Don't read me. I can't lie. I loved you, I love you today. Even if I tie the words in a knot, even if I lock them in a cage, they will spill again into verses on a white half-crumpled sheet. It will gleam there, treacherous— a longing purer than truth itself. And I know, every syllable will sear you, every line will steal your breath, when you read that you are all I have. Forgive me. I forgave myself long ago, because I am utterly powerless to stop loving you. And with another, I still drink from the same cup... Don't read me. Don't stir the dust now that you've only just learned to live with it— to think of me for a minute or two. Carry on believing you are nothing to me. And... perhaps one day it will be true.
# Pain The body remembers what the mind forgets— a bruise blooming beneath the skin like night flowers, the way a wound keeps its own counsel, speaks in a language older than words. I have learned to live with it, this uninvited guest who arrives without knocking, who settles into the joints, the hollow places, who whispers when I thought I was finally silent. They say time heals. They say this the way one says *it will pass*, as if pain is weather, as if it moves on like clouds and leaves us clean and bright behind. But I know better now. Pain doesn't leave— it becomes furniture in the house of the body, something you navigate around in darkness, something you learn the shape of by touch. There is a geography to suffering, a map written in sensation and memory, and I have become its cartographer, charting the territories of my own ache. Yet in this strange intimacy with hurt, I have found something—not healing, not yet, but a way of standing that doesn't require wholeness, a breath that knows its own depth, a hand that can still hold, still reach, still somehow, impossibly, offer.
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