Love led to cherry bomb loss.

I think a loving relationship starts with an unexplainable pull toward each other. Together, you share mutual understanding, transparency in wants and needs, deeply rooted respect, good communication, and love that beats through veins.

But still, when you walk into a pharmacy, all the romance dies a rapid death. There are no kisses or violins when you buy emergency contraception. You just numbly take a number and step into the queue. With lube and condoms on your right and insoles on your left, you inch closer to the cashier. You can’t allow your emotions to take over. You have to stay calm, so your survival instinct kick in—an invented truth.

I’d always known love could twist and turn. But I had never experienced it myself, how, in less than 24 hours, it can mutate something so beautiful and natural into something cruel and punishing.

How silly of us, to think we have it all figured out. We humans take contraception: daily Ethinylestradiol pills, condoms with strawberry flavor, or get a Mirena IUD shot into our wombs. Or, if you're feeling bold and just fucking dumb, you pull out. Pick your poison. All in the name of giving in to our primal, instinct-driven desires. Because aren’t we, at our core, a manifestation—a mix—of human fluids and the need to procreate? Hunting and gathering, to find out I am the weak one?

Like the hunt for the girl in the club wearing a red crop top—you think about the taste of her lip gloss. You want her to put more on. You want her to wear nothing but gloss. All so you can savor more of her. Improvised interexistence begins when you lick her face from bottom to top.

Or the guy in history class who never even looked at you—you don’t want it to be comfortable. You want him to forget that you can break, or feel pain, or pleasure. You want to be welcomed into the hell of love—never enough and too much, all at the same time. Trembling with pleasure, you quietly whisper your wishes.

To get and to hold.

But to hold is to let go.

We ignorantly believe that, in essence, we can be more sophisticated about sex than that. That we don’t want it suddenly to be day. Moaning echoes and trembling liquids. Animalistic love and adorning lust hide between two souls. Smooth stretched skin of fruit tears and all hair on the arm rise, liquid drains down the chin. I am alive and I barely exist.

How can something created out of so much love feel so right and so wrong at the same time?

I think emergency contraception is a perfectly suited term—because if it weren’t an emergency, you wouldn’t take it. Still, it feels like performing a forbidden ritual. One where you are the priest, the sinner, and God. All of them are you. The pharmacy becomes a confessional. Holy water becomes the sacred initiation of the act, and your gestures feel eerily familiar to swallowing your daily supplements.

Sometimes before you walk, you run

And sometimes before you live —you die

How can something so beautiful and loving be so cruel?

It’s a state of scandalous, yielding energy—and you shudder. Two primitive people, loving each other, surrendered completely to the world. Primitive, yet mad. What do you believe after the madness of a pinned-down death? You can't get closer to life and death than this—this oil-stained butterfly metamorphosis, a play only your womb witnessed.

All because you love each other.

You don’t dare to mourn. So you avoid awakening beyond the day’s beginning. You don’t want the day to grow, only for it to die. You don’t want to look the hard sun straight in the face. You don’t want a world tangled in madness, refuge-seeking, white knights, and murky light. Yet no matter how hard you try, you can’t ever run far enough to outrun the white skeleton of your breaking point, hunting you down.

It is at the annexation of the mountain where the skeleton finds you. You lie there, curled in the fetal position, shivering. As he sits down beside you, he tells you, “My girl, please, please, please—dare to mourn.” Believing that you aren't worthy of mourning, you wonder out loud, “How can I grieve what never lived?” The heaps of bones replies, bluntly and without hesitation: “How can you not?” By ripping you open, he sets you free.

You are never too small to be worthy of grief. It's true life seen by life. Through deaths and births, you became the size of a grown woman. You are the place of afflicting souls—eerie and earthy—an echo of wonders and repeating terror. All of it is you.

Emergency contraception lies there on the shelves, sticky with a thick layer of greasy oil. Waiting to be picked up. Not used as a miracle, but as the instrument that instantly unfurls your reality. Yet you live from it—and rise above a shining darkness.

Unwrapping the manual, you find all the side effects and instructions. But nothing is written about the growing beneath your ribs. No marking of the passing of the almost-instant. So you wait for the white-boned skeleton to rip you open, so it becomes real.