how far we go

I saw your hamburger slippers on TikTok and remembered how much I love your work

I’m sitting outside the bar where everyone is underage or a pedophile, watching teenage boys shatter glass bottles on the streetlights.

I don’t know how you end up sitting next to me.

Without looking at me, your hand is on my knee. You smell like warm paper, and remind me of when I was little and reading the books that I love. I think about reading, and then not reading on a warm rug in the sunshine. I lean in, close my eyes, teleport us there.

Your friend tosses a bottle too close to my feet. You pull me behind you, away from the shards, yell at him. I love you already.

You sit me down on your lap, hand up my thigh, then up my skirt, stroking me through green cotton underwear that my mom still insists on buying for me in multipacks. Sliding the underwear aside, gently inside me. Clear eyes, dark eyebrows, you lean in for the first kiss, yes, yes, yes.

Later, onto the back of your red scooter, the wind is too cold on my legs. You tenderly put your helmet on my head, it smells like boy sweat. I squeeze you with my thighs and bury my face in your back, I’m absorbing the orange streetlights, how the drivers can’t see us in the darkness, how our bodies have barely lived, the ruthlessness of semi-trucks as they roar by oblivious.

I think calmly about my mom’s warnings of death by twisted metal, flesh wrapped around machines. I lose my footing for a moment and the hot tailpipe singes my ankle. I still have the scar.

Safely in your room, you put my pink sandals by your door.

You roll a joint, kiss me deep, slide down between my legs, and touch your tongue to my clit, painfully tender and urgent. Even today, the smell of weed still makes me wet. My body count is approaching my age, but this is the first time someone is doing this for me.

As you tend to me, I look around your room, try to take it in. Music posters, a hanging effigy, signs of somebody growing up the way that maybe everyone is supposed to. You run the flat of your tongue gently up and down the length of my vulva. Did you know the clitoris is shaped like an upside-down Y? The glans under the hood where you’re now flicking your tongue, is only what people can see. The entire clitoris, from the glans to the crura, can be 3.5 to 4.25 inches long.

You take a slow breath and slide one finger inside me, I squeeze and release as you start licking a little harder, holding my hips as I press against you, insistent and urgent. Another finger, then switch to your thumb which feels different again. I am aware that I am a precious being who is being very carefully taken care of right now. You feel very close and very far away all at the same time, kissing, licking, watching me, listening to breath and pulse.

You stroke my other ankle, the uninjured one, and I come quietly but inevitably, like waves lapping at a distant shore again, and again, and again.

I sneak out of my second-floor bedroom window most nights because I can’t get enough. For six weeks, if I don’t find you, you find me.

We sit on a stone bridge and you kiss me again and again, pull me inside your sweater. I fall asleep on top of you, you’re the first person I wake up next to.

Fifty two missed calls on my phone. Mom. Mom. Mom. Mom. Mom. Dad. Mom. She says, “no one will marry you if you do things like that” - she can’t look at me, can’t say the words for what she knows I am doing. Mom, I think. I’m not asking to get married.

—

I’m eighteen, you’re twenty. I fly to meet you. My hotel room is tiny and dark and slants to one side, I can roll a ball from one end to the other. My father’s concerned friend gives me a thousand euros and takes me to a bistro. We eat thin strips of raw beef on toast as he lectures me about the revolutionary impact of technology and the boundless potential of the youth.

I count down ninety minutes until you slide your hands under my shirt again.

A girl that used to look at us wrote me a long email saying she loved how we were such fucked up little horny angels. I don’t know if it’s true, because I don’t see any of this as fucked up or particularly angelic. I don’t know. There isn’t a single photo of us together. We were always disappearing.

I meet you in a park. We hug in the middle of the buskers rolling heavy-looking crystal balls up and down their arms. In three heartbeats, my hands are in your beard, on the back of your neck, tugging you closer. I go numb which is what I think it feels like to die from shock. I bite my lip to keep from crying and kiss you harder. We kiss so hard and so urgently that my lips are bruised for days. In two minutes, we’re down on the grass, your fingers are tracing the crescent of flesh where my shirt lifts up off my jeans, you smile like a thief, this is my favourite colour.

I don’t care that you’re lying but I hope in that moment you’re not.

You skip the subway fare and squirrel me away to your sister’s flat. You kiss me and say you’re going out quickly. I pace the apartment, pick up books, put them down like a hungry ghost. Hungry and heartsick, I’m going down the stairs just as you come up. We’re always almost missing each other.

You come back to my hotel room, and finally we are naked and I can breathe. I trace your ribs carved out like a saint on a cross, count the freckles that have emerged since the last time you undressed us. You never cared about longevity or sun protection. You show me your tongue ring and kiss me from forehead to knees to ankles. I try to feel it, then it’s too much and I try not to feel it, then I push you down and ride you so I can feel it again.

We fall asleep, I wake up. I count the minutes, forward this time, memorise the way you smell. I remind myself that love is freedom and think about how tigers pace back and forth in their enclosures at the zoo. I want to be freely chosen and freely loved.

You wake up and I wave goodbye to you from the bed.

I love you forever, let’s never speak again.

Letting the taste of you just sit on my tongue (my tongue)

And I know I should get a new one

Worship isn't just words—it's action: https://throne.com/nagaramama