. The legs and the torso and the head. You pluck careful at all the clay that remains afterwards until all that is left is bare metal with a pile of unformed person beside it.

It's not cold, being bared like this. It's not chilling to be stripped down below the bone and reduced to the very essence of self. It's not unsettling, somehow, because you still have who you are in your heart and you still are who you have always been in your head.

But it is unnerving to have someone see the bare parts of you.

I think everyone gets a little nervous, the first time they strip down in front of a new lover. I hope, at least, that even the most confident of beautiful people are a little insecure, maybe only because their insecurity makes me feel better about my own.

I remember the last time I did this. The last time which wasn’t the first time but was one of the only times and it was done in the dark because it was the only way that I could bear it. My hands were shaking as I worked at the buttons of my shirt and no amount of reassurance from her could make me feel better about it.

A moment that is pure exposure, baring yourself without protection. A moment that encapsulated trust and the breaking of it for me. A moment I thought I understood until I lived this moment instead.

The person who has stripped me bare now looks on me with a kind but clinical analysis. I don’t see their face for I am without eyes, but I sense the warmth of their kindly presence all the same.

They see the rigid structure of my armature, the conviction and the knowledge and the experience that is written into my spirit. They see me, and I am bared in a way that clothing could never cover.

No one in my whole life has ever known the real me. No one in my whole life has ever understood who I am. But this person, this being, they know me. They know me better than I know even myself.

I am drawn up before their gaze and they are enormous. They hold the whole of me in their hands and they draw me up to their eyes and peer into mine. They are eternity and they look into the heart of me without judgment, with only understanding.

They kiss me chaste on my head and it is the kiss of a creator. It is the gentle caress of someone who will always be proud of me.

It would bring me to tears, if I had but any to shed.

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