The Girl in the Small Glass Jar

I wish it would hurt, even if only for a while.

Sadness washed over me as I embraced her naked body, her face contorted in an expression I never fully understood. People tell me it’s pleasure — I’ve always wanted to believe that it is. But hers always looked more like pain to me.

Pain, and sadness. The same sadness brought forth by the pounding of the rain on her apartment window. Oppressive. Relentless. Pounding and pounding and pounding, outside, inside, everywhere.

I felt her nails digging into my back, then. She whispered something in my ears. It wasn’t my name, nor was it simply a moan of anything — what the hell was it that she whispered?

I did not care. I sped up my pace and kissed her below the ears, holding her still as she began to convulse. I felt the pain steadily increasing on my back, her nails tearing my flesh apart. Was there blood? I liked to imagine there was blood.

I hoped for it. I wanted to feel her pain.

I waited and waited. But the blood never came.

I sat at the corner and watched her back as she slept. Strands of hair were sticking to it from sweat, like the roots of tiny water plants inside a small glass jar.

I wanted to scream out to her. I love you, I would say. I love you. I believe you. I know how much it hurts.

Except that I don’t. No matter how hard we embraced, how much her nails dig into my flesh, I could never find that elusive thing.

The rain kept pounding outside. My heart beats with the dull rumbling clouds in the cold, stormy distance.

She hated her body. She hated the way it curves in all the wrong places, how her stomach is too fat or her legs too thin. She hated her mother. She hated her life. She hated the way her old crushed dreams look under her feet, the way its ugly remnants glittered all over her naked body like a broken eggshell of numerous rejections.

I wanted to reach out to her. I wanted to tell her it’s okay. But I know she would never believe me.

So I kissed her. And I left.

I never saw her again after that. When I come back the next morning, she was already gone. Maybe the police would find her body by the river the following week.

I drench myself in the rain. I let it hit my body with the same oppressive force it did her window that night. I wish it would hurt, even if only for a while.

This has been a short story by Bonni Rambatan, with photography by Iris Laurencio. For more stories like this, please follow Pleasure & Pain, our Medium publication that explore the complex intricacies of love, sex, and relationships. To write for us, simply tweet the editor at @bonni07.

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