That was how it happened (fictional excerpt)

That was how it happened—at the playground. It was the gritty sand, the dark flutter of the swing in the background and I mean, the thing is, I don’t have to explain it because I know you can feel how it would be, that you know intuitively how you’d be afraid. It happens to every girl sometime, right?
The breeze floated into the hollows of the deepest corners of me, my arm-pits, the space between my toes, the concave of my ear—I was like a cathedral housing stained glass and ancient doorways, my body full of spaces, of immense ceilings and intricate gothic archways, so that I suddenly, too late, wasn’t sure if I was capable of opening this sacred place. There was a holy moment when I marveled at myself and knew that I hadn’t known how beautiful I was, but it was a short moment, ten seconds maybe that I had before I knew it was too late, like standing on the edge of a road about to cross, wondering if you can race the car that’s coming directly at the place you will run to, feeling the fleeting moment where your existence is intertwined with critical choice.
By then he was confident, sure of himself, and I knew I would not say no when I saw his face. Then when he stepped in, quietly, I suddenly knew he was not solemn enough, I could see it in the shine of his eyes, and I couldn’t stay there with him in my mind. I felt myself leave him there mentally, dreamily find a hazy purgatory where I could only think of the color of my father’s eyes. He did not know he was alone. I could not understand what I had done.
It was cold and I remember thinking about how difficult it would be to wash the sand out of my hair, how the shower would later contain dotted reminders of my impurity, swirling matrices of sand falling down the drain. I thought: T.S. Eliot “These fragments I have shored against my ruin.” Then I thought about the rise of my stomach close to my face and how strange it was to see myself from that angle looking down, how I seemed to belong to someone else—like a wrist watch, like a model airplane. I could not claim myself, I was not this girl. I was not afraid.
Afterwards I told him I wanted to fly on the spinning wheel and he pushed me laughing, with such gentleness that at first the shock of his touch on my arm when I was going around was like the softness of my father’s when he held me or embraced me—like when I was learning to dive and he put his hands on the small of my back to usher me into the pool headlong without fear. My father taught me to look at my belly-button, to concentrate on its shape and I would just slip in like a dolphin. That was how it was as I spun there, I thought I was a dolphin, I imagined that I was free and fast and shiny and strong and gone.