(Written 11th August 2025)
Staring at the ceiling at night, I think about how asking for intimacy feels like the forest asking the sky for rain. It’s not just a request; it’s the soft, desperate hope that something bigger than you will see your thirst and choose to answer. The forest doesn’t have words. It just waits, year after year, leaves drying and curling in on themselves, roots searching deeper into the soil for a trace of what they once knew. That’s what it feels like inside my chest. My ribs are the treeline. My lungs are brittle branches. I don’t remember the last time it rained.
I’ve been taught not to ask. Somewhere along the way, I absorbed that needing another person was shameful, dangerous. That to reach out was to give someone the map to my most vulnerable places, and people don’t always visit gently. So I keep my longing locked in my throat until it rots there. I keep my hands folded under the blanket, even when they ache to be held. I keep my eyes fixed on the ceiling because it’s easier to imagine the rain than to risk finding out the sky is empty.
There’s a kind of madness in needing this much. A madness in craving touch when your skin already feels like it’s splitting from loneliness. The ceiling above me is blank, endless, and heavy, like the sky on a day that refuses to break. And I lie here thinking: if I asked you to hold me, would you? Could you? Or would you turn away, the way the sky sometimes turns from the forest, letting the ground crack and the undergrowth wither?
I imagine saying it; Will you hold me for a while? and it feels like standing naked in the clearing, arms lifted to a sky that may never answer. The forest can’t promise to bloom again, only to try. I can’t promise not to cry, only to hold you back. And maybe that’s the real fear, that my need will be too much, my drought too deep, and that you’ll see how barren it’s become inside me.
Still, some part of me hopes. Hopes for the weight of another body against mine, for the kind of silence that isn’t empty but shared. For the slow, sensual breathing that says you are here, you are not alone. Maybe the rain will come. Maybe it won’t. But tonight, I am the forest, and I am looking at the sky, and I am trembling, asking it to rain.