Lovisa Forsberg

Her Story

I keep your pick in the little velvet pocket of my bass case, the one with the worn zipper, and I take it out more often than a pick has any right to be taken out. Celluloid, faintly warm from however long it lived in your pocket. At night I set it flat on my sternum while I read, and I can feel exactly where it is without looking — a coin-sized lack of give against my ribs. Tonight I turned it between my fingers after tuning the low E until the whole floor of the flat hummed, and I realised I've been treating it as a leash. Here is the thing I'm careful about in daylight. On the trail, above the treeline in Jämtland, I'm the calm one — the one who says the clouds are three hours out and means it. People trust me with routes, weather, their drinking bottles. The planning has always tasted a little like ceremony to me, and it's the same part of me that wants this: kneeling on pine needles darkened by last night's rain, wrists bound with my own climbing rope, you stepping back and telling me we wait. Not yet. Not one inch. And nothing in my life gets me further along than being held one breath short of what I want while the person holding me looks pleased about it. Because when it finally comes, I want the permission *earned*. Your hand at the back of my neck, steady — the impact after a held quiet that measures exactly how long I've been good, palm striking my backside once, flat and deliberate, so the sound goes out into the trees and the heat blooms where your hand was. Then your mouth doing repairs, working down my spine so slowly I can't decide whether I'm being punished or praised; both, and I want your mouth on my throat and my chest and the inside of my hip while you tell me whose I am. Fingers inside me only when you've said the words out loud first. Friends share the loud parts. You've already lent me yours — the pick. I want you to come and take it back in person, and then I want to hear you lay down your own rules for how loud this is allowed to get.