To write to you is butchery. I might as well take a carving knife and have a go at my thigh. I may as well make fillets of my tendons. Only, writing is worse. To write, I have to step out of my clothes with immense caution. I need to undress for you with such exacting patience and attention that the act itself is weight. I am heavy in my vulnerability. My arms cling to my sides. My breasts tremble with the hammering of my heart underneath. My throat is a strip of desert scrub. My eyes cannot meet yours.

One thinks that a writer has all the words in the world. One does not consider that there are times that the words do not have the writer. The writer may be reluctant to be written of. He may be unbearably weak, careworn, or incredibly faceted. The writer may be a thing of such dazzling complexity and deep-rooted shame that she cannot bear to be cast in the indelible. The writer may be so irrevocably entrenched in love for you, that she may not make it out of baring herself to you, alive. This is the plight of a lover who writes. Or a writer who loves, even. Either way, we are inseparable from our deepest want and fear: to be seen as we are.

Who among us can subsist on a meagre diet of absences? But here I am, in love with an impossible thing, as I seem to be so fond of saying. Here I am waiting for no particular consequence. I am here and I am yours in ways I have not imagined one could belong. You have redefined what it is to be owned. I am complicit in my enslavement; with complete, unbridled freedom. I don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t know where to put my hands on you anymore, or how to kiss. I don’t know any part of my body that will not curl up in a frisson of fried pleasure at the very sound of your voice. I am gone so long untouched by you that my body rejects contact as an alien intimacy.

Fix me.

Each time you say the words, ‘come here,” I am willing to forgo ever hearing another “I love you.”

Ask me one more time. Ask me to come to you. If you were to say so, I would come as fast as wheels can kiss the gravel, and with no more than everything I have ever called my own, to lay at your door.