Intimate Stories

Figments
How does he feel it
so deeply
when I am not even there?

Not really.

Not in the way he wants me.
Not in the way he swears his soul touches mine
through the screen,
through the silence,
through the stories he builds
in the dark corners of his mind.

He says we’re making love.
That when he closes his eyes,
he can feel my breath in his mouth.
My skin is on his.
My name trembled at the edge of his moans.

He says he feels it.
All of it.
So much that he cries sometimes
like it’s real.
Like I’m real.

But I am not there.

I am a still body on the other side of the day.
A name he shaped into a longing.
A voice that once hummed into his hunger,
But never really fed him.

He is making love to figments.
To echoes.
To wishbones and shadows.

And maybe that’s the cruelest thing
That his body believes the lie.
That his heart bleeds for a phantom.
That his tears fall for a story
he wrote
alone.

**On When S*x Becomes a Chore**

I remember when just the sound of him breathing would make my thighs clench.
When the heat between us was wild, reckless, and holy.
When one looks from him across the room would undo me completely — my skin prickling, my breath catching, my body begging before a single word is spoken.

I craved him like hunger.
I needed him like breath.

And then it started.

The first slap was almost tender, the way a storm first kisses the earth before it rips it apart.
The first insult was almost a joke, something I could laugh off, until it wasn't funny anymore.
Until it stuck.
Until it buried itself inside me.

And the beatings came after.
The bruises hidden under sleeves, the blood swallowed down with shame.
The nights of silence.
The mornings of pretending.
The thousand tiny ways he taught me that my body was not my own.

Now...
s*x is no longer a homecoming.
It’s a chore.

A sickening script I know too well.
The way he grabs without looking.
The way I freeze and disappear, piece by piece, until only my body remains, performing.

I pray, not for passion, not anymore, but for peace.
For a night without hands.
For sleep that isn’t interrupted by the weight of obligation.
For mornings without the hollow ache of being used.

It’s a special kind of death, this.
The death of desire.
The death of wanting.
The death of yes.

What once made my toes curl and my heart race now makes my stomach turn.
Where there was once fire, there is now dread.
Where there was once surrender, there is now survival.

And still, somewhere deep, deep beneath the wreckage, a flicker remains.
A stubborn, pulsing truth:

My body was not made for suffering.
It was made for love.
For pleasure.
For joy.

One day, I will reclaim it.
One day, I will feel the breathlessness again — not from fear, but from being truly, fiercely wanted.
Loved without bruises.
Touched without obligation.

Until then, I pray:
Not tonight.
Please, God. Not tonight.