We spend all our lives learning to have good sex.

We learn how to touch. How to get someone off. How to make someone have fun, even when she’s sad and lonely. How to make someone orgasm, even when he feels unsafe and misses his mother.

Men flee from me wanting to cry and I flee from men wanting to lock myself in a room, alone.

The erotic exists in a realm we cannot enter. A space governed by intoxicating scents and storms of emotion. By rose petals on the wind and stars I don’t know the names for, but you do.

I am afraid of chaos, true. But I am not afraid of him.

We are animals underneath. I am lying hair scattered across the pillows of men I fuck to punish him for wanting me and not saying it. I break things between my teeth, laptops, statues of gods. I am a good soldier snapped to attention. He belongs to White people now, it is where he belongs, doesn’t he?

If I really love him, I should let him go. If I really love him. If.

I.

I was once a girl in a forest full of lost things and truncated songs. I was once his angel looking down on him from afar. I crawled into his bed at night and we slept shoulder to shoulder, thick as thieves. We were thieves. We stole from our people’s history. What we stole was time.

I was never lonely. I ate his love when I was loveless. I drank his touch when I was hopeless. I came for the first time in my life because he looked at me and that look was like a touch.