Everything about this city is penetrative. From the dicks that run Wall Street to the majority of the global corporations which headquarter on the tiny island of Manhattan to the people darting through the midtown crowds to the artists and activists clawing their way to recognition to the skyscrapers themselves standing tall and erect, thrusting up into the sky, everywhere you turn in this city is invasive, inserted, hard, forceful, opening, hollowing out, ecstatic.

At first, it frightened me. It felt non-consensual, intrusive, making me an object, a hole, something to be taken or filled up. But that was coming from me, and my position of being unable to keep boundaries and properly dominate simultaneously, a skill I have tirelessly worked to perfect (or at least be capable of) ever since.

I had to work for my cock confidence. It did not come “naturally.” It did not come easily. But it aligned deep within me as right, and as mine. Something about it clicked. Something about the extension of myself, my desire externalized, aligned and corresponded with some inner frisson of lust, of drive, of need. It is what I crave, being inside, coaxing: come, come, come for me. Taking that energy into my hand and squeezing it, working it, bringing it up to the brink and back down again, or taking it into my hips, into my pelvis, into the very grounded core of me in order to transform it, move it, feel it, walk it up the ladder of my spine to pour out the top of my head: the process of moving from earth to divine.

And it is divine. It is spiritual, it is a prayer, every time we speak lips to lips, every time we insert, enter, open, explore, explode. I continue to be in awe of that power, of that exchange, of that sacred conversation that happens in the sparks between our bodies when we fuck.

And much of that, New York City has taught me: the power, the control, the ache of absence and the overwhelm of connection, the whole spectrum of merging and communing with another.

Before I came here, I lived in the Pacific Northwest rainforest and was very used to the way the earth upturned her leaf and flower faces to catch every drop of rain and dew. Before I came here, I took long walks in the woods and walked out my front door to go for a jog. Before I trekked across the country to the Big Apple, leaving behind the Emerald City, I rode my bicycle to work and took the bus and didn’t own a car. I opened my legs and opened my heart and eagerly, readily fell in love.

But New York changed that. I delved deeper into my own desires. There was no room for mistakes, no room for stating a sentence I did not stand behind, and lovers who demanded explanation, labels, conversation, description. How do you work, they demanded to know. And if I didn’t know, they couldn’t either. They left, moved on, flirted their way through the next cocktail party or called their back-up date.

New York City demanded I know how I work, and I set out to figure that out. I tried things on as if I was testing out a new outfit, a new coat, a new hairstyle. I was one way on one date and another way on another date. I asked those whom I wanted to attract what they liked. I experimented and took copious notes and listened deep to my inner compasses that told me which directions to continue to travel, and which to give up. I became well acquainted with the city’s thrift stores, both for shopping and for dropping off boxes of unwanted clothes, hobbies, lives I choose not to live. Paths I traversed and decided were not right for me. It is a constant reinvention process, these big cities which demand so much of us, and if one cannot reinvent, one will get crushed by the hugeness of the vast choices in identity.

And me, I needed my cock. I didn’t even know that weight between my legs was missing, but suddenly, when I started packing, when I started fucking ninety-nine percent of the time using a strapped on phallus, I craved it, I missed it when it wasn’t there. Not so much that I crave transition, at least not of the medical or hormonal kind—but a different kind of transition, from female to in-between, from woman-loving woman to cock-centric butch. It is a subtle difference, but one that has shifted my energy down to my molecules.

I knew how to be entered, how to be taken, how to be filled up. The rainforests, the Pacific ocean, the fiddlehead ferns taught me that. New York City taught me how to take without draining. How to enter with permission—hell, how to ask permission, and how to hollow out a place for me to fit. How to know when to push, and when too much is too much. How to tell her to shut up and take it and when to ease back and hold, cradle, coddle. How to fuck. How to stay hard. How to find holes to fill.

I didn’t even know that was something missing from my energetic meridians until I started experimenting, until I started occupying that space. Then, it was like being hit from within, lit from within, discovering an inner core I had never used but that was always there. I started noticing it’s absence, and recognizing the interactions where it would be useful. I began to be able to fill it up myself, to call on it, to use it as a tool. To have my own confidence.

Maybe I would have discovered that in another city, maybe I would have stumbled upon that absence in another place, but there has been nothing like New York City to teach me how to wield a cock.