Naked

The story of my naked body is not mine to tell.
The second I speak about it, it becomes someone else's.
Their version, multiplied, becomes a story for the rest of them.
Right now this is a story of shame.
I don't get a say in this version. It's not mine anymore. 
They say, if there is proof of my body, I can't get a job. When the story is out there, when it is no longer mine, it is a thing of conjecture. By admitting it exists, by it existing, the teaching opportunties go away. It is too awkward to be working with children to have a body. It means I can no longer work with men, because, when the men know the body is there, everything changes.
It makes them uncomfortable and compromises the relationship with the wives.
When the women know the body is there, they have no choice but to stone it to death. If the body is not owned by another man it is even worse. It means the unclaimed body is truly for anyone and no one with a gun can fight against it. 
This is the contract we have with the body these days. 
Sometimes never, I walk with my hips. Sometimes in closed door spaces I am naked. I try my best to keep the body away from the threat of losing the compsure of strangers. Once my mother saw my breasts and hid her vision with her hand.
"You made these," I protested.
"I didn't make those," she said.
A woman's body is Satan's creation and I can't blame the people for the gaze or their avoidance. When I walk in front of my boyfriend, he reaches out. He knows I will not show this body to anyone else and this makes him happy. Because if another man saw my naked body, it would be for sex.
The story of my naked body is not mine to tell.
Once, by the river, where everyone was naked, and we could see men slurping on the genitals of one another in tall grass, we played. We rubbed dirt on our bodies and army crawled through warm pools of sandy water on the shallow island in the middle of the river that we crossed by swimming. We bared our teeth and farted and splashed water with eyes closed. The sun beat down, like from that scene in that book by Camus, the hot sun revealing a wavering stranger on the periphery. For once his story of fucking and breasts and rape was not ours. 
There, in the sun, we were protected.
We told each other a new story and for once we believed. 

"For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man." 1 Corinthians 11:8