I Prayed to Be Loved, But They Chose Lust Instead

I didn’t fall in love. I descended. Slowly, foolishly, like a velvet-wrapped philosopher walking into the fire, calling it warmth. I didn’t just want to be held — I wanted to be read. Carefully. Passionately. I wanted to be annotated. Cited. Memorized.

But they — oh, they — came hungry for cliff notes. Fast readers. Lazy translators. Lips grazing the surface of a language they never intended to learn. And I, feral in my craving for fluency, mistook appetite for intimacy.

I asked for love with the reverence of a ritual. They responded with lust, casual as an emoji. Two fingers. A flame. A fuck-you masquerading as a good night text.

What a joke.

I don’t just feel desire. I excavate it. With teeth, with theory, with trembling thighs and annotated dreams. I treat every kiss like a citation — desire as footnote, longing as thesis. I take my lovers like literature: slowly, and with trembling reverence. I underline their sighs. I reread their silences. I mourn the parts I never got to study.

But this? This was not that.

They came fast and left faster. No punctuation, no aftercare, just a full stop. They fucked me like a sentence they were trying to finish before it got complicated. And I — idiot scholar that I am — stayed behind to analyze the syntax of absence. Why did he look away during orgasm? Why did his mouth soften when I spoke about my mother?

My theory? Some men treat women like a genre they don’t believe in.

And I’m a fucking epic.

A whole goddamn Iliad of ache and tenderness, and still, they skimmed. Called it connection. Laughed when I cried after. As if my grief were some archaic dialect they didn’t know how to conjugate. As if my want was a character flaw. As if praying for love in this economy wasn’t already a radical act.

Let me be clear: I don’t mourn the sex. I mourn the semiotics of it. The promise embedded in touch. The grammar of intimacy. His hands said stay. His mouth said mine. His silence said never mind.

Desire is dishonest like that.

It cloaks itself in rituals. Moans masquerading as meaning. Hands sliding under shirts like parentheses — as if holding someone could ever make their chaos readable. And I, always the analyst, mistook body language for belief.

What they gave me wasn’t love. It was access.

They used my softness like a passport. Toured my hunger like a foreign country. Took pictures, touched artifacts, left without buying a souvenir. Colonizer energy. All extraction, no reverence.

They didn’t love me. They entered me.

There’s a difference.

And the most humiliating part? I opened the door. I wrote poems about the way they texted good morning. I catalogued the time stamps like scripture. I imagined futures from fragments. I constructed cathedrals out of crumbs.

My god is not merciful.

But still, I study. I dissect. I theorize my way through collapse. Every missed call becomes a case study. Every ache a metaphor. I write as if each word might summon understanding. I write because my body still believes someone, somewhere, might want to read it deeply.

I believe the body is a text. And mine? Mine is annotated with scars, desire, and barely healed betrayals. Margins full of moans. Whole chapters of “what if” and “almost.” I write essays in bruises. I draft longing in whispers. My thighs remember metaphors my mind has tried to forget.

I’m not ashamed of how much I feel. I’m enraged at how little they did.

I wanted to be loved. Not as a reward. Not as performance. But as a process. Slow. Ritualistic. Profound. I wanted love like translation — imperfect but reverent. I wanted someone to try. To fail, but try again. To linger in the mystery.

Instead, they came with fast fingers and faster exits. They made my body climax but left my soul cockblocked.

So now? I fuck differently.

I don’t chase potential. I don’t pray with my panties off. I don’t confuse desire with depth. I read people like I read theory — with skepticism and a highlighter.

And yet — here I am. Still aching. Still scribbling. Still seducing with syntax and getting ghosted by grown men with God complexes and poor grammar.

But also — still me. Mouthy, messy, moaning through margins. A sensual theorist with cracked lipstick and a hunger that refuses to die quietly.

Because here’s what they don’t teach you in girlhood: Lust may take the body, but it’s love that ruins the mind.

And I? I want to be ruined properly.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.