If that's allowed.

For many years, I have tried to explain to others what those words did to me, standing in his hallway with my hand still on the doorknob, and my whole ruined wet face hanging out there for him to see. The arithmetic of my life up until that point had been dictated. Every single person who ever wanted anything to do with me only wanted my body. That was the only currency I had, and the only reason anyone ever crossed a room to get to me. My body was the product, and I, the person living inside that body, was just the candy wrapper. I had been the wrapper so long I'd forgotten there was supposed to be anything inside it at all. And now, here was a man who not only turned the product down, he turned it down flat, and pushed it away with his own hand. He stood before me in his dingy white socks in his clean little apartment asking me, asking me, like being my friend, like getting to know the person behind the skin was the audacious thing, like he was the one with no rights at all. He was asking if he was allowed to want the wrapper, the person, the nothing I would keep floating up in the high corner out of reach. He was asking for me.

I started to go wobbly. But I couldn't sit down. I needed to get out of there. I needed air, and distance between us. I needed to fall apart in private. But I couldn't bolt from his sight. I stood there and I wiped my eyes and nose with the back of my hand and looked at this strange and kind man, and I heard myself speak in a voice I could barely recognize. It was my real one.