Arterial Yearning
Maya Olson
I wish you would bleed for me. I scratch at you, slowly, softly, slicing all day waiting to see a mark, to get more than I'm privy to. What is behind the walls of your skin? I’d peel you apart to crawl inside. Your skin rips apart, and finally I can get a taste of your insides, scour the enigma of your brain, peel you apart layer by layer, more, more, more. Is this what love is? A craving never satiated? To have you on my skin never enough, only satisfied when I am suffocated by your presence. I wish you had the same need to pull back my eyelids, to scratch off my skin just to know what’s underneath it. When I find your cuts and bruises, I only can poke and prod to have more to taste. I love you so much I’m terrified it could destroy you, imploding me in the process.
What do you want for dinner? I know what answer will make you tick. I want to see you explode; organs flung on the walls. I want to have more of you than you could ever give me, hold your bloodied heart in my hands, fingers prodding at your arteries.
I need you to tell me you want sushi for dinner, because I could never eat pasta and be able to swallow it if I even suspected you wanted sushi. I can't function without your desires illuminating a path, I don't know the function of myself without your needs laid out in front of me, anticipating each of them. How do you crawl along a dark road when I can feel that in the distance, somewhere out there, a light is on, fueled by desire far away. Tell me you wanted sushi for dinner, damn it.
And on that day when we first met, a singular interaction became a lifetime, a forever, a day-by-day commitment to always, did you know right then? Or did you adjust to the way my hair fell in your mouth, the way our legs wrap around each other one and a half times just right?
And you boil my insides into bubbling stew, that you’re content, that you don’t want to watch me bleed. Don't you yearn for more? Don’t you also crave to lick the drip of blood blue turned red?
Do you flinch when I feel you, do you cry when my eyes blanket you, swallow you whole? Do I ever scare you? Do you ever lie awake to hear me talk, to watch me bleed? Do you hear my breathing stop as you crawl around my brain?
You hold your eyes in mine and I can finally see. I won’t move an inch, I won't dare to inhale, because this is all I've ever asked for and all I've ever wanted, you see: I can finally reach into the confines of all you’ve been storing, see where the veins I’ve carefully counted in your eyeballs all lead, all the information they soak and carry back with them. I would follow them along on their journey, carefully considering each and every blood cell. In the depths of this vastness, I can see into your skull, I could never turn away from the chance to see the thoughts as they travel through the canals in the maze of your brain to your mouth. I will never believe that I am worthy of you and all your blood cells, the veins in your eyes, their traverses through the depths of your heart and lungs.
I live in the space between your eyeballs and between our stares, in the empty air that is our gaze, oxygen and carbon floating in the way. There is no world beyond this place, no place of infinite possibility and a universe with galaxies. The space between our brains only existent for our breath to fill, it doesn't ever feel like there will ever be anything to fade or come or go and time only passes in shared measures. There's a whole world to discover here and it is the one I live in, bouncing between the greens of our eyes and the brown specks and the blue pools. There is only magnetism, a pull that we are never close enough, that there is no existence in any air that doesn't hold my breath or the millions of words I think just for you, and can never seem to articulate anywhere else.
I live for me for you, and the silky way you say my name, hold the last syllable. The half-moon of your bottom lip, the smooth skin on porcelain cheeks, the slinking curls I wish I could stab a finger into like a trap. The way you pull me into you and I fit just right, as if my whole life I'd been waiting for you to wake up and pull me near. The way your head is starting to mold to my tough skull, and you sleep on it anyway. When you take a sip of coffee and your eyes react first, widening to take in the day, and your soft mutterings as I talk you into a slumber. And in this whole wide world, it is only us, and only our small hands, and our little soft bodies, and our brains that only speak to each other, and that is all I've ever needed.
You make me combustible. Aware of every emotion ever elicited from the cauldron in my skull. I become a brewing, simmering, bubbly mess of gasses floating and sinking, ready to take on any and every nearby flame. I was unaware of being able to feel sourceless, a stew of unknown emotions in their most relentless state, sloshing against the walls of my body. Your flame ignites me, ablaze with an unsourced desire.
As you see right through me, my fears illuminate and all that I've learned to be true about myself appears questionable, uncertain. And yet you carry the confidence of a person who can exclaim love and laughter publicly. Who runs across streets to hail cabs for old ladies and their dogs, who offers his hand without being asked. You make me want to leave all that I know behind and relearn all I can from the way you think. I yearn to daydream and float on clouds that exist in your brain, all the ways you can ever teach me again, how to breathe, how to stand on two feet, how to inhale and exhale, how to open my eyes. How to think nothing and everything, create a realm of my own. To breathe quickly as I sleep, an adventure in each step. I turn to you and I feel my heart take flight, turn left and I am a lighter human, another right and I am bouncing with each step. Love is many things, a teacher, a healer, but you are what love wishes it could be; an explanation for all that makes sense, all that makes no sense, and all that is beyond my control.
You are the answer to every question, the why and the how and the who and the what.
I once made myself all I thought you wanted, walking three steps ahead of your desires, anticipating every need. Once we made sense, we were glamorous, working hard to impress, and yet with complete ease slid into each other's lives, contradictorily, it took no effort at all. Love is ironic that way, it tells you everything you need to know with one look, and yet leaves you always wanting to know more. You were ironic that way, I knew immediately that I could hardly breathe without you once I had tasted your breath, inhaled you entirely, and yet I spend my days nuzzling my nose into each pocket of air in each crevice of your being.
How can love be? I don’t know how anything so charged, so electric and alive and fizzing with possibility can be written about, sung about, justified with legal documents, could make so much sense. And yet there is little sense in our function, flying thousands of miles to exist again in the space of shared breath.
Every inch of life is only in the way of our being, my mind in two places at once, ripped in fraying pieces that strive to hold on. Like speeding down the freeway and going faster because you're not in the passenger seat, and it feels so crazy and yet it isn't at all, both just small people in small bodies, unremarkable being together, unremarkable apart. Nothing is remarkable from outside, quiet babble at the dinner table, shouts of laughter across the street, but nothing is remarkable from the inside, beyond the walls of our world all is cold, icy.
I speak to you all the time, you're who I act for, do you hear me? I’m talking to you every day, I rant and I cry and it's all for you, I itch to hear your thoughts and I send you mine in hasty scrawls of good luck I love you you're everything I’ve ever wanted and all I've ever needed and I don’t know why I got picked.
I see you on stage, every line beat of bass reverberating off the walls of the dark bar, buzzing and sticking to the walls of my skull. And you say my name while you're on stage in front of hundreds of people and I know that we are both ours and now that we are physically braided together there is only one strand and that is us, the galaxy of my choosing, and I will stay here forever, counting all the strands of infinite that bind us.
And you tell them that this song is for me, and I feel that we only make each other better, that we make purple in our navies and pinks, and purple is my favorite color and I'll paint the walls of my brain with it, layer after layer.
And you sing lyrics that are just for me, so I bleed onto this page, the words splash into your eyes, but this can't live inside our universe anymore, and yet the only thing to say after all this is I love you I love you I love you.
Maya Olson
I wish you would bleed for me. I scratch at you, slowly, softly, slicing all day waiting to see a mark, to get more than I'm privy to. What is behind the walls of your skin? I’d peel you apart to crawl inside. Your skin rips apart, and finally I can get a taste of your insides, scour the enigma of your brain, peel you apart layer by layer, more, more, more. Is this what love is? A craving never satiated? To have you on my skin never enough, only satisfied when I am suffocated by your presence. I wish you had the same need to pull back my eyelids, to scratch off my skin just to know what’s underneath it. When I find your cuts and bruises, I only can poke and prod to have more to taste. I love you so much I’m terrified it could destroy you, imploding me in the process.
What do you want for dinner? I know what answer will make you tick. I want to see you explode; organs flung on the walls. I want to have more of you than you could ever give me, hold your bloodied heart in my hands, fingers prodding at your arteries.
I need you to tell me you want sushi for dinner, because I could never eat pasta and be able to swallow it if I even suspected you wanted sushi. I can't function without your desires illuminating a path, I don't know the function of myself without your needs laid out in front of me, anticipating each of them. How do you crawl along a dark road when I can feel that in the distance, somewhere out there, a light is on, fueled by desire far away. Tell me you wanted sushi for dinner, damn it.
And on that day when we first met, a singular interaction became a lifetime, a forever, a day-by-day commitment to always, did you know right then? Or did you adjust to the way my hair fell in your mouth, the way our legs wrap around each other one and a half times just right?
And you boil my insides into bubbling stew, that you’re content, that you don’t want to watch me bleed. Don't you yearn for more? Don’t you also crave to lick the drip of blood blue turned red?
Do you flinch when I feel you, do you cry when my eyes blanket you, swallow you whole? Do I ever scare you? Do you ever lie awake to hear me talk, to watch me bleed? Do you hear my breathing stop as you crawl around my brain?
You hold your eyes in mine and I can finally see. I won’t move an inch, I won't dare to inhale, because this is all I've ever asked for and all I've ever wanted, you see: I can finally reach into the confines of all you’ve been storing, see where the veins I’ve carefully counted in your eyeballs all lead, all the information they soak and carry back with them. I would follow them along on their journey, carefully considering each and every blood cell. In the depths of this vastness, I can see into your skull, I could never turn away from the chance to see the thoughts as they travel through the canals in the maze of your brain to your mouth. I will never believe that I am worthy of you and all your blood cells, the veins in your eyes, their traverses through the depths of your heart and lungs.
I live in the space between your eyeballs and between our stares, in the empty air that is our gaze, oxygen and carbon floating in the way. There is no world beyond this place, no place of infinite possibility and a universe with galaxies. The space between our brains only existent for our breath to fill, it doesn't ever feel like there will ever be anything to fade or come or go and time only passes in shared measures. There's a whole world to discover here and it is the one I live in, bouncing between the greens of our eyes and the brown specks and the blue pools. There is only magnetism, a pull that we are never close enough, that there is no existence in any air that doesn't hold my breath or the millions of words I think just for you, and can never seem to articulate anywhere else.
I live for me for you, and the silky way you say my name, hold the last syllable. The half-moon of your bottom lip, the smooth skin on porcelain cheeks, the slinking curls I wish I could stab a finger into like a trap. The way you pull me into you and I fit just right, as if my whole life I'd been waiting for you to wake up and pull me near. The way your head is starting to mold to my tough skull, and you sleep on it anyway. When you take a sip of coffee and your eyes react first, widening to take in the day, and your soft mutterings as I talk you into a slumber. And in this whole wide world, it is only us, and only our small hands, and our little soft bodies, and our brains that only speak to each other, and that is all I've ever needed.
You make me combustible. Aware of every emotion ever elicited from the cauldron in my skull. I become a brewing, simmering, bubbly mess of gasses floating and sinking, ready to take on any and every nearby flame. I was unaware of being able to feel sourceless, a stew of unknown emotions in their most relentless state, sloshing against the walls of my body. Your flame ignites me, ablaze with an unsourced desire.
As you see right through me, my fears illuminate and all that I've learned to be true about myself appears questionable, uncertain. And yet you carry the confidence of a person who can exclaim love and laughter publicly. Who runs across streets to hail cabs for old ladies and their dogs, who offers his hand without being asked. You make me want to leave all that I know behind and relearn all I can from the way you think. I yearn to daydream and float on clouds that exist in your brain, all the ways you can ever teach me again, how to breathe, how to stand on two feet, how to inhale and exhale, how to open my eyes. How to think nothing and everything, create a realm of my own. To breathe quickly as I sleep, an adventure in each step. I turn to you and I feel my heart take flight, turn left and I am a lighter human, another right and I am bouncing with each step. Love is many things, a teacher, a healer, but you are what love wishes it could be; an explanation for all that makes sense, all that makes no sense, and all that is beyond my control.
You are the answer to every question, the why and the how and the who and the what.
I once made myself all I thought you wanted, walking three steps ahead of your desires, anticipating every need. Once we made sense, we were glamorous, working hard to impress, and yet with complete ease slid into each other's lives, contradictorily, it took no effort at all. Love is ironic that way, it tells you everything you need to know with one look, and yet leaves you always wanting to know more. You were ironic that way, I knew immediately that I could hardly breathe without you once I had tasted your breath, inhaled you entirely, and yet I spend my days nuzzling my nose into each pocket of air in each crevice of your being.
How can love be? I don’t know how anything so charged, so electric and alive and fizzing with possibility can be written about, sung about, justified with legal documents, could make so much sense. And yet there is little sense in our function, flying thousands of miles to exist again in the space of shared breath.
Every inch of life is only in the way of our being, my mind in two places at once, ripped in fraying pieces that strive to hold on. Like speeding down the freeway and going faster because you're not in the passenger seat, and it feels so crazy and yet it isn't at all, both just small people in small bodies, unremarkable being together, unremarkable apart. Nothing is remarkable from outside, quiet babble at the dinner table, shouts of laughter across the street, but nothing is remarkable from the inside, beyond the walls of our world all is cold, icy.
I speak to you all the time, you're who I act for, do you hear me? I’m talking to you every day, I rant and I cry and it's all for you, I itch to hear your thoughts and I send you mine in hasty scrawls of good luck I love you you're everything I’ve ever wanted and all I've ever needed and I don’t know why I got picked.
I see you on stage, every line beat of bass reverberating off the walls of the dark bar, buzzing and sticking to the walls of my skull. And you say my name while you're on stage in front of hundreds of people and I know that we are both ours and now that we are physically braided together there is only one strand and that is us, the galaxy of my choosing, and I will stay here forever, counting all the strands of infinite that bind us.
And you tell them that this song is for me, and I feel that we only make each other better, that we make purple in our navies and pinks, and purple is my favorite color and I'll paint the walls of my brain with it, layer after layer.
And you sing lyrics that are just for me, so I bleed onto this page, the words splash into your eyes, but this can't live inside our universe anymore, and yet the only thing to say after all this is I love you I love you I love you.
Maya Olson (PZ '25) is a writer and reader in Pitzer's class of 2025, and a New Yorker.