Once, impressed with my own malleability, I had just taught myself a new way to masturbate.  
  I decided to learn to come from touching any part of me. It was lazy to take everyone's word for it that sex began and ended between the legs, with merely scenic excursions to the breasts. So maybe the most obvious hot spots were between my legs.  
 

There were other points all over my body that burned in a barely-there way I thought I could amplify with a little practise: what about the crook of my elbow or my wrist, the hollow at the pit of my neck, the sore saddles between my fingers?

  
  I thought if I concentrated I could hitch the rising fever to another spot. I wanted to be able to enter my playground anywhere. I thought about people who went blind from brain damage, then learned to see again with an entirely different part of their brain. The neurons found another way to link up. If you needed to, you could rewrite your brain. What if you just wanted to?  
  I had already found that I could rope more into my orgasm than the clitoris itself. If I dug my fingers into the muscles of my inner thighs while I masturbated, my orgasm had a different flavor than if I rootled in my belly button. Once I had established a fingerhold somewhere else, maybe I could let go of my clit and proceed to unassisted thigh orgasms, elbow orgasms, earlobe orgasms. In the meantime I kept one hand between my legs.  
  I lay with sweat breaking out all over my body in a curtained room afternoons, rubbing my upper lip. Who would presume to tell me I couldn't do it? It was an experiment in will. Why shouldn't will intimately inhabit and entertain pleasure as well as more ordinary actions of the day, like chucking a stone into the arroyo back of my grandparents' house?
  
 

I gave it up, marooned on the familiar island of my cunt. Now I think I should try it again; I admire that almost holy dedication to the study of my own mysterious flesh, my faith that I could unpack unheralded advantages from its portmanteau of possibilities. I was a kind of nun of fun, a Hildegarde of Bingen of the body!