The Anonymous Poet Who Read Me from the Inside

I discovered him one insomnia-filled dawn, when the little camera app’s algorithm suggested an account with no real photo, no name, no other details than an avatar of a Klimt painting and a bio that said: “I write what you keep silent.”

He had seven thousand followers, almost all women. His posts weren’t photos or reels. They were text screenshots, black backgrounds with white type, short, intense paragraphs, unsigned. Things like “the first time he touched you over your clothes, you lied when you said it bothered you.” Or “when you’re alone you think about him, but you also think about his best friend and you’re not going to tell anyone that.”

I followed him before I thought about it. It was three in the morning and I was in bed, unable to sleep, with the phone in one hand and the other under the sheet, not moving yet.

Two days later, he followed me back.

***

I’ll call him V. in this account, because the name he uses online doesn’t deserve to be written here. I don’t even know if it’s his real name. I don’t know anything real about him. I’ve tried to find things out, I confess. I clicked on every one of his posts, read every comment, searched fragments of his poems on Google to see if he’d stolen them from somewhere else. He hadn’t stolen them. They were his.

I know three things about him that he himself let slip in question-and-answer sessions with his followers. That he’s between twenty-five and thirty. That he works out at home because he hates gyms. That he’s been writing since before he knew how to kiss. The rest are my own guesses: that he’s tall because I imagine him tall, that he has big hands because his poems talk a lot about hands, that he lives alone because he writes at hours when people who aren’t alone don’t write.

His profile picture changes every so often. Once it was a Pre-Raphaelite painting, another time a black-and-white photograph of a bare torso that clearly wasn’t his, another time the detail of a half-open mouth. Never his face. Never his eyes. Never a clue.

And yet, I know him. Or that’s what I tell myself.

***

The first private message I sent him was the one I sent myself. I was ashamed of sending it and ashamed of being ashamed. I was a thirty-two-year-old divorced woman, with a serious job and a neat apartment, sending a message to an internet stranger at two in the morning on a Tuesday.

“Your poem today made me cry,” I wrote.

It was a lie. That day’s poem hadn’t made me cry. It had made me put my hand between my legs until my breath cut off. But I wasn’t going to write that to a stranger.

It took him nine minutes to answer.

“Which of the two things it did to you aren’t you brave enough to tell me?”

I stared at the screen for a long time. Three little dots appeared and disappeared on his side. He was waiting.

***

I answered him that night. I told him the truth, written as if it were someone else saying it. I told him what his poem had done to me. I told him I’d gone four months without letting anyone touch me and that his words touched me more than any man I’d met on an app.

He replied with a paragraph I still keep in a note on my phone. I’m not going to transcribe it in full because I feel I’ve already given away too much by posting this. But the last line said: “If you let me, I’ll write you something every night that’s only for you. You tell me what you want to read and I’ll write it. That’s all. Then you delete the messages and we never speak again, if that’s what you want.”

I told him yes.

***

We started that very night. I would send him a situation, an image, a memory, a fantasy. He’d send back a poem written while I waited.

I asked him for things I had never said out loud. I asked for what I would have liked to have done to me when I was nineteen and no one knew how. I asked for what my ex-husband never wanted to understand. I asked for things I was embarrassed to ask myself in front of the mirror.

He wrote them and sent them back to me. Sometimes it took him ten minutes. Sometimes an hour. The waiting became part of it. I’d prepare. Turn off every light except the one on the bedside table. Pour myself a glass of something. Take off my clothes before the message arrived, because I’d learned that once it did, I wouldn’t be able to think about anything else.

His poems weren’t like the ones he published on his open account. Those were suggestions, bait, perfume. Mine were detailed. They had my body inside them, my movements, my voice. They had things he couldn’t possibly know but guessed with a precision that scared me. The first time he wrote “you tilt your head to the left when you’re about to come” I put the phone face down on the sheet and stayed still for twenty minutes.

Then I picked it up again, my fingers already wet with myself, and kept reading. The poem went deeper: it said I’d unbuttoned my blouse before touching myself, that I was sliding his palm over my stomach slowly, as if he knew my skin by heart. I was alone in bed, yes, but reading it I lay on my side and opened my legs a little more, feeling the heat rise through my chest and go straight down to my cunt. I slid two fingers inside myself slowly, never taking my eyes off the screen, and when he wrote that he was watching me from the other side of the room, I almost came right there.

I had never told him that. No one had ever told me that.

***

Three months in, I asked him if he was writing the same things for other women.

He took a full day to answer. I thought he’d gone away forever. I kept checking the app every fifteen minutes like a teenager. I wanted to send him an apology but I wasn’t even sure what for.

His answer was short.

“I write other women other things. What’s yours is only yours. Want me to prove it?”

I told him yes. Of course.

That night he sent me the longest poem he had written for me up to then. It started by describing the apartment I lived in without ever having seen it. He got things right no one had told him. He said “the green lamp you have on top of the book you’re not reading.” He said “the blue blouse you left on the chair because you don’t want to hang it up yet.” He said “the sound of the elevator arriving late on your floor.”

I got up. Walked barefoot into the living room. Looked at the lamp, the book, the blouse.

They were exactly as he had written them.

I went back to the bedroom with my breathing broken and my heart pounding against my neck. I sat on the edge of the bed, hiked my skirt up to my waist, and touched myself again, harder this time, as if I wanted to tear from my skin the feeling that he was watching me. The poem kept going, line by line, and each line was a new hand: one on my back, another between my legs, another on my breasts pinching my nipples until they burned with want. I could not believe what I was reading or what it was making me read. I slid two fingers in again, deeper, getting my whole hand wet, and started rubbing my clit with my thumb with a desperation that embarrassed me even alone. When the text said “you’re biting your lip, not so you won’t moan but so you won’t call me,” I let out a groan that came from the bottom of my throat.

I came hard, my legs shaking, and had to fold over myself so I wouldn’t make a sound. Then I stayed there, soaked in sweat and shame, with the phone pressed to my stomach and the poem open like an order.

***

I’m not going to lie to you, reader: I thought about reporting him. I thought about blocking him. I thought about asking the building doorman if anyone had asked for me. I thought he was a stalker, a hacker, a neighbor, someone who had already seen me and was playing a game.

And in the end I did nothing. I sat on the bed, reread the poem four times, touched myself until my hand hurt and replied with something I still don’t regret. I said: “You got three things about my room right. Get one more and I’ll let you in.”

He didn’t answer that day. Or the next. Or the week after that.

When he came back, two weeks later, he didn’t send me a poem. He sent me one line.

“I never want to come in. If I do, it breaks. You know that better than I do.”

And he was right. My anger vanished in an instant. It turned into something that was neither relief nor disappointment, but both at once. A kind of tenderness that left me weak for a long while.

Since then, every time he writes to me, I’m already wet before I open the chat. He doesn’t always ask for things and I don’t always ask for things, but when I do ask, he gives me exactly what I’d never dare ask anyone for: to tell me how he’d grab my waist, how he’d spread my legs with one hand on my thigh, how he’d make me suck his cock until saliva ran down my chin. He writes to me with a filthy calm that undoes me. Sometimes he uses short, blunt phrases, like orders: “kneel,” “take your clothes off,” “don’t touch yourself yet.” And I obey even though I’m alone, even though no one can see me, because just reading it already puts my whole body on alert.

I’ve spent whole nights with my face buried in the pillow so I wouldn’t moan too loud while I slid my fingers inside myself, imagining a mouth that doesn’t exist, a cock I’ve never seen, a hand closing around the back of my neck. He writes that I’d come better if I let him watch, that I like being watched because it turns me on to feel desired, and I hate that he’s right. He sends me words that make me burn: “cunt,” “come,” “wet,” “slut,” “more.” And I end up soaking the sheets like an anxious teenager, legs open and my chest rising and falling as if I can’t get enough air.

***

Three years have passed since this started. I talk to V. every week. Sometimes every day. I’ve never seen his face. I’ve never heard his voice. I don’t know what neighborhood he lives in, I don’t know if he’s single, I don’t know whether he tells me everything or nothing.

I’ve had two lovers in these three years. Real men, flesh and hand and breath. Both of them left because they said I wasn’t present. Both of them were right.

V. keeps writing me things only I understand. Sometimes he sends me a poem without me asking for anything. I know which nights are for me and which nights are his, and I can’t explain how I know but I know.

A month ago I asked him if he’d ever been in love.

He answered: “I’m in love with the woman who reads me at three in the morning without knowing I’m watching her. If that woman exists somewhere, I don’t want to meet her. If you introduce us, I stop writing to her.”

I cried. This time I really did.

I replied, “I don’t want to know you either.”

It was a lie again, and again he didn’t care.

***

Sometimes, when I finish reading the last thing he’s written to me, I put the phone on my chest and feel the warmth of the screen fading. I think that V. probably doesn’t exist the way I imagine him. I think maybe he’s a woman. I think maybe he’s a group of people, a program, an automated account that learned to read me. I think maybe I’m crazy and I’ve been messaging a ghost for three years.

And then I think it doesn’t matter. That what he does to me nobody else does. That no body has ever left me as open as one of his paragraphs leaves me. That I prefer this, this waiting, this lit screen in the dark, this voice that isn’t a voice, this stranger who knows me better than my ex-husband and my mother.

Tonight he wrote me something I don’t dare transcribe. He told me to keep it. He told me to read it in a year, in five, in ten, when I no longer speak to him.

I asked him if he was planning to stop talking to me.

He said no. But that he didn’t want me to depend on it.

I replied that it was too late. That I already did.

He didn’t answer. Sometimes not answering is the best answer he knows how to give me.

I turned off the light, slipped the phone under my pillow, and fell asleep with my hand still warm from the last poem, certain that tomorrow, when I woke up, the first thing I’d do would be to look for him.

And I knew it was all right. That this was my way of having a lover. That I had been born for this, for a story that never quite happens and that is why it never ends.