Naked In My Desire For You.

They catch us in a moment of stolen privacy. Our eyes are locked, we whisper to each other, and every few seconds, you kiss my mouth, and smile at me. Your fingers press into my spine and as I watch you with my head resting on my own shoulder, I can feel myself beaming, and yearning.

We don't notice them watching.

Until we hear the clicking sounds of their snapshots and the barely contained giggles. These strong, staid women who raised me, the ones I mindlessly trust to handle a crisis or stop a war, giggle at me like children who have seen something they shouldn't have known. These complicated, brilliant women who have suffered the world in ways I cannot fathom, they treat love and sex like candied treats from times gone by. There is an innocence to their gaze and to the desire to giggle at this picture they have taken, of our eyes longing in need, and of the intensity of love expressed in stolen moments of intimacy.

*Why are you both so obsessed with each other?*

They ask.

And then they turn to each other. They perform caricatures of our need for each other and in good-natured ribbing they tell us how they view our love-sick obsession with each other. As they walk up to the roof to smoke in secret, I turn to you and kiss you again. I know it confuses them, they're accustomed to a different conception of love and relationships, one of duty, in which indulgence is frivolity, but I know underneath the amusement and ribaldry are desires left unfulfilled. They stay away from understanding it because they've expelled it from their world, only to be expressed in secret clatches on roofs.

They say they don't understand this obsession.

They don't understand you.

They don't understand me.

But they don't know what you know.

They don't know that last night I asked you to fill my ass up with your cum, and you held my throat as you scooped it out of my cunt and stuffed it inside another hole. They don't know it feels to be seen in being so depraved, by comparison it feels like the rest of the world knows nothing of me at all.

They don't know that this morning I lay in bed and begged for you to hurt me. They don't know the profundity of a well-placed elbow on a shoulder in a moment of dire need. They don't know how it feels to be so helpless before another and still feel so safe, by comparison a hanging over a cliff feels less scary and a sterile room, less safe.

They don't know I was buying all those meditation cushions so I could kneel before you for longer. They don't know how it feels to devote yourself to the service of the whims of another. They don't know how it feels to be so convinced of the power of another you put your faith in them for no good reason at all, by comparison prostrating before god would feel less like worship.

They don't know my hormones have nothing to do with why my face looks swollen, it's swollen because yesterday you held me against the wall and beat me until the world around me started to spin. They don't know how it feels to look cruelty in the face in a moment of vulnerability, and find intensity that soothes your soul, by comparison having your entrails strewn all over the floor would feel less like exposure.

They don't know we're counting the days until we are alone, so he can tie me to the foot of the bed, crush my face underneath his boot and hurt me until I cry my weight in blood. They don't know how human it is to long to express your love, by comparison even thirst and starvation feel like secondary needs.

Or maybe they know.

They take pictures of us to poke fun at our love, but they giggle because there are things that cannot be hidden. In this little moment they captured is my entire world.

How can anyone not see?

I am naked in my desire for you. If you look close enough,

it's plain for the world to see.