#alim

You are my country of maybes.

Not a man, not really—

a door left half-open in a storm house, slamming between yes and no until the hinges forget which side they belong to.

I built a kingdom from that sound.

A look. A word. Someday.

How small the bricks were, how eagerly I stacked them.

Soon there were entire cities balanced on your unfinished sentences. Cathedrals of possibility. White towers made from things you never actually promised.

I lived there for years.

In that place you reached for my hand without hesitation. In that place your face turned toward mine like a flower recognizing the sun.

In that place I never had to wonder.

Reality stood outside, knocking politely.

I did not answer.

Because reality came carrying receipts. Reality knew the arithmetic.

You do not call. You do not ask. You do not choose.

And still I fought it.

What a strange war: one man defending a castle against the truth.

The truth never even raised its voice.

It only pointed at the empty chair.

Look, it said.

Look again.

I think that is what hurts most— not that you were cruel, but that hope is such a gifted sculptor.

It carved entire futures from a handful of dust.

And I loved the statue so fiercely that I forgot to ask whether the man beneath it existed.

Tell me:

Do you live there too?

In some private country where impossible things survive?

Do you also love shadows better than daylight?

Or is that only me—

You arrived when my life had already begun folding inward.

The days were gray fish floating belly-up in dark water. I had stopped asking the future for anything.

Then you said maybe.

Such a small word.

A match head. A seed. A splinter of light.

You will never know what that word did to me.

I took it home carefully. Fed it. Protected it from doubt.

I built an entire cathedral around your maybe.

When you are drowning, you do not examine the rope.

You grab it.

And now I keep asking myself the same impossible question:

How do I turn hope into reality?

How do I transform your uncertainty into certainty?

How do I become the version of myself that you would choose?

I circle these questions endlessly, like a moth convinced there must be a way through the glass.

Maybe I am too... Too needy. Too broken.

Maybe there is some fatal flaw buried in me that everyone sees immediately except myself.

So I search.

I excavate my own soul looking for defects.

Meanwhile you are somewhere else entirely— laughing, sleeping, living— your days untouched by the gravity that governs mine.

And still I defend you.

It has become reflex.

I explain your silences. Excuse your absences. Translate indifference into misunderstandings.

I have become your attorney against the evidence of my own heart.

Perhaps you would say you never promised anything.

Perhaps you would say I misunderstood.

That we were reading different books while standing in the same room.

And maybe that is true.

But what am I supposed to do with the words you gave me?

I carved them into myself.

Your possibility became scripture.

Now everyone tells me to let go.

As if hope were a switch.

As if love could be evicted by logic.

As if I could simply abandon the thing that kept me alive.

You tell me we can stop.

You tell me I do not have to continue if it hurts.

And that is how I know you do not understand.

Because for you it is an option.

For me it became a reason.

A reason to wake up. To improve. To imagine a future.

Without it, I am left standing in the ruins of possibilities, counting all the lives I failed to live.

And perhaps that is the deepest wound:

Not that you do not love me.

But that I cannot stop believing that if I were somehow different— better, brighter, worthier—

you would.

So I remain here, caught between faith and reality,

holding a candle that burns lower every year,

still unable to decide

whether it is guiding me home

or slowly consuming me.

I was telling my friend about how happy I am that I will get to see you.

About the airport delays, the ruined schedules, the ridiculous mathematics of longing— hours of travel collapsing into only two brief hours beside you.

And I was smiling while saying it.

Smiling.

Because two hours with you still felt miraculous enough to reorganize an entire day around.

But my friend frowned the way sensible people do.

She counted the distance out loud: the drive there, the waiting, the exhaustion of returning home half-empty again.

She said it like it was sacrifice.

And I remember blinking at her with genuine confusion.

Sacrifice?

No.

Sacrifice is giving something up for nothing.

This feels like purpose.

The world sharpens when I am moving toward you. Roads become meaningful. Train stations glow. Even inconvenience acquires romance.

I thought of that time you were stranded five hours away and how instinctively I wanted to come to you— not for a grand declaration, not even for a night together—

just to say hello. Just to see your face briefly under unfamiliar city lights.

How strange love is.

How two people can examine the exact same circumstance and see opposite truths.

My friend saw effort. I saw devotion.

She saw imbalance. I saw direction.

Because before you, my life felt like a room where someone had forgotten to turn on the lights.

Now even waiting feels alive.

Even sitting in traffic, checking arrival times obsessively, holding coffee gone cold in my hands— all of it hums with meaning because somewhere at the end of it is you.

And maybe that is dangerous.

Maybe no person should become another person’s compass so completely.

But still— there is something beautiful about loving someone enough that distance stops feeling heavy.

I keep trying to shrink my love into something less alarming.

Fold it smaller. Quieter. Something I can place gently in your hands without you mistaking it for a chain.

Because the truth is enormous.

It follows me everywhere— through grocery stores, through sleepless nights, through every ordinary moment your absence has sharpened.

And I am afraid that if I tell you the full weight of it, you will step back instinctively like someone opening a door to find a fire already inside the room.

So I measure myself carefully around you.

I soften my voice. Swallow certain sentences whole. Pretend I need less than I do.

Not because my feelings are weak, but because they are frighteningly alive.

How do I tell you that my care for you has roots now? Deep ones.

That your sadness alters entire days in me. That your happiness feels strangely tied to my own survival.

How do I say this without making you feel responsible for keeping me alive?

Because I do not want your pity. I do not want guilt to masquerade as tenderness. I do not want you trapped inside the gravity of my longing.

I just want you to understand.

To know that when I ask if you got home safely, when I notice the exhaustion in your eyes, when I memorize the smallest changes in your voice—

it comes from a place so sincere it terrifies me sometimes.

And maybe that is the cruelest part of love:

that real devotion can resemble pressure when it is not returned equally.

So I stand here holding oceans inside my mouth, trying to offer you only a cupful at a time.

Carefully. Carefully.

As if honesty itself might scare you away.

Please— don’t close the door completely.

Leave it open an inch, a crack of light, enough for me to kneel beside it and still believe you might return.

I know what this is to you.

An arrangement. An hour. A body passing briefly through another body before night folds back over everything.

But to me— God—

to me it is survival.

Your visits are the only bright pins holding my life together.

An hour every few months— do you understand how little that is? How enormous?

I live off those hours like famine people live off crumbs.

The memory of your hand on my neck lasts longer than entire seasons.

So yes, I will take whatever you are willing to give.

The unfinished kisses. The distracted tenderness. The fragments.

I have trained my heart to survive on fractions of you.

And perhaps that is shameful.

Perhaps a person should have more dignity than this begging.

But loneliness is a strange country. It lowers the body to the ground. It teaches you to worship things that barely stay.

Please don’t leave entirely.

I am trying to ask gently, without frightening you with the full scale of my need.

Because I know you do not love me the way I love you. I know your freedom matters more to you than being held too tightly by someone aching.

Still—

if there is even a small room in your life where I may continue existing, quietly, carefully, without ruining everything—

let me stay there.

Even if I must stand at the edges of your attention like a man waiting outside a lit house in winter.

I can endure almost anything except the finality of losing you completely.

Every time you visit,

The hallway brightens. The air turns gold at the edges. My heart behaves like a child hearing sleigh bells in the snow.

You laugh at that comparison, probably. But it’s true.

Your visits feel miraculous to me— rare, glittering things I survive whole weeks waiting for.

And they are always too short.

I try to stretch the hours quietly, pretend not to notice the clock dragging you back toward another life, another room, another version of yourself that does not include me.

But for those brief moments you are here.

Your shoes beside the bed. Your tired grin. Your body warm enough to convince me loneliness is temporary.

It is everything I look forward to. That is the humiliating truth.

Without these visits my days flatten into gray paper.

So of course I want them to last forever.

And yet—

if touching me disgusts you, if my longing exhausts you, if you leave feeling hollow or trapped or guilty—

then I do not want it.

Because hurting you would ruin the very thing I treasure most.

That is why I ask so often if you are okay.

Why I watch your face carefully for signs of discomfort, why I apologize too much, why my concern spills out of me like nervous water.

I know it must seem pathetic sometimes.

But you are so precious to me that even the thought of pain reaching you feels unbearable.

And please— don’t talk about giving back what I gave.

Keep it.

Let me at least have this small usefulness.

If I cannot be the man you love, if I cannot become home to you, then let me at least be gentle. Let me ease one burden. Let me give something without watching you flinch away from it.

It is not sacrifice. Not really.

It is simply the instinct to place blankets around what I worship - You.

You arrive like a lit match

cupped in the dark palm of my phone,

your body stripped to the pale machinery of want—

collarbones sharp as razors,

I imagined mouth half-open like a wound asking forgiveness

before the knife descends.

I paid for you

the way women pay for candles in churches,

small hot offerings

to keep the loneliness from hardening completely.

Coins for illusion.

Bills for the soft theater

of being chosen.

And you—

God, you made it look holy.

The photograph bloomed in my hands,

your nakedness white as hospital sheets,

that practiced hunger in your message

like you had swallowed the moon

and found it tasteless.

I thought desire was permission.

Isn’t that the oldest lie?

The apple shining itself red

for the obedient teeth.

But then your voice—

that small animal sound,

caught under the floorboards of the call.

“Maybe,” you said,

and the word dragged its broken leg

across my conscience.

Maybe.

Not yes.

Not hunger.

Not the velvet eagerness I painted over you

to make myself less monstrous.

I have worn loneliness so long

it fits like skin now,

a gray glove stitched to the wrist.

I wanted your body

the way starving women want mirrors—

to disappear inside something beautiful

for one merciful second.

And what did I make of you?

A lantern to warm my cold hands.

A sacrament with bruised eyes.

Another lovely boy

learning how to leave himself behind

while strangers consume the light.

I am sorry.

Sorry for every time

my wanting entered the room before my tenderness did.

Sorry if my hands became another mouth

asking too much of your flesh.

Sorry if afterward

you looked at your own reflection

like a rented room

someone had dirtied and left.

Still—

even now—

your beauty stalks me.

The gold animal of you.

The dangerous silk of you.

I am weak before it

in the old biblical way:

salt pillar,

burning city,

man turning back despite the angels.

But tonight

I fold my desire shut

like a bloodied dress.

You have a talent

for turning the room to winter.

Not loudly—

you are not the type for storms—

but carefully,

the way frost claims a windowpane

overnight,

without the sleepers noticing

their breath has become visible.

At times you press against me so hard

I split at the seams.

My eyes become two raw mouths.

I cry into the dark

and wonder if you can hear it

through all your locked doors.

You never answer the important questions.

You feed me teaspoons of yourself,

measured and medicinal.

A childhood here.

A bruise there.

Some vague catastrophe

wrapped neatly in a joke.

And I—

idiot archivist—

build whole cathedrals from the rubble.

Who are you when no one is watching?

Who taught you love was a taxidermy thing,

all glass eyes and stiff fur,

something to keep mounted far from the touch?

You ask for so little.

Or perhaps it only sounds little

because your voice wears starvation well.

A place in my heart?

You live there already.

Like a wolf in the walls.

Like smoke in curtains.

Like God, if God were exhausted

and slept through prayers.

Still, I know

there are rooms in you

with furniture thrown against the doors.

Rooms where every kindness arrives carrying an axe.

So when you place me last

behind your work,

your silence,

your old ghosts lined up like saints,

I pretend not to bleed from it.

I tell myself:

this is how frightened men survive.

By making distance into religion.

By chewing tenderness down to gristle.

You hate when I become emotional.

My love embarrasses you.

It drips too loudly.

Too red.

Too visible.

So I swallow it instead.

I write these things

in notebooks no one opens,

sentences crawling like black insects

across the page.

I used to tell you I cared.

The words sat between us

like trembling animals.

Then one day

I saw the look in your face—

not disgust, not cruelty,

something sadder:

fatigue.

As if my love

was another coat

you were too tired to carry.

And who am I

to promise permanence?

Men leave.

Men bruise.

Men learn each other’s weak spots

like hymns.

Who am I to say

I understand your suffering

when all I possess are guesses,

stitched together feverishly

from pauses in conversation,

from the way your voice changes

when certain subjects approach?

I know nothing.

Only this:

some instinct in me

reaches for you

the way hands reach

toward falling glass.

Even now

I imagine myself beneath you

at the moment of impact,

arms bloodied and ridiculous,

trying to keep your sharp edges