Member-only story
The Pleasure Scale
On a scale of 1–10, with ten being highest, where would you rate your pleasure?
(Trigger Warning: graphic sex)
1
When I can’t run. When I can’t walk. When I can’t heave myself out of bed to get to the bathroom, when I have to crawl on hands and knees, my heart 180 beats a minute, barely able to breathe. When I am partway there, wriggling on the floor like a lizard, leaking pee.
2
I am vapor. I am the puff of guilt-smoke in your able-bodied air: blue and floating. There, gone: poof.
3
My life is constricted, the width of a very thin windpipe.
I am an atheist, so I don’t look for meaning, but I do look to squeeze pleasure into my life like juice from a lemon.
4
My grandchild, who is two, has learned to play hide-and-seek not by secreting her face, but by screwing her eyes shut. She is a little perplexed by the magic of this, but proud of her cleverness, and she laughs a lot. At first I wanted to call the children by gender neutral pronouns, not wanting to restrict them to assigned femalehood, but their mother nixed this, wanting them to find pride in their gender.
