I fear I am in the wrong Century.⋆♱ ~

I burn for thee in secret, unseen, unheard,

A phantom of longing, each thought a whispered sin.

Thy body, thy voice, thy very presence

Consumes my mind, though thou knowest me not.

I ache to trace the lines of thy face in shadow,

To taste the heat of a moment that will never be mine.

Each glance imagined, each sigh imagined,

Leaves my chest a storm of fevered torment.

Oh, cruel fate! That thou shouldst walk unknowing,

While I writhe in the fire of a hunger untamed,

A lust that tears at the very marrow of my heart,

A heart that beats only in thy absence.

Were it mere fancy, I could quell it with reason,

But passion knows no law, no mercy, no bounds.

I am undone by thee, a captive of invisible chains,

And yet, I would not renounce this exquisite ache,

For to love thus, though unacknowledged,

I ache for you.

Not just for the thought of you,

but for the taste of your skin,

the weight of you pressed into me,

a closeness I will never have.

I imagine your hands,

your lips, the way your body moves,

and I burn—

a fire so fierce it makes me ache,

even though you do not know I exist.

Every glance I dream of,

every touch I invent in my mind,

leaves me trembling, undone, desperate.

I want you—

all of you, in ways I cannot speak aloud.

And yet I am nothing to you.

A shadow, a ghost,

but still I burn,

still I want,

If there is a world where I am not beside you,

it must be one where the air forgets my lungs,

where the sky closes its eyes to the earth,

where every clock finally grows tired of time.

Because I have tried to imagine absence—

a morning without your name resting on my lips,

an evening that does not ache for your voice—

and each vision dissolves into silence too heavy to hold.

To live is to orbit you softly,

to breathe in the quiet gravity of your presence,

to exist in the gentle certainty

that my soul has chosen its place.

So if ever I am without you,

do not call it distance,

do not call it fate—

call it the stillness beyond heartbeat,

the hush beyond breath,

the only horizon where loving you