Jack,

            I am no longer afraid of human hands. I know what flesh against flesh feels like now, even in the most unassuming of places: finger to ear, arm against calf, I’ve felt your crooked bones on mine in every crevice and corner my simple mind can name. I didn’t know that veins could be so blue, skin could be so tender…. Feeling your arms around my unclothed body felt like wrapping myself in a velvet wash. Consumed by your soft, soft touch. I am no longer afraid of human hands.

            I am now afraid of the human mind. Rationality was a safeguard (making lists, pros and cons, weighing out why and why not) I thought I knew how to keep everything tidy, everything understood, how to wrap it up on paper and regurgitate by mouth. You taught me that rationality plays no part in the heart’s endeavors. I should have learned that from Pascal-- the classroom is meant to teach those hard truths, is it not? However, you are more philosophy than you are boy, and I’m feeling incompetent in reflection of it all; almost as though I wasn’t shrewd enough to read you. I was too naïve, too caught up in your tender arms to see your hard, hard mind and the way you could change it without a blink. I did the blinking for us both. On the ride home from your house on a hill, an hour away from my flat ground temple, I asked myself why I had let myself unlock and why I had given you the key. You exhibited no signs of trustworthiness, reliance. In fact, you were a ticking time bomb, and I could feel that we would both implode. I suppose you taught me that I am not the girl with the head cemented on her shoulders, I would say my flesh is merely stitched—tearing at the seams now, I feel as though what I knew has been undone and I’m left here, this sacrilegious experience zipped up in a backpack, the sweater I stole that smells of you, and the 45 dollars I put aside to ride the bus. I was not going to tell mom and dad where we were going. But you entered into my body and left it like a vacant shadow. I couldn’t help but tell through tears.

I’m not afraid of your hands. You’ve already touched me like I wanted.  I just feel as though I’m a lost traveler of your mind, and I wanted to be a desired explorer. That trip has come to an end.

I don’t wish you my best, nor do I wish you my worst.  I just thought you should know that I gained and that I lost

Both at our cost.