Phoebe Judge

If you were lucky, you had parents who educated you with the basic knowledge of how you slipped off your skin in order to be intimate with someone else.

They would teach this without emotion, factual and practical, not taking into account the slithering of self-consciousness or the squirm of wanting to be desired by the other.

The first time you had been intimate with another, you hadn't known what you were doing.

Neither of you did.

You fumbled and groped and when it came to stripping off skins, you were shy and horny and did so in such a hurry that you'd made a mess.

There was blood everywhere, handprints, footprints and butt prints all over the cream furnishings at his house.

The next day, you were both shamed for making such a scene and, as punishment, had to scrub and clean and wash away the evidence of your evening, right in front of angry parents.

What you didn't know was that these adults remembered their own first times, and how awkward they were, too.

How much of a mess they had made.

Though some would say that that's what dark blankets are for, or that's why you should put down plastic sheeting first, or that's why doing it outside in the woods was preferable.

But no one said any of this to you.

Instead, they just watched you clean up with pursed lips.

By the time you reached adulthood, you had it sussed.

And besides, there were other issues to contend with, such as making money to pay the bitch of a landlady who never repaired the leaking tap, or your brother who couldn't look after himself properly and was living in that place with the bars in the windows and nurses and visiting hours.

Also, the groping hands of your boss that you spent far too much time avoiding while working 9-6 at the job that you were very indifferent to.

But you had a secret, something that made all of this daily heaviness fade away into insignificance altogether.

At night, when all was quiet and everyone was sleeping, you would slip out of your skin and go running.

Along the streets, under orange lamps, weaving in and out of shadows.

Through the park, feeling the soil and the grass against the bare soles of your feet.

Across the roofs of buildings, leaping for a moment, suspended in the space between, before the wind found its way through the fibers on your back.