I can’t be measured. I can’t be measured with you. Not with you.

I try, I do try, but I fail miserably, each and every time. In the face of you, my carnality, my sensuality rises up, forcing its way through my skin, tearing at my flesh, dizzying my mind, shredding the seams of my impatience, my rationality, my experience of time. In the face of you and your body and your passions and your words, I am aflame.

In the end, it is this flame, this fire, my fury, my fervour that has burnt us right up for the very last time. And in its wake there is nothing but the need to guard and shield and hide this flesh, this heart, this vulnerability away, to paper over the fissure of desire you cruelly and tenderly tore open wide, to find my way through the tears and this pain to the love and the lust and the home of man I hunger and crave.

In the hours and days and weeks that slide imperceptibly away, in the grip of his fire, in the face of his presence, in the space of his absence, in the past tense of his desire, she realises with an almost painful clarity that this is no longer a game. She realises that he is unlike any other, that he is the man of flesh and blood and word and passion, the man ideal, the man flawed that she has always longed to meet. He is the man, he is that man, the one who inspires thoughts profound and profane, who speaks to her erotic and carnal longings, who pierces a place deep inside her she can barely acknowledge, let alone articulate.

She knows this now; knows it her bones, in her cunt and her heart and her soul.

She knows this just as she knows she will soon be forgotten, replaced, leaving the barest whisper of a trace. She knows this just as she knows she will never be that woman for him, he will never want her as she wants him, he will never want in the inquisitive, complex and complete ways that overtake her as the sun shines bright, that taunt her in the darkness, in her dreaming even as she prays to forget, that sweep over her petite form as she splays her legs wide, as she grinds her hips, her palm into her throbbing sex, as she nudges the flimsy cotton aside and spreads her bright lips to circle the nub of her purest pleasure, as she pushes in one digit, then two, then three, as she fingers, as she fucks with animal abandon, with feminine sensuality, her moans, her raged breath bringing him back to life once again, her moans, her murmurs placing him right before her eyes, by her side, her moans, her murmurs, her call to him flooding her ears with his voice, her mouth with his kiss, her senses with his skin and weight and burning need, her moans, her murmurs, her call, her cry binding, enslaving, plunging her headlong into the abyss shadowed and blinding.

As the sheen on her bare, shivering body glistens in the low, winter light, she knows this; she knows all of this. And how she wishes instead for ignorance’s bliss.

She wishes he could be as forgettable to her as she is to him. She wishes for the ability to wipe him from her thoughts, her dreams, her body memory, from her erotic longings as easily and cleanly as his own process of erasure. She wishes and hopes and attempts to forget. But time and again her body betrays her, for there he is just as she opens herself to the pleasures of the flesh, just as the light blinds her eyes and the orgasm screams through and out of her.

There he is.

There he is before her, behind her, pressed softly, firmly into her. There is his voice, his scent, the taste of his kiss on her lips. There is his desire; the desire that speaks to her, somehow knows her, the desire whose subtleties and complexities, whose primal urgencies and lingering sensualities uncannily feel just like home.

The words will not come. The body will not follow. There is only numbness in their place. There is only the contrary longing to exorcise this desire while clinging to it for dear, electrifying life. There is only the bittersweet craving for a man whose intensity and magnetism, whose complex eroticism excites, revives, terrifies. There is only the dull, aching recognition of an impossible possibility.