Serendipity

We orbit like two moons

caught in the wrong gravity,

close enough to feel warmth,

too far to land.

His laughter cracks the sky,

and suddenly I remember

how it felt to run barefoot

through sprinklers at dusk,

when everything was simple—

or at least, pretendable.

He reaches for my shoulder

like it’s instinct,

like I’m a lighthouse

he doesn’t know he’s steering toward.

Just a brush.

Just a moment.

But my skin remembers.

We build forts from silence,

tents made of half-words and glances

where the world feels like

a secret worth keeping.

He says he’s looking for a map,

some way out of the thicket

he wandered into before

we started carving our names

into the bark of each other.

But maps don’t grow

from guilt and confusion,

and I worry his compass

was only ever a mirror

telling him what he wanted to see.

Still—

if this is a dream,

I let it hold me,

because I haven’t laughed

like this

in years.

Even if he never comes,

even if he never leaves,

I’ll be grateful

he stirred the wild in me

Now, word comes down like thunder
without rain.
The gate creaks open before the sentence of seasons
has finished its reckoning.
And in that creak is a scream
only I seem to hear.

I am a house rebuilt on scorched earth,
window panes transparent but trembling,
foundation poured over bone.
And he—
he is the shadow that remembers
the map to every locked room
I prayed he’d forget.

There is no safety in steel
when steel can bend to whispers,
no justice in numbers
when time is measured in fear
and not calendars.

I walk through days like shallow rivers,
feeling the current shift,
as if the earth itself prepares
for the return of a storm
that learned my name
long before I had one.

And still, the world asks me to be calm—
to be soil again, to grow.
But they do not hear
the rusted key turning
in the door of my silence.

There are no locks thick enough
to silence memory’s footfall.
No light bright enough
to chase away the shape of him
slipping through my pulse at night.
Safety is a language I no longer speak,
a word I mouth
like prayer
to a god who no longer looks my way.

Every mirror hides a corner I cannot see.
Every silence could be him,
waiting with breathless patience.
Walls feel like suggestions now—
thin, frail things that can’t hold back
what has already been inside me.

The world goes on—
the birds still sing,
the sun still rises—
as if the wolf never learned
to walk upright.
But I feel the tremble beneath the soil,
the warning in my marrow,
the old terror stretching its limbs.