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s over, he came up and kissed my cheek, said: “That was so incredible that I forgot to breathe while you were talking.” Then he turned on his heel and walked away. I rolled my eyes, but couldn’t get him out of my head. The way I moved was nothing. He was proof it didn’t matter. At a taffy shop on the boardwalk in San Francisco, the weekend we first say “I love you”, a middle-aged man is pushing a woman, clearly his wife, in a wheelchair. They are laughing and his head is bent so that their faces are close together as he walks, intimate and tender. We bump into one another in the aisle and pause – two couples exchanging smiles – while we make room for her wheelchair to get past mine. They walk on, and then we kiss, fierce and happy there. We’re young, and don’t know anything. We both think “maybe”. Later, we’re in Florida at the beach, and I’ve been stiff and hurting for weeks from a summer of travel. In the bathroom, while we’re changing into bathing suits, he looks me up and down. I’m prepared for him to try something – to kiss me – and I’m prepared to put him off, we don’t have time; we have to meet my family by the water. Instead, he asks me tenderly: “Do you want help clipping your toenails, baby? They’re getting kind of long.” That night, in bed, I ANDIEZ I Only Use Sarcasm Periodically Shirt roll away when he reaches for me. My body is no country for desire. A couple of years later still, another man – charming, boy-next-door-beautiful and quarterback confident – has started spending evenings in my bed, or with me pinned to his couch. He tells me I’m sexy, asks to read what I’m writing, then asks quiet questions about poetry and movies that I love. But he won’t be seen dating me in public. When I tell him I’m more than happy to be fooling around, but that I won’t sleep with somebody I hardly know, he puts all his weight on top of me, says: “Oh, if I wanted to have sex with you, you’d know.” Then flips me over. Pushes my head down hard enough that it hurts. I think: he’s embarrassed to be seen with me. He gets off on how fragile I am. I’m too old to put up with this. But I let him. I let it go on for weeks and weeks like that before I stop returning his late-night texts.

I Only Use Sarcasm  Shirt

I want him to want me, and though I can’t quite admit it to myself, I am also a little afraid. Always, I’m aware that I’m particularly vulnerable: I couldn’t run if you came at me. I’d fall to the ground if you touched me even slightly roughly. I will always start at an unexpected hand. But because some of you are wondering (I see you ­leering at me, stranger at the bank. I see you, terrible internet date); because we live in a world that often assumes disabled people are sexless or infantile; because I wish I had heard anyone who looked or moved like me say it when I was 14, I want to be very clear: I can, in fact, have sex. I am a woman who wants in ways that are both abstract and concrete. I have turned down advances from people I wasn’t attracted to, and said yes to a few advances I’m sorry about now, and more that have been lovely, surprising and good. I’ve had a date who didn’t realise I was in a wheelchair turn and walk out of a restaurant when he saw me, and I’ve watched the light behind men’s eyes turn from desire to curiosity to something else when they realise something’s wrong with me. I’ve been hit on while on barstools by people who disappear once they’ve watched me get up and shuffle slowly to the bathroom. I’ve used that trick to my advantage. ANDIEZ I Only Use Sarcasm Periodically Shirt I’ve spent a summer weekend taking baths and eating overripe peaches in a seedy motel with someone I loved, and another getting lusty-whiskey-drunk with someone I didn’t, but whom I was still perfectly happy to have unbutton my shirt. The explicit details I’ll keep to myself, except to say that my familiarity with how to jump-rope the line between pleasure and pain has done me some favours. If you’re listening, younger self, some of what you’re learning will, I swear, eventually have uses no one’s naming for you, uses that no one orbiting around you can locate, name or even imagine. In another kind of story, I would leave it there. Or I would say that I’ve arrived at a reconciled point, that no part of me ever still believes that the boy in the dining hall, who was certain I would die a virgin, hit on some real truth about the ways my body is ­defective and repellent; that, now, I can watch myself move without feeling some small wave of shame; that I’ve completely stopped abandoning my body out of instinct, or habit, or what feels like necessity, in moments when it should bring me pleasure and intimacy and joy. I’d have fully worked out how to be with a partner who I know really sees my body, its contours, its scars and its pain, who I can let give me the kinds of help I need and still trust to see me as sexual and desirable. But that isn’t where I find myself.

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I don’t know exactly where the reconciled point is, or even what it looks like. Instead, things just get more complicated. I really want children, and in the past few years that prospect has collided with questions of intimacy and desire. I worry about finding a partner truly willing to parent with me in the ways I know my disability will necessitate, and to sign up for the medical uncertainties I know are around the bend in my own life. I worry about the toll pregnancy might take on my body, and about being physically capable of being a good parent once my children are born. I worry that my clock is ­ticking faster than most people’s, my body wearing down and wearing out. And, in the hardest moments, that whatever small kind of beauty and desirability I might, in fact, possess is wearing away with it. I’m still surprised by my own limits, still frustrated and exhausted by pain. Sometimes I still feel suspicious of all my body’s sensations, the good ones tangled too tightly with the bad. But not all moments are the hardest ones, and maybe the point is simply this: that I am still alive, still in the business of heading somewhere, still a woman who can stumble, hurt and want, and – yes – be wanted. That there is no perfect reconciliation, only the way I hold it all suspended: wonderful, and hugely difficult and true. Places I’ve Taken My Body by Molly McCully Brown will be published by Faber on 4 March. To order a copy, go to the Guardian Bookshop. Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, sign up for the long read weekly email here, and find our podcasts here London Firefighter Who Hanged Himself ‘not Bullied’, Say Colleagues Black London firefighter, 21, who hanged himself at home was bored and frustrated in his job and was not being ‘bullied’ as the only BAME member of crew, inquest hears Jaden Francois-Esprit, ANDIEZ I Only Use Sarcasm Periodically Shirt found hanged at home Wapping, east London, in 2020 Colleagues of firefighter did not think he was being bullied, an inquest heard He had been training as a firefighter with the London Fire Brigade at Wembley For confidential support, call the Samaritans on 116123 or visit a local Samaritans branch. See www.Samaritans.Org for details By Bhvishya Patel For Mailonline Published: 12:49 EDT, 15 February 2021 | Updated: 16:15 EDT, 15 February 2021 The colleagues of a junior firefighter who took his own life did not think he was being bullied, an inquest has heard. Jaden Francois-Esprit, 21, was found hanged at his home in Wapping, east London, in August 2020 despite no previous history of mental health issues. The inquest heard the firefighter felt he was being bullied and treated unfairly at Wembley Fire Station in north London where he was singled out in group tasks and teased for eating Caribbean food. But colleagues today claimed Mr Francois

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