If this was desire, it was unlike any desire I had felt or known before. This was something infinitely more helpless. What I knew and could rationalise, could harness and dispel were those old longings stretched out tight along skin, those manic hums reverberating in our ears and on our tongues. Those were hungers easy enough to shoulder and then shrug off, eyelashes low on our faces, fingers tight in each other’s fists. Irreverent, gentle; loving and infectiously excited; we were self-sufficent, satiable.

This gnawing is impossibly different — felt not on my skin but, in a painful return to the literal: a hunger in my belly. Some gaping vacuum that persisted in growing off our shared nothings, feeding ravenously off our silences. I could not repress it, until I began to feel it press against muscle, bone, surface. I would think of you placing your hand there, the pads of your fingers and the soft thrust of your palm resting on that imperceptible pulse under my skin, that throb under the rise of my stomach. In this imagined proximity, my skin is paper-thin and irrelevant. Where your touch translates in my abstractions into a synaesthesia of palpability and absence is at the surface of that foetal loneliness.

In the real world moments now of our bodies folding into each other, what I want most desperately is to curl your hands around that hollow, to wish your fingers into willing this insupportable silence away, replacing it with that wordless language of clairvoyant touch that used to define us. But the new silences between us — too quickly become too familiar — give my courage pause; we fall asleep in those suspensions, wake to interruptions insupportable in the mornings’ grey light. Love is insufficient.