By: IO

I think about age, about how we use it to measure time, success, desirability, knowledge, everything. I think about how the measurements are inconsistent. 

I am now the same age as he was at the moment he pressed himself on me, covering my body with his, holding me down with his weight, coercing gravity into an accomplice. That moment divides my life into the before and the after. 

He probably doesn’t even remember the night. 

He carried himself with the easy confidence men display around younger women, girls too new to adulthood to draw bold fonted borders in permanent ink. My borders, drawn with a retractable pencil and an uncertain hand, were easily smudged. 

When I pushed him off my body, off the bed, to the floor, I succeeded in trading my pencil for an extra-bold tipped Sharpie, the kind one might use to mark a package as fragile. 

I wonder if he thought he should be wanted. If he thought he could become desirable by impressing a surrogate for his earlier youth with his success. If, when I told him I would not sleep with him, he heard, “I do not desire you.”

Certainly he heard, “Make me desire you.”

Does he know his mistake now? At 43, does he regret pressing a drink into my hand, persisting after I told him he would not get what he wanted, herding me like cattle to slaughter to his hotel room above the bar, laying his body on mine? If he remembers that night at all, does he cringe at the phantom sense of hands pushing softly, politely, of whispered pleads of “stop?” 

I hope he knows now what he should have known at 32, should have known at 21, should have known. 

I hope he asks permission before taking a kiss. I hope he offers his arm before grabbing her wrist.

I hope he has stopped hearing “try harder,” “shoot your shot,” and “make me” when she says “I’m not interested,” “not tonight,” and “no.” 

I hope for her.