Salvation

There are nights, like tonight, where I feel like I am going to come apart from wanting. I don’t know how to live without wanting like this.

It’s embarrassing, almost, how physical it is, how real, how tangible, how heavy the wanting feels in my chest, in my stomach, in the backs of my knees, in the pit of my throat where words get stuck because how do you say this out loud without sounding completely insane? Where the ache inside me is so big, so loud, so unruly, I swear I can feel it rising under my skin like something alive, like something caged and starving and pacing the length of my ribs. Nights where I don’t know what to do with my own hands, my own heart, my own body because every inch of me is humming with need.

Not just for love. Not just for sex. Not just for comfort or closeness or warmth beneath the covers.

But for something else.

For something that feels ancient. Sacred. Biblical.

For something that feels like falling to my knees at the altar of another human being and finally, finally being known, not just for the easy parts, not just for the surface shine, but for everything. The holy and the messy. The ugly and the beautiful. The parts I tuck away even from myself.

I want to love someone in a way that feels like worship.

And I want to be loved like I am worthy of that worship in return.

I think about it all the time. More than I want to admit. More than I can say out loud without feeling crazy or dramatic or hopelessly soft. But it’s there, always there, burning like a candle that never goes out, even when I’m exhausted, even when I’m alone in the dark telling myself to stop wanting so much.

But I can’t stop.

Because I don’t want love like a quiet thing.

I don’t want love like a hobby. Like something casual. Like something you do on weekends or when it’s convenient.

I want love like religion.

I want love like faith. Like ritual. Like devotion.

I want love that fills me like wine at the altar. Love that steadies me like whispered prayers. Love like scripture etched into the architecture of my body. Love like I was born for it, like I was crafted by whatever god is out there for the sole purpose of loving someone until it hurts and then loving them more. Love that ruins me in all the right ways and then stays; stays to help rebuild me softer, stronger, sweeter than before.

Love like survival

Love like Salvation.

And God, I want sex like scripture.

I want sex like stepping into a cathedral and feeling your knees go weak from the sheer presence of something divine.

I want to be touched like someone is reading a holy book for the first time, slow, intentional, awed by every line, every curve, every story written across my body. I want someone to kiss me like they’ve spent years walking barefoot through deserts just to kneel at my door. I want someone to look at me, naked and open and utterly unguarded, and feel not lust, though I want that too, but devotion. I want to be looked at like I’m something sacred; like I am Holy Ground; like I’m something to be studied and remembered and cherished.

And I want to look at them the same way.

I want to know the topography of their skin like gospel, memorize their skin like Hymns. I want to learn the sound of their breath like prayer. I want to trace the lines of their body like I’m writing a psalm with my hands.

I want to be ruined in the oldest, purest sense of the word, undone completely and utterly by the weight of intimacy, the heat of skin against skin, the soft devastation of knowing and being known.

I want sex that feels like kneeling. I want sex that feels like confession. Like forgiveness.

I want love that feels like resurrection.

I want to be pressed down, opened up, taken apart piece by piece not out of dominance or power but out of worship. Out of love so overwhelming it can’t help but spill into the physical, the messy, the flesh-and-blood reality of two people craving each other like salvation.

Because that’s what it feels like to me.

Salvation.

Not release. Not relief. Not pleasure for its own sake, though yes, that too. But more than that. Deeper than that.

I want sex like communion. Like breaking bread between bodies. Like drinking deeply from someone else’s mouth because I have thirsted for them for so long I’ve forgotten what it’s like to feel full.

And it isn’t just physical. It never has been.

I want a kind of love where the emotional and the physical bleed into each other until there’s no separating them. I want love and sex braided together so tightly there’s no telling them apart. Until touch is language. Until every glance, every sigh, every desperate whisper becomes liturgy.

I want the late nights in bed, limbs tangled like vines, laughing so hard we forget how tired we are. I want devotion that leaves marks, touch that feels like tithing, being held like it’s sanctuary.

I want a night, maybe many nights, maybe every night, where we touch each other like survival. Where I cry into their shoulder, not because I’m sad, but because it feels so good to be known. To be ruined and rebuilt in the same hour by the same hands. I want their mouth at my throat like they’re praying. I want their body against mine like they’re afraid I’ll disappear if they let go.

I want them to know every inch of me, not just the geography of my skin, but the fault lines of my fears, the sharp edges of my grief, the soft centers of my hope. I want them to map me like scripture, slow and careful, like every freckle is a verse worth memorizing.

I want to give myself over like an altar. I want them to kneel.

I want the mornings when I wake up to their body warm beside mine, their face soft with sleep, and I think this is my church.

This is my heaven.

This is where I am most alive.

But I am not there. Not yet.

Instead, I am here, in this body that feels too big for my longing, too small to hold all this hunger. I am here with all these words caught in my throat, all this love burning holes in my chest, all this wanting spilling out of me in the dead of night with nowhere to go.

Sometimes it feels unbearable.

Sometimes it feels like I was born with a mouth that only knows how to pray for someone who hasn’t arrived yet. Someone, something that doesn’t even exist outside of my own imagination.

Sometimes it feels like a curse, to love like this. To want like this. To need like this.

Because I do need it.

I need it the way lungs need air. The way deserts need rain. The way pilgrims need something to kneel for at the end of a long and brutal journey.

I am tired of the wilderness.

I am tired of wandering.

I am tired of being the church with its doors flung wide open and its pews empty.

I am tired of loving in a way that feels like worship only to have no one kneel in return.

But still, still, I believe. Foolishly, maybe, but what is that but faith?

Still I pray in the dark, in the quiet, in the ache of my own body.

Still I write psalms for a lover I haven’t met yet. Maybe I have, maybe we’ve brushed shoulders or exchanged smiles or kissed or woken up together.

Still I believe there is someone out there who wants to meet me at the altar of all this longing; someone who isn’t afraid of the size of my heart, the depth of my wanting, the wreckage and the wonder I bring to love.

Someone who wants to love me like I am a cathedral worth falling to their knees for.

Someone who will let me love them like they are my only religion.

Until then, until that day, I will keep writing it down. I will keep holding space in my chest for the holy thing I have yet to find.

I will keep being the altar.

And I will keep believing, foolishly, wildly, faithfully, that one day, someone will come home to me and say:

“I’ve been starving too.”