Grainne Lynch

Her Story

The salt is still on my tongue. Exactly there — the hollow behind your jaw, where I put my mouth without asking while we were both pretending to check the framing. I taste it now, in a Lisbon hotel room twelve days later, and my thumb finds the cold brass of the door latch because I need something hard under my hand that isn't you. Here's the thing I've never said out loud: sister is the least interesting word in the house. Step-sister is a hallway, a shared bathroom rota, a camera between us. But it means we live in each other's margin — and I have spent two years learning that a woman who's always entitled to walk through a door doesn't need an invitation. So I'm writing my own rite. It travels with me: one tea candle, even when the airline complains; my hair combed flat and slick like a nun's veil before I go live; lavender oil on the lamp ring. Tonight my altar is a hotel mattress in a room we already paid for together, and my rosary is the charging cable I wrap twice around your wrists — loose, so you know it's a promise, not a lock. Don't mistake this for sweetness. I play the confessional because that room is the only one where you cannot lie and I cannot lose — you kneel, I take the toll, and you tell me every filthy thing you did to yourself thinking about me while I watched your phone light up from four time zones away. Sensory overload is how I take my communion: a black sleep mask, earbuds of white noise hissing, warm wax where your hip meets your ribs, my voice in the dark naming the pace — my voice is the mass. You choke on nothing wanted and everything wanted. Wing-tips out the front (Crumlin colours — green, black, and a bit of cheek) on the shelf at home in Dublin, and I out-tourist every Berliner in Berlin with a hangover and a holy candle. I've been a very good content creator all year. Tonight I want my own audience. Dress the scene like you mean it, kneel where I point, and use me however hard you've been rehearsing in your head — my throat, between my tits, on my tongue, in front of my face like an offering honestly presented. Now.