text me back …

What might it mean for you to touch my body? Creator, I call you that and we have never even met, nothing more than these textual exchanges on a hookup app, nothing more than two-dimensional ass and dick.

When your hand moves across my body, feeling chunks, feeling the girth of my thighs, feeling the roundness of my chest, what will you think of me? This mountainous flesh. These crevices, these chunks, these cracks. I tell you I am thick in the message before we even plan to meet. I know what it’s like for a man to come and to see my body. To see my weight and feel intimidated, to see this flesh and say no you’re disgusting. You don’t ask for a full body photo like the other guys do. I like that. I like my being something cropped and filtered and angled in particular ways to elicit particular desires. This edited corpse. I don’t like giving full body photos because men are intent on scrutinizing my body, determining if my body meets their standards, if I am thin enough, unstretchmarked enough, never really enough.

What is enough for you, creator? This body in place. The way this body moves. The way this body feels. This body sensing your body. Enough for you? Is this text between us enough for me? Myself as enough for myself? What a concept.

Can I come over, you ask, but I don’t want that. I don’t want to imagine our meeting. Our beginning and end. I want this textual deferral. I need this virtual nothingness. I need to know you and I can make it in some form, as something.

Creator, I call you that and we have never even met, nothing more than me in my bed alone and you wherever you are, wherever you spend your days at this 2 p.m. hour. I want you to complete me but I don’t know to what end. I don’t know what my completion looks like and I, cutie, have been around the block, I have played this game a long time. I have been completed many times before. Completely incomplete. Completion of my body. The body completed. What do I need from you? Specifically, the you who are you? You, who are nothing to me, you who are just text and image on a screen in front of me.

Where do I begin?
Where do I end?
I want to think it begins with your hand, faceless stranger, your hand on my body giving me form and forming me though I am ever formless. You and I, our dick and ass shots, our being us but a fanciful idea, a fantastic concept.

Creator, tell me through the written word you will put your hand on my body, creator, remind me you and I are always on the horizon, always potential, creator, when will you complete me, creator, when will you text me back?

I am an essayist and PhD candidate in Literature living in New York City. My essay collection about growing up a gay son of an undocumented Mexican immigrant and a poor Puerto Rican mother in white America, Pedro’s Theory: Essays, is represented by agent Lauren Abramo and is currently on submission with publishers. My essays can be found or are forthcoming at Electric Literature, Ploughshares, Catapult, The New Inquiry, and LitHub, among others. Twitter: @MarcosSGonsalez .