All Natural
No experience required
📖 Behind the Story
We don’t write honestly about physical intimacy very often. We write around it, perform it, or make it cinematic in ways that have very little to do with what it actually feels like to be a beginner with someone you trust.
I wanted to write the version we don’t see enough.
The one with laughter in it. The one where an “ouch” happens and nobody flinches. Where curiosity leads and ego stays out of the room entirely.
That’s All Natural. Not intimacy as performance, but intimacy as trust; the particular kind of ease that only exists when two people have quietly agreed there’s nothing here to get wrong.
I made one decision that shaped everything: I would write around what was happening rather than through it. Not to be coy, but because the emotional truth I was chasing had nothing to do with the act itself.
It had everything to do with what it feels like to be a beginner in front of someone whose opinion of you matters, and to discover that it costs you nothing.
That’s the real vulnerability here — not the physical closeness, but the willingness to not know what you’re doing and stay anyway.
On the Visual Process
The cover is the only panel in full color, warm and close and laughing. It sets the tone before a single word lands: this is not a serious story. It’s a tender one.
From there, the zine moves into black and white, and the choices become deliberate.
The opening panel doesn’t begin with faces. It begins with feet, tangled and unhurried under sheets. Something small and specific rather than something obvious. An entry point that’s intimate without being declarative.
The hand panels carry the story through touch and guidance; one person leading, the other following, both learning the rhythm together.
And then the “ouch” panel. Three frames: the pull, the moment, and Monica smiling after. That set of frames was my favorite to come up with. That smile is everything —it’s the story’s thesis in a single expression.
The imperfection didn’t break anything. It deepened it.
The final slide closes in complete darkness.
We had nothing to fear.
Nothing after it. Just those five words and the space around them.
The most honest kind of intimacy isn’t about knowing what you’re doing; it’s about trusting someone enough to figure it out together.
💭 A Question for You
Have you ever had an imperfect moment with someone that somehow made you feel closer, not further away?
✦
Studio Letters go deeper — into the creative process,
the questions I’m chasing, and the longer reflections
that need more space.
First letter drops early April.
Read the Original Flash Fiction Here → All Natural