— What does it mean to occupy a body? To whom does the naked body belong?
It wasn’t the nudity that surprised me. It was the egg salad.
I had braced myself for the bodies — sagging, swinging, sun-dappled — but I hadn’t braced for the quiet pop of Tupperware opening beside me, or the dense, sulfurous wave of warm boiled egg that followed. The scent drifted toward me: oily yolk, mayonnaise, chopped onion, something sweet and wrong like relish. Even through the brine and wind, it landed heavy.
The man, entirely naked except for his sandals, stirred the mixture thoughtfully before taking a bite. His plastic fork squeaked against the container. I offered a polite nod. He returned it without shame, yolk on his lip. We were, it seemed, both in on something.
That was the thing about Charco del Palo. It held its own strange communion, this little nudist colony carved into the flank of Lanzarote. The Atlantic doesn’t crash here so much as sigh, folding inward against volcanic rock sharp enough to split thought. The tide has carved out a basin in the stone — not quite a beach, not quite a pool — just deep enough for bodies to lower themselves into.
I walked barefoot down the narrow path, the sand cream-colored and soft like sifted flour. Warm, fine, deceptive. The rocks were another story — jagged and unyielding, ink-black and fossil-wet. I stepped wrong, once, just once, and felt the skin split beneath my foot. The blood was sudden and red. I watched it bead and fall, leaving two or three punctuation marks in the sand before vanishing into its grains.
The water lapped at the edges of the rocks. It pooled in a horseshoe of stone, one side open to the ocean, the others jagged and rising. The basin was lined with natural ledges — volcanic shelves like primitive altars, flat enough to sit on, sun-hot and grainy under the palms. I laid out my towel on one, the fibres already clinging to the salt on my thighs.
One tier down, on a lower shelf of rock, sat two British men, well into their seventies, the sort of old men who seem to be constructed entirely out of sun and leisure. They were fully naked — gloriously so.
One was perched on a folding stool, legs thrown wide like punctuation marks, hands behind his head, testicles sagging like forgotten fruit between his thighs. His face tilted back to the sun with priestlike solemnity.
The other sat cross-legged on a faded blue towel, hunched over a dog-eared paperback — the kind of book you bring on every trip and never quite finish.
The two of them didn’t speak. Occasionally, one would grunt softly, reposition a foot, scratch a shin. Their skin was a dense map of exposure: freckled, mottled, leathery. Their knees looked like peeled potatoes. Their nipples had faded to the color of worn coins.
A woman passed between us. Wife, maybe friend. She walked slowly, deliberately, down toward the tide pool with a towel slung over her shoulder like a sash. Her breasts swayed unbothered beneath her ribcage. Her belly was round and low, a soft apron of flesh that shifted with each step.
It struck me, then, how different we looked — not just in age, but in texture. I looked down at my own body. My thighs, still taut. My breasts, still high. The soft concavity of my stomach, still obedient, still waiting to be filled with meaning, or perhaps to be spared that particular burden.
I was proud of my body. It hadn’t yet sagged or surrendered or slipped out of its seams.
And still, I was the one who felt naked. My youth — so often mistaken for power — felt suddenly performative.
These bodies around me had sagged, softened, split, and stayed.
Mine had not. Mine had never housed another life. Never given itself over to pain, or age, or rest.
It had been displayed. Marketed. It had been fucked, but not lived in.
I thought, briefly, about sex. About fucking. And about how this wasn’t it. Not even close.
There were no parted lips here, no arching backs or theatrical stillness waiting to be broken. Just skin in the sun. Breasts that moved freely. Bellies that settled. Bodies that had nothing left to prove.
And there, in that slack-bellied, sun-drenched stillness, was a kind of intimacy I had long forgotten. Just the absence of wanting. And somehow, that felt more intimate than anything I’d ever performed.
I unclasped the top of my bikini. The fabric peeled off my chest with a faint stick of salt and heat. Then the bottom. I folded both pieces — not for modesty, but for some semblance of control. The wind moved instantly over me. It touched everything. My nipples tightened. The backs of my knees prickled. The sun warmed the crease of my thighs. I lay back and felt it all.
Flesh in the sun. Salt in the air. My arms open.
And finally, my stomach rose and fell without armour.
*****
I grew up in Japan, where nudity means something different. Public bathing is an ordinary act. Women scrub themselves in silence, seated on low stools, steam clouding the mirrors.
I used to think I would breathe that steam forever. That cloistered warmth. That soft, slippery silence of bodies rinsed and real. That tiled hush of women bathing — mother, daughter, stranger — all of us slick and open and unafraid.
My childhood is full of that wet intimacy in my small neighbourhood in Tokyo — the sweet rot of cedar buckets, the feel of wet hair against my spine, the weight of my mother’s hand scrubbing my back.
But then I left. I moved to New York. I started college, and grew into a woman, or something approximating one. I began to forget what it meant to inhabit myself. To move without performing.
Nakedness changed. It curdled. It wasn’t softness anymore, or steam, or ritual. It meant sex, threat, power — and my body became currency.
I was seventeen when I learned my body could pay bills. I spent it, sold it, wielded it. Rented slices of myself to strangers I met online when management threatened to cut the lights. Let them pull my head back by the roots, spit hot-wired compliments — baby, good girl, whore, goddess, sometimes all in the same breath — into my mouth. Let them finish on my stomach, my face, my chest, leave my skin glazed like a pastry and wiped it clean with hotel hand towels and stared into the glass like I was still inside it.
I was nineteen when I learned that my body could be misunderstood on purpose. I had sex I didn’t really want in a dorm room painted oatmeal beige, on a twin bed with navy blue sheets. Always navy blue sheets.
Once, a boy I’d met smoking on the fire escape during a party touched the small of my back in the same place my mother used to scrub when I was a child. It startled me — not because it hurt, but because for a split second, it felt almost kind. Then he kept going.
Mostly, I said yes because no was too complicated. Sometimes I didn’t say no fast enough. Sometimes I said yes just to make it end sooner. Sometimes I was too drunk to remember when the asking stopped. And sometimes they didn’t ask. They took from me what they thought they’d earned.
My breasts grew fuller. My waist, smaller. My thighs softened, my lips parted. I became a body built for wanting. And I became colder, harder, all angles and corners.
I learned how to lean forward just so at the bar on a first date, offering them the arc of my clavicle. I saw how they looked — not at me, not really — but at the suggestion of softness beneath a white ribbed tank top, where cotton kissed flesh just enough to imply more.
Sometimes I tried to like it. Tried to find something in the heat, the rhythm, the closeness, the attention. Sometimes I used it. Sometimes I let myself believe I had the upper hand. That I was in control. That if I named the price, I couldn’t be cheapened. That if I played the game, I was never the pawn.
But power is not possession. Recognition is not understanding. To be seen is to be fractured — interpreted, projected, rewritten — until the self blurs into the act. And desire, above all, is not proof of value.
I knew how to perform desirability, how to cash it in. I could name the price, set the terms, walk away, even. But that didn’t mean I belonged to myself. My body was still a negotiation — something I offered, angled, adjusted. I could weaponise it, but I couldn’t come home to it. Not fully. Not yet.
But here — here, naked under the glorious Spanish sun — I was remembering. Remembering home. The onsen, the steam. The ritual of rinsed skin and warm silence. How to be naked again — burnt and soft and human and whole.
It was a bit different at Charco del Palo. This was rock and salt. The sun wasn’t gentle. There was no ceremony, no steam to blur the outlines of my body.
And yet, the three Britons did not stare. There was nothing to sell, and there was no one buying.
*****
Later, I sat cross-legged on my towel, the rock beneath me now cool in the lengthening shade. I was dry, sun-warm, faintly sore from the salt and the quiet. The cut on my foot had stopped bleeding. It looked like a red petal, pressed flat.
I stood to stretch and immediately stepped in someone’s discarded peach pit. I slipped slightly and cursed out loud. A seagull stared at me with open disdain. The two British men barely blinked. One was now sunburnt in a very specific rectangle on his stomach, where a paperback had rested all afternoon.
I watched the older woman float face-up in the tide pool, her breasts bobbing freely, her arms spread like wings. She looked like driftwood. Like something the sea had decided to keep. I watched her for a long time. I wondered what she had let go of. I wondered what I had come to release.
I wrapped my towel loosely around my hips, not out of modesty, but because the sun had begun to wilt me. I walked down to the basin to join her in stillness. To see if I, too, could still be held. To see if I could still find a way back to something like home.
As I passed the duo of elderly Britons, the man with the fork offered me a bite of his egg salad. I smiled and declined. He shrugged, returned to chewing, and belched softly, with dignity.
