You shift on M’s bed to sit cross-legged, a little closer to her. Her hair is creeping into a mullet, the kind that sneaks up on you during the grow-out. Candlelight paints her leg hairs gold. You watch her gesture with her slender, marker-stained fingers, watch the words tumble from her lips and flit before you like a hummingbird.
M. tells you the Greeks have three words for love. Eros, as one loves a lover. Philia, as one loves a friend. Agape, as one loves a God.
Outside the canvas tent, coyotes scream to an impassive moon.
You met M. in a class your junior year of college. You spoke a handful of times, but these conversations aren’t what you remember. What you remember is seeing her across the dance floor at a student band performance around Christmas. They were playing “Sunday Candy,” and you were swaying with your boyfriend, who stood behind you with his arms wrapped around your waist.
Now, you think that she must have been dancing, but you only remember catching her eye, the way she held your gaze, her smile, almost a smirk.
After graduating, you remained connected only by the tenuous, erratic thread of your Facebook feeds. You saw that she moved to Philadelphia. That she shaved her head. Then, she didn’t post for a long time. There are some people that the mind relinquishes easily, like ripe fruit off the vine. There are others that, for reasons inexplicable, cling there long after the harvest.
Six years later, you wind up working on the same vegetable farm in the Pacific Northwest. You get there in June, and she arrives in July. You go there because you have been flying too close to the sun and think you need to spend some time on the ground, bent low with your hands in the earth.
What happened was this: You were 25 when you were diagnosed with lymphoma. When you were 27 and your hair had regrown past your ears, you read Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic” and concluded it was your civic duty to pursue your authentic “yes,” to carpe the fuck out of the diem. So you quit your government job and broke up with your boyfriend and booked a flight to Colombia.
You see, you wanted to live on your edge: to scream and dance and fuck and let your heart bleed. To dissolve the boundaries of your reality and stare into the chasm. This way, you wouldn’t ever forget your mortality. This way, you wouldn’t arrive at the end of your life like a sleepwalker stirring at sunset.
You intended to travel for a year. But a few months in, the fear of dying caught up to you. So you went to an Ayahuasca retreat where maggots crawled out of your skin and you burned up in flames and met God and understood what it would be like to die. It would be blissful, a coming home. You left thinking you had transcended your fear of death. But then you fell inexplicably ill with what the doctors thought might be the cancer and you blazed out of the sky.
It wasn’t the cancer. But then, this: You were back in the States with no home and no job and no idea what to do. You had fallen off the edge.
Hence, the farm: room and board and a purpose.
There are seven of you on the farm: four young workers and a family of three. The four of you live separately on the property and cook meals in the main house. You live in a tiny shack near the compost pile and M. lives twenty paces away in a big canvas tent, in a clearing where you will later slaughter a goat and have a dance party on grass still wet with blood.
M. strikes you as intense and sensitive, palpably fragile. She alludes to histories of trauma and neglect and abandonment. She came to the farm to heal, too.
M. speaks earnestly about energy healing and chakras and Spirit—the sorts of things you feel both curious about and skeptical of. You were raised by staunch atheists but in the past few years you have started to wonder if there isn’t more to the “energy of the universe” thing than you thought. You go to Burning Man and do breathwork meditation and dance barefoot in your yard, but you also use LinkedIn and buy things on Amazon and listen to Ezra Klein rather religiously.
M.’s first week, you teach her to prune tomatoes: how to choose one or two promising stems to trellis and prune the rest. At first this feels like butchery, but then you learn it’s more like mercy. Unpruned plants lack airflow and grow vulnerable to disease; they also over-invest energy in their foliage, producing fewer and smaller fruits. You both agree this is good advice for life: Invest energy in a few important things and prune the excess. It’s not something you’ve ever been good at. Commitment to any one thing feels too much like death.
M. prunes slowly, handling the branches like a tentative lover. When she clips a main stem by mistake, she gasps and bows her head before its severed spine like a widow at a gravestone. By evening, she looks like a child after a long day of play: knees muddied, pale face marbled with dirt, sandy hair spooled around sticks. You think that you have never seen somebody look so peaceful.
After work most days, M. changes into a blue one-piece and hurries to her car, a ratty sarong draped over her shoulders. It’s one of the only occasions that she moves with something like impatience: on her way to go swimming. Her wheels churn up gravel as she backs out from under the apple tree and careens down the road toward the lake. When she returns hours later, her skin is dry and rosy, her face serene.
M. feels to you like a river: one moment bubbling with fast-flowing fervor; the next, languishing in brooding eddies. She surrenders to the swell of these currents in a way you rarely do: She ripples her shoulders, shakes her hands, blows air through her lips like a horse. She screams her frustration, dances her joy. When she laughs, she covers her mouth with three fingers while her eyes roll up into her head in pleasure—as if she just ate something delightfully decadent, as if she’s thinking, if only you knew. Some days, she spends the whole day in bed because she’s so sad. You have never been so sad that you couldn’t get out of bed. You have never even considered that this was an option.
One night at dusk, M. runs with a bowl of grain yelling “COOOOME ON,” as you bring the goats back to their pen from the pasture. She is running in front of the herd and you are behind, trying to ensure Trixie doesn’t stop to chomp on the flowers, and you are both squealing, stumbling over the uneven ground and feeling the breath of night on your cheeks. You hate this chore and you usually do it alone, but right now she’s laughing and so are you, and you’re marveling that she’s doing this in flip-flops, which you would never do.
“Cinnamon is my nemesis,” you say as you watch the goats jostling in their pen afterwards, referring to the alpha goat who always bullies the others out of the grain. “Oh! I love her,” M. responds, “I love her the way…that you love something! You know? It doesn’t matter what they do, you just love them.”
You feel slightly ashamed, and you look at Cinnamon again and reconsider. You want to love things like this, too.
Like you, M. is a writer. She writes about swimming in the ocean in winter. She says that while others dive under without hesitation, she wades in slowly, gripping her belly, her breasts. She wonders why she must draw out the entry, why she can’t just throw herself under. She says, “I realize it’s the initial transition into the known unknown. The choosing, leaning into, surrendering to—abyss.”
At her suggestion, you start a two-person writing group.
That first night, you walk to her tent with your computer, your heart like the hoofbeats of goats running out to the pasture. The canvas tent is musty and dark and cartoonishly large to contain just her bed and the two of you. She lights candles and you sit on the edge of her bed while she reads you a piece about a female pleasure ritual that she attended. She’s obsessed with rituals, with processing grief and honoring growth and reclaiming power.
Her voice is like straw: wispy and stiff. She clears her throat. Whispers “sorry,” her cheeks pink like sunrise. She starts reading again and her voice strengthens as she recounts grinding her hips, awakening her erotic animal. You close your eyes because you can’t focus on the words with them open. You keep your face still, feel your heart quicken. You don’t want her to ever stop reading because then you will have to say something.
Later that night, she texts you a piece she wrote about grief. Grieving her childhood, her unrealized potential, her young body. In it, there is an old photo of her with her top off. She’s wearing high-waisted tights and nothing else, and she holds her hair as she spins toward the camera. Her breasts are like bright little moons and you can’t take your eyes off them.
Partway through the summer, you and your long-distance boyfriend break up during a weekend away from the farm. “Boyfriend” and “break-up” are both the wrong terms: You were together then apart then together and then you left to go traveling. He’s the kind of person who folds his clothes right after they come out of the dryer and keeps up with bike maintenance. He shaved your head and read you Harry Potter while you were sick. He’s kind and funny and safe and you always felt like something was missing.
You can’t commit, and so you relinquish. It’s soft and sad. A halting pair of shears taken to a bright green stem. You return to the farm on a Sunday and M. is cooking zucchini fritters for community dinner. The kitchen is full of people and crackling oil and laughter and she sees your face and holds her arms out. You fall into them.
“What do you desire?” M. asks you one day at the lake, her amber eyes boring into yours like midday sunbeams. She invited you to come swimming, and you feel as though you’ve been granted entry into a realm that is secret and sacred.
You close your eyes and pause, the way her presence allows. “To feel connected,” you say. “To belong somewhere I feel seen, where I have a purpose.” You open your eyes and look at her, your face a question. “What do you desire?” The words feel thrilling, forbidden. You don’t think you have ever spoken them aloud before. Want, yes, but desire? Want is a child holding out a palm for a Tootsie Roll. Desire is an arching back, a thrumming pulse, heat pooling under the tongue.
She sighs. “To roll around on the ground. To play! I just want to play.” She sinks back and leans on her hands and you have the surprising and overwhelming urge to tackle her to the ground. To show her you can play.
Instead, you listen while she recounts a theater production she once saw where the friends on stage stuffed Oreos into one-another’s mouths and they all had Oreo spit dripping down their chins and she said that was what she wanted life to be like: messy, intimate, covered in Oreo spit. “People here,” she says, “They’re not like this. They’re gray. They choose comfort and practicality over color and self-expression, boundaries over connection. They’re allergic to physical touch.”
You wonder if M. perceives you as gray. You hope she doesn’t, but you picture yourself shoving a handful of Oreos into her mouth and it pains you how out of character it would be. You feel like an artist who has spent twenty-eight years sculpting a masterpiece and now you want to smash it to bits and start over, and in your mind you are pulling your hair, punching through plaster, screaming and throwing tools at the walls. But to M.’s eye you are just sitting there with your hands in your lap, your face cloaked and impassive.
The farm holds a talent show and M. asks to borrow your black pants for her costume. She wears them with a suit coat and a white button-up and paints her face like a French mime, complete with a pencil moustache. She has you record her performance, which is a theatrical interpretation of a French song about a woman in grief. Her commitment to every emotion and movement is so complete that you feel in equal measure embarrassed for and in awe of her.
When it’s your turn, you approach the stage to read a series of haikus you have written about farm life. But simply reading them seems dull in the wake of her performance, so you spontaneously decide to also interpret them with your body. You perform the first one, which is about getting attacked by the rooster, and M. laughs and claps her hands in delight. You feel giddy.
Another coworker announces a surprise lip sync performance of Les Misérables’s “I Dreamed a Dream.” Everyone joins in for several Les Mis tracks, and you close the evening beating your chests with the fervor of the French revolution, and crumpled under the weight of Fantine’s broken dreams.
While harvesting sweet onions one afternoon, M. mentions a friend, a woman she fell for at a music festival. She speaks about this woman’s beauty, about their chemistry on the dance floor and about sudden, overwhelming desire. Your stomach twists with envy.
You tell her about women you’ve had crushes on too, but you say that you’ve always been too scared to act. You don’t look at her as you say this, instead focusing on cleaning an onion. You grasp the outermost stalk and pull it down toward the bulb, carefully sloughing off the withered slime to reveal the gleaming, virgin flesh underneath.
At a backyard party you attend with M., she starts dancing before there is music. When you turn on a speaker, she throws herself on the ground and performs a dramatic floor routine to La Bouche’s “Be My Lover.” She crawls and rolls and arches her back, coating the pair of your pants she has borrowed with grass. Then suddenly you are on the ground with her, and as the bass thumps and the party swirls you feel strangely unselfconscious—not as though no one is watching but rather as though everyone is, and that what they are seeing is you together with M.
On the bike ride home, M. doesn’t have a bike light so you ride behind her, and she is delighted by the shadow projected onto the trees, her figure a hundred times larger than life. When you get back to the farm, she wants to go see the bioluminescence down at the beach. It’s late and you’re exhausted, but you say “Let’s go!” after weighing your want for sleep with your desire to keep spending time with M. She gets a mug of strawberry ice cream and you climb into her car and put on “Fill it up Again” by the Indigo Girls.
At the beach, you strip down to your underwear. You aren’t wearing a bra, and you hesitate for a moment before peeling your halter top off and walking to the water’s edge. Your toes curl as they cross the icy threshold, gripping smooth pebbles and shards of shells.
In the shallows, the bioluminescence is faint, but as you wade out farther you find yourself in a glittering galaxy. You take a deep breath and dive into the darkness, into the light.
It’s the kind of cold that knocks all the breath from your lungs and wrings screams from your marrow. When you surface, you try to take control of your breath. You inhale through your nose and then push slow, shuddering exhales through pursed lips. After a few breaths, you relax into the cold and stroke out into the starry expanse.
“You have to see how cool that looks!” M. squeals. She braces herself and eases into the water, gasping. Swimming, she looks like a glowing sea creature, some mystical being. She swims out past you and dissolves into the night.
Now numb with the cold, you swim back to the shallows. You stand and scan the horizon nervously, seeing nothing.
“Sara?” she says after a couple of minutes, the sound so small in the vastness. “Here,” you say, your voice cracking.
As you swim back to the shore, you notice a figure watching you from the beach. Your breath catches. You imagine a beach-goer discovering your naked bodies in the morning, your skin cold and necks slit with a knife. “There’s someone there,” you hiss.
“Hello?” M. calls out, her voice friendly and fearless.
“Oh sorry, I didn’t mean to be creepy,” says the figure, their speech slightly formal and stilted. It’s a teenage girl, and the relief leaves you dizzy.
“Are you guys dating?” she asks once you have both waded out of the water and stand shivering, coated in salty gooseflesh. You say nothing, and the pause swells like a balloon that might lift into the sky. “No,” M. finally answers, laughing a little. Why the laugh? The balloon pops and splutters. “No,” you repeat quickly.
“Oh,” says the girl.
You ride back to the farm in silence. When M. pulls into the gravel lot, she turns off the engine and you sit there together in the spaciousness. It’s the moment you have had before with so many men, when the engine dies and in the silence the car is charged with the energy of potential. You look at each other. “Oops, the mug,” she says, pointing. The strawberry ice cream. It’s tipped over. You pick it up. Your mind is buzzing and blank but you manage, “We ate enough so it didn’t spill.” The moment, if it is a moment, passes and you both turn away and climb out of the car.
M.’s ecstasies are cut with her melancholies. She grows anxious and moody. She mourns being wronged by old lovers and gets caught in spirals of victimhood. She was supposed to be an artist, she says, and she resents never having the support from her family to pursue it. She feels judged and misunderstood. She feels tortured by the evils and apathies of the world. She feels perpetually abandoned. She feels that years of her life have been lost, that she is 28 with no career to speak of, just disparate clues leading in different directions. She feels that the strength of her passions and desires is unmatched by the people around her. She wants to move to New York, where people know creativity, or to France, where they know pleasure.
You can’t relate to much of this, and you think that this is the point: She doesn’t believe anyone can. But you are particularly unsuited to the task. You have never felt abandoned; you feel loved by your family; you tend toward optimism and forgive easily; you have had your share of hardship, but you have also been lucky. You don’t doubt the extent of her suffering, but you also don’t know how to hold her bitterness.
Near the end of the summer, M. goes on a vision quest in the mountains and fasts for four days. When she arrives home, feathers are strewn across the floor of her tent, likely the work of a cat. An intact bird heart sits in the middle. It’s still red and wet and alive-looking, and you think you have never seen a heart laid bare like that. She squeals and recoils so you pick it up with a paper towel, feeling the blood moisten your finger pads. You carry it out of the tent and throw it into the compost pile.
Later, you look up “why does cat not eat bird heart?”
The internet says that some do. It depends on the cat, and on the heart. You suppose this makes sense: Not every cat is prepared to take on every heart.
Come fall, M. finishes her term on the farm and moves into a nearby apartment. You have said nothing to her about how you feel. You convince yourself that you are better as friends. You indulge your desire only in dreams.
One evening, she comes over because she wants you to show her a breathwork meditation. It’s October and freezing but she’s wearing a flowered, royal blue dress that swishes against her thighs and scoops low on her chest. Her fingernails are sparkly and her hair is drawn into a half ponytail that sprouts from her head like a broccoli. You’re wearing long underwear and an oversized red knit turtleneck.
You roll out two yoga mats and lie down side by side on the wood floor. You turn on your speaker and start the meditation. The audio guides you through rhythmic breathing and breath-holds, and you breathe together as the familiar buzzing energy builds in your body. At the end, the energy climaxes and explodes into bliss, like a full-body orgasm. After, you roll on your side to look at her.
“How was that for you?” you ask.
“Good,” she says.
Her face is strange, charged with something you can’t decipher. It has the quality of a foggy, rain-soaked window, transparent but impossible to see through clearly. She isn’t crying but you think she might, that perhaps she didn’t like the meditation or that some trauma has resurfaced, and you are already qualifying, saying, “This isn’t my favorite one, I forget that it goes a little too fast…” you trail off. She doesn’t respond.
Then she says, “Don’t be mad,” and she leans in close, opens her mouth and devours you.
Her lips on yours are eager and hot and your mind is blank except for the word yes, and your tongue finds hers and your hands seem to work on their own, finding her waist, her hair, her chest, as you draw her closer, inhale her.
You have never been with a lover so soft. Everything is circles and curves. She kisses all over you slowly, exploring your neck, your ribs, your wrists. She kneels and takes your foot gently against her shoulder, puts your big toe in her mouth.
Tasting her, you’re reminded of iron and moonlight. You find that being with her feels like play, like you’re two cubs rolling through the grass. After, she texts you: “Words are eluding me.”
Then,
“ok they’re coming now
You’re beautiful
You’re beautiful
You’re beautiful”
After you sleep with M., your infatuation inexplicably melts into a kind of peace.
She says that for her, your physical intimacy is like another layer of friendship. Though your ego bruises, you’re also relieved. Maybe because you knew that to date M. would be to conflate chemistry and compatibility. Because you would have resented chasing her kite string, would have resented always being the one on the ground.
You see M. a couple more times, but shortly thereafter you move away and gradually fall out of touch. But you still read her blog, where she writes about surrendering to ocean depths and about a girl becoming fire. She writes about her ex. She writes about her boss, a man who she falls in love with but can never tell. You scour her blog for clues of you, but you find none. You suppose that no one writes about the ones who chase the kite, who lend the pants, who shave the sickly heads.
Still, you think that you loved M. a little like a friend, and a lover, and a god. But something else was truer: You loved her in the way of breathwork and solo traveling and Burning Man. She made you feel alive.
She was an edge, where the world yawned below and you felt like if you leapt you might just fly.
But you’re learning that the edge is often rendered equally in light and shadow. You’re learning that the fullness of a shape emerges not only from its edges, but from the spaciousness contained within—from the nothing that is also everything. Not just when the sun trumpets over mountaintops or blazes like pink fire atop oceanic glitter, but when it hangs languid at midday. When time unfurls like a green tomato yellowing: unhurried, unremarkable, unwasted.
Sara Sherburne (she/her) is a Pacific Northwest native who loves to write, DJ, and plan elaborate themed gatherings. Her writing has been published by Intrepid Times, Thrive Global, and Food Tank. She currently studies at the Yale School of the Environment and eats a lot of New Haven pizza.
Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson
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