[CW: I say cunt and overshare to the max. Repost from a previous account]
1. OriginsĀ
I remember the first words you ever spoke to me. Tu es sublime.
In the decade since, strangersĀ have emptied the usual drawer of adjectives over my body (I post nudes on Reddit; the vocabulary comes standard). Gorgeous. Beautiful. Sexy. Hot.Ā
They land, they thrill, they slide off.Ā Ā
Sublime is different. Sublime is yours.Ā
It belongs to the way your hazel eyes traced my silhouette, slow, a little stunned. To the way your cupidās bow caught on the consonant.Ā Ā
I remember other things about that night too. How you tasted when I first kissed you: Captain Morgan and skin and something green and loamy, like earth after rain. Like coming home and riding a roller coaster; oh, itās you and oh fuck, itās you.Ā
I remember dragging you by the wrist upstairs to the deserted upper floor of the club, my body already trying to meld into yours, undoing buttons as you laughed, half protest, half astonishment. That look of delighted outrage you gave me, like you couldnāt quite believe your luck or my nerve; a dynamic we would repeat so often it became a shared bit.Ā
I remember you suggesting we take a bike home, that I could sit on the handlebars like some ridiculous movie, and me staring at you in mock horror before insisting on a taxi. How we compromised by walking back to yours instead, stopping at the McDonaldās, my feet blistering on cobblestone, fingers going wrinkled with salt from the fries.Ā
I remember how fast you dropped to your knees as soon as we touched. The shock of pleasure that rolled through me before I could even name it; toes curling, cunt clenching, mouth slack in what I am sure was a mildly unflattering o.Ā It was the first time anyone had done it properly, and I can still feel the thin film of wonder that settled over my skin, indistinguishable from sweat.Ā
I remember those things like I am still 18, with shittily applied foundation and a friendly bartender at every club on St. Lo. The night feels weightless when I touch it, blur and bass and the soft stick of liquor on the floor.Ā
But time has layered other sediment over the ephemeral quality of it.Ā
How we were introduced to the person we would fumble into adulthood with by quasiāstrangers whose faces I can now only see the outline of.Ā
How you delighted in telling the story of how, when you met me, I was dressed to the nines in a club but wearing cushiony teal blue Nike flip flops. I love feeling beautiful but I hate being uncomfortable, and Iāve never cared enough about the outside gaze to bleed for it, so I had this habit of showing up in fourāinch thighāhigh boots and leaving in my flip flops. What stays with me now isnāt the punchline, itās the way your voice softened every time you told it, affection leaking in around the edges.
How I left the shirt I was wearing that night at your place and you kept it. Years later, when we were dividing up our things, you pulled it out like an artifact and set it aside. No discussion, no ādo you mind?ā, just a quiet assumption that this one was yours. I know you still have it. I can feel it across an ocean, light as a hummingbird, wings beating furiously.Ā
Time adds contrast I couldnāt see then.Ā Ā
How the boy in all these memories would become the man I would hurt, and the one who would hurt me. How you were bold enough to walk up and call me sublime like it was my given name, but life would slowly strip that ease from you, leaving you wracked with uncertainty; about the world, about yourself, about me.Ā
How those pretty eyes would go clouded in pleasure, in pain, in sadness, in anger, and how long it took me to learn the difference. The way they fluttered halfāshut when you went down on me, lashes damp, pupils blown wide. The way they crinkled at the corners, like all your siblings' eyes did when they laughedĀ hard.Ā
I have my first memories; the bedrock, all surface tension and shine. And then I have the ten years of context poured over them; the false impressions that turned out not to be false so much as unfinished.Ā All the ways you would live up to and diverge from that twentyāyearāold boy I met in a liquorāsticky, strobeālit club. All the ways I would live up to and fail the girl you met that night.Ā Ā
I used to think memory worked this way. Like geology.Ā
Not clean exactly, not in the way textbooks would have you believe, with their coloured bands laid one over the other like compliant histories labelled in tongue-twisting Latin. The weight of whatever comes after can press so hard on what came before that it buckles, folds, loses its original shape.Ā
Geology isn't static, but it does carry a kind of promise: that if you dig far enough, you will eventually reach a point where the story clarifies. How weight became strain. How strain became fracture. There is, or so I believed, a line you can follow all the way down. Somewhere near the bottom, at the first shift, you can place your finger on it and say: here. This is where it began.
I learned the art of excavation early. One day there was a man in the kitchen, leaning against the counter, drinking coffee from a mug. The next day there was only a mug. One day someone's shirts were folded into a drawer. The next the drawer opened onto nothing, the wood faintly faded where the fabric had been. When you grow up with the ground refusing to stand still, you start to obsess over what makes it move.Ā
The adults around me were constantly surprised by their own lives. No one could explain at what point familiarity starts to breed contempt instead of tenderness, when childhood hurt curdles into adulthood fuck-up, when bliss gives way to bitterness. Surely the signs had been there. Surely everything, if examined closely enough, could be traced backwards to its point of origin. Watching them, I decided I would never be caught off guard. If someone was going to hurt me, it was going to be because I handed them the knife.Ā
I learned to watch what they refused to see, tracing cracks they called life. In the process I became an expert at pressure testing for the hairline fracture that set the ground to shaking. This instinct followed me into everything.Ā
Friendships. Arguments. Love.
2. EntanglementĀ
As Mont-Royal burned to gold, I purged the apartment, as if your absence could be solved through inventory.
As rain stiffened to ice and the nordet made the whole city its bitch, we spent hours on the phone sifting through the history of us.Ā Ā
When green ate through the bark and bodies spilled onto terraces, I rested my head against the metro window, the world smeared into a blur, my eyes charting the years of us on the glass where my face should have been.Ā
I thought I could trace my way back to our first hairline crack; the first time I felt I donāt know if I can do this forever coursing through my body.Ā
Sometimes I locate it on the couch, you listing symptoms weād already discussed three times that week, a small tired part of me thinking I canāt be the only thing holding this up.Ā
Other times Iām sure it was in the density of the middle years, you painting our life in France, a smile cracking my face wide while something thin and uncomfortable coiled in my stomach, and I canāt say if they were even separate. The coil and the smile. The closing door and the open window.Ā
Doubt never arrived alone. Tenderness was braided all through the slow wreckage of us. On your hardest days Iād trace your bone structure with my gaze and settle my diaphragm to the rhythm of your breathing, a wave of such intense love making my ribs ache. Somewhere in that same stretch, I also wanted, quietly and with considerable guilt, to leave.Ā
I took a selfish pride in carrying you, a pride tinged with gratitude for the nights, years before, that you spent with me on the bathroom floor when my own head was on fire, holding my wrist, my hair, and my panic.Ā My need had once been the gravity of our relationship, but it quieted as yours submerged us. The same newfound competency that made me proud became the thing you counted on, your thank you fading into of course you will. Resentment braided into shame for feeling it, which braided into overcompensating, which braided into into exhaustion. My first doubt and my deepest love shared the same ribcage.Ā
Your steadiness made me feel anchored for the first time in my life, as though someone had turned the dimmer switch of my brain down. You paid bills before they were due, built me bookshelves, remembered the small things, held a shape for us when I would have let everything blur.
The first time that steadiness started to feel like suffoca*ion was almost laughably small: we were trying to get out the door and I kept misplacing things, wallet, phone, coat, and each time you found them, you handed them back with a clipped efficiency that made it feel less like help and more like a verdict on how I moved through the world.
The part of you that sheltered me and the part that made me feel small drank from the same spring.Ā
Europe was never just a place. It was a whole weather system hanging over our kitchen table; part warmth and expansion, part gathering pressure we could never quite outrun. It was also all my resentment and guilt knotted tight in my chest, because you had never given my home a real chance and now you were asking me to dive headfirst into yours when I already felt hollowed out by everything Iād given for us. And yet you had surrendered so much too, that knowledge hanging there like a counterweight, blurring the line between fairness and bitterness.
I kept trying to sort everything cleanly; the categories refused to hold. I wanted layers. What I found was entanglement. I thought I was excavating, and somehow, I ended up in a forest.Ā
Not the postcard kind, all uprightĀ trunks and polite paths, but the kind I traipsed through as a ch*ld; a dense, overgrown thing, the air thick, the ground soft with years of fallen branches, roots crossing unseen beneath my feet. In that kind of forest, nothing belongs to only one tree. The same network that carries water and light also passes along rot; tug on one root and half the forest moves. The thing about forests is that they donāt give a fuck about origin stories.
3. Opacity
During the first Covid summer I became obsessed with a book called The Universe in Your Hands. I talked about it constantly to whoever was around; which, fortunately for them, wasnāt many people. My best friend still refers to it, half-joking, as my ācosmology era.ā
One idea lodged itself in my mind and never quite left: the wall of last scattering.
In cosmology, it refers to a moment in the early universe when everything was still so dense that light couldnāt travel in straight lines. Instead, it kept bouncing off particles, unable to move freely through space. Beyond that point, you canāt see anything; not because there is emptiness, but because there is overwhelming density. The universe doesnāt go dark there; it becomes too bright, too crowded with interaction for anything to be observed.Ā
Live with someone long enough, and you build your own version of that wall.
Selfish entered early, more question than accusation. I remember the word hovering at the surface, like you were trying out language for a discomfort you couldnāt yet pin down. I heard it, I flinched, I thought am I? and then I let it go.
But words are particles too. They donāt stay singular once they start bouncing around a shared life.
Every time you repeated selfish, it picked up more matter. By the fifth or tenth time, selfish wasnāt one thing anymore. It was a dense cluster of associations, ricocheting off everything it had already touched.
It hit the months I spent trying to problem-solve your suffering into something manageable: researching keto recipes until our kitchen forgot what carbs looked like, chasing specialist after specialist, reading case studies late into the night, as though diligence alone could coax your body back toward itself.Ā
It hit the way illness quietly rewrote the choreography of our sex life. Before, you led. After, I did. I never mourned it, only felt an eager tenderness at learning how to make you feel at home in your body, and a quiet gratitude for the way it reshaped how I lived in mine.
It also hit the part of me that is older than us. The girl who watched adults misplace their jobs, relationships, and sanity like lost items on public transit, and decided she would never let anyone whittle her down to nothing. The part that keeps a quiet ledger. The part that thinks: if someone is going to hurt me, let it be because I chose to stay, and I reserve the right to choose to leave.
And it hit the first version of me you knew. The girl who was, in many ways, genuinely selfish. The one who wanted the rush without the maintenance, who took your steadiness for granted, who assumed you would adjust around my chaos because you always did. The girl who loved the feeling of being carried and rarely asked what it cost you.
So when you called me selfish, it never landed on a clean surface.
Sometimes it stung because I suspected you were right. That I was pulling away in ways I hadnāt yet owned. Sometimes it bit into the problem-solving version of me and hurt because you were wrong, that I was giving more than you could see.Ā
Sometimes it hit both at once. I remember sitting with that feeling for hours afterward, trying to decide whether I felt accused or unseen, and realizing I couldn't separate the two. I still can't, entirely. The pain wasn't just the word. It was not knowing which part of me you were naming.
It hit you, too.
You didnāt learn selflessness as a gentle skill. You inherited it; care meant pouring yourself out until there was nothing left. By the time we met, ābeing a good personā and āhaving no boundariesā lived in the same room inside you.Ā
So when your need for me grew, it made sense to you that I should stretch alongside that expansion. In your internal physics, more need should equal more giving. When I didnāt, or couldnāt, or failed at it, the gap wanted a label. Selfish was a word your mouth knew the shape of.
Even there, it refused to be simple.
Thereās a version of our story where you called me selfish because you were hurting and needed somewhere to put it; where the word was less description than flare, a way of saying I feel abandoned without admitting how much you were leaning on me.Ā
Thereās a version where you called me selfish because you were right; that I was beginning to withdraw, testing the edges of leaving while still insisting on staying.Ā
Thereās a version where your endless selflessness with everyone else quietly turned into entitlement with me, where giving yourself away out there made you feel youād earned the right to take endlessly in here.
Thereās a version where you never stopped seeing the early selfish girl, and every later limit I set was proof she hadnāt changed.
None of those versions cancel each other out. Selfish sits at the centre of all of them, refusing to pick one.
Selfish wasnāt the cause of our fracture. It was the place where all our particles were already too close together for us to tell who was hurting who, or where, or why.
And in a way, even that was a luxury.
Selfish had edges. You could hear it in the room, taste it in your mouth, feel where it cut. We could say it out loud, argue with it, trace some of the lines that fed into it.Ā
So much of our relationship never even made it that far.
There is an opaque middle in any long relationship; a crowd of small days and gestures and halfāconversations that never get catalogued, but still shift the dynamic. The evenings we were just tired and vaguely unkind. The times one of us reached out and was met with indifference. The weeks when sex felt like habit more than hunger but we did it anyway.Ā
All of that sits underneath selfish, pressing up against it from below.
By the time we started saying the word out loud, it was ricocheting not just off the big, cinematic scenes we can still name, but off thousands of small, irretrievable interactions.
Selfish became the rays that made it past the wall, scattered and partial as they are.Ā
Everything else is texture: the uncatalogued density that builds the wall of last scattering between what we lived and what we can ever fully know about why it broke.Ā
I spent years tracing my family like a crime scene, mapping their cracks, their blindspots, their coping mechanisms, convinced that if I knew exactly how their ground had shifted, maybe I could predict my own fault lines.
Its made for very impressive diagrams. I can sit in a therapistās office and lay out causation in neat lines: chaos breeds vigilance, inconsistency makes control feel like oxygen, and neglect turns being seen into a hunger you never quite stop feeding. I can turn my life into an annotated flowchart where everything seems to lead sensibly into everything else. On paper, it almost looks like clarity.
But the older I get, the more I feel the edge of something those diagrams canāt cross. I can explain why Iām afraid of being blindsided, why I press closer and push away with the same intensity, why words like selfish hit where they do. I can explain why I stayed with you as long as I did, and why I left when I did, in a dozen different ways. And still, underneath all that explanation, thereās a layer that doesnāt resolve.
Eventually selfāawareness hits something it canāt move through. Not resistance. Structure.
Somewhere inside me, all the causes I can name have collided so many times that theyāve fused into opacity. The girl who was selfish for survival, the teenager whose selfishness became destructive, the woman who tried very hard not to be, the daughter who watched people implode, the partner who stayed, the one who left; they occupy the same dense space.
I can tell you why I might have done something. I canāt tell you, with the purity I once believed was possible, why I actually did.Ā
There is a wall of last scattering in me, too; a boundary beyond which my motives stop behaving like data and start behaving like light in the early universe.
I used to think the point of all this excavation was to find one clean origin, the line I could press my finger to and say: here. This is why. Now Iām starting to accept that sometimes the most honest thing I can say is: here is where my knowing runs out. Here is where even my best explanations dissolve into brightness.
4. LuminescenceĀ
I find myself thinking about the tree on our old street that I passed everyday walking to work. A maple, the one that stains itself red before all the others. If we were to trace that treeās roots, we could almost believe we knew everything about it. A life cleanly mapped.
But a tree standing alone, poured into cement, has always left me faintly desolate. Itās missing the one thing that makes a forest a forest: other lives to be tangled up with.
Iāve started to accept that part of the beauty of being alive is being so woven into a system that you canāt stand outside and chart it.Ā
Of course, I canāt always resist the lifelong impulse to dig. I still go back sometimes.Ā
To the beginning. To that night, still bright under everything that followed. I still turn certain moments over, testing them; not with the same urgency as before, but with a kind of residual curiosity. The way you prod a sore tooth with your tongue, just to see if it still hurts.
It does, sometimes.
But not in the same way.
More and more I just feel the glow.Ā
The warmth of certain memories. The sting of others. The strange fact that, despite everything we both did to and for each other, the image that feels most real is something as trivial as a shirt.
Ten years on, I can still see it: the way it clung to me after hours of dancing, the faint deodorant shadow under the arms, the little twist of fabric where I always tugged it down when I felt shy. I can smell the mix of my perfume and your detergent from that first week it lived at your place instead of in my drawer. I can see your hands folding it, that day we split our life into piles, the tiny pause before you slid it into your stack without asking.
And I am still, unreasonably, certain that you have it. That somewhere, in a city I havenāt walked through in years, that flimsy piece of fabric is still taking up space in your life. I feel it the way you feel a phantom limb: not literally, but insistently. Light as a hummingbird, wings beating just out of sight.
Maybe it doesnāt resolve into a clean because. Maybe it just means that once, there was a night where someone looked at me across a liquorāsticky dance floor and called me sublime, and that word buried itself somewhere deep, and everything that came afterāour love, our shifts, our failuresāgrew around it.
Maybe some things stay luminous even after theyāve stopped being legible.
Maybe thatās all they have to do.
Be light.
Reach me, late and partial and scattered, and warm my skin.