When I sleep with a boy I wish had let me love him,
When he is all tenderness and nothing else,
Each slide into my body is intermingled with sweet nothings. He looks at where we join so perfectly
And I at him.
When his eyes meet mine,
I think about how no part of him is awkward in the way bodies are: He flows seamlessly.
Even his penis is beautiful.
I feel a five-story fire when I come*
And while I cry in the crevice of his neck after, he holds me. I understand why they call it making love.
There is no other name for this.
He anticipates all of my movements like they’re patellar reflexes, So, even the way he holds me is different:
We braid ourselves together.
His chest outlines my shoulders.
My breasts fill his hands.
His bicep pillows my head.
My mouth fits the hollow of his throat.
When we wake up in the night,
We kiss without a word before falling back asleep.
It’s an intimacy I could cherish for the rest of my life,
The kind I fantasize about dying for.
We fill the morning with whispers and kisses between words, And it’s the first time in my life I’m grateful to wake up hours before the alarm. We lie skin to skin,
Soul to soul,
Because anything less is unnatural,
Because our hearts are freestones in each other's hands.
I try to decide if it’s better to fall in love with him or have his affection, And surrender to him as if it’s muscle memory,
Without fear or hesitation,
And against my better judgment.
I realize that in gaining this, I’ve lost something, too,
A hidden part of me I didn’t know existed,
Something I have no language to describe.
In the end,
I fail to understand that all he ever wanted from me was a sweet nothing** That only existed in the space of a single night.
That everything else was only accidental,
At worse, pretend,
And if so, does he call it a mistake?
In the months after,
I feel like a deer dead in the road,
A tire track tattooed hit-and-run.
I wonder if it ever meant anything at all to him,
If any of it was real,
Until I have no choice but to believe it doesn’t matter.
And it doesn’t.
Not in the way I want it to.
For all it was worth,
It does not erase the fact that he changed what intimacy meant, That he undid me,
And I realized undoings must be what life was meant for.
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* “Love is a Losing Game” by Amy Winehouse
**“Sweet Nothing” by Taylor Swift