Love wasn’t in the air the night you unbuttoned my shirt and kissed my skin. No, love definitely wasn’t in the air the night we spent in heat of moments, sweating and tumbling and fumbling on your father’s bed.

It was anywhere but there. Does love go on vacation? I ponder and make fleshy butterflies from my outstretched fingers. Probably.

I can’t remember much but I can remember the beginning. The burn of acid bleeding and gushing past my tongue and down my throat. The noises and then your silence. The clumsiness and then the awkward kisses.

You had a garden of dark hair growing from your scalp and dirt eyes. You had a protruding belly button and clown feet. You smelt like my grandfather in his coffin.

You didn’t ask me if you could take my virginity. You just assumed I wouldn’t mind giving it to you. I always wonder where you put it, if you take good care of it and how it is doing. I imagine you put it in a shiny jar with a sticky label reading ‘Loretta’s Virginity’, although I could be wrong- you always seemed like a box sort of person. I imagine you keep it next to your bed and show visitors when they visit. “And this is Loretta’s Virginity.” You’d tell them, sticking your gaunt chest out proudly. They’d applaud you.

I’ve never made love you know. Never. I checked afterwards but love was still missing. I don’t think we did it right.

I saw you once more. You were pushing a trolley and the muscles in your arms were thick bands around your bones, they must keep him together, I thought. You didn’t see me, blue wide-eyed from the edge of the corner, but I noted everything about you and wrote it in my diary that night, filling in gaps.

I note everything. I noted everything I could remember about you from that night and all I could come up with was: He had vodka breath, dark tangles of hair and a bumpy stomach. His name starts with a K and he is covered in miles of brown skin, like dirt and like soil, and he took me away. He laughed in my ear and it was potent, but I was numb all over and he was holding me from falling into my knees. I didn’t say yes, he didn’t ask, he didn’t say anything, maybe he was a mute. But his breath was too loud for a mute. He took my skin in his teeth and my jeans at my toes and the rest is a blur of hue and maybe vomit.

Why didn’t you say goodbye? Sometimes I think about you, I hold my ribs together to try and stop my heart from beating too fast and I hold my breath in my palms. Lights outside draw shadows on my roof, silhouettes of you, you, you and I want that warmth back.

It’s an ache and it’s a wonderful ache but it’s a terrible ache. I dream of planting seeds beneath your flesh and having exotic flowers erupt from the soil in a heap of soft petals and green leaves. I pick them all and hand them to you in colourful bunches of lovely. Birds dance around your empty face and I clutch the corners of my dress and ask “May I have my virginity back now?”

You never answer me.