I Had Professional Nude Photos Taken To Surprise My Partner. It Was A Disaster.

"Who has the right to access your body? To touch, probe, view images of your flesh? It is only flesh, after all. But it is also you."

My partner and I had been together for just a few years when I decided I was the kind of person who hires a photographer to take artful nudes as a birthday gift for her beloved.

I selected one of the photos and blew it up, big as a poster: full-frontal in a half-kneeling, seemingly relaxed but hard-to-hold pose. The background is a flat, black void from which I have emerged with a joint pressed between my ringed fingers. My head is in profile, angled to the left, lips pursed as I blow out a puff of air that’s supposed to be smoke — I had trouble keeping the joint lit. In the cloud’s absence, it looks like I’m whistling, or singing. Or primed for a kiss.

When Jen and I moved in together, the framed photo hung on the wall of our too-small bedroom. It was huge, absurdly so, imposing itself over the bed like an awkward third in a three-way. We took it down every time the landlord came over to apply tape and chewing gum to whatever needed fixing in our overpriced Oakland shoebox. Meanwhile, I spent a year looking at myself every day, morning and night, like gazing in an enchanted mirror, the inverse of Dorian Gray’s portrait, where my image never changed, even as I grew fitter, older, commissioned more tattoos.