# Voices Voices arrive like migratory birds, settling in the hollows of my chest. Some nest there for seasons, others merely pass through— a brief eclipse of sound, then silence spreads its wings again. I've learned to recognize them: the one that comes at dusk, carrying the weight of old letters; the one that laughs in my sleep, a stranger's joy borrowed from dreams; the one that speaks in my mother's cadence, though she has been silent for years. They don't ask permission. They arrive the way rain arrives— inevitable, necessary, sometimes unwelcome. I am a house they visit. I am a street they walk through. I am a well where they come to drink. Some voices are kind. Some arrive as accusations, as questions I cannot answer, as mirrors I'd rather not face. But I've stopped trying to lock the doors. There is a music in this crowding— this symphony of the unbidden, this chorus of the half-remembered. I've learned that loneliness is not the absence of voices, but the silence between them. And perhaps that is enough: to stand in this crossroads where all the unspoken words gather, to listen as they find their way through me, to let them reshape the rooms of whoever I might still become.

I will let the desire to love your sweet eyes die within me,
For I have nothing to offer but the sorrow of my sight—endlessly worn,
eternally spent.
Yet your presence glows like light and life itself,
And I feel it: in my gesture lives your gesture, in my voice, your voice.

I don't want to possess you—in my grasp, everything would end.
I only want you to bloom in me like faith in the desperate nights, so that
I might gather one drop of dew on this cursed ground that clings to my flesh
like a stain from ages past.
So I will let you go... you will drift and rest your face against another's.
Your fingers will weave through other fingers, and you will blossom into
the early hours.

But you will never know it was I who held you,
Because I was the night's great intimate,
Because I pressed my face into the night's face and heard your loving words,
Because my fingers have cradled mist-fingers suspended in the void,
And I have drawn into myself the secret essence of your wild, unraveled surrender.

I will simply be like sailboats in still waters.
But I will possess you as no one else can, because I alone can leave.
And all the laments of the sea, the wind, the sky, the birds, the stars...
They will be your voice present, your voice absent, your voice sharp-edged and broken.