The Madness of Wanting You

Even God Himself could not stop me from loving you.

Not when loving you has already become the darkest prayer my body knows how to speak. Not when your name has stopped being a name and has become something I feel under my skin, something I breathe in when the room goes quiet, something that crawls into my chest and makes a home there without asking. I do not love you gently. I do not love you cleanly. I do not love you like something holy people would approve of.

I love you like hunger.

Like fever.

Like sin that has learned how to look beautiful in candlelight.

I love you in ways that frighten even me.

Because this is not the kind of love that sits politely inside the heart. This is the kind that gets into the blood. The kind that makes my hands restless. The kind that makes my breath catch when I imagine you standing too close, your body near mine, your warmth bleeding into the air between us until even the silence starts to tremble. I want to be near you in a way that feels almost impossible to admit. Not across the room. Not almost. Not carefully. Near. Close enough to smell you. Close enough to feel the heat of you. Close enough that my skin forgets where I end and you begin.

Could you live if you lost me?

Or more importantly, could I live if I lost you?

I ask myself that when I am alone at night, when my thoughts are no longer disciplined, when the dark comes close and touches the parts of me I keep hidden during the day. I ask it when I imagine your hands on me. Not gently at first. Not politely. But with that dangerous certainty I have dreamed into you so many times. Your fingers finding my waist. Your palm against the small of my back. Your body guiding mine closer until there is no distance left to lie between us.

And God, I want that distance gone.

I want it ruined.

I want the space between us to stop pretending it has a right to exist.

I am lost in obsession.

Lost in limerence.

Lost in the unbearable madness of wanting you so much that my own innocence feels like something I buried a long time ago.

There was a version of me before you. A woman who could be reasonable. A woman who could want and still sleep peacefully. A woman who thought desire was something soft, something pretty, something that could be written about without becoming undone by it. But then you became you in front of me. You moved through the world with that quiet gravity of yours, and something in me turned its head. Something ancient. Something starving. Something that had been waiting for a reason to wake up.

And you woke it.

You did not even have to touch me.

That is the maddest part.

You ruined me without laying a single hand on my skin.

Now I imagine your touch like a punishment I would beg for. I imagine your fingers trailing slowly over me, not rushing, not asking for mercy, learning every place where I tremble. I imagine your mouth near my ear, your breath warm enough to make my thoughts scatter, your voice low enough to make obedience feel like surrender. I imagine the scent of you clinging to me after, dark and warm and intimate, something I would find on my clothes, on my sheets, on my skin, long after you were gone.

And I know myself.

I would press my face into it.

I would close my eyes and breathe you in like something I was not meant to survive.

Because you are not only a “someone” to me anymore. You are atmosphere. You are heat. You are the ache that gathers between my ribs when I try to think of anything else. You are the reason my body feels haunted by hands it has not yet felt. You are the reason I understand why women in old stories walked into storms, why they opened forbidden doors, why they followed beautiful monsters into the dark and called it destiny.

I used to think madness arrived screaming.

But mine came quietly.

It came in the shape of your eyes.

It came in the way your presence changed the room. It came in the way I noticed your hands, your mouth, the line of your throat, the way your voice could make something low and dangerous move through me. It came in the way I started craving impossible things. Your breath against my neck. Your fingers tightening slightly at my waist. Your chest against mine. Your scent on my skin. Your mouth lowering to places my mind should not have wandered to so easily.

And still, it wandered.

Again and again.

Always back to you.

I wish I could say goodbye.

I wish I could be graceful about this. I wish I could look at you and feel only fondness, only admiration, only something simple enough to survive. But there is nothing simple about what you have done to me. You have made my body feel like a locked room waiting for your key. You have made my thoughts indecent with longing. You have made me ache for the kind of closeness that does not leave room for pride.

I want skin.

I want heat.

I want the unbearable honesty of bodies pressed together in the dark.

I want your hands on me like you have finally stopped pretending.

I want the moment when restraint breaks.

Not carelessly. Not cruelly. But completely. I want the moment when your eyes change because you can no longer hide that you want me too. I want to see your composure crack. I want to feel your breath turn uneven. I want your hand at my jaw, your thumb brushing my mouth, your body close enough to make thinking impossible. I want the kind of kiss that feels like confession and destruction at once.

The kind that says, I tried not to.

The kind that says, I failed.

The kind that says, God forgive me, but I want you.

Do not cry, my love.

Even God could not stop me from loving you.

And perhaps that is what falling in love does when it becomes this dark. It strips the soul first, then the body. It takes away dignity slowly. It takes away restraint. It takes away the clean, careful words and leaves only the truth beneath them. Want. Need. Ache. Hunger. It leaves me standing inside myself with nothing elegant left to offer you except the confession that I want to be touched by you until I forget every wound that ever taught me loneliness.

I want to be reached by you.

Not only held.

Reached.

I want you to find the places in me that have gone silent and press your warmth into them. I want your hands to know where sadness has lived in my body. I want your mouth to kiss the ache out of my throat. I want your chest against mine so closely that my heart has no choice but to admit what it has been doing all along. Beating for you. Burning for you. Begging for you in a language my pride refuses to translate.

You feel like ecstasy to me.

Like color returning to a life that had gone gray.

Like warmth spreading through frozen blood.

Like the first taste of something forbidden, sweet enough to make damnation seem negotiable.

When I imagine you close, the whole world becomes too vivid. The shadows deepen. The air thickens. My skin becomes too aware of itself. Every nerve waits. Every breath feels stolen. My body becomes a prayer and a crime at once, aching toward yours with a devotion so intense it feels almost violent. Not violent against you. Never against you. Violent only in the way a storm is violent when it has been trapped too long behind the horizon.

I want to be the storm that finally reaches you.

I want to press myself against you and feel you understand.

I want no translation between us.

No polite distance.

No careful silence.

Only your hands, my breath, your lips, my skin, the dark around us, and that terrible moment when both of us realize we are no longer pretending to be innocent.

Because I am not innocent with you.

I lost that somewhere between the first time I wondered what you smelled like up close and the first time I imagined your scent on my pillow. I lost it when I started thinking about your hands as though they were capable of absolution. I lost it when I began to envy the air that touched your neck. I lost it when the thought of your body near mine made me feel both ashamed and alive.

There is no innocence left in the way I want you.

There is only truth.

And the truth is this. I want to be close enough to you that my perfume mixes with your skin. I want your lips on mine until my thoughts dissolve. I want your hands in my hair, at my waist, on my back, pulling me closer like distance has offended you. I want to feel your breath against my neck. I want to feel the heat of you through the thin boundary of clothes until even that becomes too much. I want the slow undoing. The quiet gasp. The trembling pause before surrender. The moment when desire stops being imagined and becomes real.

I want to know what you become when you stop being careful.

I want the darker part of you.

The hungry part.

The part that looks at me and forgets the world outside the room.

And maybe that makes me wicked. Maybe it makes me weak. Maybe it makes me exactly the kind of woman I once swore I would never become. But I do not want a pale love. I do not want a love that behaves. I do not want something bloodless and safe and easy to explain. I want the kind of love that makes the walls feel too close. The kind that makes my pulse reckless. The kind that makes goodbye impossible because the body has already chosen before the mind can object.

I want you like that.

With my heart.

With my skin.

With the parts of me I keep hidden even from myself.

Sometimes I imagine standing in front of you, close enough that neither of us can lie. I imagine your eyes lowering to my mouth. I imagine the silence becoming unbearable. I imagine you reaching for me slowly, giving me every chance to step away, and I imagine myself not moving. Not because I cannot. Because I do not want to. Because if your hand touched my face in that moment, if your fingers slipped beneath my chin and lifted me toward you, I think something in me would break open with relief.

I would not ask you to stop.

I would ask you why you waited so long.

And then I would let the dark have us.

I would let it wrap around our bodies like velvet. I would let it hide the world from us. I would let it swallow every rule, every fear, every reason we were supposed to stay untouched. I would let your mouth teach me what it means to be wanted by someone who has also been starving. I would let your hands turn me into something trembling and honest. I would let myself become soft beneath you, not because I am powerless, but because surrender can be its own kind of power when it is chosen.

And I would choose it.

God help me, I would choose you.

Again.

Again.

Again.

Because you do not feel like temptation only.

You feel like recognition.

Like my body has known your body in some other life and has been mourning it ever since. Like my soul has been walking through this world half-awake, waiting for the sound of your breath to call it back. Like every part of me that has been untouched, unseen, unheld, has turned toward you with a hunger so old it feels sacred.

That is the blasphemy.

You make the sinful feel sacred.

You make the dark feel warm.

You make my longing feel less like shame and more like worship.

I want to worship you in all the ways my mouth is too shy to name in daylight. I want to learn the taste of your skin. I want to hear the sound you make when control slips from your hands. I want to feel your body answer mine without hesitation. I want to be so close to you that there is no room left for loneliness. I want to be ruined by your tenderness and undone by your hunger. I want the softness and the danger. The reverence and the madness. The kiss and the bruise of memory after.

Not pain.

Memory.

The kind that stays.

The kind that makes me touch my own lips the next morning and remember where yours were.

The kind that makes the body blush before the mind has finished waking.

You have made me want to be remembered by your hands.

You have made me want to haunt you back.

I do not only want to love you. I want to remain in you. I want to be the scent you cannot wash from your thoughts. The warmth you remember when the night turns cold. The name your body betrays you with when silence becomes too honest. I want to be the ache you return to. The forbidden softness beneath your ribs. The woman you try to forget and fail.

Is that terrible?

Maybe.

But my love for you was never gentle enough to be innocent.

It is dark. It is devoted. It is hungry. It is trembling in the doorway of something it should not enter, and still it reaches for the handle. It wants the whole of you. Not the polished version. Not the distant version. Not the version the world is allowed to see. I want the version that breathes harder in the dark. The version that needs. The version that says my name like surrender has finally become inevitable.

Could I live if I lost you?

Maybe.

But what kind of life would that be?

A life where my body still remembers what it never got to have. A life where every quiet room becomes another place to miss you. A life where my hands remain empty because they once imagined holding you too vividly. A life where I survive, yes, but only as a woman walking around with a ghost beneath her skin.

And I do not want to be haunted by what we never dared to become.

I want the dare.

I want the fall.

I want the door closing behind us.

I want your breath, your warmth, your scent, your hands, your mouth, your body pressed to mine until the world outside us loses all its power. I want the passion that makes prayer useless. I want the kind of closeness that feels like confession without words. I want to tremble because you are near, then tremble harder because you finally touch me.

So do not ask me to stop loving you.

Do not ask me to be reasonable.

Do not ask me to look at you like you are only a “someone” when my heart has already made you into the altar and the flame.

If God Himself reached into my chest and commanded this love to die, I fear my heart would still turn toward you. Bruised. Burning. Disobedient. Yours in all the ways I should be ashamed to admit.

Because even God could not stop me from loving you.

Not when I have already imagined your hands as home.

Not when I have already breathed you in like sin.

Not when every part of me is waiting, aching, burning for the impossible mercy of being skin to skin with you.

And if that makes this love my ruin…

Then let it be ruin.

Let it be dark.

Let it be holy in the most unholy way.

Let it be you.