April 1st, 2025

Do you feel the same?

You once asked me. I tried to focus on the trees behind you, blurring your anticipation and softening your urgency—simply because I couldn’t bear to disappoint you. Your brows furrowed, your fingers mapping the ridges of my knuckles, tracing the faint olive rivers beneath my skin. How could I tell you that I knew you were trying to read me, wishing upon touch alone to translate the silence? I laughed when the wind tickled too closely in my ear and pinched the edges of my mouth when the silence was too sharp to ignore.

Maybe when the moon decides to drown in the sea and the sun forgets to fly high, when rivers run upstream and the stars fall like wingless fireflies onto the back of our palms; I could say I don’t love you. Maybe then I could meet your gaze and tell you that my heart still throbs when I feel the breeze of your passing.

But love is cruel, isn’t it? It’s like a ghost flickering in the corner of my conscience. Always there, but it never seemed quite tangible.

You sighed, your breath warm against the cold air, but not warm enough for me to seek hospitality in its translucency. I wondered if you could hear the way my pulse staggered beneath your fingertips. I wanted to tell you that I had been buried deep in your brown eyes, your laughter had burrowed itself into the marrow of my bones, that I was afraid of holding something too beautiful, too breakable.

Instead, I looked past you again, toward the trees swaying like indecisive thoughts. “It’s getting late,” the bitter words pulled out of my tongue, stiff and wrong, the kind that neither of us believed.

Your hand lingered before pulling away, taking the rest of this moment with it. The wind rushed to steal the space you left behind.

Maybe in another life where the sky was not so bound and my heart not so heavy, I would have held on to you. Maybe in another life, I would have told you the truth.