I am need incarnate. Not the gentle, whimpering kind that poets dress in silk and call longing; I am the raw fucking nerve that screams when exposed to air, the kind of want that strips you down to bone and sinew and leaves you gasping like a drowning man who's forgotten how to breathe without another's lungs to guide him.
I ache like flesh torn too quickly, like skin peeled back to reveal the crimson machinery beneath. In your absence, I become geography; a landscape of hunger carved into valleys of desperation, mountains of ache that no map could chart, no explorer could conquer. I rot beautifully, like fruit left too long in summer heat, sweet decay seeping through every pore until even my sweat tastes of mourning.
And then I break. Not with thunder, not with the dramatic crack of lightning splitting sky, but quietly, like bone giving way under pressure it was never meant to bear. Beautifully, like a cathedral collapsing in slow motion, each stone a prayer falling to earth.
There exists a hunger that feeds only on absence, grows fat on emptiness, thrives in the spaces between heartbeats where your phantom pulse should echo against my ribs. It lives in the pause between your footsteps that still ring in corridors you no longer walk, in the untouched geography of sheets where your body carved valleys I now worship like a pilgrimage site. I press my face into that hollow, inhaling the ghost of your perfume as it decays into something sweeter, sadder, more mine than you ever were when you breathed beside me.
Your scent becomes archaeology; I excavate layers of memory from cotton fibres, carbon-dating each molecule of you that clings to fabric like evidence of a crime I'd commit again and again until my hands bled from the repetition.
I am possessed by want. The feral, venom-dripping kind that keeps you rigid long after flesh has departed, the kind that makes your own hands feel like trespassers on territory they should know better than any cartographer ever mapped a continent. It's the want that turns masturbation into manifestation, self-pleasure into séance.
When I touch myself, it isn't replacement; it's resurrection. I conjure your hands from heat and breath and the slow, deliberate drag of memory across skin that remembers you better than my mind ever could. This isn't fantasy, it's fucking liturgy, a summoning circle drawn in salt and semen and the sacred mathematics of how your fingers traced coordinates across my body like you were claiming new worlds.
I know the topography of your touch better than pilgrims know their prayers. How your fingers move like scripture across skin, how your mouth opens before it bites, that perfect pause where your breath hitches just before you surrender to the wild thing that lives beneath your controlled exterior. I recreate it all with the devotion of a monk copying manuscripts by candlelight, each stroke faithful, each gasp a genuflection before the altar of your absent flesh.
My palm becomes your palm, my rhythm becomes your rhythm, until the boundary between memory and masturbation dissolves like sugar in rain. I fuck myself with the phantom of you, and Christ, it's better than most reality I've ever tasted.
This is worship in its rawest form, communion without wine, sacrament without church. They call it love, those who've never felt their soul crack open like an egg and spill its yolk across the floor, but it's closer to starvation, closer to the fire that lives beneath skin and feeds on itself when no other fuel remains.
It's like having a rib cracked open to let the heart breathe, like surgery performed with desire instead of scalpels, like dying a little death every night and being grateful for the privilege of resurrection come morning.
Without you, I become both priest and sacrifice, altar and offering, the one who prays and the god who answers.