ghosting in
played ball in a court i don't belong with
love sits in my chest like a stone that hums. he explores me; i carry him in my ribs, undeniably alive and breathing, something that flickers like an animal caught between fear and devotion.
it is the press of his fingers against my wrist as if checking i’m real, the way his voice drifts through a room and rearranges the furniture of my chest.
i don’t have a name for this. i don’t know why wanting him feels like running toward fire and the shoreline, why i reach for him even when he’s right here, why being held by him still leaves me hungry in ways i can’t explain.
it is the heat of summer trapped in his collarbone, the scent of him threaded through my breath like a warning or a promise. i want to be worthy of the way he looks at me, steady and unflinching, like i am something he’s already decided not to lose, and it terrifies me, it rearranges me, it makes me believe in things i shouldn’t.
my solace found in that waterfall we stood beneath, its roar drowning out the contradictions of our realities — two faiths learning to sit beside each other, uneasy but tender, washed clean for a moment in the cold rush of something older than either one of us.
hi sweetness, the sticky juice of mandarins and crushed berries, our tongues stained with something wild and bright. a soft apocalypse: juice running down his wrist. and i thought: this is how a heart ends — sticky, sweet, and stupidly full.
the quiet peace of making art with you, the soft scrape of graphite, vivid pencils on paper. the stillness that blooms when our shoulders touch, how creation feels gentler in his presence. less like proving something and more like breathing. the room filling with the echoes of his voice — low, warm, drifting into the corners long after he’s fallen silent.
richard siken said you are a ghost i made up, but you are no ghost. this is unbearably real, impossibly present, and still it feels like i’m trying to hold light between my fingers. like the whole world tilts when he smiles, neurons sparking, heart stumbling, that quiet, frantic chant of his name like a thread pulled too tight.
i think of how i would walk through ruin, how i would cross every dead field, every unkindness, and still keep moving, still keep choosing him, and it would never feel like enough.
the tongue fails, the lungs falter, the chest brightens painfully. this wanting is a kind of violence and a kind of mercy, a tide that gives and takes and gives again, and i let it, i always let it. the reverberation of his laughter lingers on this skin like a sweltering burn.
because it is his smile lodged under my skin, his stillness that steadies me. the impossible geometry of two people reaching for each other without looking away, of giving without counting and taking without shame.
but beneath it all there is the quiet terror — the fear that i cannot bear to love what i cannot live with, that the shape of him in my life is too bright, too temporary, too breakable.
that my heart has already built a home in a place that might someday empty.
of knowing that nothing about love is tidy or fair but still believing, stubbornly, that we could make it honest, make it ours.
it is a mess, a gorgeous, staggering mess, an uncharted map where everything hurts and everything matters, and when he touches me now, when he says my name the way only he does, the world recedes, and folds down to a single point.
i am left holding this thing i cannot contain, cannot translate, but i would never ask to.
if a wedding takes place in the immenent future for either one of us,
i hope the invitations get lost in the mail,
and i hope you would already have had a plus one to bring along anyway.
i hope you live happy with yourself, devoid of any more love for me.
“I will love you until your face is fogged by distant memory. I will love you no matter where you go, and who you see. I will love you if you don’t marry me. I will love you if you marry someone else. And I will love you if you never marry at all, and spend your years wishing you had married me after all. That is how I will love you even as the world goes on its wicked way.”
thank u for reading x