A few lines from my new favourite book, By Katherine Vaz,
Henry was half covered with a sheet, and he was near crying. He said there are two types of people these days, ones who've been spit out the other side of violence and understand what it means to say "never let me go" and those who never think about the need to look for grace.
This is why we close our eyes while kissing: we instantly need to brand certain close ups onto the underside of our eyelids. We need certain portraits to burn and flash whenever we blink when we're alone.
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I'd slept in this room with tonio our first night together, never undressing. It was more of a clutching, my astonished inspection of how thin he was, and his embrace of me at first was so ferocious I seemed to be underwater and breaething through a straw that pierced the surface. There was a package of condoms near expiration left over from a love affair i broke into fragments over, but when I mentioned them, Tonio said, I don't like you like that but, if you would not mind holding me. The war in Angola had left him an orphan adrift, one of the earth's totally fucked. I quit my usual anxious wondering what was supposed to happen next, until i had a sense of being pressed whole to the inside of him, and I let that print of myself there for him to carry around , and his physical weight sank inside my ride, where it expanded so he'd stay trapped in the barred cage of my chest.
This book offers one thousand ways to say please don't go. <3
