Proses In Disguise

A place I return to

Where even the air refuses to name you

You live somewhere between thought and shadow

A pulse I can’t reach

A warmth that never lands on skin

I’ve learned to speak softly

So the world won’t hear your name escape me

It slips out sometimes

Not as sound

But as a tremor beneath my breath

A ghost brushing the walls of my chest

Sometimes I think I almost see you

In the reflection of still water

But it’s only my own wanting

Learning the shape of your absence

I’ve built a garden out of restraint

Everything here blooms backward

Petals folding in on themselves

Colors draining into quiet

The soil hums with things

That were never said aloud

I water it anyway

Every dawn, I pour the ache back into earth

Watch it drink what I cannot confess

You’d never know how many small deaths

It takes to look at you and smile

The garden grows wilder each day

Roots pressing against the ribs

Petals brushing the heart like apologies

And I wonder

If one day I will vanish into it

If I’ll become the silence itself

Something you pass by

always moving on. some goodbyes need to rot a little. some griefs need to be held in the mouth like a stone.

beauty defined by algorithms. beauty exists in crow feet and smile lines

pretending to be chill. i’m not chill. i care deeply and inconveniently. i read into things. i write poems about eye contact

beige apartments with no soul. give me bookshelves and incense and loud art

sneaky links and unclear intentions. i want devotion. and also clarity

Earth was doing just fine with a mostly nitrogen/carbon dioxide atmosphere and everyone was happy to go on living in anaerobic bliss and then cyanobacteria suddenly hit the scene, altered the atmosphere composition so that there was a ton of oxygen gas and killed practically everything (97% or more of all species on earth).

Not out of anger. Not even misunderstanding. Just—distance. A wordless shift. The kind that doesn’t slam doors, but leaves them quietly ajar, as if unsure whether to close or wait.

You stopped answering in ways I recognized. I stopped speaking in ways you could hold. Since then, I haven’t heard from you.

It’s unsettling, how language can dissolve between two people. How something once fluent—effortless—can become foreign overnight. I’ve thought about where the change began. Was it a misused word? A silence too long? Or was it the slow erosion of a shared code, something once sacred now left untranslated?

But translation has its limits, translations carry with them the ache of approximation. Something is always lost: the texture of a word, the warmth of a tone, the intention behind silence. What is said is never quite what is meant. What is heard is never quite what was given. And in love—especially in love—translation falters. The gestures, the glances, the unsaid things—they need no interpreter when the language is mutual. But when that language fades, what remains?

Maybe that silence wasn’t a wall but a pause. The one that follows the final attempt to translate what no longer finds its meaning. Maybe it was our way of realizing: we no longer understood the same dialect of care. The same inflections of need.

Because love is a language. It’s spoken not just with words, but in attention, in presence, in choosing someone again and again, especially when it’s inconvenient. And when love’s language is no longer shared, no amount of translation can save it.

Still, I don’t carry it as a failure. As Carl Jung wrote, “The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.” We were transformed—at least for a time. And that matters.

So now, I let the silence be. Not as punishment, but as truth. A quiet acknowledgment that we no longer speak what the other needs to hear. And yet, I hope—wherever you are—that your voice is understood again. That you’ve found someone fluent in the particular way your soul asks to be held.

As for me, I am learning to speak differently. To listen with fewer assumptions. To love in a language that doesn’t need to be translated to feel safe.