In the absence of sound between midnight’s breath and sunrise’s soft sigh is that empty, shivering moment when the world forgets its noise and leaves hearts to beat alone in the dark.
I breathe your name here, quietly, as though the letters might shatter the calm if spoken too loud.
Everywhere, I take you with me: you are the skin beneath my fingertips, the sweetness on my tongue when I whisper your name in dreams. Your absence isn’t empty. It is a living thing, a pain itself in my ribs and rooting deep and quiet in my bones until I ache with a kind of knot that knows no release.
There are moments I imagine you close enough that your breath storms the small, fragile places in me, the ones that awake at the sound of your name. I imagine your hands, not even touching me yet, just hovering, longing, and the space between us growing thick with everything we are trying not to say.
Your laughter is like the lightening at the edge of a storm. The weight of your hand in mine, then the impression of its absence, soft as the echo of footsteps across an empty alley.
Each day I learn a little more of how to gather my calm together so I can walk through the world without giving myself away. But you, you undo that quiet. One thought of you, and I’m undone in ways I can’t admit out loud without shivering. I have tried to quiet this wanting, but it keeps rising, tidal, unreasonable, and shaped entirely like you. It presses against the inside of my chest as if my body is trying to escape itself and find yours instead. I don’t know if this is longing or hunger or something nameless that lives in the dark in between, but it moves through me in time to your pulse.
Enough of this thirst, longing and the hunger. I want you and i want you now.
This hunger doesn’t consume but claims.
You make me want to open every locked door inside me and let you walk through as though you’d always belonged there. I am greedy for you. Greedy for the breath you leave behind, the echo in the room where you once stood. Greedy for a second glance, another whispered, “Wait.” Another feel of skin against skin that says more than words could.
I want to surrender, but not in the way people think surrender works. I don’t want to fall at your feet. I want to fall into the hollow of your throat, into the curve of your shoulder, into the quiet heat of your wanting. Descend into the holiest parts of hell, where one burns without respite or redemption.
And if you asked, softly, even once, I would confess everything:
how you live beneath my skin,
how the thought of you betrays my breath,
how desire turns my bones to gel,
how I ache with the impossibility of being close enough.
This is my truth. My offering. My vanquishing, still warm.
Take it, take me. I’m already halfway in your hands, in ruin and in waiting.
