Her smile burned; she didn't know how to do it!
Her hands got lost in his hair.
She lay very still, staring aimlessly
In the dark night, and she was tired.
He threw himself away and moaned for a moment,
Then he would have gone to sleep.
She no longer knew whether he had existed,
Or that she had never remained alone.
Her body glowed under the hot blanket;
The rain quivered against the windows,
It dripped loudly into the garden beyond.
How gladly she would have fled the bed,
Where his hunger took her without mercy,
And pressed his head against the cold glass.
# Bridal Night The lamp flickers—a trembling gold. Outside, the night wears its dark silk. Your fingers, shy as birds, settle on the embroidered edge of the bedsheet. I watch how the lamplight catches in the curve of your collarbone, how your breath comes shallow, measured like prayer. The room holds its breath with us. In the mirror, we are strangers wearing each other's names, wearing flowers in our hair— you in white, I in the weight of tradition and expectation, both of us terrified of breaking something we don't yet understand. Your eyes won't meet mine. (Or is it that I cannot bear the nakedness of being seen?) The night stretches— each minute an hour, each touch a question we have no words for. Outside, the world sleeps, satisfied, thinking it knows what happens in darkness, thinking we are ready, thinking love is simple as a ceremony, as the tying of a knot. But here, in this small room, we are two silences learning to speak, two strangers becoming a country with no borders, no maps, no language but the one we are inventing with our trembling hands. The lamp gutters. The night deepens. And somewhere between fear and wonder, something begins— not passion yet, but possibility. A door opening onto a darkness we will learn to call home.
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