Not yet airborne. Not yet gone. Just about to be. It felt rushed. I wish we had slowed down. The walls heard it before I did.
My blood said not again. My hands said I’m sorry.
One more morning. I always think one more day will be enough. It never is.
She pulled herself back mid-air. I chose right. I chose you. I freaked out. I know. I trust her. The mind knows. The mind keeps count.
But the boy who lost her once doesn’t live in the mind. He lives in the body. And he was already in the stone, palms flat, listening for the door.
He’s been wrong before. He doesn’t care.
Years of it. The body learning to move before it learned to stop.
Ballet doesn’t teach you stillness. It teaches you to push through it.
Six months feels long when you’ve never allowed yourself a season. It isn’t.
You are not lazy. You are someone who has given everything and doesn’t know what to do with the quiet. I do.
Rest is not surrender. Let me hold what you’ve been carrying. That’s what I’m here for.
Five days. Te amo mi amor.
Ears open, mouth closed. People hang mirrors around their neck.
The comedian never laughs at his own jokes. The rehearsal is what makes it feel real.
It crumbles anyway. The body knows what the brain refuses.
I’ve felt the lungs learn to lie.
I listen now. Try to convince me.
You are my only weakness. She said: you are mine. Neither of us sure if this was safe.
But that is what love is, to be undone by someone and held up by the same hands.
I love you too much to walk you toward a version of yourself you didn’t choose. You have the same of me.
So yes. It’s good. We only get to be fully ourselves here. With each other.
Small thing, leather-worn, France. Her fingers fastening it at the bone of my wrist, staking something she’d forget.
Seven years of skin have dulled it. I have not.
I asked if she remembered. She didn’t. Won’t lose it.
Silence was the architecture. Thick walls, no windows, just the echo of my own voice bleeding through the stone.
The crack in my skull lets them breathe, the voices, the dark. I called it peace. I called it home. I meant it.
Then you called.
Your voice dismantles what I built, not as destruction, as exorcism. The jail I raised from years of hollow collapses at a single word.
Who gave you the key? How dare you. Thank you.
You can have days off from loving me. Just not from me.
The monk knows cold. Built his life inside it, named the dark, called it enough.
Then she arrived. Warmth he had forgotten was a thing. Butterflies in a gut that had forgotten it had one.
He opened the door himself. Buried the walls with his own hands. That was new. That was everything.
She asked for space while he was still standing in the entrance. Hands empty. Door open.
The light didn’t follow her back.
The monk knows cold. Cold knows him better.