My Favorite Body Part: A Short Essay

I really like Leonard Cohen. A lot of people around here seem to. There’s just something about certain of his lyrics that makes me stand up and say, “Yeah! That’s how it is!” For instance, the other day I was listening to a Leonard Cohen song with lyrics that go like this:

hungry as an archway
through which the troops have passed,
i stand in ruins behind you
with your winter clothes, your broken sandal straps
i love to see you naked over there
especially from the back

I, myself, am also quite fond of full-rear nudity (or whatever the opposite of full-frontal nudity would be). The back has a compelling and pleasing form, with subtle valleys and hills formed by the spine, vertebrae and shoulder blades. I could examine my lady friend’s back for hours on end. But that’s not what really excites me about the bare back of a woman.

I’m the kind of guy who relishes a sense of expectation. As a child, I was never tempted to look for or open my presents before Christmas came. As a red-blooded heterosexual adult male, I even enjoy foreplay. The fulfillment of a desire is as gratifying as the trouble one takes in getting there, I think. I find delayed gratification extremely satisfying (to a certain point). On a side note, I saw on TV once (I think it was Oprah) an experiment where a group of small children were individually put in a room alone (with a camera), given a marshmallow, and told that if they refrained from eating the marshmallow for a certain period of time, five to ten minutes or so, that they would then receive another marshmallow. Twenty years later, they followed up on the grown-up children, and the clear trend was that those people who had refrained from eating the marshmallow as children were almost invariably more successful than those who couldn’t resist. I guess what I’m saying is this: I am a superior human being. (Though my tendency to take down an entire can of sour cream and onion Pringles in a single sitting may cast doubt on this entire paragraph.)

Anyway, the point is, my love of the bare feminine back is a similar animal. I can tell that there is something spectacular just around the corner, but I can’t see it. Maybe when she turns ever so slightly I can catch a glimpse of a certain elegant curve that would never be found on my own body, but I know that that is only a small portion of the fullness of the divine glory that awaits me if only I could circle that bend. It drives me wild, and I absolutely love it. My lady friend also has long black hair, which obscures even the details of her back itself, flashing me brief glimpses when a movement of her head causes her hair to wave from side to side, which only heightens the overall effect. No body part is so full of promises awaiting fulfillment as the female back.

Y. Funk is a Black Heart staffer.