She Taught Me the Shape of Want

I remember the light in her flat was always soft, as if someone had considered how the sun should arrive on skin. We were always arriving at each other. I didn’t know what I was then, not exactly. There were shapes I knew I liked to hold, names I would let fall away in conversation like forgotten luggage. But with her, everything felt like punctuation. Full stops after touches, ellipses in the silence between our laughter.

She painted her nails in bed, and I watched. Not because I found it curious, but because I found her fingertips sacred. Watching her do anything felt like witnessing a private language of movement. Her gestures were always intentional, like she had rehearsed intimacy in secret and was finally letting it out in front of me. It was infatuation, yes, but also instruction. I studied her like she might help me understand something I hadn’t yet named.

At night, she played music that turned the room red. Not in hue, but in feeling. The kind of sound that slips its fingers into your chest and gently rearranges what you thought you knew. Her hips would sway in rhythm with the bass, and she would mouth the words but never sing them. I imagined each lyric was a note passed between girls who never wrote their names at the bottom.

Before her, there were others. He, and then another he. All clumsy touches and well-meaning distractions. I let myself believe in the ease of it all. In the idea that wanting someone is always legible, always expected. But I would find myself bored mid-sentence, drifting off while their hands learned nothing new about me. It was as if my skin had already left the room, tired of being misread.

With her, I didn’t have to explain. She moved towards me in slow choreography, a dance older than either of us, rehearsed by women in secret throughout history. She touched my shoulder once, in passing, and I thought about it for days. That is the difference, when desire stops being something you negotiate and becomes something you remember.

We would spend afternoons in the garden behind her building. She grew rosemary and tomatoes, though neither flourished. We lay side by side on the grass, socks stained green, talking nonsense. There was no performance to it. Her laugh came easily. Her voice slowed when she turned toward me. Everything about her was considered and generous, even in laziness. There were no declarations, only moments that pressed too close to be ignored. Her hand brushed mine as she reached for the mug. Her leaning into my shoulder while reading aloud from a book she said I would love. I didn’t know if I loved the book. I loved her lips around the words.

One day, without any ceremony, she kissed me. It was not dramatic. It was a question asked quietly, and I answered. I remember thinking, this, this is what has been hiding under all that confusion. Not fireworks, not epiphany. Just the soft certainty of her mouth. Afterwards, we walked through town like nothing had changed, though everything had. The streets were the same, the sounds the same. But inside, I felt lighter. She linked our fingers and didn’t look around to see who noticed.

That night, I lay awake in her bed while she slept, her arm across my stomach. I studied the ceiling and felt my body hum. Not with fear, but with a quiet recognition. The beginning of something ancient and unnamed. There were days we argued over small things, mostly. She said I spoke in riddles. I told her she hid behind laughter. Neither of us was wrong. We hurt each other in casual ways, like people do when they believe love is inevitable. But we always came back, our silences never lasted more than an afternoon.

There was something impossible about the way we fit together, like puzzle pieces made soft. Her grip around my waist tightened whenever I shifted in the dark, pulling me closer with a kind of desperation that made me feel wanted in the most specific way; like she needed me, not a body, not a theory of touch, but the precise shape I was becoming. My breasts, still shy in their arrival, brushed her chest and she lingered there, not startled, not rushed, just present. It was that presence that undid me most. The way she didn’t flinch as my body rearranged itself nightly under her hands, as if every version I was becoming belonged exactly here, pressed to her in the hush of dawn.

The softness between us wasn’t passive. It was alive, pulsing. Her fingers mapped my spine with a slow, studied care, like each vertebra was a confession. Our legs tangled until I couldn't tell which foot was hers, which calf pressed against which thigh. When I turned in the sheets, she turned too, following the shift like it was destined. She bit my shoulder once, barely, a mark not meant to bruise but to stay. I moaned, not from pain but from how deeply she’d found me. Our bodies – hers confident, mine still unfolding – met in the kind of quiet storm that only lovers without language can conjure. We didn’t need words. Just skin; breath and weight. That was enough.

In the summer, we swam in the sea at dusk. The water was too cold, but she would drag me in, laughing, shouting at the horizon. I would watch the salt stick to her collarbone, the moon caught in the curl of her damp hair. There was a moment, one night, when she floated on her back and said, "I feel like the world can't touch me here." I watched her float further and thought, please don’t drift out of reach. We never said the words. Not because they weren’t true, but because they were too obvious. What we had didn’t need articulation. It existed in the shared toothbrush, the knotted sheets, the playlists we made and never listened to.

Eventually, of course, things shifted. As they do. She began talking about another city, a different kind of life. I nodded, supportive, even as my throat tightened. I wanted her happiness, I just wanted it to happen with me in the room. The last time we kissed, we both knew. It was not a goodbye, it was an acknowledgement. A thank you for what we had built. For what we had dared to know.

Now, when I pass her street, I do not feel pain. Just a quiet warmth. Like an old scar that no longer aches but reminds you of something you survived. Something beautiful and finite. Desire now wears her face, even when it changes shape. When I feel a pull towards someone, it is her hands I remember first. Her way of laughing before a sentence. Her spine curving toward sleep.

I still don’t call it anything. There is no need. I move through the world with her rhythm in my step. I want what I want. And sometimes, more often now, it looks like her. Into the space she made, into the person I had been becoming all along. Not a story of before and after, but the middle. The breath caught between.

I am still breathing her in.

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WRITTEN BY: P. ELDRIDGE

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