Home.
I’m learning to lick the last traces of warmth off the sharpest knives. These days, everything feels like a slow collapse. Everyone is tired. Everyone feels unloved. There’s no room for softness here, only resignation.
I keep thinking I’ll leave, but I don’t. I stay. I stay and become more of this place. Maybe this is what it means to wear absence like a second skin. Maybe this is how it is for everyone. When even the smallest things — a sink full of dishes, footsteps too loud — feel like they’ll undo me. And still, I stay. There are no doors that don’t lead back here.
I’ve learned to speak in barbed sentences. To wear indifference like armour. I push people away, call it protection. Say “I don’t care” like it’s a prayer. Like if I say it enough, it’ll be true.
But sometimes, in memory or dream, I think of a gaze that lingered longer than it should have. Fingers that traced laughter onto skin, like they’d been waiting a long time to remember softness. All night, they speak in touches and half-sentences, as if words might ruin it, the feel of a stranger’s kindness. Not because it was right, but because I’d forgotten what it felt like to be seen. Even for a moment. For the kind of closeness where the body forgets its armour.
To be the only thing someone thinks of when they close their eyes. To be felt like a song that ruins a man for silence.