the ceiling is too wide tonight
you light the candle as though it were a vow. flame bending toward you, trembling, tender -- yet certain enough to burn the dust from the air. the room softens at once. the corners blur. the walls breathe with you, quiet as if they, too, believe in sanctuary.
the tea waits untouched. its steam curls upward, vanishes before it can kiss your face. the book lies open at your hand, pages silvered in wax-glow, but each line seems written in a language you almost remember and cannot name. when you blink, the ink shifts like tides beneath glass.
and yet you smile. how could you not? it feels like love, doesn’t it? this hush, this sweetness, this small circle of light keeping the enormity away.
until you notice the enormity has leaned closer.
the ceiling does not merely stretch: it recedes like a lover withdrawing, revealing not plaster but the unfurling dark of elsewhere. no stars, not yet. only a velvet vastness pressing its mouth to the edges of your perception. the candle is suddenly absurd, a child’s charm against an infinite gaze.
you tell yourself softly, like prayer, like spell: four walls. a flame. a shadow.
but the walls are gone, beloved, and the shadow belongs to nothing you can name.
the air tastes of copper, of rain on stone. the candle sighs. it seems to bow in reverence, casting the room not into safety but into ceremony. and you, heart caught in your throat, understand too late that you are the offering.
what reads you is not eyes, but something vaster, something hungrier: a patience that has outlived centuries, a tenderness that curdles into ruin. it is not watching. it is reading. unbinding you syllable by syllable, until there is nothing left but the margin where your name once was.
and when it breathes, it breathes through you.
when it loves, it loves you open.
when it speaks, it does so in the silence you will never escape.
