First Place: Limitless Virility

Lights shine in like bitter icicles.

I fill myself

with limes, gin, sprite.

I will myself

limitless virility.

He climbs; I wilt.

He spits; I fill.

I’m silent.

I’m wild.

I’m evil.

I’m thing.

***

She meets up with her friend, the one she thinks is gay. He suggests dinner and she wonders if he’ll be generous and pay, even though this is not a date. But he’s older, by fifteen years at least, and he knows she’s a broke college student. She meets up with him at his apartment, finding herself in the East Village where the nightlife tumbles out of doorways and Avenue D looms dark as crime. A is for alive, B is for breathing, C is for comatose, and D is for dead. That’s the acronym she learns about in the East Village, as told by her rich white hipster friends in New York who propagate the lore, which remains a floating myth in the gentrification of million-dollar apartments, renovated parks and bougie markets of 2010. Obviously, she’s never seen a crime committed.

When he opens the door, she squeals his name the way she greets all her gay friends. He ushers her into a greeting—a peck on each cheek. She talks more about dinner destinations and they land on sushi—sushi is expensive and she hasn’t had it in a while.

***

I lose my virginity when I am sixteen. I lose it to a boy I have known for a while, a boy I briefly date in middle school, before he gets sent away to a boarding school not far from our hometown in Tennessee. After he changes schools, we stay in touch and I see him sporadically for the next decade, eventually learning to share a bed with him after a night filled with solo cups of booze.

He is the alt kid, the heavy metal musician, the one who plays guitars and broods alone. In our adolescent years, he has that perfect emo fringe of black hair that tickles his eyes. When he visits me in my freshman year of college, he is tattooed and pierced, with the beard of a thirty-year-old man, not an eighteen-year-old boy.

The day I lose my virginity, I don’t expect to. I drive up to his place when he’s home from the boarding school he’s been sent to and his dad isn’t there. Bring your bathing suit, he says. We embrace shyly when we see each other, and I see the sad angsty boy that I had known in middle school, leather bands wrapped around his wrists, writing songs about lost love and current pain as if he had already lived life ten times over.

We swim in the indoor pool and our bodies touch under the water, tangling into each other like jellyfish tentacles. I feel shy and nervous. I don’t understand how natural touch can be, graduating from kisses in closets to blowjobs in the backseat of trucks. But floating in the chlorine abyss, underneath a skylight that emits a halo of light from above, I realize that this is true touch. My body vibrates with it, feeling alive and wanting to hide all at once. I fear he will see me for what I really am—a novice, an ugly, Asian girl—and try to turn away.

Instead, we move to the guest bedroom where the sheets are puffy and soft. Clothes come off gingerly rather than roughly and I watch him caress my body in ways that feel so foreign. It is as if he is inspecting me with a magnifying glass in science class rather than tossing me around like a slab of meat the way I saw buff dudes chuck skinny girls in pornos.

Eventually he is inside of me but he comes out more quickly than I expect. What is it? I ask, peering into his dark, wounded eyes. He asks if I have a condom, I shake my head no. I haven’t even told him that I am a virgin. He crawls backward off the bed, shaking his head. I’m not sure if this is a good idea, he says with grave sadness. I nod in agreement; no boy I have hooked up with has ever expressed that much restraint.

***

They walk to the sushi restaurant together, which is about a ten-minute walk. The night is young and dark; the breeze lifts her off the sidewalk as she sashays, which is how the city always makes her feel. There’s a thump in her step that has never existed outside the city; a determination and confidence that rises from the concrete below her.

The restaurant is buzzing with flickering candles and bamboo trays when they arrive. They are seated next to the window, where they watch the city life pass by. Groups of young hipsters in ripped tights and oversized tanks follow the linked arms of couples on their way to dinner.

You want sake? he says as she looks over the menu. Sure, she replies. Sure is what she always says on dates, where she knows that the man will be paying at the end. She’ll eat anything because being broke means she has no options.

The edamame comes steaming on rectangular trays. The sake comes with it. Bottoms up, she chirps, smiling. She feels beautiful and he compliments her black dress. Thank you, I stole it, she says. He laughs, thinking it’s a joke.

***

Before I lose my virginity, I have a threesome. The kind with no penetration.

It happens like this: in ninth grade, I am downtown with some friends on a Friday night. We are doing what we normally do, which is: meet up for dinner at Buffalo Wild Wings or Panera Bread and then roam around the streets until our curfew of 10 p.m.

That night, we get high, smoking doobies in bushes and carrying water bottles full of bitter-tasting alcohol. Eventually, we cross paths with these boys we know from public school, their smiles are sharp and their eyes drill holes into me. I feel like my ends are being fringed in light, in flames, and feel sexy in the short skirt I’m wearing.

As dusk settles around us and the streetlamps erupt in warm, amber light, another bottle of booze appears. We continue walking along the brick-paved sidewalks, shrieking at each other and gently punching the arms of the boys we like.

Somewhere, between the eighth and ninth lamp, I find myself drifting away from my friends until I end up behind the aquarium with two of the boys. I know them, they know me—this isn’t the first time we have swapped spit and I feel my confidence rising from the weed, the booze. I back up toward a brick wall with a knowing smile on my face as they follow in tango fashion.

One of them kisses me while the other bends down and lifts my skirt so he can finger me. I moan, like I’ve been taught to, but the feeling isn’t pleasure so much as it’s the feeling of being outrageous, daring, and wanted. The world spins around me as I watch my thoughts drift away. I surrender to the hands, the lips, the motions.

Afterward, I shimmy my skirt down and wipe my face. I see them give each other a high five.

***

She forgets what happens next because everything goes black after the sixth shot of sake. The evening hurtles forward, flecked with bits of consciousness: stumbling back to his place, the unforgiving brightness of his apartment. She doesn’t remember passing out and the only reason she knows she’s passed out is when she awakes to:

Being naked on his bed.

Seeing him come into focus, laying at the edge like a tiger ready to pounce.

His eyes slanted in the way she has seen men’s gaze shift in that predatory state.

His fingers disappear into her, in a place that feels unfamiliar.

His fingers come up for air, entering into his mouth.

***

After I lose my virginity, I have sex all the time. Sometimes with the same person, often with someone new. I am always drunk or high. I am never sober.

I am scared to be touched when I’m not floating. It’s like I don’t deserve the attention or the intimacy. I’m scared of it. Scared of how serious someone looks at me. Scared of someone seeing me for who I am. Scared of having to be me, purely.

So I drink and I fuck. I find myself in small bathrooms getting fucked from behind as I watch my face melt in the mirror. I wake up in the beds of boys I do not recognize. My vagina is always sore the next morning, as if I had gone on a ten-hour bike ride with a seat that refused to break in. My mouth is always dry. My head always hurts. I always refrain from asking, what happened last night?

I end up hooking up repeatedly with the angsty boy who I lost my virginity to. Over the years, we find ourselves near one another: in farmland Connecticut; back in our hometown. But we are always drunk when we come together, both of us learning that booze is the only way to find reprieve, to be authentically ourselves. So we get sloppy drunk and roll around like animals. We are so far from who we both were.

***

Within seconds of coming to, she’s grabbing her clothes and hauling out of there, fully understanding what people mean when they say they “sobered up quickly.” He reaches his arm out toward her as she escapes the tentacles that try to trap her. His arms float down to his side as he backs away from her, surprised by how quickly she could move from passed out to alive.

As she exits the apartment, the cool, inky air rushes around her. She gauges the time by the noises that envelope her: drunken shouts in the distance, people spilling out of sidewalks in clouds of smoke. She tries to retrace her footsteps in the evening but things are a blur and the liquor still has a hold on her.

But she makes it home, traveling east to west and then north. She always manages to make it home on drunken evenings like this, surprisingly.

As she falls into her mattress, images of the evening crash around her like dark waves. She lets the tide take them because it’s easier to forget. The alcohol will always help her.

***

In college, I begin to meet boys that I hook up with in slightly more sober states. I pursue a blonde boy who lives on the floor above me in the dorms. I like him because he is unsure of himself and shy. He is awkward and strange, unlike all of the chest-thumping Neanderthals that I knew in my youth, the rich white boys who swaggered drunk off their own confidence and slave-owning lineages.

Ken is the opposite of all of that. Ken reminds me of the boy I lost my virginity to.

He becomes my first boyfriend, ever, the one who sticks around and writes me love letters. Who calls me when I return back to the South for the summer, unfailingly committed and dependable. That summer, when distance has illuminated my feelings for him, I look at the photos he’s tagged in on Facebook—images of him looking forlorn in the corner, like a caught animal. Snapshots of him winning a wrestling medal, the coach lifting one arm up in congratulations while his face grimaces in discomfort. Our relationship is about drugs—weed, pills, powder—that we get from his roommate. We experiment, giggling on a twin-sized bed that’s half covered in a bed sheet. He develops a dance, a gait, that he does when he’s blitzed. His arms form curves on either side and he waves them as his legs kick up in a strange cancan action. His tiptoes delicately from one foot to the next, a strange sight for his burly frame. I love him for that.

I also ignore his phone calls sometimes, to experiment with the power that I have. I want to know what it’s like to dangle desire in front of someone, to be the one on top.

***

She brushes off the incident in the East Village, using it as parties as a way to make herself seem “outrageous.”

I woke up and he was licking poop! she exclaims to a rapt audience. Some laugh, others look into their drinks filled with floating ice chips and watered-down tequila. The soft electro beats hum in the background and she feels alive in being wild.

That’s how this memory lives for her—another crazy drunken story that she lived through. A scene from a movie that no one will ever watch, but rather hear.

The list goes on: the time three white men almost abducted her seventeen-year-old drunken self from a bar; the time she brought a man into her apartment during a blackout, only to wake up with dried spit on her lips and a missing Macbook. She’s not sure why these events continue to happen to her, but she uses them as fodder for an interesting narrative she can slur at parties.

***

Before all of this happens, there’s one defining incident that foreshadows the rest.

In middle school, I spend the night at a friend’s house, a girl I have known since elementary school when we sang together in a choir. Her brother is a year older and cute with his mop of curly brown hair and freckles. He is the same boy I have kissed in a game of spin the bottle. Whenever I visit my friend, I am hypervigilant of her brother’s presence like a dog sniffing out a dropped french fry, wondering if there is more to that one kiss.

On this particular night, he is there. My friend and I hang out in her room for most of the evening, talking about boys and the latest downtown excursion. She’s telling me about how in love with this boy she is. He’s dark-haired and strange. He’s the boy I will lose my virginity to a few years later.

Our conversation peters out eventually and I lie there listening to the sound of her breathing. At first, I can’t hear it but it emerges—a rhythmic in and out that signals a deep, sound sleep.

I pull the blanket from my body and creep away, using the wall as a guide along the carpeted hallway, then stairs. The TV is on, the blue glow illuminating the living room, and I see him there. He looks at me with a nod and I whisper hello. I find a seat on the L-shaped couch next to him.

My body is alive with nerves. I want to touch him but I don’t. I wonder if he knows how much I want to be touched.

But nothing happens and my nerves fade. I fall asleep because it is past midnight.

When I wake again, I feel my hand on something new. I don’t look up to find out though. Instead, I stare ahead at an infomercial for fleece blankets. His hand is on top of mine, guiding it up and down his shaft. He moans in pleasure.

This isn’t how I saw myself giving my first handjob. But I convince myself that this is how it happens, that this is what I wanted.

There is no blame or shame in the moment, only acceptance of what is: a girl getting what she has coming to her. A girl who will always be sexy, never pretty. A girl who will always be a shameful secret. A girl who will party too hard and never be able to control herself.

Because of all that I am not, I know I don’t deserve romantic sunset first kisses or hunky white boyfriends with lifted trucks. So, I settle for what I can get.

She settles for what she can get.

-Jen Shin

Jen Shin is a Korean American writer based in Portland, Oregon, entering into her tenth year in recovery from alcoholism and bulimia. Her writing focuses on her addiction, exploring the impacts of identity, race, and intergenerational trauma. Through her writing and mental health advocacy, Jen hopes to reach communities of color to destigmatize the stigmatized, decolonize shame, and encourage healing. She’s an Anaphora Arts Fellow and has been published in Beyond the Margins. Her zine on therapy was recently published through zines + things and she’s currently writing essays for her memoir. Find her on Instagram @jenperrr