What it is.

"Desire is like an open-ended anvil. It can pound you out. Desire for something can alter your mind, desire for someone can wrench your guts. This is how I began to know I was becoming attached. I could feel my guts start to throb. How a subconscious pull to him stretched from my spine through my stomach and out into a dark hooked oblivion wherever he was holding the end. I searched for him amid stacks of books. He read me as pages. Fingers spelling, skin taut across the bone. His hands were always in my hair. My hands always in her hair. I wanted to feel her skull taut against my hand. I wanted to press into her. As pen to paper. My need to swallow every fistful of her that I could shove inside made it triumphant to give her my eyes and my fingertips—the emptied place where the loneliness lay. It was mostly time. Time arching over everything. In a world so governed by ticking, of a life so turned on its ear to the hum of obligation; she was an emptied tree. Rooted, dark and mournful. That hollow place. She had been gutted and I resided in the space. I could scarcely know what half her pain tasted like, or to think of feeling it, I could not. She walked like a parade; a battalion of men in orderly rows. She talked like an old woman. I need to tell you how she talks. Cracking vase in a room of tin. Brain burning as I watched her mouth. Inside I could feel a rock."