I

Longing1 min read

How it started.

A walk with a stranger at sunset.

Love changes everything.

When I hear your voice,

your laugh,

the little snort of delight,

that shaky indrawn breath

at the end of laughing,

I am undone.

I return to that first evening.

You beside me.

My body was thin with surviving,

all sharp corners and uncertainty,

and still you looked directly at me

as if fragility were not something

to apologize for.

We walked toward the East River

while the sky burned itself down.

Cold air needling our cheeks,

the press of the city loosening its hold.

Arm in arm,

I felt the strange astonishment

of being alive.

I stumbled,

giddy with joy,

and you caught me.

The river moved below us,

dark and endless.

The last of the light lingered

across the water

as if it, too,

could barely bring itself to leave.

II

Darkness1 min read

I dreamed of her.

We were in the park.

She ran toward me

with something in her mouth,

coming to me

away from him.

It has been more than a year

since I saw his face.

The last time

it was full of rage.

She runs to me,

dark eyes shining.

I kneel.

Her silken fur fills my hands,

that warm salt smell of dog.

Gently

I open her mouth.

A blade

is buried in her tongue.

For a moment

I cannot move.

Then gently

I slide it free.

The wound opens

but there is no blood.

Her tongue forks.

She slips from my arms

and runs.

Squirrels.

Trees.

The silent language of scent.

She runs toward him.

When we were together

she used to do this,

moving between us,

as if she carried a thread,

invisibly binding us

to one another.

Sometimes I thought

she knew something

about love

we could not see.

That it moves beyond us,

beyond what we hold

or understand.

I wake.

A week

since those words:

please let her go.

She is gone now too.

Sometimes she returns.

As dawn.

As mist rising from water.

As the warm breath

that lifts a crow into flight.

Sometimes simply

as the small weight

of her body beside me.

The current between us

still moving.

He comes too.

In grief.

In anger.

In apology.

He comes.

I kneel

and bow my head.

And I pray

that forgiveness will come,

that redemption will come,

that all of us

will find our way.

III

Gratitude1 min read

Thank you for the giving—

for the invisible current that moves us

toward one another,

for the expanding that happens quietly,

the way dawn's first milky light

rouses us from dreaming.

Thank you for teaching me the receiving—

that tender art of loosening

the grip of my own longing,

of allowing what arrives

to come as it is,

not as I once demanded.

For the softening that follows,

for the opening,

for the abundance that blooms

only in the unnamed places.

Thank you for revealing the secret gold

hidden inside the darkness—

that pure, buried truth we overlook

until the undoing

forces us to listen differently.

How patient you have been,

waiting for us to remember

that even shadows are a kind of guide.

Every sunset, a goodbye,

a requiem for the day—

yet every sunset is also an invitation,

changing, changing, changing.

Trust the vanishing

as much as the becoming.

Thank you for the beauty.

Thank you for the joy.

Thank you for the heartbreak—

that stern, devoted teacher

who breaks us open

only so more light may enter.

Thank you, again and again,

for everything—

for what was given freely,

for what was wrestled from silence,

for what I failed to understand

yet received all the same.

If I falter, let me remember

that gratitude waits for me

like an old friend who knows me

better than I know myself,

lifting my face in their hands,

whispering: begin again.

IV

Memory2 min read

Wednesday early, I'm yours.

The phrase arrives without papers,

sets up a small camp in my chest.

Early evening, early settlement.

I say yes the way cities do

when they are still being named.

You admire how I inhabit my neighborhood,

my colonia

a word that smiles while carrying a history

of fences, ledgers, new boundaries drawn.

I literally invoked you with my thoughts,

you say,

and I believe you.

Desire has always mistaken itself

for prayer, for discovery,

for destiny stumbling ashore.

There are books, a child's drawing,

a beer can out of place.

The eye forgives what the heart wants.

So much doesn't belong,

yet insists on staying.

We trade poems,

a currency that dissolves on the tongue.

Heartstopping, you say.

Invasions often are.

I want to see you once more

before you leave.

Leave where?

Bodies learn borders late.

Then silence.

Then a letter that arrives fully formed,

bureaucratic with feeling.

Foreign occupation.

Gentrification.

Hypocrisy.

Suddenly I am no longer a person

but a process,

a market force,

a symptom with a face.

You will not commodify me,

you say,

as you convert us into an idea

clean enough to refuse.

I answer with lineage,

with rubble and repair,

with the long labor of staying.

I offer context like a passport

stamped with countless crossings.

Refugee. Restorer. Renter.

Words that try to absolve.

Words that cross borders one last time.

I wanted you to see me whole,

not as a flag planted in a body,

not as a future ruin.

But intimacy is its own occupation.

It rearranges the land

and then pretends innocence.

We were both right.

That is a version of the truth.

There are forces larger than us,

you say.

Yes.

But they moved through us anyway,

sweepingly,

the way love does,

never asking,

never receiving

permission for its occupation.

V

Memory2 min read

Wednesday early, I'm yours,

I say, meaning the hours,

meaning the body,

not the history folded inside the words.

I like how you inhabit your neighborhood.

Your colonia.

I say it gently,

as if naming can soften what naming has done.

I tell you I invoked you with my thoughts.

It sounds mystical enough

to excuse desire.

Beside me there are books by dead philosophers,

my child's drawing.

A beer can, memento of our first date.

I send you a photograph as evidence

because the scene wants coherence

and I want you to also belong inside it.

You are beautiful.

I say this plainly,

as if beauty were neutral,

as if wanting were not a kind of claiming.

We trade poems.

It feels equal.

I don't ask who taught us the language,

who profits when it dissolves.

I want to see you once more

before you leave.

I say leave

because it keeps me still,

because movement looks better on you.

Then I stop answering.

I draft my refusal carefully,

polished with principle.

Foreign occupation.

Gentrification.

Hypocrisy.

I turn you into a system

so I don't have to desire you anymore.

I make myself ethical by stepping back,

as if withdrawal were not another form of control.

I say I will not commodify you,

as I convert you into an idea

simple enough to reject,

clean enough to survive my conscience.

You answer with history.

With repair.

With staying.

I do not argue.

Argument would require intimacy.

I tell myself this is not personal.

That I am protecting the city,

that I am protecting myself,

that I am not choosing comfort

over complication.

I leave you with gratitude.

With a future I don't have to touch.

I keep the city.

I keep my certainty.

I keep my borders intact.

And I don't call it love,

because I have already taken what I came for.

VI

Connection1 min read

Love comes for us—

whether we pray out loud or not,

whether we've given up on it or not—

it comes.

Heart,

cracked open

by the sound of your voice,

that first murmurous exchange.

One of the first things

I ever wrote to you was:

"I hope there's a place where you feel held"—

I never imagined

that place would be this—

becoming.

VII

Waiting1 min read

As much as I long for you,

I am glad to know you like this.

In fragments.

In calls that rearrange my whole evening.

In the quiet after your laughter

when I sit alone, smiling

and drunk with possibility.

I imagine small things.

Your books beside mine.

Our shoes leaning against each other

by the front door.

The familiar choreography

of us in the kitchen,

hips grazing.

A life built not from spectacle

but repetition.

I think love changes the body.

Not metaphorically.

I mean truly.

Something in me has softened.

There is no going back.

Before you,

I had become so accustomed to surviving.

To holding myself together carefully,

like something cracked

but still useful.

Then you arrived

with your steady gaze,

your attention so complete

it made me visible to myself again.

You inspire me to speak plainly.

To write.

To stop reducing myself

into something easier

for the world to hold.

And perhaps that is enough for now.

Not possession.

Not promises made too early

against the dark.

Just this rare thing:

to meet another person

and feel more fully oneself

in their presence.

To wait without bitterness.

To desire without losing gratitude.

To love someone

and feel your life opening, quietly,

around that fact.

VIII

Presence1 min read

Yesterday I sat at her feet

and took off her shoes,

unlacing them slowly,

cradling her size fives in my hands.

Remember how you used to do this for me?

Remember how it was your hands

I stumbled toward,

learning what standing meant.

Here I am, grown,

returned to you

after too long away.

Why did you leave?

You ask me,

again and again.

What could I possibly say?

Your kitchen was always the place I meant

when I said home.

Warm light pooling on the table.

Sabbath dinner simmering on the stove.

The softness of your body,

the first place I learned to rest.

All these years later

I hold our stories close,

holding, holding for us both,

as your mind loosens its grip

and drifts elsewhere.

The magic of learning to tie a bow.

The small furrow of effort,

then the relief

when the knot gives way.

My youth lives in the tightening.

Your dying, in the unfurling.

These small, tender gestures

stand in for love.

At least this remains.

Ich liebe Dich.

Ich liebe Dich.

IX

Seduction2 min read

That first night at Pravda you arched your back as you looked at me—

white shirt sliding up. Revealing.

Already in those first moments,

my supplicant.

We spoke, though our conversation had almost nothing to do

with what passed between us.

A cast hobbled you incidentally.

What I noticed

The tender place at the base of your throat.

Those long, elegant fingers.

The way your lashes grazed your cheeks

As you leaned in close to show me something on your phone.

A ray of light pierces a dark room.

Later, crossing the Brooklyn Bridge,

You kissed me as the cold air pushed through the window.

I remember closing my eyes to the view of amber light on black water.

The rush-of-road sound.

Your mouth tasted of whiskey and cocaine.

I confess, I couldn't get enough.

Blindly feeling our way upstairs to the door

that opened onto that dark room.

Remember how we were like serpents? Slowly coiling, cool skinned.

Everything impossibly smooth.

Again and again.

The things that are most precious remain unspoken.

Indescribable.

That place outside of definition. Our liminal space.

I put all of this into a small silken pouch, draw the strings tight. I forget.

Weeks later we meet in San Francisco at a bar called Cavalier,

I nurse a Manhattan as you slide your hand along my thigh,

claiming me there, too.

I remember your hand on the small of my back, both of them cupping my face,

the way your lips tasted.

Mouths meeting,

the fall.

I remember waking to the shrouded city, your breath soft on my shoulder. The white

sheets, your hand in my hair.

That day we walked the lake in the last of the afternoon.

As we passed the wild grasses and horsetail and brassicas you recited the Latin names,

ascribing the intricate world around us.

Marking it out

and just as you named them,

silently,

you began to name us.

X

Hope1 min read

Here is what hope looks like.

It's small, flickering.

Tonight it smells like cedar.

Pass your hands over it.

Mumble a quiet prayer—

don't worry if the words aren't perfect,

the flame will make them pure.

There's a flame inside everything.

Inside me/inside you.

Close your eyes feel that.

XI

Flow1 min read

The thing inside you,

it comes, it goes.

Sometimes it feels like a great river—

like you are a great river—

flowing.

You are the source, the banks,

the still pools where small fish shimmer in the shadows.

You are the slow currents in the height of summer.

You are the cool night water.

You are the girl dreaming at the water's edge.

Deep inside you know.

Deep inside you know.

How all things, everything,

comes, and goes.

XII

Intimacy1 min read

I dream of waking beside you.

White curtains breathing inward and out.

Bodies entwined.

In my half-sleep

I don't quite know where you end

and I begin.

Your dark hair beneath my cheek,

soft as sleep itself.

Outside, some ordinary life continues:

birds clamoring,

someone walking a dog,

voices drifting up from the street.

But inside that room

everything sacred is small.

Your belly beneath my hand.

The pulse quivering at your throat.

The quiet miracle

of us remaining.

I have spent so much of my life

trying to become someone

not too big and not too small,

someone easy to hold.

With you

I forget the performance.

You make me want to arrive fully.

A work in progress.

Not needing to apologize,

or explain,

or defend.

Simply true.

And in the clear morning light

I understand something frightening:

that love is not rescue,

not promise,

not even safety.

It is a longed-for recognition.

The inexpressible relief

of seeing, being seen

and met there.

XIII

Longing1 min read

You knew how to name the weather in me

and I mistook that for shelter.

We built a language around longing,

around more time,

around the promise that one day

the future would make room

for what the present could not hold.

I learned to become smaller without appearing to.

To soften the edges of need.

To make hunger look like patience.

Let me love you the way that I can,

you said,

and I tried to live inside that sentence

until there was almost nothing left of me.

There were flowers once, too many,

their cloying scent turning the room against me.

There was comfort I could not ask for twice.

A little room in a closet that never came.

A calendar already full.

A life so defended

even love had to enter sideways.

This is working for me, you said,

and I think now how true that was.

And still, I loved you.

Loved the mornings, the dogs,

the strange little country of being known.

Loved you enough to keep translating absence into devotion,

enough to believe that hope dies last,

enough to wait for later

to become a place we could live.

But later was always later,

and I was always here.

Now I want the unknown thing.

A hand that reaches before I explain.

A life that changes shape because I am in it.

Someone who knows that love is also tea,

a cleared drawer,

a date written down.

No more surviving on crumbs.

No more making effort look effortless.

I am leaving the room unfinished this time,

leaving the door open,

and waiting.

Waiting to see

whether love can arrive

this time

also bearing its share.

XIV

Distance1 min read

Woke up in a different bed,

I can smell the sea.

I dreamed of you,

you were trying to explain something

smiling—

no matter how you tried

I couldn't quite hear…

Subtle.

LA makes me feel small,

car rides remind me of being a kid,

the heat pressing against the glass,

the flat empty streets,

the not knowing where I am

or where I'm going exactly.

I landed here yesterday,

there's a project.

Friends to see

and people I used to know.

Funny, you and my father.

The two men I love

but somehow find myself

so far away from.

We think we get to choose a thing,

I'm learning that that's an illusion.

Things happen,

they can feel small or huge,

there's no way of knowing

how they will end.

I am here.

Saying goodbye with silence.

Saying I love you under my breath.