Teach me words I can use to love you with. Help my mouth meet new shapes and sounds, form them between my teeth, and blow into them life and love.

Helen, I go back to your voice notes again and again. It is like a dying man in a desert finally having had sight of an oasis. When you call for me that way I feel there is nothing in this world that can keep me from you. No man or ten thousand men, nor wolves, not even wild horses. I am bound to you in ways that I have lost the language for. Every cell inside of me screams for you – desiring you, needing you, thirsty as hell. It is what this desire unleashes in me that holds a space of fear for you, isn’t it? Because really, what can you do with this kind of energy? It cannot be contained. And that which cannot be controlled and inevitably lead to destruction, yes?

What if there was another story? What if we took this and moulded it like dough? What if we kneaded our desire and created nourishment from it? What if we were to consume it in ways that fed us rather than burned us? What then, Helen? What would that make but more love? More life.

What is it to exist in this space with you? Delicious with possibility. Some part of me has willingly forgotten. To know so intimately the hunger for your skin, the taste of your tongue, the feral scent between your legs. To ache upon hearing you say my name in a way that spells wanting. Or to remember your fingers in my hair, your nails on my back, your teeth on my throat. Slowly like a cut upon skin, the past returns in rivulets of remembering. My face in your hair, my mouth hungry upon your breast, my fingers a search party upon the map of your body. And your voice in my ear, urgent and sanguine at once. The flush of deep diving into you, your soft hot cave, your impatient wetness.

Wait. You’re blushing furiously. But stay in this moment with me. Don’t move. Lock yourself in. Please stay. It eases. The blush recedes. The pulling will return and then we can be animal in our ways. I don’t want to be decent. I need the claw of your wanting in a way parched earth calls for rain. We have known a drought, after all.

I know I get caught up in the poetics of writing and at some point stop making sense. In the years since I was last inside you, my body forces itself to forget. The hunger racks my being distended with wanting and not having. But I think this is why desire is so coveted and so dangerous. It germinates. It gestates. It holds possibility of new things to come to life. Touching myself is a synonym for your name. I’m calling it. Aching for you. Needing to take and be taken. Needing absolution and retribution at once. Surrender.

Here is my white flag, my Helen, my coloniser.
There is nothing I wouldn’t do for you.

M.