Did she actually feel guilty or was she performing it because that was the only world she knew, where these things weren’t allowed, where pleasure in those forms wasn’t allowed?

It was exhausting feeling this raw, running away from the memories.

She managed to say the word “queer” with a small sour twist that somehow acknowledged how it could be an arrow with a disgust- poisoned tip even while reclaiming it in her mouth.

There are some places that you swear you’ll never go back to because the space itself has become inseparable from the time; the there is the same as the then and you don’t know how to deal with the space if it’s inside a different slot of time.

but that’s the problem with pressing yourself down too much, folding and folding when you’re not really made of a material that’s suitable for those kinds of creases. At some point, you just spring back up when you can’t take another bending, not a single pleat more. And upon that, you spring back with force, and your momentum can be quite upsetting to people who didn’t expect you to claim your space.

She was good at that, trying not to put too much pressure on things, trying to fit into slivers of space, press herself against the edges so she wouldn’t bother anyone.

You could be so intimate, so familiar with someone’s skin and flesh and spirit, only to wake up one day and find that it had receded from you, suddenly, like a tide rushing back out into the sea, leaving you with dissolving foam and a damp heart.

"I’m just trying to look at something without blinking, to see what it is like, or it could have been like, and how that had something to do with the way we live now."