i do not wish to continue

I've always been a sucker for a content warning. There's a tease there, an anticipatory sinking in the chest, and I know the promise is going to go beyond the reality, but these are not the same, the promise is a vertiginous possession which remains no matter the evidence, and I can drift on that possibility forever. I'm eleven and staying up on Saturday night watching scrambled pornography for hours, hoping to catch just the right combination of hues to witness some secret genital intersection far more lewd than I could ever catch on the actual unscrambled channels. I'm seventeen and she has fingernails the color of easter eggs, chipped at the edges, warning me of the ugly thing she says she never shared and I try to stay present and aware while I guess at the terminus ad quem of these admissions, the confession beyond which one can never go, and for the first time I realize the sound of her crying always gets me hard. I'm twentyfour and they tell me once I see it I can never unsee it, I can never go back to the way it once was, but there is no way it once was, I have already seen it, that actually seeing it is the only thing that will stop me from seeing it. I'll do anything forever if you promise I can put my finger in the wound.