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The story of my vagina begins with the Virgin Mary. If we’re being honest and historically accurate, she was not a virgin after her son certainly, and probably not beforehand. If we’re being honest I wanted to be her for maybe a year or more. 2000 years after her labor and delivery in a barn in Bethlehem, I asked my mother to make me a Mary costume for Halloween. She sewed me a heavy blue veil. I remember the snaps around my neck, the white muslin dress. I remember my brother the knight and my sister tinker bell, and my sense of superiority. I, the Virgin, the vessel of God. Doing the Lord’s work. I was seven and I knew I had a birth canal because I read my mother’s college textbooks. I knew it felt odd on the inside, like a soft and warm accordion. I wondered how it felt to be Mary and give birth on all that hay. I wasn’t masturbating yet, but I knew I had a vagina, and I knew someday I would be a vessel. For Christmas that year I asked for a manger. My mother called the local woodworker who lived down the road. He was spiritually moved by my request, and made the manger for free. On Christmas at midnight my five siblings and I piled down the stairs and I found a manger, lined with a trash bag, full of hay. It was made of the purest oak wood. It was perfect. I think I pretended to be Mary so often in the year 2001 that I believed I was sacred. Even if the tyrant who came home every night told me I was getting chubby, I was blessed. Even if the world was burning on television, my vagina was the pearly gate. I don’t think any of this was really about spiritual devotion. I think I needed to believe that I was pure and good. I wanted to see myself with that golden glow around my head, the beatific smile, and the infant depending on me. The woman in control of salvation. In 2009 I misplaced that sense of my sacred body, replaced it with a body I wanted to give away. I wrapped myself in star-printed paper and placed myself in several boys’ grubby hands. They didn’t want to be grubby. But they were teenage boys. Now I know myself to be a lover. A sacred being. A woman partnered with a man who happens to have his own vagina. A vessel of my own happiness. A person in control of her own orgasm and her own
salvation.
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SHANNON PALUMBO
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