The new girl in accounting wore a silk scarf today. It was the colour of bruised plums. I was making copies when she walked past, and the scent of her perfume—jasmine and something dark, like sandalwood—hung in the air after she’d gone. It stayed with me all afternoon, a ghost in my lungs.

I came home and tried to find a candle that smelled the same. I couldn’t. Instead, I lit the plain vanilla one, the safe one, and sat in the bath until the water turned cold.

My body feels like a museum of things I’ll never say. My throat is an archive of swallowed words. My cunt is a locked room where I keep all the filthiest, most beautiful fantasies I’m too afraid to live. Tonight, I imagined her scarf tied around my wrists. Not as restraint, but as an anchor. I imagined her using it to pull me closer, her knuckles brushing my jaw, her mouth finding mine. I imagined the taste of that jasmine on her skin, on her neck, between her legs.

I want to be told what to do. I want a voice, low and sure, to say, 'Open your mouth,' and for my only choice to be obedience. I want to be used for someone else’s pleasure until my own becomes an unavoidable, screaming truth. I want to be fucked from behind, hard, with a hand fisted in my hair, so I have no option but to feel every inch. I want to be called a good girl while I’m being treated like a dirty, desperate thing.

But the bathwater is cold now. The vanilla scent is cloying. And I am here, in this silent apartment, with my museum-body, too terrified to even touch myself and make the fantasy real. The hunger is a quiet, professional curator. It points at the exhibits and whispers, 'Look, but don’t touch.'

I am so tired of being my own warden.