Raven Leilani

I mean, with one half degree of difference, everything I want could be mine. I am good, but not good enough, which is worse than simply being bad. It is almost.

“It makes me want you more,” I say, wondering if I’m beginning to say too much, if it was a mistake to tell him that he is the only one.

It is like I really need him. Because there are men who are an answer to a biological imperative, whom I chew and swallow, and there are men I hold in my mouth until they dissolve.

Slowly, he eases me down onto his grand, slightly left-leaning cock, and for a moment I do rethink my atheism, for a moment I consider the possibility of God as a chaotic, amorphous evil who made autoimmune disease but gave us miraculous genitals to cope, and so I fuck him desperately with the force of this epiphany

I was pretending not to
worry about the consequences of my isolation. But whenever I talked to anyone, I found myself overcompensating for the atrophy of my social muscles.

I didn’t tell him I was a virgin because I could not bear to be treated tenderly. I didn’t want him to be careful. I wanted it to be over with. So when it hurt and I was too proud to say stop and so said more, I believed, like a Catholic or a Tortured Artist, that the merit of a commitment correlates directly to the pain you endure in its pursuit.

He was afraid of her like I would one day be afraid of him, because children, like dogs, are attuned to the signs of an impending storm.

But from the outside, the loneliness is palpable, and I think, She is too young.

I was sixteen. I could not have been a mother. The women in my family maybe should not have been mothers. This is not so much a judgment as a fact.

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” she says, her voice low, tight. I remember when my parents tried to tell me this, the only time in their miserable marriage they were ever united. It must be strange for every black kid, when their principal authority figures break the news that authorities lie. Ironically, I didn’t believe them. I had to find it out for myself.