Mosquitoes sock my feet and suck with their spiteful proboscises—a biting performance that makes me clap, a relentless whining in my ears that makes me slap. Splotches of blood crimson on my palms and the smell of crushed insects heavy in my nostrils, I trash like sea waves in bed. The mosquitoes remind me of your moans, shuddering snatches of heaven’s pipes, and I want to touch myself with the blood of the vanquished.         

My body is reliving us wrapped in rubbery skins, sliding off sweat, dissolving in seminal fluids, and the titillating diffusion of pleasure moving towards toes squirming in apostrophes and fingers quivering in sheet-clutched commas. I dream. I see you standing above a woman, the one you call your wife now. You call her Cinderella as you suck her toes. Cin-der-e-lla. The cin becomes the sin of your sloppy sounds. Her legs adorn your shoulder, squirming toes as dangling earrings for your soft earlobes. Do you remember when you took my ear in your mouth, made indentations with your teeth, and whispered that I was the love of your life?

You were young, and I younger—how naive of us to think in absolutes then! I have loved and yearned for many after you. Loops and loops of pining and lust: I have crawled in buccal orifices and anal crevices searching for a semblance of your essence. I have massaged prostates hoping to hear you moan the shuddering snatches of heaven's pipes rising in crescendo, but I hear other voices. Ugly baritones—I have loved and yearned for many after you.

There are weeks when I live without reminders of you and those are my happiest. When I remember your breath against my neck, moaning my name with the same fervour you spoke in tongues during church services, I become death, which means that everything crumbles into ashes when your memories bubble up like the sea giving up her dead. I lie with the debris of our passion on these shores, refusing to answer the call of the deep but also never leaving the sea's presence. The waves wash over me—I will never be as clean as I was in your bathroom, your arms wrapped around my waist, the shower trickling down my chest in rivulets. I became water when you entered my muddy temple, became incense, communion wine, blood of the lamb bent over the altar for fucking, the water before Genesis. I existed above all and beyond time.

“Cinderella, where is your glass slipper?” you asked with a smirk before my feet disappeared in your mouth. Cin-der-e-lla. The cin became the sin of your sloppy sounds, and I ah’ed as you lla’ed. Miaows in allegro and mhmms in andante. We made love with our hands, built sandcastles by the beach, and prayed for the surf to be merciful.

I am a single, struggling working class guy now. I juggle so many things and sometimes crash down on the floor at midnight in tears and exhaustion. You drive the latest family car to parties in East Legon, Cantonments and Airport Residential Area. How foolish was I to think we belonged together? Your family was established and respected in the upper echelons of Accra. I was just a boy trying to survive in Ghana after living almost two decades as a second-generation immigrant in Nigeria. I was a stranger in my home, and you were the only thing familiar. The green in both national flags, the moss that grew on unplastered walls like velvet for naked skin, the green of your curtains soaking in your heady perfumes and strange recipes. You were the only thing familiar, a fellow lover of Burna Boy and Niniola—but your world wasn't. I didn't belong.

“Fiifi, you're too young to be my boyfriend,” you said one day as you dropped the red roses I bought for you in a vase.

“You're only eight years older,” I said, wrapping my hands around your waist and kissing your shoulder. I had to look down because I was taller. I looked like your elder brother with my big beard and your egg-smooth jaws. Hair eluded your face and settled around your anus.

“It's insignificant, Nii,” I continued. “Age gap won't be the reason people disapprove of us when we come out in a safe place.”

“When?” Your left eyebrow arched like a rising wave.

“Abi you know we can't be in Ghana forever. If we want to live freely as lovers, we have to get out, Nii,” I said, pulling your waist closer to my groin. I wanted you to know how much I craved to be the ink of your journal entries, the eyes through which you saw beauty and lived the rest of your life. You pulled away and said you needed to use the restroom. I should have known then that you were never going to choose me. After all, you were becoming scared to walk with me in public because I couldn't put on a convincing masculine act. My hips were the seats of a swing; my wrists were flags flapping at half mast. Your parents wanted you to be with someone presentable. By someone they meant a woman, and by presentable they meant someone who could blend into your class like a character in Bridgerton.

But you knew all these before you buried yourself deep inside me and grew out your seeds to become perennial trees. You said we were woody perennials, that this was a forever thing. Perennial, you said as you bit my lips. I love this wood, you said as you stroked me. My woody perennial, you called me and drew out blood to taste as we French-kissed forever in mumbling smacks. Maybe that is why I'm tethered to you. Why I dream of you fucking your wife—it hurts to see someone else come screaming your name.

Maybe that is why I know you think of me before you ejaculate inside her with a groan that is almost a yawn. She holds you inside her afterwards, hoping for the fourth child that would be a prop in your theatre. You are a good performer to the rest, but she can tell you don't desire her like other men would. You have the mouth of a lover who worships, but you speak in the tongues of men. She knows when you kiss her. At midnight you stroke your wood watching porn. The men always have my physique. You taste your warm sap and mumble my name as your mouth takes your seedy index finger, a pallid proxy of me.

You liked me to thrust so hard and fast while I penetrated. You always asked if I drank stuff before we met behind locked doors—two clicks in the doorknob, countless thrusts in your hole like a shovel digging up sand. Did it scare you, how fierce I could be in bed? I loved it when I bit your hands as you pounded. I loved flicking knives across your chest and neck as I made you submit to me. You loved playing with a toy gun in bed. The clicks of the gun made us hard—harder. We loved dangerous things because we were loving dangerously. Every day could be our last, every night our end. Running on that adrenaline proved insufficient alas. All that terror as we watched the country become more inhabitable.

We talked again about running away. Living abroad open and free like the birds I loved. But you were the first son in a rich family, and all the promise of that inheritance…I didn't have that temptation. I was building my life from almost nothing. You were creating new pasta recipes, and I was still growing wheat for flour. It was unfair, asking you to leave all that when you had more to lose. But I had things I was leaving behind too. Pastors' sons do not come out as gay and marry men, you know. The church my father worked for was becoming an influential force in pushing the bill that criminalised our existence, our love.

Did you resent me for it, that every Sunday I went to the church that was pushing for us to be criminals? Did you hate watching me struggle to balance my sexuality with my faith? You loathed church then. Now you post pictures of your family after Sunday services. You're a family man, God-fearing and responsible. No one will believe we ever shared a heart-shaped nest and a sweat-soaked bed. No one will read this and think of you. We barely took pictures together because we thought we had forever to go, and the few we had are deleted now. I can't break our no-contact agreement. I'm too proud to consider that anyway. I want to forget everything about you. Damnatio memoriae. But how do I do that? You left your soul with me. Peeled back your foreskin and gave me the light of your essence. If I throw that away, I'll have only darkness left.

I stroke with the blood of the mosquitoes in my palm and mutter Cinderella as my feet flail and falter. Cin-der-e-lla—I will be a tree felled soon.