Content warning: mentions of death, blood and sex in no explicit detail

We were the smell of each other, the glandular oil, the acned sweat, the small of the neck smooth and vaguely feminine. We were the humanly accumulation. We were the needy homunculus. We were close, close. We were aimless as braiding hair untied and loosening, as drawing in sand as the sugar and the ease of it dissolving in the heat of our hands. And day the colour of lemons where we were quiet as kittens small heart attacks in the stillness and we were close, close. And like spring we were bladed, and like wilted daisy-chains we were lackadaisically sad. We were benign as small shocked creatures, as butterflies with blades as wings. We were close, close enough to mark each other with our hurt like the delicate nosebleeds of rich pale-skinned girls. We were animal instinct maddened in dizzying light. We were blind birds developing eyes, and in the starless embryonic night we navigated by each other, magnetic equators, following lines fatalistic as mathematics with sex as our axiom. We were where every new thing felt like a point of no return. We were where life and death were each as bright as the other. We were the wide-eyed joy with the whites of the eyes. We were the sublimation straight past the material to the symbolic and the grand and the life-affirming. We are this body cartography. We are this mortal geography. Like spring, we are ripe for death and we make small gods of everything.