Mathilde

I remember you as we played in the rock pools that long ago summer when we were both children, how we fished out tiny creatures with our nets and I tried out my French on you, on your brothers. I remember our goûter of baguette and plain chocolate, I remember the woman in the orange bikini who owned the sailing boat next to ours. I remember your freckles, your gap tooth, remember the Citroen 2CV in which we were driven to the beach, the seat cushions we could untie to take with us to the sands. I remember us both, playing together in what was my last summer before sex entered my head, sexuality made itself known as a hardening cock and marks on my underpants. The summer before, the last summer I knew you as a child, we were pure. You laughed at my jokes.

I knew it was you in the magazine, in a shift dress and cowboy boots., you as the woman I had never known. The freckles I knew so well, the freckles burned in my mind , the face that was imprinted by hot sun through closed eyelids on a sandy beach in the years of purity.

Now we are no longer pure. I am nearly thirty, still a virgin, but with the supple wrists of a wanker. I go to bed with a packet of tissues as my intimate companion. I go to sleep with my pubic hair matted in come, my mind defiled by the fantasies I play in my head. You, Mathilde, are a woman, defiled by your bleed. Oh Mathilde, we are made dirty by the fluids that come out of us, how…