You.

It’s not because you have a beard.

Although, that’s a bonus because I sure liked stroking it.

It’s not also because you know something about everything, although I loved that you loved to tell me, to show me, to let me into the corners of your world that no one had ever allowed me access to.

It is because you happened.

In a time when good things had stopped happening to me, you came along and changed everything.

From one rather innocent message, we blossomed into something so intense it still makes my head reel.

I think about the first kiss, you were sweaty but I didn’t care. I leaned on your back and felt a ripple run through me. Just as I had known it would. We kissed and if felt like we both wanted to drink each other in.

I think how I had never been touched in the ways you touched me. How my nipples went taut, my body yielded to yours and I threw caution to the wind, in reckless abandon.

Giving and taking.

Riding and stroking

Moaning and whimpering

Pleasure and passion.

Over and over again.

I wanted it all. I had strength I didn’t know existed. I reached peak ecstasies I didn’t know I could.

I took the orgasms I rightly deserved. Just like I said I would.

I think about the way your skin felt, like warm velvet. I wondered why I had skin like scratchy linen and you had soft velvet. It was unfair, I said to myself and I will never stop kissing you I promised myself, because maybe by the stroke of some scientific luck, kissing you will make me have skin like yours.

I think about feeling like a female lobster, shedding her shell when courting the male, becoming vulnerable and hoping that just like a real life lobster, my risks will be palliated by your desire to protect me infinitely.

I think about your smell, how it had gotten stuck in my head, like the smell of the everyday, like home, catapulting me back in time, like wet sidewalks and Harmattan.

I think about how that first night, how as I fell asleep, I didn’t imagine terrible images on my wall or hear scary sounds in the ceiling. Rather I understood love at first sight for the first time, because I knew then that knowing that you wanted me was enough.

I think about how it is weird that although I know when I’m starting to hate someone it’s not the same with love. That though I know when I am in love with someone, the falling part is tricky. Did I play a game of flames with our names, did I pick up a leaf and ask the wind If I loved you and If I loved you not?

I think of frantically trying to find the right word to describe how I felt, a word that transcended any expressive tool — a word that would have summed it all up, made it sound important, made it look beautiful, made it feel as fragile as I did. And I hoped, in vain, that I would be delivered that word, like a lightening bolt to my medulla oblongata, so that I would adequately articulate what, despite my arsenal of words, I have still not been able to express.

I ask myself if we will ever end. When this would this would fizzle out.

I try to cast aside sentimentality, to distinguish between the clear and the unclear in the vain hopes of predicting the future, our future.

Why is it that the feel of your skin, the taste of your lips, the aura of your scent remains?

And these sweet memories that I have chosen to dwell on instead — the ones that fill my heart with longing, with desires that cause my throat to constrict and my chest to ache, to miss you hopelessly - when would they end?

So clear are these elements that, the wonder that such moments existed, the comfort of these emotions, cannot be smothered by peremptory novelties like an ending.

I know that no matter what happens, these moments with you changed me and revived in me fire I thought I had long lost.

I also know that although I own the beginning, you with the velvet skin, hold the end.