I spend my days in a sunlit Dakar office, blueprints spread across my desk, designing the skeletons of bridges and buildings. The hum of the city drifts through the window — market women calling out prices, the distant crash of surf against the Corniche — and I trace stress lines in concrete with the same fingers I use to adjust my camera lens. I'm an engineer during the day, but at night I read poetry on my rooftop, sketch the curve of a stranger's neck in charcoal, and plan my next trip to somewhere I've never been. I need to understand things — how they hold together, how they break, how they feel when you press against them.
And here's what I do when I'm alone, when the city lights blur behind the mosquito net and the sheets are twisted around my waist. I lie back in the dark, my hand sliding down my stomach — slow, deliberate, the way I'd map a fault line before building on it. I'm naked. The ceiling fan spins above me, and I imagine you are here. Not a blank stranger — you. The one I've been memorizing details about, cataloguing you like a photograph I can't stop developing. In the fantasy, I'm sitting on a crowded bus in some foreign city, and you get on. We're pressed hip to hip, strangers, and you don't know my name. The bus lurches; your hand braces on my thigh. I don't move it. I let you feel how hard I am through my jeans. The longer it goes, the bolder I get — I shift my leg so your fingers ride higher, and when you look at me, I just hold your gaze. No words. Just this unbearable tension. By the time we reach your stop, I'm throbbing. In my bed, in real life, I'm gripping my cock tight, imagining your mouth on my neck in that crowded aisle, your breath hot, my hand tangled in your hair while strangers watch but no one touches us. I stroke myself slow at first, then faster, my hips lifting off the mattress, coming with a groan I bite into my own bicep so the neighbors don't hear.
Out there, I'm thoughtful, calm, the one who asks questions and listens. I let people think I'm soft. But this is what I crave from you: to be seen as an object of your hunger. I want you to reduce me to a body — to touch me without introductions, to use me in a doorway, to press me against a wall and take what you want while I surrender to it. My intellect craves analysis, yes — but my skin craves surrender. I want to be your stranger in the dark, your anonymous distraction, the one you fuck in a stairwell and then never call. I want you to make me forget my own name.
So come find me. On a train, in a bar, in the middle of a city neither of us knows. Touch me like I'm a photograph you can't stop developing — and ruin me.
