“You get a strange feeling when you lose someone you were intimate with. Kind of like you never want to be touched again. Or avoiding letting anyone else put their hands where theirs used to be. It becomes a strange process, letting the relationship die over and over again until you can stop hating anything that comes into contact with you that isn’t them. You resent the shower because all the hot water makes you feel like your body was never theirs. You quit masturbating because their fingers were the last inside of you and you want to keep it that way. You want your insides to become a relic of all the ways they loved you. So it becomes a funny process, you have to bury them and dig them up for every new old thing that you do without them. You kiss another person and think it’s the worst kind of betrayal. You’re angry at your mouth for enjoying it, you’re angry at your mouth for wanting more, and you’re angry at yourself for forgetting what their lips tasted like. That’s how it happens, you barely notice at first. It starts with tiny little things, you forget how they looked in the morning, you forget how their own brand of stubble felt between your thighs, you move on and it’s terrifying and it’s glorious but more than that, it’s freeing. Because you thought you’d never have that again, you’d never want someone so much that it felt like drowning and gasping for air was the most wonderful thing you’d ever done.So it’s okay, you can say ‘I am so scared that I will never love someone like I loved you’ when they leave, but it won’t be true. It won’t come close to true. Months from now you’ll be in a dark room with another person who turns your body into a lit match and there will be a litany of ‘fucks’ falling in procession from your mouth and they will be more a part of you than anyone has ever been and you’ll feel glorious and more than that, you’ll feel safe. And here is what you’re going to think: I had that moment with you and I am thankful for it. That is it.”
