by Karin Wares.
I remember, at the age of three, playing with my sister’s doll with the long blonde hair that pulled out of a hole on the top of her head and wound back inside of her with a turn of the knob protruding from the middle of her back. Her anatomical oddities didn’t faze me; in fact, all the hair truly meant to me was that the color was like my own and, as such, allowed me to identify with the doll.
My interest in her capacity to instantly change the length of her white-gold hair was obliterated by my fascination with her bottom. I couldn’t wait to be alone with her, to remove her panties under her little dress, exposing the subtle implication of a crack.
“Nobody knows how naughty she is, going without her panties,” I would imagine, sitting in the closet, as the waves of pleasure coursed through my body like the warmth of the sun through the window hitting the carpet and filling the room with a radiant red glow.
Forty years later, although my hair has dulled to shades of dishwater, the sensations have returned. After many years of diligently removing the obstacles, the stillness and the tingling vitality are as vivid to me now as they were then. It is clear that what was going on then was the free flow of vibrant sexual energy that occurs naturally in the body when there are no psychological, emotional or mental blockages to hinder it.
But even back then, I sat in the closet for a reason: I was hiding. At three, there was already shame and secrecy surrounding my pleasures, even though the unrestricted movement of sexual energy was not yet blocked in my body by the crystallization of psychosomatic inhibitions. I don’t have any conscious recollection of precisely where these insidious notions came from, but I functioned according to an unquestioning certainty that what I was enjoying must remain secretive.
I felt a rush of adrenaline when I heard my mother’s footsteps approaching the room, and I felt my face flush red like the carpet when she mused aloud at how quiet I was… and how odd that I played in the closet.