01
Days passed without measure.
I stopped counting them.
The noise in my head
did not leave at once.
It fought.
It circled back.
It tried to make itself important.
But the woods are patient.
They do not argue.
They outlast.
02
I only stand here now,
in this small crossing of lives,
aware that I am late,
but not lost.
Because something in me
recognized something in you
as if the universe,
despite its endless distance,
still knew how to bend
two separate paths
into a single moment.
03
I do not come
with clever sentences
or the language of certainty.
I come only
with the small trembling truth
that appears
when someone begins to matter.
04
I wasn't expecting you,
to find me when I was lost in thought,
wrapped in my own solitude,
content with the silence that had grown
familiar,
only to have it broken by the sound of your laughter,
a sound that now echoes through my heart.
05
Exile is not being sent away,
it is being forced to live
where meaning still exists
but permission does not.
You feel it in moments that misfire:
a laugh arriving too early,
a thought addressed to no one,
a warmth with no object.
The field remains intact.
Only access is revoked.
06
When I say I love you
time loosens its belt.
The past stops arguing,
the future leans closer to listen.
07
Perhaps this is love now,
not the collision of bodies,
but the sustained attention
we offer each other
across impossible space.
08
Night brings you without apology.
You lie beside my thoughts
as if you have always belonged there,
as if forgetting were a language
my body never learned.
09
I tell myself: stop.
Enough ink, enough hunger.
Enough reaching across air.
But the words do not listen.
They spill from me
like water from a cracked jar,
like poems that learned your name
before they learned restraint.
10
I think of you
the way fruit
thinks of summer,
inevitably,
without impatience,
accepting sweetness
as a form of waiting.