Until I Forget Myself

I think the worst thing about wanting you is that my body has started wanting you separately from me.

My mind can be reasonable. It can remind me of distance, circumstances, consequences. It can dress itself in dignity and pretend there are boundaries desire should respect. It can tell me that wanting someone does not mean I am entitled to have them, that hunger is not permission, that longing is something I am supposed to carry quietly.

My body does not care.

My body hears none of it.

It only knows that when you are near me, something inside my skin becomes restless.

It knows the shape of the space between us and hates every inch of it.

It knows your hands exist, and that knowledge alone has become unbearable.

That is what I cannot confess without sounding unwell: I think about your hands more than I should.

Not romantically.

Not innocently.

I think about them touching me.

I think about the weight of them. The warmth. The pressure. I wonder whether you would touch me carefully at first or whether there would be some moment when restraint finally became impossible and your hands would stop asking what they were allowed to want.

I wonder what my body would do beneath them.

I wonder if it already knows.

Sometimes you are standing close enough that I can see the smallest movements in your fingers, and I have to pretend they mean nothing to me. I have to pretend I am not imagining those same fingers against my skin. I have to continue whatever meaningless conversation is happening while somewhere beneath my ribs there is an animal throwing itself against a locked door.

Touch me.

That is the thought.

Again and again.

Touch me.

Touch me.

Please, just touch me.

And it is humiliating how simple the desire becomes.

I have spent so much of my life believing longing had to be complicated. That it needed poetry, tragedy, some beautiful explanation worthy of all the suffering it caused.

But sometimes I look at you and there is nothing beautiful about what happens inside me.

There is only need.

Ugly, honest, aching need.

I want your palm against the back of my neck. I want your fingers tangled into me. I want your arms around my body tightly enough that for one moment I cannot tell where my loneliness ends and you begin. I want to know what it feels like to be pulled against you instead of always standing at the edge of you pretending distance is enough.

It is not enough.

God, it is not enough anymore.

Looking at you used to satisfy something in me.

Now looking only makes the hunger worse.

Every time my eyes travel across you, my body interprets it as deprivation.

Something you cannot have.

Something you cannot touch.

There.

Until wanting you begins to feel like some elaborate form of punishment.

I can see you.

I can hear you.

I can stand close enough to feel your presence change the temperature of the room.

And still, I cannot crawl inside the feeling of you.

I cannot close the space.

I cannot satisfy this terrible curiosity my skin has developed about yours.

Do you understand what kind of madness that creates?

To be fascinated by someone’s body but not because you simply want to see it.

Because you want to know it through touch.

Sight has become insufficient.

I want texture.

Heat.

Pressure.

Reaction.

I want the involuntary things.

The things you could never fake for me.

The small change in your breathing when my hand finds yours. The way your muscles might tense beneath my fingers. The instinctive movement toward me before thought has time to interfere.

I want your body to answer mine.

That is the obsession.

Not simply touching you.

Being answered.

I want to place my hands on you and feel something in you respond as if it had been waiting.

I want proof that I am not alone in this fever.

Because that is what you have become to me.

A fever.

You enter a room and suddenly I am too aware of my own skin.

I can feel my pulse in places I normally forget exist. My breathing becomes something I have to control manually. I become conscious of my hands, of my mouth, of every useless inch of my body that is currently not touching yours.

It makes me angry sometimes.

You make me angry.

Not because you have done anything wrong.

Because you can exist so casually while I am being destroyed by proximity.

You can move past me without knowing that every nerve in my body noticed.

You can stand beside me without understanding the effort it takes not to lean into you.

You can touch me accidentally –

God.

Those are the worst moments.

Because an accidental touch is never accidental to the person who has been starving.

You can brush against my arm for half a second and move on with your life while I am left carrying the ghost of it for hours.

My skin remembers you longer than you intended to be remembered.

That feels cruel.

Almost unbearably cruel.

Sometimes after you touch me, I catch myself returning to the exact place later, pressing my own fingers there as though the warmth might somehow still belong to you.

It never does.

My hands are not yours.

And my body knows the difference.

That might be the most pathetic part of this.

I cannot substitute you.

I cannot convince myself that touch is simply touch.

I do not want arms around me.

I want yours.

I do not want someone’s fingers tracing my skin.

I want yours.

I do not want warmth.

I want the specific heat of your body pressed against mine.

There is no generosity in my desire anymore.

It has become horribly precise.

You.

Only you.

That is the word beneath everything.

You.

I could be surrounded by beautiful people and feel nothing because my hunger has learned your face.

My body has become loyal to someone it has barely had.

What a ridiculous kind of devotion.

What a dangerous thing, to crave a touch you do not even fully know yet.

Because imagination is merciless.

It fills every absence.

It invents details.

I have imagined your hands so many times that sometimes they feel like memories.

I have imagined you reaching for me when I am trying to walk away. Imagined your hand closing around my wrist – not to frighten me, not to trap me, but with that silent desperation of someone saying don’t go yet without speaking.

I have imagined being pulled back into you.

I have imagined the first real collision between us after too much restraint.

No elegance.

No careful choreography.

Just months, years, lifetimes of wanting suddenly discovering they have bodies.

I imagine touching you and feeling all the thoughts disappear from me.

That is what I want most.

Silence.

Not the absence of sound.

The absence of thinking.

I am exhausted from thinking about you.

I want your touch to make thought impossible.

I want there to be a moment when I am no longer analyzing what this means, what happens afterward, whether I am too much, whether you feel the same, whether this ends badly.

I want my mind gone.

I want instinct.

I want to become nothing but sensation beneath your hands.

Maybe that is why my desire for you frightens me.

It is not delicate.

I can write delicate things about it. I can dress it in stars and moons and all the pretty celestial metaphors people use when they are ashamed of how physical love can become.

But the truth is darker.

Sometimes I do not want the moon.

I want your mouth at my throat.

I want your hands holding me like letting go would physically hurt you.

I want your forehead against mine while we both try to remember how breathing works.

I want the kind of closeness that makes the outside world seem obscene for continuing to exist.

I want to be surrounded by you.

Covered in your presence.

Overwhelmed by it.

I want there to be nowhere for my body to go that does not encounter yours.

And maybe that is obsession.

Maybe I should be afraid of the word.

But obsession is merely longing that has lost its manners.

And mine has.

Mine does not sit quietly anymore.

It prowls.

It waits for you.

It watches the door when I know you might enter.

It recognizes your footsteps before I consciously do.

It knows your silhouette.

Your posture.

The particular way your body occupies space.

Sometimes I swear I could identify you in complete darkness simply by what happens inside me when you come near.

Something wakes.

Something lifts its head.

There you are.

There you f*cking are.

And every civilized thought I possess suddenly has to hold the leash.

I wonder whether you have ever felt me looking at you and understood what was happening.

Not admiration.

Not exactly.

Hunger.

I wonder whether sometimes you can feel it from across the room.

Whether desire has weight.

Whether it can travel.

Whether some part of your body has ever become suddenly restless and you did not know it was because mine was calling for it.

That thought ruins me.

Because what if you feel it too?

What if beneath everything we say to each other, there is another conversation happening?

One made entirely of bodies.

A language neither of us has been brave enough to speak aloud.

You look at me.

I look at your hands.

You move closer.

I forget what I was saying.

My eyes fall to your mouth for one treacherous second.

You notice.

Neither of us says anything.

How many confessions can two people make while pretending they are silent?

Sometimes I think desire begins there.

In all the things we notice and refuse to acknowledge.

The fraction of a second someone looks too long.

The unnecessary closeness.

The hand that almost moves and then decides against it.

Except I am tired of almost.

I hate almost.

Almost has become a torture chamber.

Almost touched.

Almost kissed.

Almost confessed.

Almost reached for.

Almost gave in.

Almost…

Almost…

Almost…

I could die inside that word.

I do not want your almost.

I want your hands.

I want the full consequence of them.

I want to discover whether reality is cruel enough to feel even better than imagination.

Because imagination has already done unforgivable things to me.

It has taught me your touch before I have earned the right to know it.

It has created entire nights that never happened.

It has put your hands against my face when I was alone.

It has placed your arms around me when the bed felt too empty.

It has invented the sensation of your chest against my back, your breath near me, your fingers absentmindedly tracing patterns against my skin while the world outside disappeared.

And then I open my eyes.

Nothing.

Just me.

Just the dark.

Just my own body lying there like an unanswered question.

Those nights make me resent you a little.

Isn’t that terrible?

To resent someone for not being present in a fantasy they never promised to fulfill.

But longing is not fair.

It does not care about innocence.

It only understands absence.

And you are absent from me in every way that matters.

You are not beneath my fingertips.

You are not pressed against me.

You are not reaching for me.

So my body interprets your absence as loss even though technically I have never had you to lose.

How do you grieve something you never had?

Apparently like this.

By craving.

By replaying every touch.

By starving beside a table that was never yours.

By becoming jealous of the air because it gets to rest against your skin all day without appreciating the privilege.

See?

This is what you have reduced me to.

Jealous of air.

Jealous of fabric.

Jealous of anything allowed to touch you without consequences.

There are moments when I look at your clothes and think something so absurdly possessive that I almost laugh at myself.

They know more of your body than I do.

How sickening.

How unfair.

How completely fucking ridiculous.

And still the thought comes.

Because I do not want proximity anymore.

I want intimacy.

Physical, undeniable intimacy.

I want to know what you feel like when there is nothing between us except skin and trust and all the wanting we kept pretending was harmless.

I want to touch you slowly enough to make the waiting worth it.

And I want to be touched like you have been starving too.

There is something I need you to understand about that.

I don’t want to be handled like something disposable.

I do not want careless hunger.

I want obsession reflected back at me.

I want your touch to reveal that you have imagined this too many times.

I want your hands to hesitate for one second because finally having something you have wanted for too long can be frightening.

And then I want the hesitation gone.

I want to feel the exact moment restraint dies.

That moment.

That is the one that haunts me.

The instant when someone stops merely touching you and starts needing you.

When their hands become more certain.

When their breathing changes.

When desire ceases to be theoretical.

I want to see what you become when you stop controlling it.

I want to know whether there is something dark inside you that recognizes the dark inside me.

Something hungry enough to match it.

Something that would pull me closer when closer should already be impossible.

Something that would make me understand why I spent all this time aching.

And yet underneath all that hunger, there is still something devastatingly tender.

Because if you touched my face, really touched it, I think I might break.

Isn’t that strange?

I can imagine all this ferocity and still know that one gentle hand against my cheek could destroy me more completely than anything else.

Maybe because hunger is easy.

Tenderness is dangerous.

Hunger says, I want your body.

Tenderness says, I see the person inside it.

And I want both from you so badly that sometimes it feels like there is not enough room in my body to contain the contradiction.

I want you ravenous.

I want you gentle.

I want your hands to say things your mouth would never dare.

I want them to tell me I have been wanted.

I want them to erase every night I lay awake wondering whether anyone would ever crave my existence instead of merely tolerating it.

I want to feel chosen in the most primitive language human beings have ever known.

Touch.

Not words.

Words can lie beautifully.

Hands are harder to teach.

I want the truth of you in your hands.

And I want to give you mine.

Every trembling, obsessive, unreasonably hungry part of it.

Because there are nights when I think I could survive never being loved by you.

That would hurt.

But I could survive it.

I am less certain I could survive never knowing what it feels like when you finally stop keeping your hands to yourself.

That thought has become the blade I keep pressing against.

Maybe nothing will ever happen.

Maybe all of this will remain trapped inside me.

Maybe years from now I will still remember you as the person I wanted to touch more than anyone I ever knew.

The body I never learned.

The warmth I never reached.

The hands I spent entire nights imagining.

And there is something unbearably tragic about that possibility.

To desire someone until your own skin becomes painful, only to remain untouched by them.

To carry all this hunger to the grave without ever discovering whether their body would have recognized yours.

So yes.

I want your touch.

There is no graceful way left to say it.

I crave it.

I ache for it.

I think about it in the dark.

I think about it when you are close.

I think about it when you are nowhere near me.

Sometimes I think I could peel my own skin away just to escape the sensation of wanting yours against it.

And if you ever finally reach for me –

do not touch me like it means nothing.

Please.

After everything my imagination has done with you, after every night my body has called for something it could not have, after every accidental brush I turned into scripture and every inch between us I learned to hate –

do not give me something forgettable.

Touch me like you know exactly how long I have been starving.

Touch me like some part of you has been starving too.

Touch me until all those imaginary versions of your hands disappear.

Touch me until there is only the real thing.

Until my body finally stops asking.

Until it has its answer.

Until I cannot remember what it felt like to belong entirely to myself before you put your hands on me and taught my skin your name.