my biggest fantasy

to break the whispering spell

If you were a planet, which one would you be?

If you were an animal, which one would you be?

If you were a color, which one would you be?

And I always knew exactly what to answer.

The sun.

A horse.

Yellow.

Duh.

So it was hard for me to admit I didn’t have an answer to this one.

“What do you like in bed?” he asked again. “What's your fantasy?”

I couldn’t just say I was fine with everything, that I had no specific requests. I am a determined girl. Opinionated. Experienced. I have to have an answer. I said that what drove me crazy was dirty talk.

Which wasn’t true but not entirely false.

I find it fascinating that dirty talk requires understanding of tone, timing, and your place in the picture. It also requires a lot of trust. Trust in believing that your words will be understood and that they will fit the moment perfectly without making it cringe. Like writing, dirty talk might be one of the biggest acts of trust I get involved in constantly (along with bringing these random-ass dudes to my place).

But I don’t fantasize about dirty talk. In the same way that I don’t fantasize about writing. I don’t find those things unreachable. I just wake up and do them.

The next few weeks, this guy is almost completely erased from my mind. His face blurs in my memories. What remains is his simple question: what is my biggest fantasy? What do I drift off thinking about right before I fall asleep, before thoughts turn into dreams and we can’t draw the line between the two?

I lay in bed, close my eyes, and think about conversations. Declarations. I make them up, restart them until I’m happy with them, and then memorize them all by heart. I think about the words, but never how he looks like when he says them. And I don't get frustrated as I do with the other dreams I fail to remember, because that doesn't really matter. What matters is the talking. It's the voice. The voice with a sound and a volume. A voice I can hear. That everyone can hear. Because we are not in my bedroom, but in the middle of the street. It talks to me and it talks to the world. It tells everyone that they're in love with me. And that's it.

My sweet words have never seen the daylight, the outside. Nor have others. They have always been murmured, and to some extent—unreal. I never held hands or kissed in public. I never had a crush I could legitimize.

And never has someone had a crush on me so hard that it made them want to say the secret so bad.

I dream about how all of this would be, if it wasn’t like this. If I was able to break the spell, that keeps me bound to the whispering.

If another boy asked me again, I would say my biggest fantasy is dirty talk, because it's simpler (and not entirely false). But between me and you, the thing I cannot stop thinking about is how it would feel to be loved out loud.