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from oinos, Greek for wine the slow alchemy of fruit into spirit, sweetness into ache.

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At first, abundance— every night a glass too full, sweetness rushing the blood, loneliness blurred to warmth. It felt like devotion, the pour unending, the room bright with gold.

But indulgence dulls. Too much sweetness numbs the tongue; the long steep slackened what held us. What seemed like safety bent easily into risk. Hunger sharpened, boundaries softened, and the night turned.

Overpour drowns discernment. It leaves the body pliable, calls the overproof warmth devotion, until the burn reveals itself too late.

This was never vintage— never something aged into depth. Only pulp, over-soaked, coming apart in the glass.

Curled Across Lifetimes

Once, in a house stitched from sunlight and dust, we were cats; not the sharp-eyed hunters of legend, but the kind who curl into corners like living shadows, puzzle pieces pressed into each other’s warmth.

You were the quiet hearth, steady paws folding over the edges of my noise, the soft, deliberate purr that pulled me close, measuring my leaps and tumbles with patience I could never earn enough of, but always sought.

I was the spark that tumbled over floorboards, a blur of whiskers and twitching tail, flinging myself into the orbit of your calm, and always, without fail, your gravity caught me, your warmth and presence holding the chaos I could not contain.

Yet your subtle mischief always found me too, brushing against my flailing paws with gentle insistence, letting me topple into your steadiness, then nudging me awake with patient affection, curling around me in ways that said: I am yours, in every way you can be held.

We slept like two halves of a single shadow, my head tucked beneath your shoulder, your tail curled along my spine, the silent rhythm of our hearts a language older than words. I pawed, I nudged, I demanded, and you responded with a quiet, fierce devotion, teaching me to fold my wildness into safety, to rest in the orbit of your care.

Even in the soft hours of dawn, when sunlight spilled like milk across the floor, I would stretch into you like a ribbon of shadow, and you would shift, ever attentive, pressing against me, matching my warmth with your own, our chaos and calm spinning together, until the house itself seemed to breathe with us, two halves of a single puzzle, purring in unison, each whisker, each paw, a quiet promise: we have always belonged to one another.

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I have learned to dress my words in costume. Among the ones to whom my love belongs, I keep the room alight, carry the conversation like a torch no one asked for. I can make them laugh— yet I watch them lean easily against each other, while my voice drifts along the walls, searching for a doorway never built.

What I crave is not spectacle. Only the shelter they grant one another without thought— to be welcomed at their hearth, to sit where warmth circulates and the beams hold steady, where fire is tended without asking who struck the first spark.

When I turn toward the higher powers, the same effort collapses in my hands. The rafters echo, the ceiling offers no reply. God does not answer in rooms like mine. The silence feels structural, as if the house were abandoned mid-foundation, its framing rotting in the weather.

I ask nothing impossible. Only that my words might settle like bricks in a wall that endures. Instead they scatter— stones slipping from mortar, arches collapsing before they rise, corridors ending in plaster dust.

Perhaps this is what I fear: that inadequacy is not social, not human, but architectural. That my voice is a staircase leading nowhere, a tower without an entrance, a dwelling mapped by absence. Not unheard because I falter, but because I was never built to be lived in.