First: she sat on the floor of the shower thinking about soft flesh, all the places she could grab and bite.
     Then: he sat in the passenger seat of her car wondering if she’d ever gotten in an accident, all this weaving and speeding.

     “If you would shut up about the moon, I would love to have sex with you,” she said.
     He leaned against silence.
     She turned her eyes back to the road in front of her.

     First: she explained to her six-year-old niece what a clitoris was and got in trouble with her sister.
     Then: he was trying to remember if he still knew the taste of communion wafers. How long had it been? He felt like a sin.

     She liked when they were walking down her narrow, brick-laid street and he would let go of her hand for someone to pass but wouldn’t stop touching her. His fingers would travel to her waist, then drift towards her lower back, gently grazing her sacrum, voicing in a whisper, more like a breeze than a statement: I’m here.

     He liked her tattoos, a map of her life. This one for her sister, that one a reminder; she had tattoos for others, her mom. For friends, and also from friends. He liked her tattoos not because of their aesthetics. Rather, it was a sign she could commit. Or at least, a sign that she had before.

     She thought the world belonged to her.     
     Or some version of her.
     She believed in the person she was becoming.

     The more books he read, the more sure he became that he was, ultimately, nothing but ordinary and would never amount to much.

     He was all afraid of himself: who he was and even more so who he was not. He was hesitant to offer any information about his being (from his fear of spiderwebs to his love of her), a sort of identity phobia, the fear of getting himself all wrong.
     He was constantly mulling over the horror of being seen through someone else’s eyes, of finding that what they saw wasn’t something he understood. Or wasn’t something he liked.
     He had no idea who he was; he had no idea who he wanted to be beyond “good.”

     She was always neglecting any thought about identity—because when she did think about it, and how our little quirks make us who we are, she unearthed a need that made her queasy.
     She tried not to think back towards all the time she spent trying to impose her personality on others. As in: she couldn’t bear the thought that someone might see her differently from the person she thought she was becoming. The person she wanted to be. The person she had curated.           
     She was desperately afraid of the horror of being unknown.

     She dazzled.
     He was dull. Or at least that’s what he was afraid of.

     First: “Sometimes the sky feels so big it hurts,” he disclosed through a tight jaw.

                 She did not understand this sentiment.

     Then: “Sometimes I feel so big it hurts,” she rasped through a hit from their joint.

                 He could not imagine what this felt like.

     They wanted each other, and they would have each other for many many moments, not because they were so close, but because they were so curious, so keen to understand.

     The things that set us apart are sometimes the things that hold us together.

– Amelia Wright