A Thousand Reasons Why

He is smoke threaded through stone,
A shape the light forgets to hold.
Time folded when our eyes met:
Years collapsing like wings at dusk.
A forgotten music stirred beneath by ribs,
a stillness lit from within,
like it held its breath for ages. Not desire,
but the gravity of being seen without question.
Time paused between heartbeats—
the touch that breaks the chains of waiting.
In his hands, I feel the broken shackles.

My world has never known
what holds the hush that gathers before touch—
I had turned tenderness into ash—
I had called my longing exile.
But in his arms I found a world
where history cracks open like a husk,
and something ancient is restored.
Like a thousand rebels locked inside
gazing amazed at the shattered walls.
In his hair, I smell the rebellion.

We spoke in silences carved from (the) stars.
His breath brushed the edge of my name.
I drink the warmth beneath the wordless.
No borders. No laws. No past. No present.
Only the heat that makes me yield,
and the taste of a world that could have been ours.
In the beat of our breaths, flew time and history.
In his lips, I taste my freedom.

There was a flicker once —
not fire,
just the suggestion of heat.
I turned my face away
before it could name me.

Called it a shadow.
Called it passing weather.
Built a life in sunlight
with someone who gives me everything,
except the part of me I never offered.

Still, some nights,
the air shifts —
and I slip
into the life that never was.

A life of glances held too long.
Of rooms we never entered.
Of silence that could’ve broken into light.

He doesn’t know.
How could he?
I buried it so well,
even I forgot
until the forgetting started to burn.

Now I live in two mirrors —
one I show the world,
and one that shows me
what it might have meant
to be undone
by the right kind of touch.