The Animators

by Kayla Rae Whitaker

It occurs to me that I’ve been holding my breath. It’s the kind of conversation that makes you feel an unspeakable closeness to another human being. For me, a person who has always considered herself alone, those conversations feel like a gift, someone trusting me with something private and valuable.

Maybe we’re not wired to have many of these moments, as people. If we had too many of them in a single life, we would forget the heat of intimacy. We’d have nothing left to crave.

Whisper to him, “They’re full of ghosts.” “You’re full of ghosts.”

“Eleven-year-olds make life-changing decisions all the time. They have all the weight and responsibility of any other human being.”

We live to reach the middle of each other, even after an argument. The best is when I straddle his lap, wrapping my arms around his head, his mouth to my ear. It feels impossible to be closer to anyone than I am to him when we do this, when I can clasp him inside me, pulling gently. And it is during lovemaking, sometimes rowdy enough to be called fucking and sometimes gentle enough to be called prayer, that we loosen our holds on ourselves enough to confess that this has never happened before, to either one of us, maybe not to anyone else ever, and we hope against hope, with gritted teeth, that there will be no end.