you didn’t try to touch me, or at least touch me in the way that this title might suggest. at one point, I remember you laid your hand on the place where my hip meets my waist, because I was lying on my side and you were scared by the way I kept shaking from the nightmares gripping my mind. you told me the next morning you didn’t know if I had been asleep, awake, or cold, but I had just been scared.

I laid in your bed because I didn’t know what else to do—because that night, someone had robbed me of permission and made intimacy into a command, and I wanted to show myself that I didn’t have to be alone when somebody tried to make me feel that way.

I remember at some point grabbing that hand that lay on the place where my hip meets my waist and hugging it. I felt you hesitate—and then you realized that this title doesn’t have the connotation that it might suggest. you realized that I wasn’t cold but scared and needed to hold on to something—and you let me.

we do not speak anymore, this person whose bed I slept in one night. seeing you reminds me of how childlike I felt, and I refuse to feel that frightened anymore. I am frightened of being that frightened. but thank you, person whose bed I slept in one night, for letting me sleep in your bed without any of the connotation that had thrown me in there in the first place.