I haven’t been that close, physically or emotionally, in years. A decade in comparison. You forget the way your mind goes blank, the way – nose to nose and smile to smile – the world disappears around you. You forget how it feels to be wanted, to be met with “show me more” instead of “be less”. So you wring yourself out thinking you can extract wanting to be wanted drip by drip, hang drying until you crack, sure that if you could drown once more that’d be enough. But they leave their taste in your mouth, the shape of their body imprinted in your memory, the smell of their hair coming back to you on every humid day since and that part of yourself that you kept hidden for the last 10 years starts clawing at the surface begging to be seen, be heard, be healed.

-tbrumm