At heaven’s gate, I kill him every night for a week. Not violent deaths. Gentle ones. He chokes on something. He falls asleep and doesn’t wake up. In one dream he just fades, like a photograph left in the sun. I wake up crying and I don’t know if it’s grief or relief.
The feeling has no name. Or it has too many names and they all contradict each other and they’re all true simultaneously and I’m supposed to pick one but I can’t, so I just sit there with my coffee watching him exist and wanting to crawl into his skin and wanting to peel it off and wanting to disappear into him and wanting him to disappear and none of this makes sense but it’s the only thing that’s real.
It leaves traces. Not fingerprints. More like pressure. The way a room feels different after you’ve wanted something in it.
I’m bleeding.
The love and the hate and the need and the rage don’t cancel each other out. They just pile up—
Salt and iron.
—layer after layer until I can’t tell which feeling came first or whether that’s even a different question from what my body is doing right now.
My body knows things I don’t. It contracts around what it wants and doesn’t ask permission and doesn’t explain itself and I have learned to pay attention to this.
There’s a fantasy. All the doors lock from the outside. Not forever. Just—
He fades, like a photograph left in the sun.
—just long enough that the feeling has to stay. Not by choice. By architecture.
In the fantasy I don’t do anything. I don’t need to. Permanence is enough.
My body during this time knows how to hold two things at once. Come closer and this will hurt in the same gesture. Not contradiction. Just precision.
I’m on the bed, sheets already marked.
The feeling is circling. I open my hand—not surrender, not invitation exactly—more like: I know you’re here. So witness this.
Watch me want something while I’m breaking down.
There’s a hunger that has nothing to do with emptiness. My body reaching toward the feeling the way it reaches toward anything it has decided to want: without apology, without asking what it means.
He exists.
Not penetration. Absorption. The way water takes in blood—not violently, just inevitably.
I think about the feeling like this: something that would know the temperature of me. The salt and iron taste. Something I could pull into the part of me that’s already open, already doing its monthly work of destruction and renewal, and say—
He falls asleep and doesn’t wake up.
—be here for this too.
My body is always shedding. Always making room by destroying what came before. It does this without my permission and I have stopped wanting permission to be part of it.
Close enough to stain. Close enough that afterward neither of us is clean. Close enough that the feeling has to reckon with a body that is never finished, never static, never just a place where things happen—
Still reaching.
This is not about transcendence. It’s about being animal enough to want what hurts.
The feeling can stay. But it has to stay for all of it. The parts that smell like iron. The parts where I’m curled around my own aching and my body is still, underneath that, insisting on what it wants.
That’s the deal.
Witness me in my cycle.
Or don’t come at all.
PSYRAW FLUX 