X-Ray Crush: I only Love What I Can't See on Mosher Mag

Falling for bones, lungs, blood maps—emotional intimacy through internal anatomy.

Some people fall for eyes or smiles. I fall for ribcages on greyscale film. The faint outlines of lungs mid-inhale. The stillness of a heart caught in an MRI.

It’s not about surface-level attraction. It’s not your skin or your style or your curated selfies that get me.

It's not just metaphor. I crave internality. I ache for the things hidden behind flesh. Bones feel more honest than words. Organs seem more sincere than smiles.

What seduces me isn’t your face—It’s your lungs. It’s the architecture of you. The scaffolding that holds you together. The ghost of your heartbeat in your chest. The hidden things. The fragile things. The real things.

We talk about intimacy like it’s something physical. Skin to skin. Eye contact. A shared breath. But there’s another kind of intimacy—the quiet kind. The x-ray kind. The kind where you know someone not by what they say, but by what they carry deep inside.

To be seen beneath the surface is the highest form of intimacy. Screw small talk—I want to know the shape of your spleen. Show me your fractures, your slipped discs, the calcium ghosts of old injuries. Show me what you carry that no one else can see.

The curve of a spine tells you how someone learned to bend. Scar tissue shows you where they’ve been stitched back together. A tilted pelvis can whisper a lifetime of imbalance. This is not eroticism as spectacle—it’s eroticism as evidence.

I don’t want to undress you. I want to de-layer you.

Show me your skeleton and I’ll show you what love feels like when you stop pretending.

There’s a strange ache in only wanting what I can’t touch. Like loving an x-ray: the bones are there, but the warmth is gone. And yet, there’s something purer about it. No lies in the cartilage. No performative joy in the marrow. Just the truth of your anatomy, stripped bare by technology and light.

The internal body is emotional territory. We associate feelings with physical places—your heart breaks, your stomach sinks, you feel something “in your bones.”

And it’s not just poetic—it’s anatomical.

Your nervous system doesn’t know the difference between grief and a stab wound.

Your endocrine system processes heartbreak like injury.

Every crush feels like pressure in the lungs. Every goodbye knots in the intestines.

That’s why I fixate on anatomy. Because it mirrors emotion more accurately than any facial expression ever could.

The heart isn't the seat of love just because it pumps blood.

It’s because it hurts in rhythm.

Because it skips when you’re near.

Because the way it works becomes metaphor without even trying.

The lungs are like longing: always expanding, always emptying, always gasping for more.

The liver, quiet and bitter, processing toxins—just like a bruised memory.

The stomach? That’s where butterflies die when you realise they don’t love you back.

Every organ feels like a feeling. Every image from an MRI or CT scan is a portrait of the private self. That’s what I fall for. Not what you present—but what you contain.

Let me love the blueprint of you.

Your ribcage is more intimate than a photograph.

Your vertebrae tell a story your mouth never could.

I want to study your x-rays like sonnets.

Trace the fractures like family trees. Learn your internal geography like a haunted map.

An x-ray doesn’t perform. It doesn’t pose. It simply exists—unapologetically real, eerily still.

Loving an x-ray is loving someone without the lies. Without the front. Without the filter. Loving someone’s x-ray is like being in a relationship with their absence. Loving someone’s x-ray is to admit you might never know the whole of them. But still, you want to. Still, you try.

That’s what haunts me.

That’s what turns ribs into relics.

That’s why I ache for what’s inside.

You’re not with them—you’re with the proof they existed.

The spinal column they left behind in a file folder.

The crooked clavicle that once held a hand to a chest.

It’s not romance—it’s relic collecting.

And isn’t that what a crush is, sometimes? Falling for an idea? A fantasy?

A version of someone that’s just detailed enough to feel real, but distant enough to stay perfect?

What I want is someone who doesn’t need to be beautiful—just visible on the inside. I want to see the shadows in your skull. The secrets in your soft tissue. The emotions lodged in your lymph nodes.

We think of ghosts as disembodied souls—but some of us are haunted by bodies instead.

By the idea of a body. By the silence inside it.

By the truth that a person can be alive, breathing, speaking—yet still feel invisible.

X-rays capture that contradiction.

They freeze a moment of pure vulnerability. They show the soul’s scaffolding.

They whisper, “Here I am, even when you don’t believe me.”

This isn’t gore. This isn’t fetish. This is emotional x-ray vision.

I’m not turned on by your bones—I’m moved by them.

Because what we carry inside us is quieter, sadder, and far more permanent than the things we wear outside.

So yeah, maybe I only fall for people I can’t really have.

Maybe I love like a radiologist—studying from a distance, never making contact, just observing the structures and memorising the shapes.

You start loving silhouettes. Scans. Fleeting data. A ghost trapped in soft tissue.

You become someone who falls in love through a screen—not the glowing kind, but the backlit kind.

A person who longs not for kisses, but for cadavers. Not for sex, but for stillness.

Because stillness doesn’t abandon you. Stillness doesn’t disappoint.

But sometimes, the most honest version of love is the one where you don’t need the body—just the proof it was once alive.

Let me love your x-ray.

Let me hold the hollow echo of your organs.

Let me feel close to what I’ll never truly touch.

Because maybe that's what love is anyway:

Not seeing someone completely,

but knowing that you could.

Because being known? Being touched? Being held? That’s terrifying.

But admiring someone’s internal blueprint?

Worshipping the shadow of their skeleton?

That’s divine. For the freaks, by the freaks.

Thanks for reading. Stay strange.

✦ moshermag.com