Written by: Sam Rabbie
They start in the classroom,
age is never a question
It’s a statement.
written across his face
And something in the way he looks back
makes her feel briefly
less invisible.
It unsettles her.
A grossly irritating palpable desire.
She notices sunken eyes
the grey threaded through faded brown,
sparse at the crown.
Broken blood vessels bloom at the sides of his nose.
Hands, arms,
sturdy in their adult shape,
Back, rounded from hours of typing
yet another draft.
unfinished.
her stare narrows
She wants to consume him.
Hunger for connection
the intrigue of a life worn well,
leathered by time.
Hands rough and callused from the damming disappointment
of a dream dried up, shrivelled
crumpled into a paper ball
a missed shot at the trash.
Those eyes, she wills to catch in hers,
dulled by life,
yet holding a burning desire.
A thousand questions,
and maybe even more answers.
Answers she can’t find
in any of her bright-eyed, sweat-stained, pimplefaced peers.
Boys who, to her newly filled chest, call her name down the school hallways.
Linger on the curves of a body foreign to her,
two sizes too large, too fast.
They stare, amused.
She stares back.
and finds nothing waiting in their eyes.
She yearns to be seen.
*
His age doesn’t loom
it leaks.
From coffee-stained breath,
from his drudged step,
from sentences coated thick
with yearning
and the quiet rot of everydayness.
“Maybe that’s all passion is
sadness and desire.”
It is not fate,
She wants to believe it is
to dress his soul as her soulmate,
regretfully housed in a forbidden body.
Her worth invigorated
in his every knowing glance,
each encouraging gesture.
Worthy. A person, she is,
with him.
In his proximity, she feels herself growing
wiser, more tasteful.
She wants to drink him in.
His knowledge and experience seep into her
from mere closeness.
It begins with small corrections.
In his sophisticated taste,
he turns his nose up at the songs she plays in her car.
“This is not music,” he says,
reaching over, taking control.
A pattern they seem to fall into.
He asks about her future.
She asks about his past.
The weight settles there
her life imagined
as something ahead of her,
his already lived.
He replaces her music with his.
She memorizes names, albums.
Taking mental notes.
Studies them later, alone.
She wishes she could be as tasteful
as those before.
Women.
She has stalked every photo,
scrolling down and down.
It hangs suspended,
a reminder of what she is
not.
The mirror won’t let her forget.
She is just
a girl.
Who chews pencil erasers,
spending mind-numbing hours
frantically adding item after item
to online shopping carts.
Tabs multiply, carts swell.
She knows it won’t stitch the void
back together
she binges
on clothes, on food,
on her insatiable desire for him.
Desperate to fill the incompleteness,
the uncertainty, that is,
her.
She chases the high of tracking numbers,
package after package.
Maybe inside one she’ll find
the woman who’s been waiting for her,
tasteful, cultured.
Boots and kitten heels.
She can’t imagine when she’d wear them,
but keeps them in the cart
just to stare at them.
She will buy them,
and regret it immediately.
Holding onto the image:
feet painted in ballet-slipper pink,
poised on tiptoes in thin, strappy heels
heels that call for a fancy dinner with him,
sipping wine.
When nothing arrives fast enough,
she turns inward.
Scraping, shaving, plucking, pruning.
Precision she has mastered.
She rubs, wipes, rubs again
until the tube is empty.
This she can control.
Coating her legs in the rough, granular paste,
forcing her hands up and down,
watching skin peel away
making her anew.
Rubbing,
until her legs burn,
red and raw.
*
Desire stirs,
unknown until now,
hot and pestering,
burning, aching to be quenched.
A need for the ugly.
The wrinkled, the sagged,
the beer belly, and carpet rug chest.
fermented
pressure building,
sweetness turning sharp.
A thirst to drink in the impossibility of the other.
To invigorate him
to make anew,
to see the dullness of his eyes coloured
with lust, pleasure, joy.
She wants him alive.
her duty
to make him feel good,
escape the burdens of
strollers and diapers, and yelling
demands of his wife.
She refuses to name.
the wife cannot give this to him.
She knows she can.
Desire finds words.
He tells her she is
not like others.
Says it softly,
as if he is handing her
a secret name.
My beautiful he coos
petting her, his lap dog,
sitting quietly,
obedient.
His muse,
his childhood playground crush,
his adult fantasy.
He hates himself
when forced to confront his ripening age
shadows
that don’t illuminate
they sag his features.
He wants her to be his student
in the safety of his room,
no eyes ridiculing his gaze.
Out in the world, he wishes,
she didn’t need platform heels
to reach his lips.
Her hand so small in his.
He wants to hold her,
protect her from the world’s cruelty
nose scrunching,
nestling into his shoulder.
She needs him
to be a firm arm,
a steady hand to hold.
They both pretend
his fingers are not trembling,
interlocked with hers.
She loses his stare,
panic flares.
She clings harder
searching his eyes for relief.
Their pain numbs together,
still pulsing.
She works to keep him there.
Forces his gaze.
In this moment,
he is hers.
That has to be enough.
*
Years later,
strutting down the cities mainstreet,
heels clicking, hips swinging,
breasts buoyant in a new, dazzling red bra,
straps taut against her small frame,
cleavage asserting itself.
Her lips swell with plumper,
the red of parted lips, gums,
a red of agonizing hunger.
Eyes hover,
forced to trace up her legs.
She straightens her spine,
grows taller in the dim light.
Smiling back
teeth gleaming behind a painted mouth.
Hunger.
Their faces blur, irrelevant
except for their beady eyes,
glossed with lust.
She collects their stares
like proof she exists.
She inhales,
cold air scorches her throat,
eyes watering.
She inhales again,
longer
feels the burn settle deep in her ribs.
Lungs on fire, she keeps breathing.
The burn is addictive.
Intoxicated in the stare.
Later, in the warmth of her bed,
the burn mellows to a hum.
In the quiet of her head,
an eeriness settles in her body.
She weeps
loud, violent cries.
Mascara melts,
tears soak the sheets beneath her face.
Eyes that won’t dry.
She cries for the adult
she is willing into being,
and for the girl she let be mistaken for one.
Mourns her lost youth
sleepovers,
confessions whispered into borrowed pillows,
unrequited crushes,
practice kisses traded with the mirror.
When did girlhood
start being read as womanhood?
and when did she start believing it…
Artist Statement
This work draws on and is in conversation with Being Lolita, My Dark Vanessa, and Half His Age in its attention to power dynamics, the interior logic of girlhood, and desire. I aim to explore the human need to be seen, and how desire, lust, and shame, which are often marked as immoral, emerge in moments of insecurity, in loneliness and deep, unfulfilled yearning. It traces the longing to feel alive, wanted, and in control. These impulses operate differently for the two figures in the work, but converge in a shared dissatisfaction with their current lives: a sense of stagnation, and a desire for something more, something transgressive, even threatening.
I seek to complicate narratives of sexual encounters between young girls and older men that rely on a simple binary of perpetrator and helpless victim. While power asymmetries are central to this dynamic, such framings can obscure the complexity of desire itself, how longing is shaped by psychological need and by social fantasy.
The speaker of this work, a teenage girl, is struggling with her sense of identity, caught between childhood and adulthood. She feels isolated from her peers, discounted and unseen, and burdened by desires she does not yet have the language or permission to express. Her longing is social beyond sexuality, with a desire to feel real, to be recognized, to know how to be in the world. In her teacher, she finds a figure who appears to offer assurance and a model for becoming. Within this dynamic, her exploration of sexuality unfolds under conditions of control and the male gaze. To sustain the relationship, she learns to perform naivety and vulnerability, playing the role of the troubled, innocent girl while internalizing shame around her desire. What feels like agency is structured through power.
I trace this insatiable longing alongside her compulsive engagement with consumer culture– clothes, cosmetics, the endless pursuit of becoming someone more refined, more adult, more worthy. These acts of self-fashioning become another way she attempts to approximate an image of womanhood that is always just out of reach, shaped by external expectations and by what she imagines he wants her to be. The pressure for girls to grow up earlier and earlier preys on this vulnerability, translating desire for recognition into practices of consumption and self-surveillance.
By contrast, he is marked by stagnation and disillusionment. He understands himself as a guide and protector, a role that offers him a renewed sense of purpose and control within a life he experiences as routine and diminished. Her youth becomes both alluring and threatening, an image of possibility and vitality that he no longer inhabits. What appears as care is bound up with nostalgia, entitlement, and the desire to recover a sense of power through proximity to youth, and particularly girlhood.
They find one another in these unmet longings and form a connection shaped by secrecy, shame, and asymmetrical power. Each comes to occupy a role made available by cultural narratives: the “special troubled” girl, the guiding older man. Their intimacy is not mutual in structure, even as it feels emotionally real to both. The work ends by tracing the afterlife of this dynamic in the girl’s early adulthood, where she struggles to locate meaning and worth beyond the male gaze, having learned to understand herself through being looked at rather than through self-recognition.
Intersections 